131

One, or Several (Blue) Wolves?

Akira Mizuta Lippit
A black wolf with yellow eyes framed in a blue box stares out from the fat image. Elad Lassry's photograph
Wolf (Blue) (2008j (fig.1j shows the full body of a wolf, seen from the side. lts front legs are mounted on
a mark, a wooden box used to position the subject. The wolf is an actor, and the photograph is staged.
(Lassry often works with found objects and images, sometimes re-photographing photographs, but here he
composed and took the photograph of this trained wolf himself, aided by two wolf trainers. lt is a primary
image.j A slight blur in the wolf's face reveals on closer inspection a second pair of eyes, set slightly apart,
side-by-side, superimposed onto the wolf's face. And not only the eyes, but also its legs, front and hind, are
doubled. The hind legs noticeably, the front legs less distinctly. One wolf or two? The same wolf twice? One
wolf in two different places and instants of time? Lassry's Wolf (Blue) superimposes two images of a wolf,
one or more wolves, onto an apparently single body. Not a singular body, as few are even when they are,
but a single body marked by too many eyes, too many legs, too many bodies. Not the entire body, but the
eyes and legs and perhaps other stretches of body indiscernible. The singularity of Lassry's image resides
in the photograph, not the animal's body. But the work's singularity is disrupted by the doubling effect
that generates a feeling of movement, of still life in motion. Of wolves wolfng. The feeling of a perception,
because the perception itself remains obscure, blurred as it were in the intensity of feeling that Lassry's wolf
or wolves provoke. (Feelings, affect, where the perception is elusive.j lt is not clear from the image whether
there are separate wolves fused together, or two separate images of the same wolf merged together at a
slight distance. Two wolves or two images? Before this image one feels the separation of wolves from a wolf,
one senses the multiplicity, a feeling separating the perception from the image, one image from another.
The multiplication of eyes and legs on the body of this animal recalls the representation of movement in
various histories of photography, most notably tienne-Jules Marey's (1830-1904j chronophotography (fg.2j, a
palimpsest of time-lapse images fused onto a single surface. Following Eadweard James Muybridge's (1830-
1904j serial photographs of animal locomotion (fg.3j, Marey produced an image of movement by merging
discrete instants of time onto a single frame, stretching his bodies across the plane of his images. His elastic
bodies move across the single plane of the image as still movements. For both Muybridge and Marey, the
subjects of their serial and chrono-photographs are often animals, human and non-human animals. ln their
work, animals become fgures for the photo-representation of mobility, of animated photography. ln contrast
to Muybridge's animal movement rendered in multiple photographs, the motion situated between the stills,
in the interstices; or Marey's condensation of multiple images that create a single frame of bodies in motion;
Lassry's wolf appears to be standing still, even posing. Nothing appears to move, yet the feeling of movement
persists everywhere in this image. Where does this sense of motion come from? From the wolf? From the
wolf splitting into wolves? Or from the attentive looking of the wolf's proliferating yellow eyes? The trace of
movement in Lassry's wolf, if it is movement at all, is minimal, a nearly imperceptible trace of blur, ex-centric
to the image. Wolf (Blue) captures the action of a still body. lt reveals looking as a visible action. One sees in
this image, the act of another looking, the movement of an other's look.
The question returns, over and over again: one, or several (bluej wolves? One or more bodies, one or more
instants of time pressed onto a single surface, and then rendered in deep blue? Does Lassry's blue box
give the wolf stereoscopic depth? ls this the source of his movement, the relief, a black wolf out of the blue?
Lassry's wolf looks outward from a box that produces a trompe-loeil frame rendered in space. At work in
this wolf's look, its doubled vision outward is the image of depth rendered fat. Lassry's use of shading in the
lower background produces in this blue box-frame, a room, a camera obscura that echoes the wolf's black
body.
lmages of multiple eyes and doubled animals appear periodically across Lassry's uvre. Man 071 (2007)
(fg.4j, also framed in a blue box, features a smiling man, naked, and in medium shot, with two sets of eyes.
His glance is askew, but his blurred eyes emit the anamorphic effect Lacan ascribes to Hans Holbein's
Ambassadors (1533j (fg.5j: l am being watched, photographed, and in this oblique image of surveillance, l
discover myself seeing myself, the mise-en-abme of autoscopy. One is tempted to add that the attentive look
of the subject portrayed appears everywhere in Lassry's work, not only in those works where he emphasizes
the multiplication of eyes. The mother cat of Burmese Mother, Kittens (2008); the Untitled (2007) ballerinas,
the smiling Philip Pruitt (2009j, surrounded by a bed of purple fowers, the smiling Czech Girl (2009j, slightly
discolored in her black bra, the serious Boys (2009j, the ghostly man and woman of Textile (For Him and Her)
(2009j, and of course the many and multiple Anthony Perkinses that produce over the course of Lassry's work
an acute sense of being observed (by himj. The intensity of looking appears all over Lassry's work, as one of
its themes. But in Wolf (Blue), the visualization of seeing emerges onto the surface of the image.
(Figure 1j
Elad Lassry, Wolf (Blue), 2008
C-print, painted frame
11.5 x 14.5 x 1.5 inches
Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
(Figure 2j
Etienne-Jules Marey, Cheval blanc au pas, 1886
(Figure 3j
Eadweard James Muybridge, High-speed sequence of a
walking lion from the series Animal Locomotion, 1887
Courtesy of the Eadweard Muybridge Collection/
Kingston Museum/ Science Photo Library/ PPS
(Figure 4j
Elad Lassry, Man 071, 2007
C-print, painted frame
14.5 x 11.5 x 1.5 inches
Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
133
Lassry's wolf is taken from two sets of negatives, which were scanned then merged (sandwiched," he saysj, a
practice, Lassry notes, common in Bauhaus photography. The multiplication of eyes, the grafting of additional
sets of eyes appears regularly throughout the history of photography, from the constructivist (fg.6j as well as
Bauhaus traditions, and in many portrait photographers, from Alvin Langdon Coburn (fg.7j to Weegee. l have
always been intrigued," he says, perhaps even panicked by the option of multiplicity."
1
Lassry's intrigue and
panic extend outside of wolves and into women as well as men. Guinevere (Green) (2009j (fg.8j shows a
naked woman framed from the hips up melded into a background of green hexagons. The box-frame is green,
and the woman is both before and behind the surfaces of hexagons, her body at once receding and emerging
from the ground. Guineveres entire body appears doubled, a trace of movement forward or backward, as if
moving in and out of time. Two pairs of eyes appear on her face, but the individual values of each set are less
equal than the Wolf's or the Man's. Felicia (2008j, presents another point on Lassry's scale of multiple eyes,
blurrier than Wolf or Man, more pronounced than Guinevere's third and fourth eyes. Felicia is framed in a light
green box, fully clothed, a red AlDS ribbon pinned on her white blouse. Colored circles form the background
surface. Men, women, and wolves, proliferate in Lassry's colored multiplicities, in some instances named
with personal pronouns, in others with generic designations, a species or a gender. Each of them associated
with a color or set of color intensities.
But why a wolf, this wolf? The late Jacques Derrida had a thing about wolves, about remembering not to
forget about wolves, as he puts it in his fnal seminar. So," he says in the Third Session" of his last seminar,
The Beast and the Sovereign (2002j, let's not forget, let's not neglect the wolves, from one year to the
next."
2
Why this reminder? ls neglecting or forgetting about wolves a phobia, related perhaps to the very
fear of wolves? ls there such a thing as the fear of forgetting wolves? This imperative to remember becomes
a refrain for Derrida. Later he says, As if l were myself, let's never forget it, a wolf or even a werewolf."
3

And maybe this exhortation because, One always forgets a wolf along the way."
4
ls the wolf so forgettable
than even when one remembers one forgets, always a wolf along the way"? (Even when one remembers
to remember?j Or maybe one suppresses the wolf, the many wolves, reducing it always to one wolf and
forgetting, repressing the others. One wolf instead of many, the many wolves that are always there in the
place where one stands. Perhaps this is what one has to remember, that there is never only one wolf; where
there is one, there are many.
There are many stories and multiple histories of men and women and wolves; some that begin with boys, girls,
and wolves. Sergei Pankeyev's story is one, or rather many. lt is a story of boys, girls, and wolves (of fathers,
teachers, maids all bound by a community of wolves), but also of names and secret names, and of entirely
secret languages
5
. But most importantly, his is a story of perception, of the perceptions of wolves to be
precise. lt centers on an image that turns and returns repeatedly frst in a dream, which is then reproduced in
a drawing, reduced eventually through analysis to a single wolf, to the fgure of a wolf, from wolves to the wolf
as such. (But even before the dream, there are more images--there always are.j Pankeyev became the Wolf-
Man," projected across multiple landscapes and backgrounds; the multiple optics and eyes that inform his
intrigue as well as his panic refected in the wolves' eyes that gaze at him from inside his dream. The dream is
a scene of visualization of seeing, like Lassry's Wolf, an image of perception. lt is also an image of movement,
not of the wolves, which are stationary, but of the movement of an image from one screen to another, one
surface to another, one frame to another.
Sergei Pankeyev, a wealthy Russian who suffered from a phobia of wolves, underwent analysis with Sigmund
Freud in vienna from 1910 to 1914, and several times afterward until 1919. Freud declared Pankeyev cured,
a triumph of psychoanalysis that demonstrated its therapeutic effcacy. Pankeyev disagreed, and his case
became the focus of a sustained narrative thread that came to stand for a referendum on the validity of
psychoanalysis. Numerous theorists, analysts, historians, and journalists have commented on this case
and Freud's handling of it, generating a vast polemics that challenge the viability of psychoanalysis as such.
Among those voices is Pankeyev's own, collected in an anthology of writings by and about him, The Wolf-Man
by the Wolf-Man.
6
Central to this case, known sensationally as the Wolf-Man," clinically as From the History of an Infantile
Neurosis (1918 [1914|j, is Pankeyev's dream. From Freud's multiple citations of it:
I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed. (My bed stood with its foot towards
the window; in front of the window there was a row of walnut trees. I know it was winter when
(Figure 5j
Hans Holbein the Younger, Jean de Dinteville and
Georges de Selve ('The Ambassadors'), 1533
The National Gallery, London
(Figure 6j
Gustav Klutsis, Boris Kulagin, 1929
Silver gelatin print
(Figure 7j
Alvin Langdon Coburn, Ezra Pound, 1917
Silver gelatin print
(Figure 8j
Elad Lassry, Guinevere (Green), 2009
C-print, painted frame
14.5 x 11.5 x 1.5 inches
Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
I had the dream, and night-time.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was
te|||hed to see t|at some w||te wo|ves we|e s|tt|ng on t|e o|g wa|n0t t|ee |n f|ont of t|e w|ndow.
There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or
sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they
pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by wolves, I screamed
and woke up."
7
Pankeyev describes the clear and life-like picture of the window opening and the wolves sitting on the tree."
8

Among the key features of Pankeyev's dream are the meta-perceptual qualities of the dream, as if the dreamer
is dreaming about dreaming; the strong impression of white, the white wolves and the diffuse color of winter
as well, perhaps; the indeterminate quantity of wolves, six or seven" in Pankeyev's account, only fve in his
rendering of the dream; and the indeterminate quality of the wolves themselves, which appear to be fuidly
canine, shifting between foxes and dogs.
ln his interpretation of Pankeyev's dream, Freud focuses on the latent sexual content of the dream, in
particular the potent fgure of the wolf and wolves, but also on its literary origins, the fairytales Little Red
Riding-Hood" and, Freud suggests, The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats." The fear of wolves that gives
Pankeyev his nickname Wolf-Man" is the fear of being eaten by one or more wolves, of being assaulted,
but even more profoundly for Freud, the imagined origin of Pankeyev's fear of wolves, a primordial scene
of perception, the primal scene in which, Freud speculates, Pankeyev saw his parents engaged in sexual
intercourse, a tergo, three times repeated."
9
(The image of the wolf also comes from his sister, who taunted
Pankeyev in childhood with the picture of an erect wolf on its hind legs, most likely according to Pankeyev, an
illustration from a household copy of Little Red Riding-Hood."j
The primal scene that Freud invokes serves in this instance as the origin of Pankeyev's phobia, his
simultaneous experience of sexual desire and fear, intrigue and panic," to use Lassry's nuances, but also as
the frame for the second scene of perception. The primal scene is never one, never remains one, but sets into
motion an entire train of sexual distress and intrigue, creating a visual sequence that moves from the primal
scene to Pankeyev's numerous fantasies, his dream, and his sketch of the dream. Even deeper than the
symbolic fear represented by the wolf and Pankeyev's wolf phobia, is the primal fear of seeing itself, the deep
affect of visuality and perception rendered by the opening window in Pankeyev's dream. Optophobia, the fear
of opening one's eyes. ln his dream, seeing produces feeling, and this feeling travels with each screen, and
each iteration of seeing. The serial visuality of the Wolf-Man's dream of wolves is embedded in every aspect
of the account, and the primal scene emerges in this instance not so much as the primal scene of adolescent
sexuality, but as the primal scene of an obscene visuality transmitted as it were from one medium to another.
Everything trembles in the multiplicity of Pankeyev's dream: six or seven wolves, and then fve; the row of
walnut trees; the protean wolf, fox and sheep-dog at frst, then father, teacher, and other devouring fgures; his
parents' coitus a tergo, three times repeated"; and the seriality of images, tableaux, surfaces, and screens
that follow from the primal scene. The mobile immobility of Pankeyev's dream also draws Freud's attention,
the factors," he says, of attentive looking and of motionless" that Pankeyev emphasized. ln Freud's
interpretation, the attentive looking, which in the dream was ascribed to the wolves, should rather be shifted
on to [Pankeyev|."
10
The wolf--the wolves--are also refections of Pankeyev himself, projections of his own
looking. At a decisive point," says Freud, a transposition has taken place."
11
Pankeyev is himself the wolf
he fears, and what he sees in the dream looking at him, is the scene of his own looking. He is truly, in this
scene, a Wolf-Man."
At the center of Freud's interpretation of Pankeyev's dream are the tropes of transposition and reversal, a
general feature of psychoanalysis in which an object or action comes to represent its exact opposite. Homes
become unhomely, horrors become wishes, and revulsions turn out to be desires. lf one transposition or
reversal" already marks the rhetoric of Pankeyev's dream, then what if other areas of signifcance were also
inscribed in reverse, transposed? What if motionlessness was in fact an image of excessive, violent motion?
ln that case," Freud concludes, instead of immobility (the wolves sat there motionless; they looked at him
but did not movej the meaning would have to be: the most violent motion. That is to say, he suddenly woke
up, and saw in front of him a scene of violent movement at which he looked with strained attention."
12
The intense look of the wolves in Pankeyev's dream is, according to Freud, an image of Pankeyev's own
(Figure 9j
Elad Lassry, Two British Shorthair Cats (BSH), 2009
C-print, painted frame
11.5 x 14.5 x 1.5 inches
Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
135
attentive looking, transposed from his own eyes to those of the wolves; his own intensive probe embodied
by the wolves looking at him. An image of himself perhaps seeing himself look. And by the same logic, the
motionlessness of the wolves that Pankeyev emphasizes in his dream is actually a fgure for the most violent
motion." How is this possible, everything in reverse? Everything is upside-down in Freud's interpretation:
objects are subjects, the wolves that are not even wolves all the time (sometimes foxes and sometimes sheep-
dogsj are always me, stillness is frenzy, white is black, or blue perhaps. Applying the same logic or extending
it, maybe the white wolves are actually blue, like Lassry's Wolf (Blue).
13
The perverse logic of perception in which what one sees is seeing as such, the seen as well as the scene of
seeing returns like Pankeyev's dream in Lassry's image. It returns, the second or after-image of the primal
scene. l see the wolf looking, but it is a second wolf that looks at me; and that second wolf is me, watching
attentively. Watching myself attentively watching attentively. What Lassry's Wolf (Blue) makes visible is not
a scene of internal anguish like that which erupts in Pankeyev's images, the visualization of anxiety, fear,
desire, despair, and so on, but rather the scene of seeing those interiorities, those intensities. ln the stillness
of Lassry's wolf, one sees the tremor of an essential multiplicity, not only of the wolves and me, of selves
and other selves, of subjects and objects, of two and many more eyes, of depths and surfaces, of colors
and intensities, but of the irreducible scene of perception in which the single image--the singularity of vision
and the visible--assumed by each subject is always breaking into two or more. Everything breaks apart,
everything ruptures but while remaining composed. This is the law of Lassry's perception, the indescribable
calm of his frenzied images. One sees it acutely in Wolf (Blue) and the men and women with multiple, blurred
eyes, but also in Lassry's animal pairings, his animals at a remove from animality--in the pleading Two-
British Shorthair Cats (BSH) (2009j (fg.9j, in the metallic Two Elephants (2010j, in the transparent, petrifed,
sculptured Cat and Duck (2011) and Cat and Duck (Red) (2011), in the brass Cub, Raccoon (2011), in his
diptych Giraffe, 93040 (2011j, in the Tiffany Collie, Poodle (2011), in his pink, red, and white Herend (Three
Pigs) (2011j. The Apollonian cool is in constant state of disruption by the Dionysiac forces that see me
watching attentively. This happens everywhere throughout Lassry's uvre, not only in his images of wolves,
animals, men and women, boys and girls, but also in objects, in Persian Cucumbers, Shuk Hakarmel (2007),
in Lipstick (2009j, High Heel, Purse (2009j, in Ropes (2009j, in Nail Polish (2009j, in Papayas (2009j, and too
many more to mention. The singularity of perception is broken apart into pieces, shattered into a multitude of
transpositions and reversals that produce intensities in lieu of expressions.
The striking colors that mark Lassry's work, and which sometimes overtake them, like the white wolves in
Pankeyev's dream, function as perception-affects: colors are, like affects in dreams, asignifying. They are
forces, intensities, every bit as important to a work as symbols and narratives, but without literary (literal,
iterablej content. They render the affective dimensions of perception that elude signification but form an
essential part of it. Pankeyev's dream cannot exist without the whiteness of his wolves, just as the colors that
permeate Lassry's work form an irremovable dimension of it. ln color is multiplicity. ln fact, color may be the
clearest sign of a multiplicity that resists signifcation.
And this is what makes the scene of Lassry's perception of wolves and men and women a feeling rather than
a symbol of desire, an affect rather than the representation of an interiority or a surface. His are scenes of
static frenzy, everything moving in the motionless stir of the still image. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari
understand this in their unforgiving critique of Freud's analysis. For them, Freud's greatest failure is his
inability to recognize the key feature of Pankeyev's dream, the irrepressible momentum of multiplicity and the
endless proliferation of bodies and selves that can no longer be apprehended or counted, but can only be
sensed in the dissolution of every singularity, ultimately his own: The wolf, as the instantaneous apprehension
of a multiplicity in a given region, is not a representative, a substitute, but an I feel. l feel myself becoming
a wolf, one wolf among others, on the edge of a pack."
14
The symbolic value of the wolf as a predatory and
threatening fgure, a castrating father, for example, is a ruse of the dreamwork, meant only as a distraction.
The true purpose of the dream is to shatter the individual and to liberate him, Pankeyev from the torment that
one lone wolf inficts upon him. His release is in the multiplicity of wolves that allows everything to reverse
itself, the wolf and me, motionlessness and violent motion, intrigue and panic. The wolf, wolves," they say,
are intensities, speeds, temperatures, nondecomposable variable distances. A swarming, a wolfing."
15

One wolf torments me, but in the eyes of many wolves, l rediscover my desire and it no longer frightens me.
The law of wolves, not of the wolf. Lassry's image compresses all of these intensities: mobility, perception,
and multiplicity. But nothing remains compressed, suppressed, or repressed, and the brief tremor of eyes
and legs unleashes the intensity deeper and deeper outward until l see myself seeing, ecstatically. Lassry
releases this fow, and before his Wolf (Blue) l am free, freer, no longer only me, a lone wolf.
1| Elad Lassry, email to author, March 5, 2012.
2| Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, ed. Michel
Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginnette Michaud, trans.,
Geoffrey Bennington, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009j, 64.
3| Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 79.
4| Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 79.
5| ln their intervention into the Wolf-Man" saga, psychoanalysts
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok claim that neither Freud nor
any other analyst could ever have cracked the code of Pankeyev's
neurosis because it circulated through a secret language formed
between his native Russian, his adopted German, and his secret
childhood language, English. They call this secret language of
wolves a cryptonymy." Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The
Wolf Mans Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986j.
6| This book, which carries the subtitle The Double Story of
Freud's Most Famous Case," is edited by American psychoanalyst
Muriel Gardiner, one of the last to interact extensively with
Pankeyev, and includes Freud's case study From the History of an
lnfantile Neurosis," American psychoanalyst Ruth Mack Ginsberg's
writings on her experiences with the Wolf-Man, Pankeyev's
autobiography and refections on Freud, and a Foreword" by
Freud's daughter and psychoanalyst, Anna Freud. Among the
many compelling insights offered by Pankeyev is the strange claim
regarding his infantile hair color: From hearsay l know that l had,
as an infant, Titian-red hair. After my frst haircut, however, my
hair turned dark brown, something my mother deeply regretted.
She kept a little lock of the cut-off Titian-red hair, as a sort of
'relic' her entire life" (The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man: The Double
Story of Freuds Most Famous Case, ed. Muriel Gardiner [New
York: Basic Books, 1971|, 5j. The questionable physiognomics of
Pankeyev's account aside, this imaginary red hair is remarkable
for its over-determination: associated with the renowned colorist
Titian, his lost red hair also appears to anticipate future scenes
of castration as well as his mother's premature mourning for her
son, mummifed like Hitchcock's Psycho (1960j in reverse, in the
preserved lock of excremental hair.
7| Sigmund Freud, From the History of an lnfantile Neurosis,"
in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. Xvll (London:
Hogarth Press and the lnstitute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955j, 29,
original emphases. A nice touch in Freud's transcription of the
dream is the visual transition from the dream to its narration,
marked by the end of italics, I screamed and woke up." The
scream remains inside the dream, or on its threshold, while waking
up is already on the outside.
8| Freud, From the History of an lnfantile Neurosis," SE: XVII, 29.
9| Freud, From the History of an lnfantile Neurosis," SE: XVII, 37.
The translator translates Freud's Latin in brackets, a tergo [from
behind|."
10| Freud, From the History of an lnfantile Neurosis," SE: XVII, 34.
11| Freud, From the History of an lnfantile Neurosis," SE: XVII, 34-5.
12| Freud, From the History of an lnfantile Neurosis," SE: XVII, 35.
13| Elsewhere, Lassry speaks of white dogs, specifcally the racist
color-conscious white dog of Samuel Fuller's White Dog (1982j.
See Lassry's discussion of Fuller's white supremacist dog and
other animals in flm and art, Animalize," in Contra Mundum l-vll
(Santa Monica, CA: Oslo Editions, 2010j, 69-88.
14| Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987j, 32.
15| Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 32.