Absorption/Lived Time

The interplay of disclosure and concealment is naturally quite distinct from the rotation of the hands of the clock. The inner temporality of man cannot be resolved into terms of objective time. Measurable time – or, as the physicists call it, discreet time – is no more than a derivation of inner time: a representation intended to make the hidden rhythm measurable and verifiable. Like objective space, objective time is structured by means of a mathematical expedient, that of a numerical series; Its principle is succession. Michael Fried, in his remarkable attack on Minimal Art, ‘Art and Objecthood’, has fallen victim to the deceptive obviousness of this conception. He distinguishes between ‘duration’, to which a Minimal object lays claim, and the ‘instantaneousness’ of High Art. But time-span and instant impact are not true opposites. Both concepts are rooted in objective time; duration is to the instant as the sum is to its smallest constituent part.
The phenomenon which Fried presumably means by ‘instantaneousness’ – the minute extracted from the order of time’ of which Proust speaks – cannot be grasped in terms of successive time at all. Proust’s ‘minute’ may be a sudden insight, but it can equally well last for a while. This experience of time is familiar, whether in situations of heightened awareness or in periods of listlessness : the ticking stops, we no longer feel bound to the wheel of time. Man’s inner temporality has unexpectedly cast off the outward fetters of successive time. Such situations are indeed capable of creating ‘a human being liberated from the order of time’.

Robert Kudielka, from a text on Robert Denny in the Tate Gallery catalogue of his 1973 retrospective

depth / surface

Here, on the contrary, it is as though the external and coloured surafce of things - debased and contaminated in advance by their assimilation to glossy advertising images - has been stripped away to reveal the deathly black-and-white substratum of the photographic negative which subtends them. Although Warhol's pieces - most notably, the traffic accidents or the electric chair series - this is not , I think, a matter of content any longer but of some more fundamental mutation both in the object world itself - now become a set of texts or simulacra - and in disposition of the subject.

Overhastily, we can say that besides the hermeneutic model of inside and outside which Munch's painting develops, there are four other fundamental depth models which have been repudiated in contemporary theory: the dialectal one of essence and appearance (along with a whole range of concepts of ideology or false consciousness which tend to accompany it); the Freudian model of latent and manifest, or of repression (which is of course the target of Michel Foucault's programmatic and symptomatic pamphlet La Volonté de savoir); the existential model of authenticity and inauthenticity, whose heroic or tragic thematics are closely related to that other great opposition between alienation and disalienation, itself a causality of the poststructural or postmodern period; and finally, latest in time, the great semiotic opposition between signifier and signified, which was itself rapidly unravelled and deconstructed during its brief heyday in the 1960s and 70s. What replaces these various depth models is for most part a conception of practices, discourses and textual play, whose new syntagmatic structures we will examine later on: suffice it merely to observe that here too depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces (what is often called intertextuality is in that sense no longer a matter of depth).

Postmodernism will presumably signal the end of this dilema which it replaces with a new one. The end of the bourgeois ego or monad no doubt brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego as well - what I have generally here been calling the waning of affect. But it means the end of much more- the end for example of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brushstroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction). As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centred subject may also mean, not merely a liberation from anxiety, but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling. This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings - which it may be better and more accurate to call 'intensities' - are now free-floating and impersonal.

From 'The Deconstruction of Expression' by Frederic Jameson, 1982

bashung

rephotography

The excess of sameness in Prince's rephotographs is also part of a culture - in film, television, literature - of paranoia: we are drawn to ask 'What is it about these people, apparently so normal, that makes them different, and all different in the same way? What kind of extra-terrestrial plot is at work here?' Prince relates this excessive sameness to the image. When image and reality collapse into each other, what was previously considered to be outside the image in a referential sense - the image referring to what is not image - migrates to become excess in or of the image itself. What exactly is the relation, then, between the rephotograph and its source image? Is the rephotograph a reproduction, or a copy? Implicit in Walter Benjamin's argument in The Work in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility' is a distinction between the copy-as-facsimile, which uses the same material as the original, and the photographic reproduction, where technology transforms perception itself. Given that for Prince the 'original' is already a photographic reproduction, in his rephotographs, this distinction between copy and photographic reproduction blurs, although without disappearing. The best way to think of the rephotograph might be as a 'remake' of the 'original', involving reframing and often other kinds of manipulation, although this 'original' participates in a different kind of circulation and the rephotograph is not explicitly linked to it. Further if the 'orginal' is already a reproduction, the rephotograph is a reproduction of a reproduction. This doubling generates a double referent. On the one hand, the (absent) referent of the rephotograph is another image, which as copied is also the same; on the other hand , the doubling generates a reflexivity concerning reproductions as such. That is to say, the rephotograph refers to both to what it is a rephotograph of and to the process of reproduction, both in general, and in its historical specificity. this implies a claim about modernity, even a double claim: first, that modernity is the epoch of reproducibility; and, second, that the historical technological form of reproduction in modernity is photography

Michael Newman, Richard Prince: Untitled (couple), Afterall 2006.

pastoral as rhetoric

Traditionally, the name given to the incorperation of the commonplace within the exalted - and vice versa - has been pastoral. its basic and original sense derives from a class of poetry that celebrates the pleasures and song of simple herdsman, but a steady expansion of its significance was already under way in the Augustan eighteenth century. Samuel Johnson, in 1750, generalized its scope to designate a "poem in which any action or passion is represented by its effects upon a country life(,) . . . a representation of rural nature . . . exhibiting the ideas and sentiments of those, whoever they are, to whom the country affords pleasure or employment." That final qualifier - "whoever they are" - implies the basic character of pastoral contrast: those who fashion or enjoy cultivated forms of art are compelled to compare their own condition, which permits this refinement, with that of the rustic whose existence affords no such luxury but who enjoys in compensation a natural, more "truthful" simplicity of life. One tests the truth of one's sentiments by translating them, within the circuit of the poem, from a high idiom into a vernacular one.


Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture

see also LE TOURNANT PASTORAL DE L’ART CONTEMPORAIN

Phénakistiscope

....celui du peintre....

Les Portes correspondraient à l'étape suivante : à ce stade, le peintre ne se satisfait plus de ce processus nécessairement hasardeux qu'est la teinture ; il entend réintroduire la peinture dans son jeu, et sans qu'on puisse décider s'il s'agit pour lui de l'y prendre, ou de se laisser prendre au contraire au jeu qui est celui de la peinture. La peinture en tant que matériau, mais la peinture, aussi bien , en tant que moyen, sinon en est celui du peintre, pour analyser, ou pour simplement en rendre compte, les concepts mis en place à l'époque des premiers "tressages" n'y suffisent plus aujourd'hui : car qu'est-ce que trame, dans ce contexte, et structure, qu'est-ce que neutraliser, et comment juger du gain de complexité qui serait lié au travail de peinture, à proprement parler?

Hubert Damisch, Fenêtre jaune cadmium, p288.