"taken as read"

Spagna

2010-09-18T14:08:00.000-07:00

Catalogue essay for an exhibition of the work of 'Thomas' (1941 - 2000), Galerie Michael Hasenclever, Munich, October - November 2010.

2010-08-07T02:20:00.000-07:00

Thomas,tu n'as pas oublié la peinture, 1959, manques et plus sur illustrations, 45 x 54 cm.

I first saw works by Thomas in an exhibition at the Le Carré gallery, in Lille, in 1998. They were two or three, small, framed works but had an intensity that belied their modest size. These works brought into focus qualities that I have come to associate, predominantly, with a kind of French artistic practice, most notably an attitude toward pictorial representation that factors in the 'thickness' of the surface as a prime characteristic of its status as tableau. The quality of this first encounter was one of both intrigue and curiosity. It has only recently occurred to me that a practice, such as Thomas's, is radical in terms of how it functions as 'composition' and within a framework of defiguration. The superimposition of discreet layers, in the works that I then encountered, announced depth through the piercing of the successive surfaces with holes and shapes. Composition is here not anti, auto or non-composition but a curious aggregation of the thickness of pictorial matter. Years later, and in the context of my own practice, I have come to think of this as a form of parataxis. As Rancière says in 'The Future of the Image': 'The power of connecting is not that of the homogeneous - not that of using the horror story to speak to us of Nazism and the extermination. It is that of the heterogeneous, of the immediate clash between three solitudes: the solitude of the shot, that of the photograph, and that of words which speak of something else entirely in a quite different context. It is the clash of heterogeneous elements that provides a common measure.' Thomas's work struck me in something like these terms (although I am certain I would not have articulated it in this way, at that moment, in Le Carré). His use of collage brings into play the tableau form, not simply as a question of painting or a play with reprographic media, but rather as an interrogation of the relationship of such mediations that raise questions of 'image'. Such a question is perhaps about the materiality of the image; its composition as a distribution of its various components relayed within the picture surface. Surface here is a product of a series of actions which Thomas took great care to note in his meticulous archiving of his work. Arrachage, boules, brûlure, collé, déchirure, déchiré, découpé, manqué et plus, perforées, piqueté, piquetage, roleau, rondelles, superposition, troué acquire the identity of a pathology of forms derived from this palette of permutations and possibilities. In some works text and image combine, intertwined, across stratifications, the result of one, or several, of these manipulations, seismic, sometimes igneous events. The sense of such works is not the lisibility or decoding of the combinations the original material takes but is more a sense of how this material takes its place, as presence, within Thomas's pictorial regimes.

Mick Finch, 2010

Entre les beaux arts et les medias : photographie et art moderne: Chevrier Jean-François

2010-08-03T09:23:00.000-07:00

Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini's Rome: John David Rhodes

2010-08-03T09:21:00.000-07:00

Irma Vep

2010-08-02T15:48:00.001-07:00

Antonioni interview

2010-08-02T14:19:00.000-07:00

S: What did you mean in the Cannes manifesto that accompanied L'avventura when you said that man is burdened on the threshold of space by feelings entirely unsuited to his needs?

A; I meant exactly what I said: that we are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science. Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer. Hence this upset, this disequilibrium that makes weaker people anxious and apprehensive, that makes it so difficult for them to adapt to the mechanism of modern life.

S: That much I understand, but I'm puzzled about some implications. Do you mean to imply that the old moral baggage must be thrown away? If so, is that possible? Can man conceive of a new morality?

A: Why go on using that word I loathe! We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean. In the future-not soon, perhaps by the twenty-fifth century-these concepts will have lost their relevance. I can never understand how we have been able to follow these worn-out tracks, which have been laid down by panic in the face of nature. When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them.

The hero moves against a backdrop of casual violence in Zabriskie Point.

Letter to Art Monthly in response to Dave Beech's article 'Encountering Art' (AM N°336 May 2010).

2010-06-20T11:44:00.000-07:00

In Dave Beech’s recent article, Encountering Art [1] there is a swift translation of Jacque Rancière’s idea of the part des sans-part as being more appropriately embodied in the form of the ‘philistine’ who, Beech believes, ‘holds a unique place within the totality and is therefore, the key to understanding culture and, potentially, a powerful agent in transforming it’. Beech develops his understanding of Rancière’s ‘mission to defend the spectator’ as being on unstable ground as Rancière ‘never invokes any other kind of subjectivity for his plagued spectator than the all-too-familiar subjective capacities of the contemplative aesthetic onlooker.’ Furthermore Beech asserts that Rancière is not assigning ‘aesthetics’ its full potential, ‘to engage in a sustained, reflexive self-examination of its power, rather than merely to reassert the inherited values and symbolic violence of pre-modern cultivation’. All of this as a characterisation of Rancière’s position; as defending a bourgeois, contemplative ‘connoisseur’ is a caricature of what is at work in the discussions in The Emancipated Spectator as well as The Future of the Image. Beech’s displacement of the position of the spectator by the philistine, as a critique of Rancière’s ideas and position seems to be discursively hors sujet. ‘Aesthetics’ here seems to be simply framed in terms of the reception of effects within categories of judgement, as Beech says ‘between aesthetic delight on the one hand and debauchery on the other’.

This contrast between Rancière’s contemplative spectator and Beech’s philistine begs the question as to whether this opposition is playing out yet another version of an axis of nature/culture and potentially the trafficking of genres between ‘high idioms’ and the vernacular? The fact that discussions about the philistine are so focused on modes of reception perhaps highlights why Beech struggles with Ranciére’s ideas where the focus is upon the spectator within a productive relationship to the work. The issue here is whether discussions about cultural transmission, and especially in terms of the philistine, both as art or as models of communication, can be conducted if aesthetic questions linked to artistic production are annexed? Thomas Crow’s use of the ‘pastoral’ to describe the rhetoric at work in some post-war ‘advanced art’ has echoes with Beech’s position when Crow says ‘and the pastoral entails a final recognition that the fine arts’ inability to transform themselves further, to become a genuine culture for all, remains their great and defining inadequacy’[2]. However, the pastoral puts to work genre and the vernacular within a rhetoric where instrumentalisation is equally a potential bringing to mind Amar Lakal and Tristan Trémeau’s critique of the Palais de Tokyo’s utilisation of works of art that mediate the institution itself as being akin to Marie-Antoinette playing milkmaid down on the farm at the Petit Trianon[3]. This satirical positioning of relational aesthetics, as a genre of institutional cultural rustication, is made to highlight how aesthetics are the site where crucial ethical questions of spectatorship, and not just varieties of connoisseurship, take place.

Rancière’s general problematic overlaps with Michael Fried’s ‘beholder discourse’, Debord’s development of the spectacle is not far in this critical constellation and to dismiss these types of critical formations of reception, crucial to Rancière’s position, as simply of an historical moment and derived from Diderot[4], is missing the point. The present structuring of contemporary culture as a series of institutional mediations, in search of audiences and often framed in the name of education looks like a turn toward Beech’s philistine in all perhaps but name. Such a turn means it is vital to critically view the philistine discourse, in itself, as an aesthetic regime within which ethical questions, about the dispositif of representation, are at work.

[1] Art Monthly, N° 336, May 2010.

[2] Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture, Yale Press 1998.

[3] Amar Lakal and Tristan Trémeau, Le tournant pastoral de l'art contemporain, paper given in the conference, l’Art contemporain et son exposition, Centre Georges Pompidou and la Collège International de Philosophie, Paris, 4 October 2002.

[4] As the ’defence of the spectator, familiar to us since Diderot’ and when the spectator ‘was new, fresh and bold’

image/ pictorial imagination

2010-01-02T03:13:00.000-08:00

In Warburg’s view, it was the self-abnegation of the pioneer which caused Burkhardt, ‘instead of tackling the problem of the history of Rennaissaince civilization in all of its full and fascinating artistic unity, to divide it up into a number of outwardly disconnected parts, and then with perfect equanimity to study and describe each one separately.’ But later scholars were not free to imitate Burchardt’s detachment. Hence what for him was simply a practical problem of presentation became for Wölfflin and Warburg a theoretical problem. The concept of pure artistic vision, which Wölfflin developed in reacting to the ideas of Burkhardt, Warburg contrasts with the concept of culture as a whole , within which artistic vision fulfils a necessary function. However, to understand this function – so the argument continues – one should not dissociate it from its connection with the functions of other elements of the culture.. One should rather ask the twofold question: what do these other cultural functions (religion and poetry, myth and science, society and the state ) mean for the pictorial imagination; and what does the image mean for these other functions?

. . . . . It was one Warburg's basic convictions that any attempt to detach the image from its relation to religion and poetry, to cult and drama, is like cutting off its lifeblood. Those, like him, who see the image indissolubly bound up with culture as a whole must, if they wish to make an image that is no longer directly intelligible communicate its meaning, go about it in rather a different wayfrom those who subscribe to the notion of 'pure vision' in the abstract sense.

Edgar Wind from Warburg's Concept of Kuturwissenschaft and its Meaning for Aesthetics

dissemblance/image

2010-01-01T05:26:00.000-08:00

This is the sense in which art is made up of images, regardless of whether it is figurative, of whether we recognize the form of identifiable characters and spectacles in it. The images of art are operations that produce a discrepancy, a dissemblance. Words describe what the eye might see or express what it will never see; they deliberatley clarify or obscure an idea. Visible forms yield a meaning to be construed or subtract it (sic). A camera movement anticipates one spectacle and disclose a different one. A pianist attacks a musical phrase 'behind' a dark screen. All these relations define images. This means two things. In the first place , the images of art are, as such, dissemblances. Secondly, the image is not exclusive to the visible. There is visiblity that does not amount to an image; there are images which consist wholly in words. But the commonest regime of the image is one that presents a relationship between the sayable and the visible, a relationship which plays on both the analogy and the dissemblance between them. This relationship by no means requires the two terms to be materially present. The visible can be arranged in meaningful tropes; words deploy a visibility that can be blinding.

Jacques Rancière, from The Future of the Image.

Absorption/Lived Time

2009-08-16T06:52:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-24T14:02:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-22T06:12:00.000-07:00

rephotography

2009-02-28T07:40:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-20T01:05:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-15T03:20:00.001-08:00

....celui du peintre....

2009-02-15T02:35:00.001-08:00

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.

Anamorphic Archive 2

2009-02-14T08:14:00.000-08:00

The discursive space of the disciplie of art history enframes an ars memorativa - a system of protocols for elucidating knowledge, and a prescriptive grammar for the composition of historical narratives. All, as Bentham might have remarked "by a simple idea in architecture" - that is , by the formatting of data into a multiply accesable mass in several dimensions. It has been suggested here that the modern discipline operates as an anamorphic archive keyed by a panoptic gaze, a metamorphosis of Bentham's Panopticon, Camillo's Memory Theatre, the perspectivalism of renaissance realist painting (and scenography), and the discursive instrumentalism of analytico-referentiality symbolized by the Galilean telescope, into the epistemological format of the modern cinema. Modern art historical practice has woven together these varied historical practices into a supremely cinematic discursive space.

Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, p78.

Anamorphic Archive

2009-02-05T03:09:00.000-08:00

It has even been argued that the new fields of Media Studies and Cultural Studies anticipated hyper-text effects now easily obtainable on the computer. The project of cultural criticism with its scholarly procedures of analytic comparison, juxtaposition and critical contrast anticipated such technological developments, which in turn make these procedures much easier. In advertisements of interactive academic computer software, connection by way of association, spatial juxtaposition through the superimposition of windows, and 'evident' visual meaning, are characteristics that are stressed. Terms used for these purposes are 'associative', 'linked', 'hierarchical', 'dynamic', 'visual', and 'genetic'. Such terms demonstrate a set of assumptions about how scholars go about their work. Art historians are not the only scholars influenced by these technological innovations.

For an electronic journal article in the field of Visual Culture Studies it seems an appropriate strategy to demonstrate how an ideologically biased presentation of visual images anamorphically distorts them in the minds' eye. By juxtaposing seemingly disparate images, their visual links based on shared motifs and metaphoric references, sometimes over centuries, are brought to the fore. In this way, it is hoped that some veiled nuances of ideological meaning will be teased out.

Suzanne DE VILLIERS HUMAN, Gender, Ideology and Display

The Passenger: Antonioni's Cinema of Escape.

2009-01-21T16:37:00.000-08:00

During the final stages in the shooting of a film provisionally titled Profession: Reporter, Michelangelo Antonioni in an interview with Philip Strick ("The Antonioni Report," Sight and Sound [Winter 1973/74]) talked about his enthusiastic involvement in the development of its script (from a story by Mark Peploe titled "Fatal Exit") and how it would inevitably be his most "rationalized" film. He described the film's story as a complex mosaic which in the shooting began to crystal- ize: "one day everything was clear in my mind, every part of the script" (31). Antonioni indicated that he made alterations in the original script (credited to Peploe, Peter Wollen, and Antonioni) to fit his own ideas and especially in its beginning and ending sequences. In a later context, he described the film to Gideon Bachman as "my story as an artist, as a director" ("Antonioni After China: Art Versus Science," Film Quarterly [Summer 1975], 27) and dwelt extensively on the point that he, as a filmmaker, discovered a heretofore unrealized "liberty" in his camera's abandonment of the film's characters and their movements. Such liberty, he added, provided him the opportunity to return to the piano-sequenza (the long camera take) which allows for "events to change and grow in the frame" (29). Since the first interview, of course, the film has been retitled and released as The Passenger (1975), along with Kubrick's Barry Lyndon perhaps that year's most uncompromising and challenging narrative film. The total structure of Antonioni's The Passenger resembles those Gaudian architectural landscapes which stand out so prominently in the film's narrative and visual center: a contrary blend in its natural and functional form of surrealistic spatial freedom and organic unity. The key to Antonioni's mosaic, however, resides in those beginning and
ending sequences which form a frame for the film's opposed patterns of narrative entrapment and cinematic freedom. While David Locke (Jack Nicholson), detached journalist turned reluctantly involved gun- runner, fails to escape the prison of self and narrative fate through his efforts at identity transmigration, Antonioni moves his camera - and ideally, his audience - through the symbolic bars of Locke's last win- dow and thereby frees the film from the rigorous mechanics of its plot structure and the grim implacabilities of its central character's fate.

THOMAS ALLEN NELSON, The Passenger: Antonioni's Cinema of Escape, Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Autumn, 1977),
pp. 198-213

zoe / bio

2009-01-18T09:40:00.000-08:00

Rather than starting from a theory of obedience and its legitimating forms, its dispositifs and practices, Foucault interrogates power beginning with the 'freedom' and the 'capacity for transformation' that every 'exercise of power' implies. The new ontology sanctioned by the introduction of 'life into history' enables Foucault to 'defend the subject's freedom' to establish relationships with himself and with others, relationships that are, for him, the very stuff [matière] of ethics. Habermas and the philosophers of the Constitutional State are not wrong in taking Foucault’s thought as their privileged target because it represents a radical alternative to a transcendental ethics of communication and the rights of man.

2. Giorgio Agamben, recently, in a book inscribed explicitly within the research being undertaken on the concept of biopolitics, insisted that the theoretical and political distinction established in antiquity between zoe and bios, between natural life and political life, between man as a living being [simple vivant] whose sphere of influence is in the home and man as a political subject whose sphere of influence is in the polis, is 'now nearly unknown to us.' The introduction of the zoe into the sphere of the polis is, for both Agamben and Foucault, the decisive event of modernity; it marks a radical transformation of the political and philosophical categories of classical thought. But is this impossibility of distinguishing between zoe and bios, between man as a living being and man as a political subject, the product of the action of sovereign power or the result of the action of new forces over which power has 'no control?' Agamben’s response is very ambiguous and it oscillates continuously between these two alternatives. Foucault’s response is entirely different: biopolitics is the form of government taken by a new dynamic of forces that, in conjunction, express power relations that the classical world could not have known.

Foucault described this dynamic, in keeping with the progress of his research, as the emergence of a multiple and heterogeneous power of resistance and creation that calls every organization that is transcendental, and every regulatory mechanism that is extraneous, to its constitution radically into question. The birth of biopower and the redefinition of the problem of sovereignty are only comprehensible to us on this basis. Foucault’s entire work leads toward this conclusion even if he did not coherently explain the dynamic of this power, founded on the 'freedom' of 'subjects' and their capacity to act upon the 'conduct of others,' until the end of his life.

Foucault analyzed the introduction of 'life into history' through the development of political economy. He demonstrated how the techniques of power changed at the precise moment that economy (strictly speaking, the government of the family) and politics (strictly speaking, the government of the polis) became imbricated with one another.
The new biopolitical dispositifs are born once we begin to ask ourselves, 'What is the correct manner of managing individuals, goods and wealth within the family (which a good father is expected to do in relation to his wife, children and servants) and of making the family fortunes prosper--how are we to introduce this meticulous attention of the father towards his family into the management of the State?'

From Biopower to Biopolitics, Maurizio Lazzarato.

diachronic/synchronic

2008-04-18T00:02:00.000-07:00

The problem of meaning is one of the most difficult problems of linguistics. Efforts toward solving the problem have revealed the one-sided monologism of linguistic science in particular strong relief. The theory of passive understanding precludes any possibility of engaging the most fundamental and crucial features of meaning in language……..
To understand another person’s utterance means to orient oneself with respect to it, to find the proper place for it in the corresponding context. For each word of the utterance that we are in th process of understanding, we, as it were lay down a set of our own answering words. The greater their number and weight, the deeper and more substantial our understanding will be.
Thus each of the distinguishable significant elements of an utterance and the entire utterance as a whole or unity are translated in our minds into another, active and responsive context. Any true understanding is dialogic in nature. Understanding is to utterance as one line of a dialogue is to the next. Understanding strives to match the speaker’s words with a counter word. Only in understanding a word in a foreign tongue is the attempt had to match the ‘same’ word in one’s own language.
Therefore, there is no reason for saying that meaning belongs to a word as such. In essence, meaning belongs to a word in its position between speakers; that is, meaning is realized only in the process of active, responsive understanding. Meaning does not reside in the word or in the soul of the speaker or in the soul of the listener. Meaning is the effect of the interaction between speaker and listener produced via the material of a particular sound complex. It is like an electric spark that occurs only when two different terminals are hooked together. Those who ignore theme (which is accessible only to active, responsive understanding) and who, in attempting to define the meaning of the word, approach its lower, stable, self-identical limit, want , in effect, to turn on a light bulb after having switched off the current. Only the current of verbal intercourse endows a word with the light of meaning.

V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 1929

Meaning in Modern Art (1917), Georges Braque

2008-04-10T00:19:00.002-07:00

In art, progress does not consist in extension, but in the knowledge of limits.
Limitation of means determines style, engenders new form, and gives impulse to creation.
Limited means often constitute the charm and force of primitive painting. Extension, on the contray, leads the arts to decadence.
New means, new subjects.
The subject is not the object, it is a new unity, a lyricism which grows completely from the means.
The painter thinks in terms of form and color.
The goal is not to be concerned with reconstituting an anecdotal fact, but with constituting a pictorial fact.
Painting is a method of representation.
One must not imitate what one wants to create.
One does not imitate appearances; the appearance is the result.
To be pure imitation, painting must forget appearance.
To work from nature is to improvise.
One must beware of an all-purpose formula that will serve to interpret the other arts as well as reality, and that instead of creating will only produce a style, or rather a stylization...
The senses deform, the mind forms. Work to perfect the mind.
There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives.
The painter who wished to make a circle would only draw a curve. Its appearance might satisfy him, but he would doubt it. The compass would give him certitude. The pasted [papiers collés] in my drawings also gave me a certitude.
Trompe l'oeil, is due to an anecdotal chance which succeeds because of the simplicity of the facts.
The pasted papers, the faux bois— and other elements of a similar kind— which I used in some of my drawings, also succeed through the simplicity of the facts; this has caused them to be confused with trompe l'oeil, of which they are the exact opposite. They are also simple facts, but are created by the mind, and are one of the justifications for a new form in space.
Nobility grows out of contained emotion.
Emotion should not be rendered by an excited trembling; it can neither be added on nor be imitated. It is the seed, the work is the blossom.
I like the rule that corrects the emotion.

Georges Braque 1917

Le Bateau ivre, Arthur Rimbaud

2008-04-09T21:43:00.000-07:00

Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles,
Je ne me sentis plus guidé par les haleurs :
Des Peaux-Rouges criards les avaient pris pour cibles
Les ayant cloués nus aux poteaux de couleurs.

J'étais insoucieux de tous les équipages,
Porteur de blés flamands ou de cotons anglais.
Quand avec mes haleurs ont fini ces tapages
Les Fleuves m'ont laissé descendre où je voulais.

Dans les clapotements furieux des marées
Moi l'autre hiver plus sourd que les cerveaux d'enfants,
Je courus ! Et les Péninsules démarrées
N'ont pas subi tohu-bohus plus triomphants.

La tempête a béni mes éveils maritimes.
Plus léger qu'un bouchon j'ai dansé sur les flots
Qu'on appelle rouleurs éternels de victimes,
Dix nuits, sans regretter l'oeil niais des falots !

Plus douce qu'aux enfants la chair des pommes sures,
L'eau verte pénétra ma coque de sapin
Et des taches de vins bleus et des vomissures
Me lava, dispersant gouvernail et grappin

Et dès lors, je me suis baigné dans le Poème
De la Mer, infusé d'astres, et lactescent,
Dévorant les azurs verts ; où, flottaison blême
Et ravie, un noyé pensif parfois descend ;

Où, teignant tout à coup les bleuités, délires
Et rythmes lents sous les rutilements du jour,
Plus fortes que l'alcool, plus vastes que nos lyres,
Fermentent les rousseurs amères de l'amour !

Je sais les cieux crevant en éclairs, et les trombes
Et les ressacs et les courants : Je sais le soir,
L'aube exaltée ainsi qu'un peuple de colombes,
Et j'ai vu quelque fois ce que l'homme a cru voir !

J'ai vu le soleil bas, taché d'horreurs mystiques,
Illuminant de longs figements violets,
Pareils à des acteurs de drames très-antiques
Les flots roulant au loin leurs frissons de volets !

J'ai rêvé la nuit verte aux neiges éblouies,
Baiser montant aux yeux des mers avec lenteurs,
La circulation des sèves inouïes,
Et l'éveil jaune et bleu des phosphores chanteurs !

J'ai suivi, des mois pleins, pareille aux vacheries
Hystériques, la houle à l'assaut des récifs,
Sans songer que les pieds lumineux des Maries
Pussent forcer le mufle aux Océans poussifs !

J'ai heurté, savez-vous, d'incroyables Florides
Mêlant aux fleurs des yeux de panthères à peaux
D'hommes ! Des arcs-en-ciel tendus comme des brides
Sous l'horizon des mers, à de glauques troupeaux !

J'ai vu fermenter les marais énormes, nasses
Où pourrit dans les joncs tout un Léviathan !
Des écroulement d'eau au milieu des bonaces,
Et les lointains vers les gouffres cataractant !

Glaciers, soleils d'argent, flots nacreux, cieux de braises !
Échouages hideux au fond des golfes bruns
Où les serpents géants dévorés de punaises
Choient, des arbres tordus, avec de noirs parfums !

J'aurais voulu montrer aux enfants ces dorades
Du flot bleu, ces poissons d'or, ces poissons chantants.
- Des écumes de fleurs ont bercé mes dérades
Et d'ineffables vents m'ont ailé par instants.

Parfois, martyr lassé des pôles et des zones,
La mer dont le sanglot faisait mon roulis doux
Montait vers moi ses fleurs d'ombres aux ventouses jaunes
Et je restais, ainsi qu'une femme à genoux...

Presque île, balottant sur mes bords les querelles
Et les fientes d'oiseaux clabaudeurs aux yeux blonds
Et je voguais, lorsqu'à travers mes liens frêles
Des noyés descendaient dormir, à reculons !

Or moi, bateau perdu sous les cheveux des anses,
Jeté par l'ouragan dans l'éther sans oiseau,
Moi dont les Monitors et les voiliers des Hanses
N'auraient pas repêché la carcasse ivre d'eau ;

Libre, fumant, monté de brumes violettes,
Moi qui trouais le ciel rougeoyant comme un mur
Qui porte, confiture exquise aux bons poètes,
Des lichens de soleil et des morves d'azur,

Qui courais, taché de lunules électriques,
Planche folle, escorté des hippocampes noirs,
Quand les juillets faisaient crouler à coups de triques
Les cieux ultramarins aux ardents entonnoirs ;

Moi qui tremblais, sentant geindre à cinquante lieues
Le rut des Béhémots et les Maelstroms épais,
Fileur éternel des immobilités bleues,
Je regrette l'Europe aux anciens parapets !

J'ai vu des archipels sidéraux ! et des îles
Dont les cieux délirants sont ouverts au vogueur :
- Est-ce en ces nuits sans fond que tu dors et t'exiles,
Million d'oiseaux d'or, ô future Vigueur ? -

Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleuré ! Les Aubes sont navrantes.
Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer :
L'âcre amour m'a gonflé de torpeurs enivrantes.
Ô que ma quille éclate ! Ô que j'aille à la mer !

Si je désire une eau d'Europe, c'est la flache
Noire et froide où vers le crépuscule embaumé
Un enfant accroupi plein de tristesses, lâche
Un bateau frêle comme un papillon de mai.

Je ne puis plus, baigné de vos langueurs, ô lames,
Enlever leur sillage aux porteurs de cotons,
Ni traverser l'orgueil des drapeaux et des flammes,
Ni nager sous les yeux horribles des pontons.

anamorphosis pt 1

2008-04-04T02:12:00.001-07:00

The basic problem of the drama is that of the hysterization of a king, a process whereby a king loses the second, sublime body which makes him a king and is confronted with the void of his subjectivity outside the symbolic mandate-title "king." He is thus forced into a series of
theatrical, hysterical outbursts, from self-pity to sarcastic, clownish madness.' Our interest is, however, limited to a short dialogue between the queen and Bushy, the king's servant, at the beginning of Act 11, Scene 2. The king has left for a war expedition, and the queen is full of bad presentiments, of a sorrow for which she herself does not have a reason. Bushy attempts to console her by pointing out the illusory, phantomlike nature of her grief:

Bushy: Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows.
Which show like grief itself, but are not so.
For sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears,
Divides one thing entire to many objects;
Like perspectives, which rightly gaz'd upon
Show nothing but confusion; ey'd awry
Distinguish form: so your sweet majesty,
Looking awry upon your lord's departure,
Finds shapes of grief more than himself to wail;
Which, look'd on as it is, is nought but shadows
Of what is not. Then, thrice-gracious queen,
More than your lord's departure weep not: more's not seen;
Or if it be, 'tis with false sorrow's eye,
Which for things true weeps things imaginary.
Queen: It may be so; but yet my inward soul
Persuades me it is otherwise: howe'er it be,
I cannot but be sad, so heavy sad,
As, though in thinking on no thought I think,
Makes me with heavy nothing faint and shrink.
Bushy: 'Tis nothing but conceit, my gracious lady.
Queen: 'Tis nothing less: conceit is still deriv'd
From some forefather grief; mine is not so,
For nothing hath begot my something grief;
Or something hath the nothing that I grieve:
'Tis in reversion that I do possess;
But what it is, that is not yet known; what
I cannot name; 'tis nameless woe, I wot.

Looking Awry
Slavoj Žižek
October, Vol. 50. (Autumn, 1989), pp. 30-55.

anamorphosis pt 2

2008-04-04T02:08:00.000-07:00

By means of a metaphor of the way anamorphosis functions in painting, Bushy tries to convince the queen that her sorrow has no foundation, that its reasons are null, but the crucial point is the way his metaphor splits, redoubles itself, i.e., the way he entangles himself in contradiction. First ("sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears, / Divides one thing entire to many objects"), he refers to the simple, commonsense opposition between a thing as it is "in itself," in reality, and its "shadows," reflections in our eyes, subjective impressions multiplied because of our anxieties and sorrows. When we are worried, a small difficulty assumes giant proportions; we see the thing as far worse than it really is. The metaphor at work here is that of a glass surface sharpened, cut in such a way that it reflects a multitude of images; instead of the tiny substance, we see its "twenty shadows." In the following verses, however, things become complicated.
At first sight it seems that Shakespeare only illustrates the fact that "sorrow's eye . . . divides one thing entire to many objects" with a metaphor from the domain of painting ("Like perspectives, which rightly gaz'd upon/Show nothing but confusion; ey'd awry/Distinguish form"), but what he really accomplishes is a radical change of terrain. From the metaphor of a sharpened glass surface he passes to the metaphor of anamorphosis, the logic of which is quite different. A detail of a picture that "rightly gaz'd," i.e., from a straightforward, frontal view, appears a blurred spot, assumes clear, distinct shapes once we look at it "awry," from aside. The verses which apply this metaphor back to the queen's anxiety and sorrow are thus profoundly ambivalent: "so your sweet majesty, / Looking awry upon your lord's departure, / Finds shapes of grief more than himself to wail; / Which, look'd on as it is, is nought but shadows / Of what is not." That is to say, if we take the comparison between the queen's look and the anamorphic look literally, we would be obliged to state that precisely by "looking awry," i.e., from aside, she sees the thing in its clear and distinct form, in opposition to the
"straightforward," frontal view which sees only an indistinct corlfusion (and, incidentally, the further development of the drama fully justifies the queen's most sinister presentiments), But, of course, Bushy did not "want to say" this. His intention was to say quite the opposite: by means of an imperceptible subreption, he returned to the first metaphor (that of a sharpened glass) and "wanted to say" that, because her view is distorted by sorrow and anxiety, the queen sees causes for alarm where a closer, matter-of-fact look attests that there is next to nothing
in it.

Looking Awry
Slavoj Žižek
October, Vol. 50. (Autumn, 1989), pp. 30-55.

anamorphosis pt 3

2008-04-04T02:04:00.000-07:00

What we have here are thus two realities, two "substances." On the level of the first metaphor, we have the commonsense reality as "substance with twenty shadows," as a thing split into twenty reflections by our subjective view; in short, as a substantial "reality" distorted by our subjective perspective (inflated by our anxiety, etc.). If we look at a thing straight on, from a matter-of-fact perspective, we see it "as it really is," while the look puzzled by our desires and anxieties ("looking awry") gives us a distorted, blurred image of the thing. On the level of
the second metaphor (anamorphosis), however, the relation is exactly the opposite: if we look at a thing straight on, i.e., from a matter-of-fact, disinterested, "objective" perspective, we see nothing but a formless spot. The object assumes clear and distinctive features only if we look at it "from aside," i.e., with an "interested" look, with a look supported, permeated, and "distorted" by a desire. This is precisely the Lacanian objet petit a, the object-cause of desire, an object which is, in a way, posited by the desire itself. The paradox of desire is that it
posits retroactively its own cause, i.e., an object that can be perceived only by the look "distorted" by desire, an object that does not exist for an "objective" look. In other words, the objet petit a is always, by definition, perceived in a distorted way, because, outside this distortion, "in itself," it does not exist, i.e., because it is nothing but the embodiment, the materialization of this distortion, of this surplus of confusion and perturbation introduced by desire into so-called "objective reality." Objet petit a is "objectively" nothing, it is nothing at all, nothing of the desire itself which, viewed from a certain perspective, assumes the shape of
"something." It is, as is formulated in an extremely precise manner by the queen in her response to Bushy, her "something grief" begot by "nothing" ("For nothing hath begot my something grief "). Desire "takes off" when "something" (its object-cause) embodies, gives positive existence to its "nothing," to its void. This "something" is the anamorphic object, a pure semblance that we can perceive clearly only by "looking awry." It is precisely (and only) the logic of desire that belies the notorious wisdom that "nothing comes from nothing." In
the movement of desire, "something comes from nothing." It is true that the object-cause of desire is a pure semblance, but this does not prevent it from triggering off a whole chain of consequences which regulate our "material,""effective" life and deeds

Looking Awry
Slavoj Žižek
October, Vol. 50. (Autumn, 1989), pp. 30-55.

compensatory investment pt1

2008-04-03T05:50:00.001-07:00

Like Miller, Kelley explores this space where symbols are not yet stable, where "the concepts faeces (money, gift), baby and penis are ill-distinguished from one another and are easily interchangeable. Both artists push this symbolic interchange toward aformal indistinction-push the baby and the penis, as it were, toward the lump of shit. However, this is done not to celebrate mere indistinction but to trouble symbolic indifference. Lumpen, the German word for "rag" that gives us Lumpensammler (the ragpicker that so interested Benjamin) and Lumpenproletariat (the mass too ragged to form a class that so interested Marx, "the scum, the leavings, the refuse of all classes"), is a crucial word in the Kelley lexicon which he developed as a third term between the informe (of Bataille) and the abject (of Kristeva). In a sense, he does what Bataille urges: he bases materialism "on psychological or social facts". The result is an art of lumpy things, subjects and personae that resist shaping, let alone sublimating or redeeming. Unlike the Lumpen of Napoleon III, Hitler or Mussolini, the Lumpen of Kelley refuses molding, much less mobilizing.

Obscene, Abject, Traumatic
Hal Foster
October, Vol. 78. (Autumn, 1996), pp. 106-124.

compensatory investment pt2

2008-04-03T05:49:00.001-07:00

Is there a cultural politics here? Often in the general culture of abjection (I mean the culture of slackers, losers, grunge and Generation X) this posture of indifference expresses only fatigue with the politics of difference. Yet sometimes too this posture seems to intimate a more fundamental fatigue: a strange drive to indistinction, a paradoxical desire to be desireless, a call of regression that goes beyond the infantile to the inorganic. In a 1937 text crucial to the Lacanian discussion of the gaze, Roger Caillois, another associate of the Batailean Surrealists, considered the drive to indistinction in terms of visuality- specifically of insects assimulated into space through mimicry. This assimulation, Caillois argued (Roger Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia), allows for no agency, let alone subjecthood (these organisms are "dispossessed of this privelge"), which he likened to the condition of extreme schizophrenics:

To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis (consumption of bacteria). It ends by replacing them. The the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is "convulsive possession".

Compensatory investment pt3

2008-04-03T05:46:00.001-07:00

The breaching of the body, the gaze devouring the subject, the subject becoming the space, the state of mere similarity: these are conditions evoked in much art today. But to understand this convulsive possession in its contemporary guise, it must be split into two constituent parts: on the one hand an ecstasy in the imagined breakdown of the image-screenand/or of the symbolic order; on the other hand a horror at this breakdown followed by a despair about it. Early definitions of postmodernism evoked this first, ecstatic structure of feeling, sometimes in analogy with schizophrenia. Indeed for Frederic Jameson the primary sympton of postmodernism was a schizophrenic breakdown in language and time that provoked a compensatory investment in image and space. And in the 1980s many artists did indulge in simulacral intensities and ahistorical pastiches. In recent initmations of postmodernism, however, the second, melancholic structure of feeling has dominated, and sometimes, as in Kristeva, it too is associated with a symbolic order in crisis. Here artists are drawn not to the highs of the simulacral image but to the lows of the depressive thing. If some high modernists sought to transcend the referential object and some early postmodernists to delight in the sheer image, some later postmodernists want to possess the real thing.
Today this bipolar postmodernism seems pushed toward a qualitative change: some artists appear driven by an ambition, on the one hand, to inhabit a place of total affect and , on the other, to be drained of affect altogether; on the one hand to possess the obscene vitality of the wound and, on the other, to occupy the radical nihility of the corpse. This oscillation suggests the dynamic of psychic shock parried by protective shield that Freud developed in his discussion of the death drive and Benjamin elaborated in his discussion of Baudelairean modernism- but now placed well beyond the pleasure principle. Pure affect, no affect: It Hurts, I Can't Feel Anything.
Why this fascination with trauma, this envy of abjection, today? To be sure motives exist within art, writing, and theory alike. As I suggested at the outset, there is a dissatisfaction with the textual model of reality - as if the real, repressed in poststructuralist postmodernism, had returned as traumatic. Then too there is a disillusionment with the celebration of desire as an open passport of a mobile subject - as if the real, dismissed by a performative postmodernism, were marshaled against a world of fantasy compromised by consumerism.
......................in this psychologistic register the subject however disturbed, rushes back as survivor, witness, testifier. Here a traumatic subject does indeed exist, and it has absolute authority, for one cannot challenge the trauma of another: one can only believe it , even identify with it, or not. In trauma discourse, then, the subject is evacuated and elevated at once. And in this way it serves as a magical resolution of contradictory imperatives in contemporary culture: the imperative of deconstructive analyses on the one hand, and the imperative of multicultural histories on the other; the imperative to acknowledge the disrupted subjectivity that comes from a broken society on the one hand, and the imperative to affirm identity at all costs on the other. Today, thirty years after the death of the author, we are witness to a strange rebirth of the author as zombie, to a paradoxical condition of absentee authority.

Obscene, Abject, Traumatic
Hal Foster
October, Vol. 78. (Autumn, 1996), pp. 106-124.

inside / outside : sovereignty

2008-03-23T05:01:00.000-07:00

Since "there is no rule that is applicable to chaos", chaos must first be included in the juridical order through the creation of a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, chaos and the normal situation - the state of exception. To refer to something, a rule must both presuppose and yet still establish a relation with what is outside relation (the nonrelational). The relation of exception thus simply expresses the orginary formal structure of the juridical relation. In this sense, the sovereign decision on the exception is the originary juridical-political structure on which the basis of which what is included in the juridical order and what is excluded from it aquire their meaning. In its archetypal form, the state of exception is therefore the principle of every juridical localization, since only the state of exception opens the space in which the determinantion of a certain juridical order and a particular territory first become possible. As such the state of exception itself is thus essentially unlocalizable (even if definite spatiotemporal limits can be assigned to it from time to time). The link between localization (Ortung) and ordering (Ordnung) constitutive of the "nomos of the earth" is therefore even more complex than Scmitt maintains and, at its center, contains a fundamental ambiguity, an unlocalizable zone of indistinction or exception that, in the last analysis, necessarily acts against it as a principle of its infinite dislocation. One of the theses of the present inquiry is that in our age, the state of exception comes more and more to the foreground as the fundamental political structure and ultimately begins to become the rule. When our age tried to grant the unlocalizable a permanent and visible localization, the result was the concentration camp.

Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Georgio Agamben

Composition as consistency

2008-01-14T02:24:00.000-08:00

The problem of 'consistency' concerns the manner in which the components of a territorial assemblage hold together. But it also concerns the manner in which different assemblages hold together, with components of passage and relay. It may even be the case that consistency finds the totality of its conditions only on a properly 'cosmic' plan, where all the disperate and heterogeneous elements are convoked. However from the moment heterogeneities hold together in an assemblage or inter-assemblages a problem of consisitency is posed, in terms of coexistence or succession, and both simultaneously. Even in a territorial assemblage, it may be the most deterritorialised component, the deterritorializing vector, in other words, the refrain, that assures the consistency of the territory. If we ask the general question, "What holds things together?",the clearest, easiest answer seems to be provided by a formalizing, linear, hierarchized, centralized 'aborescent' model. Take Tinbergen's schema, which presents a coded linkage of spatiotemporal forms in the central nervous system: a higher functional center goes automatically into operation and releases an appetitive behavour in search of specific stimuli (the migrational center); through the intermediary of the stimulus, a second center that had been inhibited up to this point is freed and releases a new appetitive behavour (the territorial center); then other subordinate centers are activited, centers of fighting, nesting, courtship... until stimuli are found that release the corresponding executive acts.
This kind of representation, however is constructed of over simplified binarities: inhibition-release, innate-acquired, etc. Ethologists have a great advantage over ethnologists: they did not fall into the structural danger of dividing "terrain" into forms of kinship, politics, economics, myth etc. The ethologists have retained the integrality of a certain undivided "terrain". But by orientating it along the axes of inhibition-release, innate-acquired they risk reintroducing souls and centers at each locus and stage of linkage. That is why even the authors who stress the role of the peripheral and the acquired at the level of the releasing stimuli do not truely overturn the linear aborescent schema, even if they reverse the direction of the arrows.
It seems important to us to underline a certain number of factors liable to suggest an entirely different schema, one favouring rhizomatic, rather than arborified, functioning, and no longer operating by these dualisms.

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

map-out

2008-01-13T14:43:00.000-08:00

From whatever side one approaches things, the ultimate problem turns out in the final analysis to be that of distinction: distinctions between the real and the imaginary, between waking and sleeping, between ignorance and knowledge, etc. — all of them, in short, distinctions in which valid consideration must demonstrate a keen awareness and the demand for resolution. Among distinctions, there is assuredly none more clear-cut than that between the organism and its surroundings; at least there is none in which the tangible experience of separation is more immediate. So it is worthwhile to observe the phenomenon with particular attention and, within the phenomenon, what is even more necessary, given the present state of our knowledge, is to consider its condition as pathology (the word here having only a statistical meaning)–i.e., all the facts that come under the heading of mimicry.

Roger Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia

Vanishing Point/ the null point

2007-10-07T04:49:00.000-07:00

3.

Let us take a moment to develop this notion that Benjamin thought in coordinates. His unfolding of concepts in their “extremes” can be visualised as antithetical polarities of axes that cross each other, revealing a “dialectical image” at the null point , with its contradictory “moments” as axial fields. Against this scepticism of Espagne and Werner, we will go so far as to suggest that a pattern of coordinates functions as the invisible structure of the Passagen-Werk’s historical research, enabling the project’s seemingly disparate, conceptual elements to cohere. The axes of these coordinates can be designated with the familiar Hegelian polarities: consciousness and reality. If the termini are to be antithetical extremes, we might name those on the axis of reality, petrified nature/transitory nature, while in the case of consciousness, the termini would be dream/waking. At the null point where the coordinates intersect, we can place the dialectical image which by 1935, stood at the “mid-point” of the project: the commodity. Each field of the coordinates can then be said to describe one aspect of the physiognomic appearance of the commodity, showing its contradictory “faces”: fetish and fossil; wish image and ruin. In the positioning of the fields, those under the sign of transitoriness would need to be affirmed. Display D represents this invisible, inner structure of the Passagen-Werk.

Here the fossil names the commodity in the discourse of ur-history, as the visible remains of the “ur-phenomena.” Even after his early, metaphoric ur-landscapes of consumer dinosaurs and modern ice ages recedes, Benjamin sustains the physiognomy of the fossil in the idea of the “trace” (spur), the imprint of objects particularly visible in the plush bourgeois interiors of the velvet lining of their casings (- here ur history turns into a detective story, with the historical “trace” as clue). The fetish is the keyword of the commodity as mythic phantasmagoria, the arrested forms of history. It corresponds to the reified form of new nature, condemned to the modern hell of the new as the always-the-same. But this fetishized phantasmagoria is also the form in which the human, socialist potential of industrial nature lies frozen, awaiting the collective political action that could awaken it. The wish image is the transitory, dream form of that potential. In it archaic meanings return in anticipation of the “dialectic” of awakening. The ruin created intentionally in Baudelaire’s allegorical poetry, is the form in which the wish images of the past century appear, as rubble, in the present. But it refers also to the loosened building blocks (both semantic and material) out of which a new order can be constructed. Note that the figures of the collector, the ragpicker, and the detective wander through the fields of the fossil and ruin, while the fields of action of the prostitute, the gambler and the flâneur are those of wish images, and of the fetish as their phantasmagoric form. Haussman builds the new phantasmagoria; Grandville represents it critically. Fourier’s fantasies are wish images, anticipations of the future expressed as dream symbols; Baudelaire’s images are ruins, failed material expressed as allegorical objects.

Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. MIT Press, 1989.

vanishing point : the engram

2007-09-05T04:52:00.000-07:00

The inherited consciousness of maximalized impressions stamped
on the mind (engram) passes them on without taking cognizance
of the direction of their emotional charge, simply as an experience
of energy tensions; this unpolarized continuum can also function
as continuum. The imparting of a new meaning to these energies
serves as a protective screen.
Aby Warburg, Journal, VII, 1929, p. 255

vanishing point : croisements

2007-09-02T03:34:00.000-07:00

Structures of an Atlas

Wolfgang Kemp was the first to point out that Warburg’s project of an organization and presentation of vast quantities of historical information without any textual commentary should remind us of surrealist montage procedures. Thereby, Warburg’s Atlas inevitably enters also into a comparison with another extraordinary and unfinished montage-project of the late 1920s, a textual assemblage which had attempted to construct an analytical memory of collective experience in nineteenth century Paris. Benjamin had equally associated his Passagenwerk with the montage techniques of the surrealists and had explicitly identified it in those terms when he wrote that the “method of this work is literary montage”. I have nothing to say ,only to show.”

And Theodor W. Adorno’s description of the Passagenwerk could just as well be applied to the essential features of Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas:

..(Benjamin) deliberately excluded all interpretation and wanted the actually existing conditions to be foregrounded through the shocks that the montage of the materials would inevitably generate in the reader… To bring his antisubjectivism to the point of culmination, Benjamin envisaged that the work should only consist of accumulated quotations.

Again several terms stand out in this discussion that deserve our attention, with regard to both the accuracy of the description of (and the potential differences between) Benjamin’s and Warburg’s model and to the accuracy of their definition of the epistemes of collage/photomontage and the question whether these are in fact the epistemes of the structural organization of the Atlas: first of all, the exclusions of interpretation in favour of actually existing conditions in the discursive construction of the textual memory. Second: the anticipation of shocks as an inescapable and intended result of the montage technique, presumably occurring most vividly in the interstices of discursive fields (such as the pictorial versus the photographic, the mass-cultural clutter versus the structural distillation of the avant-garde strategy, the artisanal versus the technically reproduced, the textual versus the painterly: to name but a few of the classical topoi and tropes of collage and montage aesthetics).

Benjam H.D. Buchloh, Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive, in Photography and Painting in the work of Gerhard Richter: Four Essays on the Atlas, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2000.

vanishing point : dionysiac art

2007-08-30T07:24:00.000-07:00

Dionysian art, too, wishes to convince us of the eternal joy of existence: only we are to seek this joy not in phenomena, but behind them. We are to recognize that all that comes into being must be ready for a sorrowful end; we are forced to look into the terrors of the individual existence—yet we are not to become rigid with fear: a metaphysical comfort tears us momentarily from the bustle of the changing figures. We are really for a brief moment primordial being itself, feeling its raging desire for existence and joy in existence; the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena, now appear necessary to us, in view of the excess of countless forms of existence which force and push one another into life, in view of the exuberant fertility of the universal will. We are pierced by the maddening stings of these pains just when we have become, as it were, one with the infinite primordial joy in existence, and when we anticipate, in Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructibility and eternity of this joy. In spite of fear and pity, we are the happy living beings, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose creative joy we are united.

Friedrich Nietzsche,The Birth of Tragedy, section 17.

vanishing point : point de fuite

2007-08-30T06:55:00.000-07:00

Aby Warburg's autobiographical schemas

vanishing point : all and nothing

2007-08-30T05:48:00.000-07:00

Music, therefore, if regarded as an expression of the world, is in the highest degree a universal language, which is related indeed to the universality of concepts, much as they are related to the particular things. Its, universality, however, is by no means that empty universality of abstraction, but of quite a different kind, and is united with thorough and distinct definiteness. In this respect it resembles geometrical figures and numbers, which are the universal forms of all possible objects of experience and applicable to them all a priori, and yet are not abstract but perceptible and thoroughly determinate. All possible efforts, excitements, and manifestations of will, all that goes on in the heart of man and that reason includes in the wide, negative concept of feeling, may be expressed by the infinite number of possible melodies, but always in the universal, in the mere form, without the material, always according to the thing-in-itself, not the phenomenon, the inmost soul, as it were, of the phenomenon without the body.

Richard Wagner quoted in The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche, section 16.

vanishing point : "sacred profanities"

2007-08-29T04:39:00.000-07:00

vanishing point : self effacement

2007-08-20T05:39:00.000-07:00

"But what relationship can be said to obtain between such an ideal Apollinian drama and the plays of Euripides? The same as obtains between the early solemn rhapsodist and that more recent variety described in Plato's "Ion": "When I say something sad my eyes fill with tears; if, however, what I say is terrible and ghastly, then my hair stands on end and my heart beats loudly." Here there is no longer any trace of epic self forgetfulness, of the true rhapsodist's cool detachment, who at the highest pitch of action, and especially then, becomes wholly illusion and delight in illusion. Euripides is the actor of the beating heart, with hair standing on end. He lays his dramatic plan as Socratic thinker and carries it out as passionate actor. So it happens that the Euripidean drama is at the same time cool and fiery, able alike to freeze and consume us. It cannot possibly achieve the Apollinian effects of the epic, while on the other hand it has severed all connection with the Dionysian mode; so that in order to have any impact at all it must seek out novel stimulants which are to be found neither in the Apollinian nor in the Dionysian realm. Those stimulants are, on the one hand, cold paradoxical ideas put in the place of Apollinian contemplation, and on the other fiery emotions put in the place of Dionysian transports. These last are splendidly realistic counterfeits, but neither ideas nor affects are infused with the spirit of true art."

Friedrich Nietzsche,The Birth of Tragedy, section 12.

vanishing point : "finalité sans fin"

2007-08-17T15:12:00.000-07:00

Ce n'est qu'ainsi que l'obscure expression kantiennes de "finalité sans fin" revêt une signification concrète. Elle est, dans un moyen, cette puissance du geste qui l'interrompt dans son être-moyen même et ne peut l'exhiber, ni faire d'une res une res gesta, que par ce biais. De façon analogue, si l'on considère la parole comme le moyen de la communication, montrer une parole ne revient pas à disposer d'un plan plus élevé (un métalangage, lui même incommuniable à l'intérieur du premier niveau) à partir duquel faire de celle-ci un objet de communication, mais à l'exposer, hors de toute transcendance, dans sa propre médialité, dans son propre être-moyen - et c"est là, justement, la tâche la plus difficile. Le geste est en ce sens communication d'une communicabilité.
Giorgio Agamben, Moyen sans fins: Notes sur le geste.

note 2 : movement, degeneration / debasement and sanctification of the image

2007-08-13T02:41:00.000-07:00

The dual aspects of these two figures, in this context figured by Benjamin and Warburg , also impact upon what could be thought of as two other competing models of modernist ‘formalism’ (but not ‘the’ only models). Namely a Kantian/Nietzschian contrast between category and genealogy. These formulations; movement, degeneration / debasement and sanctification on the one hand and category and genealogy on the other offer ways of thinking about spatialisation of elements and the sense of how movement can be thought along the axes that these spatial dispositifs offer. These groupings also constitute a possibility of thinking through the formal aspects of what constitutes an ‘archive’ and how the reading of material within particular structures generates textualities that cross temporal axes. The ‘Pathos-formal’ in these terms can perhaps be thought of as a tracking of these temporal croisements.
My nevermind project has been a modest attempt to structure something of the above pictorially. Where flatness

and thickness/depth

are deployed as competing cultural specificities of painting per se, as fields in which aspects of image are put to work (and made in a spirit of experimentation and observation rather than declamation). The subsequent series after Nevermind, prosopopoeia, and the current, and as yet untitled works, continue within this line of thought and making. What seems increasingly pertinent here is the relationship to painting, and, an idea of composition. Composition here is in need of rethinking (and especially within its context as a polemical position predominantly through the critique of Greenberg by Minimalism and mainly via Morris and Judd.). Composition warrants being transplanted from the composition versus non or auto composition opposition, an axis that drives up through categorical configurations of the ‘work’ that rest upon reductive ideas of specificity. This is not to demonise this logic. The unfolding of protocols of making from Greenberg’s ground zero, to the monochrome through minimalism to conceptual practice, moves through a dialectal structure but where the ‘refuse’ is constitutive ideas of composition and objections to this formulation cannot be opened up the dominant critiques of this dialectic; namely objecthood or gestalt forms (as being ‘un-artistic’ and as simply being models of communication).
This brings in to question many material and ‘operative’ terms that have migrated to an ‘art-in-general’ domain and have their feet firmly in practices (and which seem to me to be along an axis of painting / photo / film). Collage, décollage, montage seem to also give rise to an idea and a working of material which can be thought through as juxtaposition. Not the laying in of something onto a naturalistic temporal axis, as narrative, but within a convention of presentation where the relation of elements can be said to produce readings or ‘narratives’ rather than naturalistically map their unfolding. Richard Prince’s idea of wild history as worked through in his photo assemblages come to mind here.

references about : movement, degeneration / debasement and sanctification of the image

2007-08-01T05:57:00.000-07:00

The one evolution of art forms unfolds in one straight logical line of negative actions and reactions, in one predestined, eternally recurrent stylistic cycle, in the same all-over pattern, in all times and places, taking different times in different places, always beginning with an "early" archaic schematization, achieving a climax with a "classic" formulation, and decaying with the "late" endless variety of illusionisms and expressionisms. When late stages wash away all lines of demarcation, framework, and fabric, with "anything can be art", "anybody can be an artist", "that's life", "why fight it", "anything goes", and "it makes no difference whether art is abstract or representational", the artists' world is a mannerist and primitivist art trade and suicide-vaudeville, venal, genial, contemptible, trifling.
Ad Reinhardt, "Art-as-Art" [1]

The symptoms were everywhere: in the work of painters themselves, all of whom seemed to be reiterating Ad Reinhardt's claim that he was "just making the last paintings anyone could make" or allowing their paintings to be contaminated with such alien elements as photographic images; in minimal sculpture, which provided a definite rupture with painting's unavoidable ties to a centuries-old idealism; in all other mediums to which artists turned, as one after another, they abandoned painting. The dimension that had always resisted even painting's most dazzling feats of illusionism - time - now became the dimension in which artists staged their activities as they embraced film, video, and performance. And, after waiting out the entire era of modernism, photography reappeared, finally to claim its inheritance.
Douglas Crimp, "The End of Painting" [2]

quoted in "What They're Not: The Paintings of Christopher Wool " by Ann Goldstein
http://www.gms.be/wool_exhibition_2001.html

[1] Ad Reinhardt, "Art-as-Art", originally published in Art International (December 1962), as reprinted in Ad Reinhardt (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art; New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1991): 122.

[2] Douglas Crimp, "The End of Painting", in On the Museum's Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1993): 92-93.

Giorgio Agamben at the European Graduate School EGS 2005 on the process of profanation (giving back to free use) video link

nevermind: pathos-formel

2007-08-01T03:20:00.000-07:00



nevermind: pathos-formel,
never achieved giclee print.

Rome project propos:

2007-07-21T03:07:00.000-07:00

Propos:

The aim here is bring together disperate thoughts, references and seperated aspects of my practice toward the time when I will be in Rome for a three month residence at the British School . Here, below, are some notes I made for my interview for that residency and which stand as the first touchstone for this blog.

mick finch
Rome project propos:

To establish a web based archive of images that would feed into the production of a series of paintings. The archive would attempt to use two ideas of the image.

• The first in terms of its movement & degeneration through time - as a continuous sequence, symptomatic & corporally referenced, the pathos-formula (Warburg) <2>.

• The second in terms of a perpetual and simultaneous debasement and sanctification of the image, allegoric and using the ruin as a reference (Benjamin)-<2>.

These temporal and active axes would be supplemented by particular examples of transition acting as pretexts where dérive driven prospection of images will take place.

eg:

Antiquity – Renaissance – Florence / Rome / Naples – Barberini – Massimo

Humanism – Enlightenment – Poussin / Trinità dei Monti

Center & Peripherique – the Forum / the borgates

Cinecitta – as a topos of the engram, collaging and montaging of images

The concept of the souvenir (perhaps more precisely the engram) would be crucial here both as a discreet object and as a complex concept (layered : displaced in time, place and space) <1>.
The objective here is to situate these axes within a materiality(s) of painting, through processes of transcription and inscription.

Adi Efal's excellent article : Warburg’s “Pathos Formula” in Psychoanalytic and Benjaminian contexts:
http://www.tau.ac.il/arts/projects/PUB/assaph-art/assaph5/articles_assaph5/AdiEfal.pdf

Of relevance is the psycho-geographic work of the Rome based group,Stalker (http://digilander.libero.it/stalkerlab/tarkowsky/tarko.html)

references

• <1> The Baudelairian allegory is a product of the flow of exchanges and reproductions in modern society and culture, which leads to and comes from a ‘shock’ experience, and it generates a work of art that presupposes and exhibits the exchangeability of the signifier and the commodity, and the turning of every sign into interpreter and reader of another sign. In the modern age, it is not the natural, external, physical world that is degrading, but rather that of internal experience. The shock, which is the modern subject’s mode of encounter with his surrounding reality, and which entails a malfunctioning of everyday experience, consciousness and memory, is expressed in the image of the ‘souvenir’, which is the ‘inanimate’ object in which authentic experience has been inscribed and buried.
(Adi Efal)

• <2> In Warburg, the degeneration of the image occurs over a continuous sequence of time, in contrast to the allegorical Benjaminian image, whose debasement and sanctification take place all the time and simultaneously. The connection between the sacral relation to the essence and the agency of the image exists, in Warburg’s theory, on a vector that points to the encounter’s declining intensity, which proceeds on a temporal axis, and which operates through an economy of using and exploiting; whereas in Benjamin’s theory these aspects are inherently necessary qualities of every image. The exploitation and reproduction of the image in the allegorical mode is permanent evidence and an expression of its debasement and sanctification.
(Adi Efal)

Other aspects

dionysian
transparency /opacity of the sign:

in pathos formula as transparency, process of mimicry, of fixing and petrifying the image.

with WB/allegory as an opacity (the continual praxis of its own interpretation, within itself, an image composed of a plurality of signs and spaces of discourse).

Rhetoric of vitality & excessive vitality (in Warburg).

Warburg / memory
‘primitive’ : immediate reflex
‘civilised’ : detachment & naming

Warburg/Benjamin structures operate as both actions and reactions of memory.