Joyce Wieland, Heart On, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 6 February 2025 — 4 May 2025

“…there is no language in existence for which there is any question of its inability to cover the whole field of the signified…”
—Jacques Lacan, The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.

In the wake of the Super Bowl halftime spectacle that the rapper Kendrick Lamar performed on 9 February, which was, of this renowned un-Canadian sporting institution reportedly the most-watched edition, likely due to multitudes tuning in to see whether or not there would be a third and ultimately successful assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the catastrophic U.S. President and billionaire blowhard, a flurry of frothy media commentary emerged, the kind of chatter that passes in our intellectually insolvent neoliberal era as “cultural discourse,” regarding the intention and interpretation of the political statement the artist was apparently making in the act.

Lamar clearly designed the elaborate show to entice spicy takes.

Almost all of these observed Lamar’s lowercase ‘a’ on a diamond-encrusted chain and proposed what it meant: the Amazon logo, perhaps, or a nod to his production company, or another sly swipe at Drake’s supposed penchant for minors.

Still, none entertained the possibility that a deeper meaning should be discerned by delving into any unintended or subconscious reading.

Curiously, no hot take that I read invoked the 20^th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, which seems a glaring oversight, since obviously the chain at once signifies and is the signifier of Lacan’s “Objet petit a.” The pendant is literally a small ‘a,’ and as an object of desire, it also represents the anxious lack sought in subjective otherness. This to me screams peak America.

Did Lamar explicitly intend to elicit this analysis? I don’t want to underrate the dude. He did win a Pulitzer Prize. But I harbour my doubts.

Nonetheless, it doesn’t matter whether it was intentional or not. Because as any philosopher of art understands, poetry, and art more broadly, as Wimsatt and Beardsley observed in 1954 in The Verbal Icon, “is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it.”

For Lacan, the “Objet petit a” is “what falls from the subject in anxiety,” and, more simply, “the cause of desire.” For the Buddhist, it may also be the source of all suffering.

HRT, Taverne Tour, La Sotterenea, 7 February 2025

“The fundamental substance of an epoch and its unheeded impulses illuminate each other reciprocally.”
— Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament.

It is fascinating that Trump is the first sitting American president to attend a Super Bowl game, and highly symbolic to the neofascist form of politics that he represents. The Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 were central to Hitler’s display of power, too. The objectification of bodies in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia is as unambiguous as the marching columns of red, white, and blue, Black performers that formed and reformed around Lamar.

Doubtless Trump viewed this spectacle unfolding for his own personal amusement because Trump, with the exception of McDonalds cheeseburgers, is composed of pure unconscious desire, pure id.

L’enfant et les sortilèges, Opéra de Montréal, Théâtre Maisonneuve, 8 February 2025

“A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know.”
—Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

America functions on the libidinal drive. It is so repressed that it represses its own repression, which is only revealed to itself in fantasy and horror and violence. It is ironic that digital language is called hypertext, because the nation’s native language, rather, is subtextual. This is why artists like Lamar layer their true messages in code, and why critics fall all over themselves to attempt to decode them as if performing some elaborate reciprocal gymnastics routine. Of course, this process only produces more anxiety in the form of surplus unfulfilled desire.

It took Trump all of a few days to reveal his overt desires upon assuming the presidency for a second time. In addition to Muntzing (or should we now call it ‘Musking’?) the government apparatus as if he were pulling out circuit boards from a HAL 9000, Trump finally verbalized his imperialist impulses to territorially expand America as he had enviously seen Vladimir V. Putin doing for three years. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Trump called the move “genius,” and doubtless, he could scarcely wait to demonstrate his own, however unstable his cognitive processes had become.

Ravel and Prokofiev with Weilerstein and Payare, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 12 February 2025

“Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand rips away from need…”
—Jacques Lacan, Subversion of the Subject.

The Panama Canal, Greenland, and Canada are all in Trump’s crosshairs, and we would be wise to take the threat seriously, because Trump disguises his expansionist desires not as wants but as needs. America needs to absorb these sovereign territories for the sake of national security, or of economic security, or of restorative balance and retribution. These are the same excuses Putin used to invade Ukraine, and that Hitler used to invade Poland. But what they repress is the Objet petit a, that which Trump — and America — lacks, and which will never be satisfied.

Benjamin Appl & Eric Lu, Schubert’s Swan Song, Salle Bourgie, 13 February 2025

Of Children in Swaddling Clothes
“O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will have no understanding of our speech; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not have understanding of your speech nor will you understand them.”
—Leonardo da Vinci

The intentional fallacy extends past poetics and penetrates into politics. There were far graver motivations, for instance, for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan than to prevent terrorism and root out weapons of mass destruction. There were generational fixations that served as factors.

And there are much more sinister explanations behind, say, Musk’s double Nazi salute following Trump’s inauguration. Unlike Kendrick Lamar’s deliberate obscuring of overt political symbolism, Musk’s was laid bare for all to see — and immediately excused by him and his apologists as unintentional. For Lamar, what audiences had to decipher was its real message. For Musk, what they unequivocally witnessed was not.

If the time to be alarmed was not before 5 November 2024, it is certainly now, as Trump and Musk alternate at behaving on a national scale like sexually frustrated frat boys with GHB prescriptions. There is no critical or analytical skill necessary to crack their code, and no thinly veiled good intentions behind which to hide. The word ‘alarm’ comes from the French, à l’arms.

If Canada has any saving grace, it is that America, in its perpetual repression, already has a 51^st state — the permanent state of anxiety.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Installation view of Joyce Wieland’s Flag Arrangement, 1970–71, knitted wool.}