Fountain at the Intersection of Feminist Art and Psychoanalytic Feminism

Feminist art (ecofeminist art, activist art), which was organised in the 1960s to emphasise women’s identity and values against the dynamics of patriarchal society, to dismantle and balance male domination, deconstructs the existing despotic language in the art community through creative activist actions that draw attention to the sexism created by the white male-dominated art hegemony and the lack of representation of women. In a similar practice of deconstruction, psychoanalytic feminists, in the formation of female gender-sexual identity and subjectivity, put forward a mother (breast)-centred counter-discourse to the father-fallus-centred understanding of psychic culture: With the Oresteia myth (antihero), which is positioned as an alternative theory to Oedipus, a woman and mother moves from object status to subject status, thus the re-symbolism produced by matricide creates a matriarchal fantasy, expression and representation system. Canan Şenol’s (CANAN) video art work “Çeşme/Fountain” (2000), which is discussed in this research at the intersection of feminist art and psychoanalytic feminism, creates a subjective and feminist counter-discourse to the image of “fountain” by referring to Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917) and Bruce Nauman’s “Self-Portrait as a Fountain” (1966). In this research, the discourse created by CANAN in “Çeşme/Fountain” is analysed in relation to Melani Klein’s Oresteia theory and art-culture criticism is carried out through examples from the history of painting.