October journal No.37 Summer (1986)

Art I Theory | Criticism I Politics

OCTO

37 Annette Michelson Andre Leroi-Gourhan Rosalind Krauss Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

In Praiseof Horizontality TheReligionof the Caves TheHandsof Gargas Originalityas Repetition ThePrimaryColorsfor theSecond Time

Molly Nesbit Steven Z. Levine Linda Nochlin Michael Fried Louis Marin Klaus Herding Yve-Alain Bois

Ready-MadeOriginals Repetition,Obsession The Originwithoutan Original AntiquityNow In Praiseof Appearance Manet'sImageryReconstructed Paintingas Model

$6.00/Summer

Publishedby theMIT Press

1986

OCTOBER

editors Douglas Crimp Rosalind Krauss Annette Michelson associateeditor Joan Copjec

OCTOBER (ISSN 0162-2870) (ISBN 0-262-75187-9) is published quarterly by the MIT Press. Subscriptions: individuals $20.00; institutions $49.00; students and retired $18.00. Foreign subscriptions outside USA and Canada add $4.00 for surface mail or $18.00 for air mail. Prices subject to change without notice. Address subscriptions to OCTOBER, MIT Press Journals, 28 Carleton Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. Manuscripts, accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelope, should be sent to OCTOBER, 19 Union Square West, New York, NY 10003. No responsibility is assumed for loss or injury. Second class postage paid at Boston, MA, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: send address changes to OCTOBER, MIT Press Journals, 28 Carleton Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. OCTOBER is distributed in the USA by B. DeBoer, Inc., 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, NJ 07110. Copyright ? 1986 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and October Magazine, Ltd. The editors of OCTOBER are wholly responsible for its editorial contents.

37

Annette Michelson Andre Leroi-Gourhan

Rosalind Krauss Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Molly Nesbit Steven Z. Levine Linda Nochlin Michael Fried Louis Marin Klaus Herding Yve-Alain Bois

In Praise of Horizontality. Andre Leroi-Gourhan1911-1986 The Religion of the Caves. Magic or Metaphysics? The Hands of Gargas. Toward a GeneralStudy Originalityas Repetition. Introduction The Primary.Colorsfor the Second Time. A ParadigmRepetitionof the Neo-Avant-Garde Ready-Made Originals. The Duchamp Model Monet's Series. Repetition, Obsession Courbet'sL'origine du monde: The Origin without an Original Antiquity Now. Reading Winckelmann on Imitation In Praise of Appearance Manet's ImageryReconstructed Painting as Model

3 7 19 35

41 53 65 77 87 99 113 125

2

YVE-ALAIN BOIS, a founding editor of Macula, is Associate Professor of Art History at The Johns Hopkins University. BENJAMIN H. D. BUCHLOH is Associate Professor of Art History at SUNY, Old Westbury, and the editor of the Nova Scotia Series. MICHAEL FRIED is Professor of Humanities and the History of Art and Director of the Humanities Center at The Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and StephenCrane, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. KLAUS HERDING, Professor of Art History at Hamburg University, is editor of Fischer Verlag's Kunststiick series. His many publications include PierrePuget (Berlin, Mann, 1970) and Realismusals Widerspruch(Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1984). ANDRE LEROI-GOURHAN was acting director of the Musee de l'Homme, Paris, from 1945 to 1950 and professor at the College de France from 1968 until his death this year. STEPHEN Z. LEVINE is Professor of the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College. LOUIS MARIN is Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He also teaches in the Department of French and Italian at the University of California, Davis. MOLLY NESBIT is Assistant Professor of Art History at Barnard College, Columbia University. LINDA NOCHLIN, Distinguished Professor of Art History at the Graduate School, CUNY, is currently preparing an exhibition of the work of Gustave Courbet for the Brooklyn Museum.

OCTOBER

In Praise of Horizontality: Andre Leroi-Gourhan 1911-1986

ANNETTE MICHELSON

We publish, in this issue, two essays by Andre Leroi-Gourhan, whose death in Februaryof this year took from us the greatestof modern prehistorians. A student of Granet and of Mauss, he was of that lineage which, in its transgression of the limits of academic parochialism, provided models for theoretical endeavors central to our time. The range of Leroi-Gourhan'swork was exceptional even considered within that tradition. His contributions, singular in their boldness and originality, included work on chronology, physical anthropology, ethnology, and the analysis of prehistoric technology seen in its relation to the development of cognitive and linguistic faculties. He was, as well, the major force over the past four decades in the renewal of our understanding of the art of prehistoric man. It is October's concern with cultural texts that impels the modest tribute represented by publication of these essays. The first of these offers a succinct and lucid summary (one of many available to the general reader)of Leroi-Gourhan'sengagement with the problematic of prehistoric art. It presents the theoretical grounding for his radical revision of its deciphering and interpretation, supported by statistical analysis of distribution and topography. It redefines the prehistorian'senterprise, extending our readings through the repertoryof abstractsigns. Locating a central, generalized mythogram, it proposes a general intelligibility of paleolithic culture, while correcting a certain hermeneutical hubris characteristicof a preceding generation of scholars. In so doing, it offersa chastening model for art history of all periods, and for none more urgently than that of modern painting, in view of recent attempts to impose upon the corpus of modernist painting a traditional and highly impertinent iconography. The second essay implements the methodological provisions of the first in a virtuosic solution of one of the most enigmatic problems confronting the student of prehistory:the distribution, in variable density, of hand prints upon the cave walls of the Franco-Cantabrianregion, here analyzed in its most arresting instance, at Gargas. These essays of the late 1960s succeeded the publication of Prehistoire del'art

4

OCTOBER

occidental,' Leroi-Gourhan's summa of the art of prehistory. This was, as well, the time (1964) of his establishment, on the site of Pincevent, near Fontainebleau, of a model laboratory of archeological research. It was here, through the work of a group under the direction of Michel Brezillon, that Leroi-Gourhan's insistent plea for a revision of the techniques of archaeological practice was carried out, yielding an abundance of detailed documentation of Upper Paleolithic culture. In what did this revision, then, consist? In the substitution of a planographic method of digging for that of the stratigraphy prevailing from the time of Boucher de Perthes and epitomized in the work of Leroi-Gourhan's celebrated predecessor in the field, the Abbe Breuil. The axis of inquiry was, quite literally, rotated, and the horizontal cut replaced the vertical. At Pincevent, the minute inspection, inventory, and preservation (through casting) of large surfaces of prehistoric remains made possible the analysis and surprisingly detailed account of successive generations of paleolithic men and women upon that site. Leroi-Gourhan, adept in the art of homely illustration, liked to clarify the difference between his methods and those of tradition by invoking the image of a birthday cake containing beneath its layers of dough the inscription "Happy Birthday!" "If you cut through vertically, as was still widely done at this time, you can read nothing at all. All you see are the little bits of cream on the slice of cake, nothing more. You've got to cut horizontally if you want to see the inscription. Prehistoric terrain is exactly the same. If you want to find what men have had to say, you must proceed layer by layer." The old method of stratigraphy had, in this view, yielded layers that were chronologically ordered, but dead. At Pincevent, his group produced, by work upon surfaces, confirmation of the fundamental principle of prehistorical ethnology, for its harvest was abundant. This rotation of axis can, then, be seen to have vital consequences, for it facilitated the reading of a terrain in terms of its inner relationships; it forced the recognition that the vestiges of former life as spatially situated are not fortuitously disposed; rather, they articulate those inter-relationships which form the text of paleolithic culture. Thus, "the very fact of casting a used object off has meaning" and the grouping of even scattered and heterogeneous vestiges may, upon analysis, be resolved into a structure of inhabitation that is intelligible. We recognize, then, in Leroi-Gourhan's digging technique, the exact and concrete grounding of theory in praxis, for the rotation of the digging axis, the replacement of the stratigraphic by the planographic, rehearses for us that privileging of synchronic over diachronic in relational analysis of cultural texts which characterizes the structuralist enterprise. And indeed, the sense of rigor 1. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Prehistoirede 'art occidental, Paris, Mazenod, 1965, translated as Treasuresof PrehistoricArt, trans. Norbert Guterman, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1967.

In Praise of Horizontality

5

and illumination generated by these readings marks them as significant documents of the era which saw the adoption of the linguistic model as central to that analysis. The excitement generated by Leroi-Gourhan's project is that of the legitimate euphoria which responds to the promise of the world's intelligibility and the exploration of its limits.

The Religion of the Caves: Magic or Metaphysics?*

ANDRE

LEROI-GOURHAN

translated by ANNETTE

MICHELSON

More than a century has passed since E. B. Tylor, an English ethnologist, first formulated the idea that the art of prehistoric man, then a recent discovery, was one essentially dictated by magic. This art, which was born 30,000 years before our era and vanished at about 10,000 B.C., is the oldest known to us. It would appear to have developed simultaneously with the first explicit manifestations of concern with the supernatural. To reach this conviction, the prehistorian has at his disposal only the figures that decorate objects or cave walls. It is comparison with the decorated objects or wall paintings made by the last primitives of the present-day world that has guided perception of the religious content of the artistic remains bequeathed by our distant ancestors. This hypothesis, which in no way excludes real artistic effort on the part of prehistoric man, now encounters hardly any objection in principle, but the mystery of the contents of these works remains almost complete. It can indeed be demonstrated with reasonable certainty that paleolithic men, twenty thousand years before the end of the Ice Age, poured into their images of bison or mammoths feelings which correspond to religion as we understand it, but we have no way of reconstituting the manner of their religious thinking. Our thought, developing out of classical civilizations, has evolved in a manner such that understanding the thought of even living Australian primitives involves great effort on our part. How much greater, then, are the risks involved in the reconstruction of the beliefs of men who lived thousands of years before the appearance of writing. Within the century of our study of living primitives-of Australians, Bushmen, Amazonians, Eskimos-ethnologists' ideas have greatly developed; theories have deepened, so that the very structure of religious thought appears in its fundamental outlines. The work of Levi-Strauss has greatly contributed to the shifting of problems such as those of totemism to a level upon which the superstructure of tradition proper to each human group *

The two

translated here are

from Andre Leroi-Gourhan,

essays excerpted ? Librairie Artheme Fayard, 1983. Reprinted by permission.

Lefil du temps,

6

Schematic plan of thecaveof Combarelles, Dordogne, arestylizedtofacilitatereading. France.Theanimalfigures Notethehighfrequency pairsin theopenpart of bison-horse in the of thegalleries(B, D, G), thepresence of mammoths transitional areas,and thatof bearsand representations of menin theturningpassages.

OCTOBER

8

OCTOBER

is located. The influence of methods of structural linguistics and the use of mathematical models have introduced a scaffolding or framework within living and shifting masses of thought. Prehistory is on its way to a comparable evolution. Work on the products of human industry and, in particular, upon chipped flint instruments has for a considerable number of years attempted, through the use of statistics, to provide a framework for the figures and to set forth the pertinent characteristics of each era. Tools and flintstones, however, reflect only a part of thought, and the realm of art still resists investigation. Can we, like the prehistorians of the past half-century, expect that prehistory's artistic message will present no serious problems and that it is to be understood through a simple transposition of currently held beliefs, primitive or popular? Or can we, on the contrary, suppose that since the words out of which paleolithic men wove their ideas are forever lost, nothing remains but the certainty of a life in which the material realities of the hunt were reflected in that which we think of as lying beyond ideas? The PaleolithicMessage The remains of paleolithic symbolic thought, as it has come down to us, is composed, on the one hand, of decorated objects found during digs (mobiliary art) and, on the other hand, of paintings, engravings, or sculptures decorating the walls of caves and rock shelters (mural art). In both we find human figures (rare), more or less abstract signs (abundant in mural art), figures of animals belonging to a certain number of species of that era (these are, in descending order of frequency, horses, bison, wild oxen, stags and reindeer, ibex, and, less frequently, other species). Traditional studies of paleolithic religion have used these materials according to very simple procedures, founded on the concomitance of different figures (bison + line = image of a bison subjected to magic spell); on the comparison with primitive customs of recent times (horse + small figure = representation of spirit of fertility penetrating a mare); on merely logical consideration (animal with rounded forms = wish for fertility) or historical reference (woman of ample forms = mother goddess), and so forth. The totality of representations thus interpreted falls easily into a few general headings: magical rights of fertility or of the hunt, totemic representation. Interpretations of this sort may quite reasonably be presumed to have some accuracy, but on a level detached from reality: paleolithic men were quite like us, they probably had some familiarity with magical practices, and they very well might have left traces of this in their artistic work. In order to establish this interpretation of the message as a truth exclusive of others, prehistorians of the classical period would have required a framework or key which accounted, if not for the totality, at least for the majority of the figures. Now, there are numerous bison unmarked by lines, personnages without corresponding animals, male animals with full forms resembling those of the supposedly full females, and silhouettes of slender

The Religion of the Caves

9

women. Furthermore, if we pursue the theory to its furthest consequence and consider the paleolithics as men comparable to present-day primitives, we must recognize that for them as for us, magic would have been simply a technique for insuring control over mysterious forces, with no explicit demarcation between the visible and invisible worlds. However, magic can exist only if founded upon a representation of the world, since it is composed of practical procedures for the mastery of external elements such as game, for the benefit of the magician. It would then have been logical first to seek out subsisting traces of metaphysical thought in the art of the paleolithic era. This line of investigation was impeded by several kinds of difficulty. The ProblemRemains The obstacles derive from the fact that the interpretations are made along with the discoveries, and that it took three-quarters of a century before we possessed the thousands of examples which authorize a general investigation. Absorbed in the abundance of new documents, the prehistorians of the Abbe Breuil's generation lacked distance. Another obstacle, almost as great, lay in the prehistorians' close dependence on the evolution of ethnological theory. Lacking direct contact with living primitives, their access to the Australians was limited to the work of the ethnologists, and they selected only that which could, as things progressed, lend explanation to a given paleolithic work. On the other hand, the universe of decorated caves is quite disconcerting, chaotic in its natural contours, and, at first glance, incoherent in the disposition of its figures. Finally, paleolithic art, mobiliary and mural, covers Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals between 30,000 to 9,000 B.C., and although we may admit the possibility of even very long survivals, we find it difficult to suppose that the practices and the stock of Cro-Magnon man of the Dordogne in 30,000 B.C. were identical with those in the Valley of the Don in 15,000 B.C. The establishment of the religious character of paleolithic art and the contribution of even incomplete proof constitute a glorious record for the prehistorical scholarship of preceding generations, but the fundamental problem nevertheless remains unsolved. It is quite out of the question to recapitulate here, even in considerably abbreviated form, the lengthy demonstration of my Treasuresof PrehistoricArt, the simultaneous study of chronology and content in paleolithic imagery; it is, however, fitting to isolate the method which might lead to the formulation of new problems. A study of this sort might, at the start, have been directed toward mobiliary art, to the abundance of isolated documents, or toward the art of wall painting, to the large numbers of well-preserved representations offered by more than sixty sites. Wall paintings were chosen for the following reasons: a well preserved cave can be considered a message whose elements (frame and figures) occupy the position chosen by the author of the figures decorating the

10

OCTOBER

walls. Whether the figures corresponded to magical or to any other sort of religious intention, the order and frequency of these figures were bound, in some manner, to express the image - even if unconscious or incompletely formulated - which their maker had of the world upon which those practices were exercised. Unless the figures involved were completely independent of each other (and this could not be maintained without proof), a certain syntax must have governed the arrangement of the images considered as symbols. Three modes possibly governing the assemblage of graphic symbols were: that in which the figures are arranged around a central point, as in a picture (mythogram); that in which the figures are articulated in chronological order following a line, as in a cartoon strip (pictogram); finally, that in which the figures form units of verbal language, as in an Egyptian text (writing). In the caves it is difficult to find the traces of writing properly so-called, or even of pictographics; both presuppose a linear arrangement directed by the line of narrative. The adherence of graphic symbols to the unfolding of speech, which led to alphabetical writing, came much later than the paleolithic period. There remain, therefore, two possibilities. Either the cave artists, whom we suppose to have possessed a coherent image of the world, have left only traces of isolated magical operations in the caves (in which case one could register only an abbreviated message, an accumulation of independent representations) or, on the contrary, the caves' decor does really form a decor, that is to say, a framework within which something magically or mythically unfolds.

Entryto theaxialgalleryof Lascaux,Dordogne,France. Thisgroupprovidesa remarkable demonstration of the constancy of therulesgoverning paleolithicrepresentation and thedifficulties of decoding.At Lascauxthetransitional animalsarestags,thetransitional signs, linesof dots. This greatstagandlineof blackdotsmarkthetransition fromthe rotundaof greatbullsto thegroupof thegallery,in which therearetwo bullsand cowsaccompanied by horsesand pairs of signs, completed by two ibexfacing eachother.

..4....

12

OCTOBER

Analyzing the Figures Now that the problem has been formulated, it remains to discover the method of decoding best suited to the "texts" constituted by several dozens of caves, oddly shaped and covered with figures arranged in no apparent order. We can speak of "texts"because the procedure finally adopted is related to those used to interpret unknown systems of writing; each figure is considered a signifying part disposed in an order provided by the very configuration of the cave. A set of perforated cards reproducing the cave, in sections delimited by natural irregularities (entry, first recess, chamber, other recesses, galleries, terminuses) with the figures in place, allows us to try out the possible combinations formed by figures and locations. The establishment of a "vocabulary" out of more than 2,000 figures allows for the division of parts into two classes, the first of animals, the second of signs, human shapes, or stenciled hands. These two classes are always represented within a single cave, implying a relation between them, if only one of simple concomitance. While animals are always present, however, the figures of the second class may be partially missing, which implies their possible interchangeability. The animals represented do not by any means exhaust the list of fauna in the Age of the Reindeer. Bison and wild oxen, on the one hand, horses, on the other, compose, in roughly equal proportions, seventy percent of the whole; mammoths and ibex, in roughly equal numbers, take up twenty percent more of the whole, while the remaining ten percent are divided among species that occur with fair frequency but are represented in each cave by few individual figures (deer, felines, bears, rhinoceroses) and, finally, by occasionally represented species (canines, chamois, antelope). There may very well have been a link between the number of figures and the economic importance of the animal species, but purely magical practices do not necessarily account for things. Our own medieval bestiary, which includes many bulls, donkeys, horses, lambs, swine, and, in lesser quantity, lions and dragons, owes nothing to magic, while the medieval representation of both the visible and invisible worlds is directly linked to our civilization's economic supports. It would be surprising if paleolithic man had covered his caves with images bearing no apparent relation to his own existence. Two Series of Signs The second class of figures is, at first glance, heterogeneous, since it is composed of male and female figures; genital representations; signs of very varied types which divide into two series: the first are "full" signs (ovals, triangles, rectangles), the second are "thin" signs (lines which are straight, hooked, or branched, and series of dots); and, finally, there are imprints of hands placed upon the wall and outlined in color. Comparison of the subjects of each series of signs leads us to see them as multiple variants of sexual symbols, masculine

The Religion of the Caves

13

for the thin ones and female for the full ones. This explains why we very rarely encounter all representations of the second class in the same place, but, most frequently, either realistic figures of man and woman (complete or in part) or symbolic signs, often highly abstract. As for the stenciled hands, represented by a limited number of cases, there is simply a reasonable presumption of their value as equivalents of full signs. The concomitance of animal figures and of signs poses a new problem. The majority of figures of the second class are placed near animals, others are isolated, and, finally, a certain number are located on the animals. This last category includes examples of all the variants: from Laussel, the woman holding a bison's horn; from Angles-sur-l'Anglin, women covering the body of a sculpted bison, the female sex, or full and thin signs inscribed on the bodies of bison. In one entire series of cases, the full sign is replaced by the representa-

Panel of the women-bison,ca. 15, 000 B. C., cave of Pech-Merle,Lot, France. In a niche near silhouettesof women in profile and leaningforward, the artist has made

a visualpun on thesilhouette of a bisonwith raisedtail and loweredheadand thatof a stoutwomanin profile.

14

OCTOBER

tion of a bleeding wound and the thin sign by a line which may represent a spear stuck in the animal. It was in these examples that the hypothesis of figures "under spells" originated, with the hunter presumed to have been representing, with magical intent, the mortally wounded animal. A group of data such as this does not exclude the possibility of magical intervention, but it does singularly extend the problem, for it may already offer part of a metaphysical framework, certainly as yet undecipherable, but articulated nonetheless. If it were true that woman and wound, on the one hand, and man and spear, on the other, were symbolic equivalents, and that they had unknown but precise relations with the animals, the limits of simply magical behavior would then be far transcended. The Structureof the Mythogram This research in its present state can be admitted solely as a clearing of terrain, but this clearing reveals a paleolithic thought which is far more finely detailed than that which traditional interpretation would lead us to believe. The first fact to emerge clearly from the general analysis of the sites in relation to the group of caves studied is the nonfortuitous role of the cave itself. Its configuration plays a part in the choice of site for decoration, which is not surprising. If we take into account only the presence of figures and set aside those open walls upon which figures are widely distributed, we observe that certain particular locations, such as the first recesses, corridor entrances, fissure edges, and terminal funnels very frequently bear images. We are then entitled to think that the cave, whatever its form may be, lends itself to the placing of a preconceived arrangement, as if the paleolithics had somehow superimposed upon it a traditionally shaped intellectual schema. This schema, more or less strict, depending upon the area and period and the cave's adaptability to such a schema, is clearly revealed by statistical superimposition of subject represented and its locations. When we consider the following sections: (1) open walls (or centers of panels), (2) transitional walls (entries, passages between chambers, panel margins), (3) the far ends of spaces (terminal spaces or extreme margins of panels), we derive the following plan of distribution: (1) open walls: more than eighty percent of bison, wild oxen, horses, and full signs; (2) transitional walls: approximately seventy percent of the ibex and mammoths; (3) furthermost end walls: seventy-five to eighty percent of stags, felines, bears, and rhinoceroses. The thin signs appear throughout in equal proportions, but are differently situated on the open walls, where they are generally paired with full signs, as opposed to those in the rest of the cave, where they are often isolated on the edge of a recess or fissure or at the end of a gallery.

The Religion of the Caves

15

To anyone who has attempted to unravel the skein of oral traditions among surviving primitives, it will come as no surprise that the mythographic image of the paleolithics emerges only when filtered through statistics; in each particular cave the profusion of traces, the topographical approximations, the overlapping periodicity of different series create imprecisions of detail within compositions which are blurred by a general treatment. If we consider Lascaux, with its great panels of wild oxen and horses accompanied by pairs of signs, its ibex and stags at the margins, its felines and rhinoceroses on the end walls; if we consider Niaux, with its successive panels of bison (marked with wounds and lines) and horses, its ibex accompanying each group of figures, its stags both on the ends and on sides; if we consider Altamira's painted ceiling, with its compact mass of bison surrounding paired horses and its margin bordered by a doe and two wild boars, and if we then compare them with Rouffignac's ceiling, with its groups of bison-horse-mammoth, its ibex and surrounding rhinoceroses, we are inevitably struck by the discovery within the great examples of cave art -and this despite variations due to distance in time and space -of the mythogram in an almost ideal state. In the light of this deciphering of the walls, mobiliary art is somewhat clarified; we find in it the same male and female figures and the curious assemblage of bison and horse. Although lacking the armature provided by the cave for the grouping of figures, mobiliary art offers, nonetheless, a very useful aid to the understanding of this phenomenon's chronology and geography. The caves are actually limited, geographically, to the West, with the exception of one in the Urals. In addition, the oldest period of this art (between 30,000 and 20,000 B.C.) is almost completely missing. The mobiliary works, decorative objects and graven plaques of stone or bone, show that the representational system was spread from Russia in the East to Spain over the entire duration of the Upper Paleolithic period. This observation dictates some reflection upon the possible content of this assemblage of figures. Most succinctly put, it comes down to the copresence of male and female figures, of horse and bison (or of wild ox), with the addition of a third animal (ibex, mammoth, or deer) and a fourth possible animal (feline or rhinoceros). The steadiness of arrangement implies a determinate association between the different couplings of the assemblage. There is no indication of appreciable variation in this association over time, since in the Aurignacian period, toward 30,000 B.C., animals and symbols, both full and thin, are already grouped on graven plaques, and in the more recent Magdalenian, toward 10,000 before our era, both in Teyjat and in the Dordogne, bison and wild oxen are still placed in proximity to horses and surrounded with deer and bear. A system of this kind corresponds more closely to the framework of myth than to the traces of magical operations. But can we appropriately speak of mythological content? Do we not rather have a container? Can we really claim that the same figurative framework articulated identical concepts over immense

16

OCTOBER

periods of time and areas of space? A familiar example will help us understand the flexibility of interpretation which the paleolithic mythogram may have retained over so many thousands of years. Beginning in the Bronze Age, there appears in the Middle East a figurative theme which later spreads throughout all of Eurasia; it associates eagle, lion, and bull. The symbolism of these figures has served to cover myths, legends, and semihistorical narratives of great variety, eventually serving as symbols of the Gospels for Christianity. The same mythographic vessel has thus served twenty different religions, offering a schema upon which each civilization has woven the symbolic convention appropriate to it. The superstructure of myths enveloping the associated images of the paleolithic era may also have varied considerably. We would, in this case, possess not the vestiges of practices, as the older prehistorians believed, not even a religion or a metaphysics, but rather an infrastructural framework which could serve as a basis for an infinite number of detailed moral symbols and operational practices. Once we are no longer wholly concerned with the search for practical or mythological narrative, several points appear to be established, or highly probable: -The cave itself is integrated into the infrastructural schema, since its natural accidents are used by the artist. These accidents are of two kinds. The first are natural reliefs which have lent their shape to the back, the neck, or the thigh of an animal, which is completed by the painter, while others are fissures or galleries whose assimilation to female symbolism is demonstrated by the addition of thin signs or dots. The cave was thus "an active participant." -The constant coexistence of bovines and horses assumes the aspect of pairing, comparable to that of the signs. The alternating of bison and horse may correspond to an order comparable to that of "female/male" in the signs. -The realistic sexual symbols are numerous enough that, even without the help of abstract signs, the presence of sexual polarization is evident. This is of a very particular character, for there exists no known scene of coupling. Furthermore, the great majority of animals do not have primary sex characteristics. This restriction of realist symbolism explains the abstract character of most signs, full and thin. To reach the deepest level of the religious schema of paleolithic times, we can add to this basic schema (woman/man, bovine/horse) the almost constant presence of some complementary kind. At a higher level would appear concepts such as identification of wound or hand with woman, of red with full sign and bovine, of black with thin sign and horse. At this point, however, we touch upon things particular to different paleolithic cultures. Our documentation of those elements concerning ethnic differentiation of thought allows us only to formulate hypotheses. In conclusion, the themes which emerge from paleolithic art more directly

The Religion of the Caves

17

invite psychoanalytical study than that of the history of religion. And this should not surprise us, for we might have expected the general analysis of documents to reveal the substratum of metaphysical thinking. Like operational magic, this can appear only after the decor has been set up, and it will be the task of future research to establish out of their variations the detailed picture of paleolithic religion. 1966

The Hands of Gargas: Toward a General Study

ANDRE LEROI-GOURHAN translated by ANNETTE

MICHELSON

Beginning in 1906, the year of Cartailhac's writing on the hands outlined in red and black in the cave of Gargas, several articles and numerous allusions have confronted the problem raised by the 160 or so hands grouped on the cave walls. In 1952 the Abbe Breuil devoted forty lines to them in his Quartrecentsiecles d'artparietal, summing up his point of view at that time: "The majority of these hands, outlined in black or red, sometimes in white or yellow, are left hands; there are more than 150 of them, many of which appear mutilated, as if the joints of one or several fingers had been cut off."2 He adds one very important detail which does honor to his power of observation: "It is certain that we have here the same hand, with the same mutilation, in multiple examples." Finally, he states, "Gargas is thus far the only European cave, among the approximately dozen discovered containing hands in outline, in which these mutilations appear." In 1958, upon republishing the text of Four Hundred Centuriesin the Melanges J.-B. Noulet, he added a mention of the outlined hands recently discovered in the cave of Tibiran, a few hundred yards from Gargas.3 Indeed, except for Maltravieso in Estramadura, Gargas and Tibiran are the only caves in which hands with missing fingers are to be found. Gargas and Maltravieso, furthermore, differ considerably from each other. In the latter cave, all the hands uniformly lack the last two joints of the little finger, while at Gargas we find ten different forms out of the fifteen possible combinations obtainable by cutting the finger. This variety in "mutilation," the grouping of hands in separate pairs, the pairs of identical hands, and the distribution of red in relation to black have gone unnoticed by writers on the subject. Assisted by Father Hours and Monsieur Brezillon, we undertook a survey of the totality of hands in their topo1. Emile Cartailhac, "Les mains inscrites de rouge ou de noir de Gargas," L'anthropologie, vol. XVII (1906), pp. 624-625. 2. Henri Breuil, Quatrecents siecles d'artparietal, Montignac, Centre d'etudes et de documentation prehistoriques, 1952, pp. 246-257. 3. Henri Breuil, "La decoration parietale prehistorique de la grotte de Gargas," Bulletin de la Societemeridionalede speleologieet de prehistoire,vol. V (1954-1955 [1958]), pp. 391-409.

s8-_--_-:

I?3D

Ci?

ai;--i'3i:ii

,?'iii9 -_H;iiuiii:

.:::::9.: i:.iji:::::-i?ili;i_ -ii :i:ii;':

Ei:i':ii::9i,iiiiiii ns

*il:l:3:ii ii::iiiiiiiii:

a ;iiiir

-,:iii-i-ii-i:,iii

r';i

si,:ici :isi:iii:iii

sl

r,l: '-i:iii-i

ins:: iaa-

B

-:.i:ai i?i:i

_,:_:,:i-------I:';

-_Li.ii:-_ tfai'-n^r:?I2, ??. *ia

i8.1-i :, :-ii__:::: :ii--i:

: ::::i:ii::: i::i?1-:__-?

iiiii.: l :.?i_

i-::.-?-i-i-l--_:::i:::i::::::;jc:,

,:inwi

20

OCTOBER

graphical setting, completing it in 1966. This first essay is intended not as a solution to all the problems raised by the hands of Gargas, but rather to provide insight into the main aspects of their study as a whole. Inventoryof Hypotheses The classical hypothesis, maintained by the Abbe Breuil, is that, like certain present-day primitives, the "Aurignacians" of Gargas cut off their fingers for sacrificial reasons. Although plausible at first glance, this hypothesis has at least two weaknesses: (1) It does not account for the variety of forms of subtraction of fingers. We must therefore suppose that the author considered them to be anarchic, for he would otherwise have implied the existence of a veritable "code of mutilation," which was not his view. (2) It accepts the possibility of impairments which go as far as elimination of all fingers except the thumb on more than fifty percent of the hands represented; this, upon reflection, seems extraordinary. The hypothesis of mutilated hands has nevertheless been accepted by most prehistorians and has passed into scientific tradition without being subjected to strict verification. The second hypothesis is that of the pathological origin of the amputations, already raised by Hugo Obermaier and by Breuil; set forth by Dr. Dekeyer in 1953, it was revived and developed by Dr. Sahly.4 According to his study, the loss of fingers was caused by a thrombo-angitis obliterans, probably due to frostbite or dietary deficiency. This would explain the variety of missing joints and the constant preservation of the thumb, normally spared by the pathological process. The arguments against this thesis are: (1) At least ten percent of the legible hands are intact. (2) Several of them are located in places unexplained by the pathological hypothesis, such as the whole hand of point 25 (see fig. 3), executed under a ledge about fifteen feet off the ground. (3) This hypothesis, like the first, at no point takes into account the topographical distribution of different mutilations nor, generally speaking, the fact that the distribution of hands may present characteristics not due to chance. The third hypothesis is that of bent fingers, which we have formulated and will here develop.5 It was G.-H. Luquet who, in Art et religiondes hommes fossibles (1926), seems to have presented it for the first time. M. Frank Bourdier has kindly reminded me that P. Saintyves, in "La main dans la magie,"6 had revived this hypothesis, which has probably not received the attention it de4. Doctor Sahly has kindly made available to me the contents of his work, now in preparation, on the hands of Gargas. I am not competent to evaluate the pathological alterations of some of the hands at Gargas; they offer a very interesting field for research, but do not, in my view, appear to explain the features which emerge from a study of the whole. 5. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Les religionsde la prehistoire,Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1964, p. 102. See also Leroi-Gourhan, Prehistoirede l'artoccidental,Paris, Mazenod, 1965, p. 109. 6. In Aesculape, no. 6 (March 1934).

The Hands of Gargas

21

serves. It is, in any case, perfectly possible, by bending the fingers and placing either the palm or back of the hand against the wall, to reproduce all of the mutilations at Gargas. Although we do not theoretically exclude the procedure of spraying from a distance, the technique which produces the effect closest to that of the original hands consists in applying ochre powder with a brush (a simple tuft of hair, straightened and bound) on the damp surface of the wall. The operation can be performed in three stages: (1) application at the base and curve of the thumb; (2) application between the spread fingers; (3) application on the outer border. The procedure takes scarcely more than thirty seconds. Whatever the mode of execution, and even if we grant the possibility of voluntary or pathological mutilations, two critical operations should normally have been in order: inquiry into the possible scheme of hand groups within the cave as a whole, and the analysis of the digital forms, since there is no reason to reject a priori the hypothesis of a deliberate arrangement. The Digital Forms If we take into account the acceptable degree of legibility of approximately half of the figures, it would appear that with rare exceptions the subtractions usually involve the first two joints. In order to establish a code of the finger combinations we simply noted the fact that a subtraction had been practiced on one finger or another. Since the thumb seems never to have been cut off, we therefore find fifteen possible basic combinations (fig. 1) from that of the whole hand (form A) to that of the hand with four missing fingers (form 0).

A 2T

F

B 3

C 13

G

H

12

7

K

L

H

4

+

+

D +

1

I

J

+

+

N

5

0

44

Formsnotpresentaremarkedbya cross.In the Fig. 1. Tableof digitalformsshowingfrequencies. secondline theformof bentindex/littlefinger (J') is omittedsinceit is not represented.

22

OCTOBER

Not all forms are represented in the cave, and the order of frequency reveals an interesting feature: the combinations O A C H N K, represented by a relatively high number of figures, are the easiest to assume by bending the fingers. The combinations B C F G, which are rare, are still relatively easy to reproduce. The others, D IJ L M, are more difficult. A certain figurative logic, independent of the criterion of ease, is apparent in the choice of digital forms. We note a very marked preference for the series of contiguous fingers, as shown in table A.

forms accounted for

Fingers subtracted

2

3

1 finger 2 fingers

B F ........F

C

4

5

G .......G H .......H 3 fingers forms not accounted for

K........K

.......K N ....

1 finger 2 fingers

I

3 fingers

.......... J'. L ........L .... M ....... .......

N ........

N

.I D .....

..........I

J .......

..... ....... .......M M

.J J' L

As we see at first glance, neither "ritual" amputation nor pathological defit this description. It implies, rather, that these finger positions were familcay iar enough to the paleolithics at Gargas to produce a selection in terms of ease of movement. Had it been simply a matter of pressing the bent fingers against the wall, all combinations could have been obtained. The fact that those that are most difficult to produce with upraised hand seem absent leads us to think that the choice of finger positions corresponded to a manual code in common practice like that still used for the hunt by the Bushmen (fig. 2).

a

b

c

Fig. 2. Huntingor narrative gesturesof theBushmenin theKalaharidesert,representing (a) monkey,(b) warthog,(c) giraffe.ComparewithformsA, K, and C at Gargas.

23

The Hands of Gargas

Analysis of Sets The topography of the outlined hands is composed of three clearly established sets (fig. 3). Set I occupies a length of thirty-five meters on the left-hand wall of the first chamber. Set II occupies part of the right-hand wall of the same chamber. Set III is located in the second chamber; it includes one isolated hand under a ledge of the left wall (27) and, on the right-hand side, thirty-eight hands

2lt

B A

N

Second hall

N\

'

, 'i '- -

/

I 5I

N..

.

0~~3

1

2

\ 3 I\

\

Passage 2

F First hall

TT

IL I

0.

10.

20.

30m.

Fig. 3. Plan of the Gargas cave showing locationsof differentseries of hands and signs within sets I, II, and III.

24

OCTOBER

arranged around a pillar or inside a small chamber hollowed out of this pillar. There are, finally, under the very low ceiling, toward the "dungeon," two hands outlined in white (28). The hands, then, occupy very sharply delimited sections: the two sides at the entrance and the second chamber's pillar, hollowed out into a sriiall apselike chamber. The isolated subjects are located beneath a vault, one (27) facing the pillar at the entry to an elevated gallery and the other two at the end of a series in the passage which follows the pillar. The general arrangement in distinct sets, with figures placed at the entry or at the ends of galleries, recalls that of most caves which contain animal figures. Set I can be divided into five sections, according to the different groups arranged upon them. The wall surface is animated by folds of greater or lesser depth (fig. 4, nos. 1, 4, 11, 14, 18), forming niches or straightened between the flat and convex panels. We have used these irregularities of the surface to determine the sections. This sort of division appears to correspond to the rhythm imposed upon the paleolithics as upon ourselves, for each section thus determined presents characteristics that can be superimposed on those of other sections. The tendency of set I considered as a whole presents some rather curious features, as shown in table B. concavity Section Section Section Section Section

1 2 3 4 5

. . . . .... . . . .

. . . .

1 red spots 1 1 2

Flat or convex surface red spot 4 + 4 4 11 3

4 8 8 11 36

Total 5 16 13 23 41

The number of hands therefore increases as we proceed from the entrance to the furthest end point (from five to forty-one elements). The same phenomenon seems to occur within each section beginning with one or two hands placed in concave parts and developing into two or three groups of increasing size. We find the situations repeated five times in a row. Set II (fig. 5) includes two sections arranged on a rather convoluted surface, opening into a gallery (37) at the entry to which we find two pairs of red lines and a series of dots of the same color. The first section, beginning at the entrance (38), is formed of six black hands plus one red; the second section has nine black hands and four red. In each of these sections we find an oval depression smeared with ochre. Here too, beginning with the entrance, the hands increase from seven to thirteen as they pass from one section to another. Set III, apart from the isolated hand no. 27 (fig. 5), is arranged around and within a free-standing mass (29). Walking around it, we find the following groups of figures (fig. 6): a red spot (A), one black hand placed in a hollow (B), then two red hands (C), then an oval depression smeared with red (D); next

25

The Hands of Gargas

I I II ';

I,

I .

t. .,,:

1?

<^

o

.11

O.

iI i

I

0 f

Fig. 4. Division of all the hands of set I into sections. Continuouslines = blackhands, dottedlines = redhands, cross-hatching = red spots, parallel lines = yellow spots.

26

OCTOBER

Set II

on

t X

7

d

o,,

!'iii' ,''"',,"

S

,

0

36

38

37

Set III

ana? ?

. :

..

. ; .

eg25 of 2sseie26

d

2 4

i

d

u

c

a

b

e

sc

l

Fig. 5. Divisionof handsof set II andfigureson right-handwall of set III. Samesymbolsasforfig. 4.

come four red hands (E), followed by six red hands together with another red oval depression (F). Finally, we enter the small chamber in which there are

fifteen black hands and ten red ones plus bent fingers in profile. Again, there is an ascending progression: 1, 2, 4, 6, 25. The fact that density increases between the entry and end chamber in the eight series of separably distributed figures can hardly be viewed as accidental. The proportion of red hands to black follows a comparable progression. We see that with one exception (section 5) the number of red hands follows the development of each series. Furthermore, the general proportion of red

hands goes from twenty-two percent in set I and twenty-five percent in set II of the first chamber to fifty-eight percent in set III of the second chamber.

The Hands of Gargas

27

I ?? f~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ??I???'?

eV I

'

:K

...

o':

A

'

32 0

Set III

*^^~~=

'

gCN^y~~~~

I

..

1

>5

.

......

~

,:..' .."^,, K ," '" K,.." ",'L.-,,;"-

,,

'

..

F

\____________::

\

..

.... E

F

...4.

o?~? ~:~ ';$ "9i=

Lwuiit

d2444

~ t'

of nicheswith redspotsand of handsof set III. Samesymbolsasforfig. 4. Fig. 6. Arrangement

Set I Section Group ..........

123

Black ...........1 Red ............

4

Total ........... % red hands.....

1

I

Section 3

Section 2

11 12 13

14 15 16

18

6 2

1 3 6 1 2

5 8 1 6 3

2

8 = 16 2%

1 4 8 = 13 3%

1 11 11 = 23 10%

2

8 9 10 44

44 4 = 5 0%

Section 4

Set III

Set II Group ..........

38

36

Black ........... Red ............

6 1

9 4

Total ........... % red hands .....

7 5%

13 20%

B

27 15 5 20 25%

1

1

C

1 2

0%

1 0%

E

1 0%

2 5%

4 4 10%

The Hands of Gargas

29

To sum up (see table C), the black or red hands are located in ascending series within each set from the entrance toward the furthermost limit. In addition, in five out of seven cases (sections 1, 2, 3, and 5 of set I, set III) the series begins with one or two black hands placed within a hollow. It is difficult to reject the hypothesis of an order and equally so to explain it. We do observe a certain affinity with those caves in which numerous subjects are arranged panel by panel with transitional figures in passages or at the entrance to galleries, but no cave has yet shown such a serial crescendo, such a clear play of red in relation to black. Repetitionsand Alternationof Colors Another curious fact, already pointed out by the Abbe Breuil, is the repetition in several copies of the same hand. Given the conditions of application on granular rock and the variable state of preservation, it is not always easy to establish the identity of the hands. The general outline nevertheless remains perceptible enough, allowing us definitively to attribute the same origin to two adjoining hands of very similar proportions. The results are set forth in table D. 2 repetitions black

group group group group group group group

Set I 8 ........ 10 ....... 13....... 15 ....... 16 ....... 21 ....... 22 .......

Set II group 38 ....... group 36 ....... Set III group E........ group F ........ group G .......

3 repetitions red

black

red

N, C H C C x, O 0, 0, 0, 0, O O

A, O O

H x

O

A

0, F 0, 0

O

K A

We find at least twenty-seven cases of repetitions involving two or three each, and greater legibility of certain figures would most probably produce many more. Pairing combined with the increase of number from entry toward end

30

OCTOBER

chamber in several cases determined the meeting of a pair of black hands with one of red (15, 16, 21, 36, 29-G). Whether or not these convergences are intentional is difficult to determine. Horizontal Hands A certain number of hands are horizontally arranged. Some are isolated in the recesses at the beginning of sections (11, 19); others are included in groups (set I, 10, 13, 21, 29-G). Since this arrangement affects those finger combinations most frequently represented in the cave, it is difficult to separate the possibly intentional from that which derives simply from the relative frequency of the different forms. These horizontal hands do nevertheless recall certain animals (mostly bison) represented vertically in groups of figures in caves such as those at Niaux, Santimamine, and Altxerri. Many of the hands at Gargas are small, hands of adolescents or even of children. This is worthy of note, for most of the footprints left in the clay of the caves by their paleolithic visitors correspond to those of young people (Pech-Merle, Niaux, Aldene, Le Tuc d'Audoubert). It is easy to conceive explanations which allude, for example, to initiation rites, but it is far more difficult to support these explanations with direct proof. In the present case, it is certain that youthful and very young subjects did actively participate in the operations carried out in the cave. Finally, the analysis of the whole leads us to observe that the hands of in which there is, as Gargas appear in groups of increasing density-groups well, an increase in the relative frequency of red hands - from the entrance toward the back. The hands are often arranged in pairs of the same kind, and among them we find some, in either black or red, horizontally arranged. The use of red in preference to black is not clearly evident, but the combinations C N B E are not represented in red. The "Code" If, as seems to be the case, the hands are not randomly distributed but correspond to a more or less clearly organized arrangement, we find a first point of similarity with all other decorated caves; the figures are distributed in a series of panels forming a chain whose elements are united by isolated figures which are themselves placed in the gaps between the panels. This sort of representational framework is comparable to that of Lascaux or Combarelles, for example. Certain hands, such as 18-19 at the edge of a large crevice, or 27, are located in spots where we normally find animal figures such as stags or ibex. Furthermore, the nave (in 29 on the map) occupies a place comparable to the niches or galleries filled with animals and signs such as we find in the far interiors, notably at Trois-Freres, Le Portel, and La Pasiega. One is thus led to hypothesize a possible homology between hands and animals or signs in other

31

The Hands of Gargas

caves. In other words, the hands might have been equivalent to animals or signs, and the play of fingers might have expressed the different themes. It therefore followed that we try out the different digital combinations in order to see whether or not this homology is acceptable. To arrive at a reading, we made use of our two visual summaries and of photographs. When instances of a contradiction between them arose, the corresponding figures were considered as merely probable, and appear with question marks on table E. They represent ten percent of the figures; fifty-eight percent of the total of 159 hands are decipherable with acceptable certainty. For forty-two percent of the hands, the inadequate preservation of the documents produces faulty decoding. Despite the uncertainty that characterizes almost one-half of the figures, we can deduce, from the table of digital combinations, the following: (1) There are considerable disproportions in numbers among the different figures: form O (four fingers missing) represents almost half (forty-seven percent) of the total of legible hands; A (all fingers present) and C (middle finger missing) together form more than a quarter (twenty-seven percent) of the lot, with none of the other forms attaining ten percent. (2) Sets I, II, and III present rather clear differences: Set I: Set II: Set III:

O 30 4 10

A 6 1 5

C 12 -

H 4 3 -

N 2 3

K 4

B 3 -

G -

E -

-

-

2

1

F -

:

1

:

57 8 26

The three sets share in common forms O and A in clearly equivalent proportions for the forward part of the cave (O = 52 and 50%, A = 10 and 12%), while the proportions at the back show a diminution of O (39%) and an increase of A (19%). C (middle finger missing) is very well represented in set I and absent in the two others. H is common to both I and II; N and E are found in I and III. The other forms (K G F) characterize set III. We thus obtain the following basic forms: I = O A C, II = 0 A H, III = 0 A N. If the homology with animal figures is entertained, the confrontation of the different digital forms with the zoological groups should reveal parallelism in proportions. If we no longer consider the distributed sets, but the totality of identified hands, the parallelism with the caves containing animals becomes very striking (table F). It is very interesting to observe that the four subjects mainly represented show the same general proportions. It may not be wholly a matter of chance that the points of similarity obtain for the caves in the Pyrenees, for in other regions the proportions among the four main subjects are different: horse, twentyseven percent; bison, sixteen percent; mammoth, nine percent; ibex, seven and one-half percent.

Table E

Set I: Section 1 group Section 2 group

1 .......... 3 . . . . . .. .. .

0

A

1?

1? 3

2 ?

13 ..........

2

20 .......... 21 .......... 22 ..........

B

G

1

2 1

1

1 3

1

Section 4 group 14 ..........

Section 5 group 18, 19.......

K

1 ?

1

Section 3 group 11 .......... 12

16, 17.......

N

2

2

8 ..........

15 ..........

H

1

9 .......... 10 ..........

C

3 6

2

2

3 ? 1

1

1 1

18 2

Set II: 3

1

group 38 ...................? 36 ..................4

Set III: group 27 ................... - 28.................2 -

29 29 29 29 29

.........1 B .. C ................. E ................. F................. G.................

1 1 21 6 -2

3

2

Total (gross)..................

48

16

13

7

5

5

3

2

Total (corrected) ..............

44

12

13

7

5

4

3

2

Table F Gargas 0: A: C : H :

47 % 13 % 14 % 7.5%

The Pyrenees as a whole

Niaux

Santimamine

bison: 49% horse: 28% ibex: 6% deer: 4%

52 % 28 % 17 % 1.5%

70% 11% 11% 4%

Altamira ceiling ,

78% 9% doe: 9% wild boar: 4%

It would then appear, according to these figures, that the hands at Gargas present the same structure of representation as the figures of the other decorated caves. To sum up, the hands of Gargas are found in a series grouped into three whose numbers increase from group to group proceeding from the cave's sets, entrance to its back end. The red figures show the same order of increase. The hands in each panel are frequently identical pairs, and sometimes these are in a group. The combination of fingers does not convey a purely random distribution; they seem to have had a meaning, and a parallel can be established between the sets of hands at Gargas and those of animal figures in the caves of the Pyrenees. This parallelism is discernable through both the relative density of each form and the localization of one or another in the walls' irregularities or on its panels. Although it is possible to see the hands of Gargas as symbols comparable with those of animals, their exact determination remains a matter of conjecture. It is merely likely that forms O and A, which are the most constant, correspond respectively to the bison (or the wild ox) and to the horse. In the case under discussion, we have, most probably, one of direct transposition, for a circumscribed ethnic group, of the hunter's gestural symbols in wall painting. Some confirmation of this transposition is to be found in the fact that those combinations of bent fingers which are more difficult to reproduce are not to be found on the walls at Gargas. Even if we do not acknowledge the possible existence of a certain compositional order in the caves, we cannot avoid observing that the disorder of the hands at Gargas curiously coincides with that of the animals in the Pyrenean caves. Once we agree that the hunters at Gargas cut off no fingers whatever, and that they mixed the different mutilations as others mixed the bison and the horses, the problem appears in the light of normal incidence, and the myth of the "mutilated people of Gargas" loses much of its baleful character. The notion that hunters amputated all the fingers of a hand in order to increase their luck in hunting or that, for a similar reason, they cut off fingers of those hunters-to-be, their children, does not correspond to an act of economic stability, even and particularly within primitive society. The loss of fingers due to pathological factors is, after all, not impossible, but it does not fit the structure of the whole. A familiarity, like that of many hunting peoples, with the

34

OCTOBER

play of fingers as a silent signaling of the presence of game of one sort or another does not strain credibility. What is remarkable, if this hypothesis is valid, is their transposition of the hunting signals to the cave walls. However we explain the art of the caves, the certainty of a fact such as this would provide a new opening upon the thought of paleolithic man. 1967

Originality as Repetition: Introduction

ROSALIND

KRAUSS

In 1985 the CollegeArt Association meetingsinstituteda new type of session- the symposium- intendedto organizeinquiryaroundan issue offar-reachingtheoreticalimportance, one that could bepresumedto be of concernto thefield of art historyas a whole. This innovationin form obviouslysignaled a shift in substanceas well, indicating(or at least seemingto indicate)that officialart historyin Americais becomingmoreinterestedin examining its own presuppositionswith regardto method,to ideologicalbias, to the theorization of conceptsit considersessential to its verydefinitionas a discipline. "a symposiumon the On February13, 1986, duringthe secondyearof this "reform, relatedconceptsof originality, origin, and the original was organizedfor the meetingsin New York. Whatfollows here is the recordof that symposium, modifiedonly slightly to allowfor certainnecessaryexpansionsto the textsas presented,expansionsmainly of bibliographic completeness. We beginwith my own introductionto boththe topicand thepapersthroughwhich all an obviouslypartial examinationof that topic, a us as participantsdecidedto choreograph of that describes the initiation the of symposiumitself in termsof an alreadydivided beginning and doubledorigin. This symposium first announced itself, in the call for papers for this meeting, as Multiples without Originals: The Challengeto Art History of the "Copy,"a title, I now realize, that is freighted with ambiguity. For a challenge obviously holds out two possibilities. Either it encourages a redoubling of strength on the part of its combattant so that the challenge can be met and vanquished; or it so impresses the combattant with its force that the response to it is a laying down of arms. If the existence of the copy challenges art history, it does so because in the place of a singularity, a unity, an entity of one, it raises the specter of a hydraheaded multiplicity that threatens to fracture and disperse that unity. We could take the shop practice of Paolo Veronese as an example. During his lifetime and for many years after his death, drawings and paintings in great number, objects which Veronese himself had never touched, were produced under his renowned

36

OCTOBER

signature. The unity "Paolo Veronese" is challenged by this fact, since his physical and conceptual singularity as the origin, or author, of his own work would seem, by this evidence, to be opened up to doubt. And given our discipline's obsession with authorship, with the status of the creative individual - with his intentions, his conceptions, his inventions - this doubt cast on Veronese as absolute origin of his own work is not, to say the very least, welcome. Two responses to this challenge are, as I have said, possible. The first is to shore up the discipline by, in this case, refining the procedures of connoiseurship so that finer and finer distinctions can be made between the genuine and the second-hand, between origin and copy. The second, and this was what this symposium was conceived of as addressing, is to wonder if the very category of the physical original, or the singular author as origin-if original-whether these very categories are themselves far more fragile and open to question than it had seemed. It would be, that is, to wonder if the attacks on the cluster of noby current theory at work outoriginal, originality-mounted tions-origin, side the boundaries of the discipline of art history need to be taken seriously by that discipline. It would be to consider if the analysis termed poststructuralist and currently important to other fields of the human sciences might not prove to be important to our own as well. Now most of the responses to the call for papers were replies to the problem in the first sense. They were either exercises in higher connoisseurship, or they were what one might call "authorial sleights-of-hand." For when, within a given area, say, medieval manuscripts, the tradition in question produces a climate of copying, the tendency is to displace authorship from copyist to some other authority, to transfer it from scriptorium to church council, to posit some kind of collective author, or even to give society itself an authorial form. This is, however, merely an evasion of the challenge to the very concept of authorial origin that poststructuralist theory poses, for while the strategy I've just described redraws the profile of the author--making it now a sect, or a class, or a cult -it leaves the idea of the origin intact; which is to say, it acts as though it goes without saying that "everything has to begin somewhere." But what if there were no beginning uncorrupted by a prior instance -or what in much of poststructuralist writing is rendered as the "always already"-- and what if this somewhere, this localizable origin, were fractured at its very core - and thus were always already self-divided? And what if this were true not just for eccentric, marginal, minor fields to which art historians might turn their attention, but for central, major fields and figures? Ingres is such a figure, and to demonstrate what I mean I would like briefly to use an aspect of his art as an example. Ingres, we could say, was a trafficker in the copy, producing version after version of essentially the same picture, sometimes exactly the same picture. Critics of Ingres, like Theophile Silvestre, sneered at this practice, saying, "M. Ingres has passed his life as much in repeating the same forms as in insidiously combining the most famous

Originalityas Repetition

J.-A.-D. Ingres.Paolo and Francesca. ca. 1815. Musee Conde, Chantilly.

37

J.-A.-D. Ingres.Paolo and Francesca.

ca. 1855-60. Hyde Collection,GlensFalls, New York.

traditional types with the living models."' And even Ingres, narcissistic and defensive as he notoriously was, admitted that perhaps "I reproduce my own compositions too often."2 Although Ingres defended this feature of his own practice by claiming that he was trying to perfect a given idea- to move it forward towards something finer, or perhaps fuller-when we examine instances of these repetitions, his argument becomes hard to support. Between 1814 and 1857 Ingres produced, for example, seven oil versions of his work Paolo and Francesca, revisions in which the major figures underwent a mirror reversal in their poses, and in 1. P. Courthion, Ingresraconte etparsesamis,vol. II, Geneva, 1948, p. 47, as cited parlui-meme in Patricia Condon, Ingresin Pursuitof Perfection, Louisville, Kentucky,J. B. Speed Art Museum, 1983, p. 10. This exhibition and the excellent essay on Ingres'spracticeof replicationby Margery Cohen provide valuable information for this issue. See also my "You, EmbraceableYou," forthcoming in Studiesin Art History,The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. H. Delaborde, Ingres,sa vie, Paris, 1870, p. 108, as cited in Ingresin Pursuitof Perfection, 2.

p. 11.

38

OCTOBER

which the husband appears sometimes to the left of the couple, sometimes to their right, or sometimes not at all, and the focal length is shortened. But what is striking in this succession is precisely not the evident refinement of the conception, or perhaps its dramatic development, but the wooden repetitiveness of the idea, the sense that, having found that almost emblematic triangle that links Francesca's dropping of the book to the incline of Paolo's back in the climax of their kiss, Ingres could not but repeat it again and again, in oil, in pencil, in printer's ink. The repetitiveness of this is all the more striking when we know what it has replaced. For Ingres had initially taken up this story with the idea of doing a narrative cycle of pictures, the four in succession to be the kiss, the husband standing over his slain victims, the encrypted bodies, and, finally, the souls of the couple caught in the whirlwind of the Inferno. But instead of developing forward Ingres was arrested, we could say, at the point in the story that is precisely about a progression backwards into that very poststructuralist "always already." The moment is, of course, that of the production of desire only insofar as that desire reproduces the desire of another. Paolo and Francesca's love has already been written. Dante has Francesca remark on this in Canto V when she explains the way that Lancelot and Guinevere had functioned as models. "We read of the smile," she says, "desired of lips long-thwarted, such smile, by such a lover kissed away. .. ." And she herself calls the book in which they read of it Galleot - the go-between for Lancelot and Guinevere: "The book was Galleot," she says, "Galleot the complying Ribald who wrote; we read no more that day." In S/Z Roland Barthes writes, "Without the-always anterior-Book and Code, no desire, no jealousy: Pygmalion is in love with a link in the code of statuary; Paolo and Francesca love each other accordingto the passion of Lancelot and Guinevere."3 And indeed, in another of these fixations on the beginning moment of a story which had initially been conceived as a cycle, but which instead returned in four versions of the same moment spread over forty years of his career, Ingres paints Raphael and the Fornarina.Here again he shows Raphael loving his mistress "according to" her surrogates in representation: both her nude portrait placed on the easel to the couple's side and her image as the Madonna della Sedia to be discovered in the background of the studio. This displacement onto Barthes's "Book and Code," this passion according to the passion of another and the endless repetitions onto which it opens could not be more dramatically demonstrated than by one final detail in the scenario I am presenting, if ever so sketchily. It has been suggested that Ingres, addicted to tracing paper as a means of recording and engorging the art of the past, was addicted as well to the use of 3.

Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, Hill and Wang, New York, 1974, pp. 73-74.

Originalityas Repetition

39

J.-A.-D. Ingres.Raphael and the Fornarina. 1814. Fogg Art Museum, GrenvilleL. WinthropBequest.

J.-A.-D. Ingres.Raphael and the Fornarina. ca. 1850-65.

ChryslerMuseum, Norfolk, Virginia.

40

OCTOBER

papier calquenot only for producing the mirror reversal we saw in the Paolo and Francesca examples, but in imagining figures and figural groupings from the back. And in this instance his imagination, stirred by Raphael's passion, projected the Fornarina from behind, to produce what is undoubtedly his most obsessional image, the exquisite Valpingon bather, who, from 1808 to 1864, remained turned away from him but nonetheless at the center of his attention, forever the erotic obsession of another.4 To capture this movement of an always already self-divided origin was, I realized, to carry out the examination of the very tools and categories of art history at a level that seemed to me extremely telling. And it therefore became clear that what was important to this subject was the examination-in-practice of a group of theoretical models in which the origin is problematized through the very agency of repetition. The centrality for this discussion of models of repetition-whether these be Freudian, Marxist, Derridian, or Foucauldian-was, then, the cause of the change of title for this symposium, and Multiples without Originalsbecame Originalityas Repetition.

4. This suggestion has been made by Eldon N. Van Liere, "Ingres' Raphael and the Fornarina: Reverence and Testimony," Arts, vol. LVI (December 1981), pp. 108-115. Norman Bryson also discusses this possibility in order to develop the concept of the trope of displacement in Ingres's work. See Bryson, Traditionand Desire, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1984, pp. 130-133.

The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde*

BENJAMIN H. D. BUCHLOH

The concept 'historic avant-garde movements' distinguishes these [dada, constructivism, surrealism] from all those neo-avant-gardiste attempts that are characteristic for Western Europe and the United States during the fifties and sixties. Although the neo-avant-gardes proclaim the same goals as the representatives of the historic avantgarde movements to some extent, the demand that art be reintegrated in the praxis of life within the existing society can no longer be seriously made after the failure of avant-gardiste intentions.

The neo-avant-garde, which stages for a second time the avantgardiste break with tradition, becomes a manifestation that is void of sense and that permits the positing of any meaning whatever.2 These two quotations give us, in highly abbreviated form, one of the central hypotheses of Peter Burger's important but problematic study, The Theoryof the Avant-Garde.To rephrase it, the hypothesis runs roughly as follows: It was the goal of the original avant-garde, that of the period 1910-25, to criticize the notion of autonomy, the central term of modernist thinking. Furthermore, this avant-garde aimed to abolish the separation of the aesthetic from the real (what is often referred to as the gap between art and life) and attempted instead to in* This symposium contribution is excerpted from a study of the reception and transformation of the paradigm of monochrome painting in the practice of the neo-avant-garde from 1951 to 1961. The study forms a chapter of a projected book devoted to the relationships of the neoavant-garde to the historical avant-garde of 1910-25, focusing on the paradigmatic strategies of that period: in addition to monochromy, ready-made, collage, serial grid composition, and open construction. 1. Peter Burger, Theoryof the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 109, n. 4. 2. Ibid., p. 62.

42

OCTOBER

tegrate art within social praxis. At the very least, the historical avant-garde attempted to criticize the institutionalization of modernism. By contrast, all those activities of the generations of postwar artists that Burger calls the neo-avantgarde are flawed from the beginning by the most obvious of all failures in art production: repetition. "The neo-avant-garde," Burger claims, "institutionalizes the avant-gardeas art and thus negates genuinely avant-gardiste intentions."3

The word genuinelybetrays Biurger's evaluation of the "historical" avantgarde artists: they were original, while their postwar followers are imitators, recapitulators. The neo-avant-garde has copied and therefore falsified the original moment of rupture with the discursive practice and institutional system of modernism. While it is evident that Burger's model of repetition is infinitely more complex than those which traditionally separate the unique, auratic original from the debased copy (whether repetition is understood as a process of learning and ever-closer approximation to an ideal of perfection or as a manufacturing process of copies and fakes), it is also evident that Burger's notion of the "genuine" original versus the "fraudulent" copy is still determined by the binary opposition ultimately deriving from the cult of the auratic original. Burger's historical scheme, valid and important as it might be in other respects, is marred by this one feature: the fiction of the origin as a moment of irretrievable plenitude and truth. This fictitious moment of an "origin" functions, as we know, as the fulcrum of the historian's pursuit. Only after establishing this plenitude or originality in the past- and that past moment can, as in an infinite regress, either be shifted further back into history or be pulled to the forefront of present-day experience - only then can the work of the historian begin. As is usually the case with such fictions, we find in Burger's text the consequence of this loss of the original for the present. The present moment is devalued, is comparatively empty and meaningless, lacks the vigor of the original, and therefore, at best, offers us the randomness of historicism. Thus, the present is not only "void of sense" and "permits the positing of any meaning whatever," but, "through the avant-garde movements, the historical succession of techniques and styles has been transformed into a simultaneity of the radically disparate. The consequence is that no movement in the arts today can legitimately claim to be historically more advanced as art than any other."4 3. Ibid., p. 61. 4. Ibid., p. 63. The implications of this statement seem particularly problematic when considered in relation to current "postmodernist" production, whose cynical apologists argue precisely for a value-free art practice based on the end of the avant-garde and the simultaneous availability of all historical styles through pastiche or quotation. Burger's discussion of the neo-avant-garde shows no awareness whatever of those art practices of the late 1960s and early 1970s (his book was originally published in Germany in 1974) that radically opposed the "institutionalization of the avant-garde as art," for example, the work of Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, and Hans

The Primary Colorsfor the Second Time

43

I want to argue, against Burger, that the positing of a moment of historical originality in the relationship between the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde does not allow for an adequate understanding of the complexity of that relationship, for we are confronted here with practices of repetition that cannot be discussed in terms of influence, imitation, and authenticity alone. A model of repetition that might better describe this relationship is the Freudian concept of repetition that originates in repression and disavowal. Rather than discarding forty years of neo-avant-garde history with the highhanded naivete of the art historian who has staked out a field and predetermined its limits, it would be more appropriate to investigate the actual conditions of reception and transformation of the avant-garde paradigms. This would entail clarifying the peculiar dynamics of selection and disavowal, of repression and "simple" omission that resulted from the particular dispositions and investments that the various audiences brought to their involvement with the avant-garde after the Second World War. Furthermore, I want to ask whether it might not be precisely the process of repetition which constitutes the specific historical "meaning" and "authenticity" of the art production of the neo-avantgarde. This clarification should be developed first of all within the discursive practice itself, and not by instantly seeking recourse in transcendental categories of causality and determination. Nor can the relationship between the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde be elucidated from a centralized point, that of the authenticmoment of originality, from which all subsequent activities appear as mere repetitions. In the following I want to discuss a single example, a case in which one of the central pictorial strategies of the original avant-garde of the 1910-25 period was in fact rediscovered and "repeated" by artists of the neo-avant-garde, and was subjected to the process of institutionalization that Burger discusses. As is well known by now, between 1919 and 1921, in the context of postcubist painting, monochromy became one of the most important reductivist pictorial strategies of the historical avant-garde. While Malevich, in his series of square and modular-cross paintings of 1915-19, was the first to introduce the monochrome figure and to map this figure onto an achromatic field in a nonrelational central composition, it is not until 1921 that we can speak of a completely monochrome canvas from which all figure-ground and chromatic relationships have been eliminated as well.5 Rodchenko's triptych Pure Colors. Red, Yellow, Blue, 1921, is the first work that not only abolishes the denotative functions of color but also liberates color from all spiritual, emotional, and Haacke. For a more developed critique of this aspect of Burger's book, see my review, "Theorizing the Avant-Garde," Art in America, vol. 72, no. 10 (November 1984), pp. 19-21. 5. For a first extensive and excellent discussion of the history of monochrome painting, see Yve-Alain Bois, "Malevich, le carre, le degre zero," Macula, no. 1 (1978), pp. 28-49.

44

OCTOBER

psychological associations, analogies with musical chords, and transcendental meaning in general. Thus, with Rodchenko's introduction of the monochrome, we witness not only the abolition of relational composition but, more importantly, the abandonment of conventional attributions of the "meaning" of color in favor of the pure materialityof color. It is only logical that this recognition of the materialityof color coincided historically with the discovery of the chromatic values of materials as pronounced one year earlier in the Realistic Manifesto of Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner (and as it had already been put into practice in Duchamp's ready-mades). Thus it is perfectly convincing to read Rodchenko's claim (made retrospectively in his text "Working with Mayakovsky" of 1939): [In 1921] I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed: this is the end of painting. These are the primary colors. Every plane is a discrete plane and there will be no more representation.6 While one cannot deny with certainty that a remnant of antibourgeois, futurist shock value still motivated Rodchenko's claim, it is nevertheless evident that the project of Rodchenko's critical modernist strategies was the demystification of aesthetic production, in this case the pictorial convention of assigning meaning to color. In its explicitly scientistic attitude -since it adapts scientific models of empirio-criticism-it proclaims itself as a model for aesthetic practice, and thus as a model for cultural practice in general. Moreover, by the mysterious process of model imitation that is never clarified in modernist practice (how exactly did Mondrian, for example, expect his paintings to operate as models of the socialist society?), Rodchenko's triptych suggests the elimination of art's esoteric nature, the rationalistic transparence of its conception and construction supposedly inviting wider and different audiences. Rodchenko aims to lay the foundations for a new culture of the collective rather than continuing one for the specialized, bourgeois elite. Inevitably, the reduction to the monochrome also implied a redefinition of the role of the artist. Insofar as the work eliminates the marks of manual creation - analogue of the specialized vision - in its form and structure, it opposes the social division of labor and that condensation of talent in the single individual that is synonymous with its suppression in the collective. This implication of the monochrome painting is programmatically and provocatively overstated in an anonymous text of 1924, written either by Malevich or El Lissitzky: With the increasing frequency of the square in painting, the art in-

6. Alexander Rodchenko, "Working with Majakowsky," in From Painting to Design: Russian ConstructivistArt of the Twenties, Cologne, Galerie Gmurzynska, 1981, p. 191.

The Primary Colorsfor the Second Time

45

stitutions have offered everybody the means to make art. Now the production of art has been simplified to such an extent that one can do no better than order one's paintings by telephone from a house painter while one is lying in bed.7 Exactly thirty years later the French artist Yves Klein - in many ways the quintessential neo-avant-garde artist--astounded the Parisian art world with his work, and he seems to have convinced that art world with his claim to have invented monochrome painting. While Klein acknowledged his awareness of Malevich at a point in time later than this "invention," we have no evidence that he had come in contact with any examples of postcubist monochrome painting before 1957, when he saw Malevich's and Strzemiriski's paintings in Paris. This fact does not in the least, however, resolve the questions that are raised by this clear-cut case of neo-avant-garde paradigm repetition. If anything, it should make us realize that these phenomena must be addressed in a way that avoids mechanistic speculations about priority and influence. This is corroborated by the fact that Klein was literally surrounded at the time by other artists of his generation who (re-)discovered the strategy with equal enthusiasm and naivete- for example, Fontana, Rauschenberg, and Kelly. This coincidence, as well as the simultaneity of rediscoveries and repetitions of other avant-garde paradigms, substantiates the hypothesis that the discursive formation of modernism generated its own historical and evolutionary dynamic. If we assume that visual paradigms operate analogously to linguistic paradigms, then the "langue"of modernism would constitute the neoavant-garde "speakers" and continuously replicate and modify their 'paroles." Since the aesthetic objects that emerge from these discursive formations seem at first to be structurally, formally, and materially analogous, if not identical, traditional art-historical approaches have been confronted with two possibilities. Either choose Burger's transcendental criticism (and it does not really matter whether this is argued on political or aesthetic grounds), which rejects neo-avant-garde practices as so much charlatanry, as insufficient in comparison to the authenticity and sublime seriousness of the "original," historical avant-garde's critical project; or revert to the opposite (and complementary) method of connoisseurship. This latter approach attempts to elevate the activities of the neo-avant-garde- often with an effort bordering on the grotesqueand to transform them into such traditional high-art categories as the oeuvre, within which each object becomes again inherently self-sufficient, its meanings understood as a function of its "essence."8

7. Quoted in Bois, p. 37, n. 40; originallypublishedin Hans Arp and El Lissitzky,Kunstismen, Munich, Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1925, pp. ix-x. 8. For a recent example of this approach, see John Bowlt, "The Zero of Forms,"in OfAbsence andPresence,New York, Kent Fine Art, 1986, np.

Malevich (center)and El Lissitzky (left, with wool cap) with UNOWIS studentsleavingfor Vitebsk,1919.

Spectatorsat YvesKlein's Anthropometries de 1'epoque bleue, GalerieInternationaled'Art Contemporian,Paris, March 9, 1960.

48

OCTOBER

But it is precisely this traditional conception of the work of art as a complete, self-enclosed, self-sufficient entity that the repetitions of the neo-avantgarde calls into question. And even though Burger argues for a conception of the work as a fragment, an open structure, he does not seem to realize that within such an open structure, all formal and material, not to mention iconographic, elements are no longer able to generate the traditional semantic functions that he nevertheless deems essential to original avant-garde practices. It is thus inevitablethat these works have reached what Bfirger calls, critically, a state of "semantic atrophy." This term betrays Burger's expectations of a traditional meaning structure inside an open, fragmented work, a meaning centralized and integrated and residing within the elements of the aesthetic object itself, yet nevertheless maintaining a referential relation to the real world. On the contrary, however, the repetitive structure of the neo-avant-garde work, with its apparently identical chromatic, formal, and structural elements, prohibits the perception of an immanent meaning and dislodges this traditional structure. It displaces meaning to the peripheries, shifting it to the level of the syntagma and toward contingency and contextual heteronomous determination. Consequently, the inherent qualities of the work no longer offer sufficient possibilities of differentiation among one another. (What would be the point of a formal comparison between two ready-mades by Duchamp or two paintings of soup cans by Warhol?) Nor are the works of the neo-avant-garde to be distinguished from their paradigmatic predecessors in the historical avantgarde; structurally, formally, chromatically the two triptychs by Rodchenko and Klein are at first almost identical. It therefore becomes obvious that the reading of these neo-avant-garde works consists exclusively in assigning meaning to them from what traditional discourse would call the outside, that is, the process of their reception-the audience's disposition and demands, the cultural legitimation the works are asked to perform, the institutional mediation between demand and legitimation. For the work of the neo-avant-garde, then, meaning becomes visibly a matter of projection, of aesthetic and ideological investment, shared by a particular community for a specific period of time. Yves Klein seems to have been aware of all of this when he decided to repeat the modernist strategy of monochromy, and he pushed all the inherent contradictions to their logical extreme. In one of his most "scandalous" exhibitions, Klein installed ten identical blue monochrome paintings in a commercial gallery in Milan in 1957. The implications of what Klein called his "monochrome adventure" seem at first glance to be that the very continuation of painting is threatened. And indeed monochromy had, in Rodchenko's case, lead to the conclusion of his painting production. By purging color of its last remnants of mythical, transcendental meaning; by making painting completely anonymous through seriality and infinite repeatability; by imbuing painting with the status of the ready-made, the final blow to painting-considered as a unique

49

The Primary Colorsfor the SecondTime

YvesKleinat theEpoca Blu exhibition,Galleria Apollinaire,Milan,January1957.

to have been dealt. We object and a moment of auratic experience-seemed are left with the infinite repetition of the structurally analogous or identical, as was precisely the case in the work of so many artists during the 1950s and '60s, the complete destruction of the closed, centered, self-contained work, as well as the destruction of the organic development of the oeuvre. But there is an almost schizophrenic split between Klein's pictorial production and the perceptual experience he wants it to generate, as demonstrated in his own observations on the 1957 exhibition: All of these blue propositions, all alike in appearance, were recognized by the public as quite different from one another. The amateurpassed from one to another as he liked and penetrated, in a state of instantaneous contemplation, into the worlds of the blue. However, each blue world of each picture, although of the same blue and treated in the same manner, revealed itself to be of an

50

OCTOBER

entirely different essence and atmosphere; none resembled another, no more than pictorial moments or poetic moments resemble each other.. The most sensational observation was that of the "buyers." Each selected out of the ... pictures that one that was his, and each paid the asking price. The prices were all different of course. This fact proves, for one thing, that the pictorial quality of each picture was perceptible through something other than the material physical appearance .. So I am in search of the real value of the picture, that is, suppose two paintings rigorously identical in all visible and legible effects, such as lines, colors, drawing, forms, format, density of surface, and technique in general, but the one is painted by a "painter" and the other by a skilled "technician," an "artisan," albeit both officially recognized as "painters" by the public. This invisible real value means that one of these two objects is a "picture" and the other isn't. (Vermeer, van Meegeren.)9 It is in Klein's desperate (or is it facetious?) attempt to protect himself against the erosion of painting and to maintain it as a form of sublime and privileged experience that he reveals most poignantly (it is unclear whether his clairvoyance is innocent or cynical) the extent to which painterly production had already become subservient to the conditions of the culture industry. The realm of modernism -once a domain of resistance to the totalizing demands of ideology and those of the production of use value and exchange value; a domain that had offered a form of refuge, a utopian space where cognition and vision, sensual play and apperception could be experienced as integrated; where the primary process maintained its supremacy - this realm was now in the process of being converted into an area of specialization for the production of luxurious perceptual fetishes for privileged audiences. But more than that, we read in Klein's account the way in which every single feature of the modernist pictorial strategy and its enlightenment agenda is turned on its head. While for Rodchenko it was the tactilityof his monochrome panels, their relief character, so to speak, that suggested the abolition of the bourgeois contemplative mode of perception, it is precisely contemplationthat Klein prescribes as the proper perceptual approach to his works. While Rodchenko wished to purge chromatic qualities of their mythical and transcendental meaning, Klein conjures up the essence and the atmosphere of the poetic moment of each individual painting. And finally, it had been evident from Rodchenko's 9. Yves Klein, "The Monochrome Adventure," trans. and quoted in Nan Rosenthal, "AssistedLevitation: The Art of Yves Klein," in YvesKlein, Houston, Institute for the Arts, Rice University, and New York, The Arts Publisher, 1982, p. 105.

The Primary Colorsfor the Second Time

51

positivist agenda, and from the Malevich/Lissitzky statement, that one of the most radical implications of the strategy of monochromy was the redefinition of the artist's role, the abolition of the painter's patte and his specialized vision in the systematic breakdown of the work's auratic status. In Klein's statement, by contrast, the artificial reconstitution of the aura is the central issue, and he must therefore logically separate the art of the copyist or faker from that of the reconstructed, inspired, original, creative genius. This reconstitution of the artist's traditional role is, however, by necessity mythical, and the products emerging from this restoration are inevitably fetishistic. They are fetishistic, first of all, because their auratic quality can only be demonstrated by their commodity status. The hierarchyof exchange value to which Klein refers with such candor reveals the myth as myth even in the act of constructing it. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the fetishistic nature of these products originates-as is crucial for the formation of the fetish in general--in disavowal, in this case, the disavowal of the historical legacy of modernism itself. Neither the original implications of the strategy of the monochrome nor its subsequent development (constructivism's transition to productivism, for example) could be acknowledged in the reception and repetition of this paradigm by the neo-avant-garde. The primary function of the neoavant-garde was not to reexamine this historical body of aesthetic knowledge, but to provide models of cultural identity and legitimation for the reconstructed (or newly constituted) liberal bourgeois audience of the postwar period. This audience sought a reconstruction of the avant-garde that would fulfill its own, needs, and the demystification of aesthetic practice was certainly not among those needs. Neither was the integration of art into social practice, but rather the opposite: the association of art with spectacle. It is in the spectacle that the neo-avant-garde finds its place as the provider of a mythical semblance of radicality, and it is in the spectacle that it can imbue the repetition of its obsolete modernist strategies with the appearance of credibility. According to Klein - and to many of his apologists and exegetes - one of his prime achievements was to have "liberated the pigment" from its traditional binding media. This was accomplished by discovering and mixing new materials to create his patented International Klein Blue. The recipe, which used transparent acrylic as a binder, made the blue pigment appear as if pure and unbound, sitting like a powder on the surface of the canvas. Paradoxically, though, it is just this extreme devotion to the details of the painting's surface which indicates most poignantly that the modernist concern with transparency of construction had run its course. Any attempt to refine it, to increase its precision, or to extend the life span of the paradigm was bound to result in fetishization. Thus we find our hypothesis empirically confirmed on the level of the materials and procedures themselves, and so the actual differences between the two triptychs - Rodchenko's and Klein's - must be taken very seriously indeed.

52

OCTOBER

The one is by no means a mere repetition of the other using slightly altered colors (from yellow to gold, from red to pink, from blue to IKB); rather, the first triptych completed the modernist, materialist project in order to abolish the last vestiges of myth and cult to which high art had been inextricably tied within bourgeois culture. Rodchenko's work thereby made possible the conception of a new collective culture. By contrast, Klein's triptych resuscitated the idea of art as transcendental negation and esoteric experience precisely at that moment when the mass culture of corporate capitalism was in the process of dismantling all vestiges of bourgeois culture's individual experience and liquidating the oppositional functions of high art. It becomes obvious, then, from these very minute material and procedural features of the neo-avant-garde paradigm repetition that the bourgeois public sphere from which the modernist project emerged had been utterly transformed and that modernist culture had lost its function of mediating between individual and public. The very same strategies that had developed within modernism's project of enlightenment now serve the transformation of the bourgeois public sphere into the public sphere of the corporate state, with its appropriate forms of distribution (total commodification) and cultural experience (the spectacle).

Ready-Made Originals: The Duchamp Model*

MOLLY NESBIT It seemsincrediblethat it is in thenameoffree instructionthat they comealong todaytoforbid us to see masterpieces,and what do they give us instead?Cubes, cones, hexagons,tetrahedrons,polyhedrons, the group of them looking like a cemetery.They made the great draughtsman[Ingres] say, "Mypoor children, they have placedyou beforeyour tombstones and thenforcedyou to copy them!"-Balze The modern model of repetition has been established well outside the avant-garde. It is usually called mass production and is recognized in the commodity, that dull fetish, the brand-name good, the ideal of middlemen. Though we tend to consider this kind of repetition unbearably crude, it has nonetheless become the unwritten point of reference for all other definitions of the copy, not to say the original. As a point of reference it is hardly abstract: mass production is a daily real; more than a flood of exchange values, it is powerful, essential, basic. The mass-produced model of repetition has perhaps been forced upon us, but we cannot take it lightly; it deserves our attention here. There is, it must be admitted, a play of variation within this brute repetition: the industrial model is neither monolithic nor all that crude. There are, for example, the historical shifts in what is understood by the word commodity. There are, for another example, the deviations and interferences made by politicians and industrialists to favor the development of certain sectors over others. The mass-produced repetition is not, bang-bang, mechanical: it con* This symposium contribution has benefited from the careful reading and good criticism of Leila Kinney, Michael Marrinan, and Andre Rouille. As ever, they have my thanks.

54

OCTOBER

tains longings for individual greatness, dreams of national prosperity, and fears of loss. These variations make for a model of repetition that is neither very simple nor easy to use. Possibly for these reasons, as well as for the others I've just mentioned, it is rarely proposed as a model for culture to follow. At one stage in the history of industry, it displayed a culture for itself, rather than, as came to be the case, using another kind of culture to represent its interests. This happened in the nineteenth century, when mass production, often with the help of the state, organized trade fairs, culminating in the world's fairs. The fairs drew attention to themselves like magnets; they easily rivaled traditional forms of culture and in many ways brought on their competition's demise. They exhibited models of modern, national cultures; they claimed to exhibit the future, natural evolution of man. They proposed a grand, new culture of the patent that quite overshadowed the culture of the copyright. This display of futures and goods provoked much debate over the way to industrial supremacy. The debate in nineteenth-century France led, somewhat surprisingly, to a call for drawing. According to Fernand Buisson, then director of primary school education, the call came from diverse sectors, from workers and management, special commissions, and chambers of commerce, and it saw drawing as the salvation of French industry; he saw it as social capital.1 A better instruction in drawing was theorized; with the Ferry reforms in public school education in the early 1880s, it became law, integrated into a program of basic, compulsory civic knowledge. The cycles of this curriculum led to another order of repetition, one designed to justify the nation and its industrial mode of production. This made for a closed system, a wheel within a wheel, where a social and political order was justified and justifying, as Gramsci observed about the contemporary Italian reforms. One was taught to regard this schooled knowledge as absolutely objective when in fact nature was being mastered according to a particular scheme of social order which was facilitating a particular idea of work.2 Work, said Gramsci, was the latent principle in the Italian primary school. It was embedded, in a slightly different form, in the French school too. Drawing was taught as one such given, full of the latent idea of work; at the same time, it was taught as a piece of the hexagone,a common sense, and a tool by which one ordered visual experience.3 It was taught through drills, like writing, and taken as a language, 1. Fernand Buisson, "Discours prononce a l'occasion de la distribution des prix aux eleves de l'Association Polytechnique le 24 juin 1883, au Cirque d'Hiver," in Conferenceset causeries pedagogiques.Mimoires et documentsscolairespublies par le museepedagogique,fasc. 59, Paris, Delagrave, 1888, pp. 57ff. See also Fernand Buisson, ed., Dictionnairepedagogique, 4 vol., Paris, Hachette, 1882 and subsequent editions, for its historical justification and summaries of the curriculum by the principals involved in the reforms. 2. Antonio Gramsci, "In Search of the Educational Principle," in Selectionsfrom the Prison Notebooksof Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1971, pp. 33ff. 3. The hexagoneis a trope for the French nation, whose borders form a rough hexagon.

Ready-Made Originals

55

to be read, as it were, and spoken. In this secondary, drawn, silent, massive, classroom repetition, we can begin to fathom the deeper machinations of the original, industrially produced model with which we began. The drawing instruction was designed by Eugene Guillaume, who was fond of explaining his method as the instrument for the establishment of drawing as a regular language; he was not, however, promoting the teaching of art. As he put it: Drawing expresses the most sublime notions of artists; it is the starting point and the last word of the painter's, sculptor's, and architect's masterpiece; and at the same time it is a means of communication and a practical instrument used by the worker-artist and the artisan. If it has its poetics; it also has in some respects its business language. But all this is but a single language which rests upon certain formal principles and rules, these having a grammatical character.4 These rules were grounded in and expressed by geometry. The geometric language base installed by the Ferry reforms and taught by the Guillaume method could be built upon later for different professional purposes, like art or industrial design, but that was not the educators' first concern. They wanted to guarantee an elementary, which is to say as yet unprofessional but still workaday visual language for daily use; they hoped that the entire population would be able to read geometrical and mechanical drawing, a skill they deemed necessary for modern life. The language base they set up was primary, aesthetically neutral, and cut to fit a particular idea of the visual. The program as it was instituted in 1883 remained in effect, with minor adjustments, for the next twenty-six years. It began by teaching the student the straight and the curved line, explaining that the entire world of appearances was built upon combinations of these two elements: they were the first letters of the alphabet. The relations between the lines were studied too: the relationships, one manual said, were the syllables of drawing.5 The tableaux illustrated here (figs. 1, 2) come from Ris-Paquot's manual for teachers in 1887 and summarize the progression of the program, how the broken line was extended into

4. Eugene Guillaume, "Dessin," in Dictionnairepedagogique, Paris, Hachette, 1887, vol. 1, p. 688. See also Christiane Mauve, "L'art a l'ecole?" in Esthetiquesdu peuple, ed. Jacques Ranciere, Paris, St. Denis, 1985, pp. 131-144. 5. Jules Pillet, Bibliothequepedagogique.Le dessin dans l'enseignementprimaire. Conferencefaitele 6 avril 1882 dans la seanced'ouverturede la session normalepour la preparationdes candidatsau certfiJcatd'aptitudea l'enseignement du dessin, Paris, Delagrave, 1883, p. 19. The official program is usually given at the head of any manual for use by drawing teachers. For an official appreciation of its success, as well as a breakdown of the program according to grade, see Paul Colin, Exposition Universelle Internationalede 1889 a Paris. Rapports duJury Internationalpublies sous la directionsde M. Alfred Picard. Classe 5bis. Enseignementdes arts du dessin. Rapport de M. Paul Colin, artistepeintre, inspecteurprincipal de lenseignementdu dessin, Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1890.

Fig. 1. Ris-Paquot,Enseignement primaire, 1887. Pl. 2, studyof lines.

/

---

F i-

\

,

/ --

\

'-*

2N,i--r-i' |<

,1$

'1,%

':

Fig. 2. Pl. 14, studyof trapezoids.

' '" j

!

-

\\ , _^.

/

-

y-

"

..

_

h

I

-: F.

l

__ e

f

'~'i!;/il

Trcises I

!" )'.&~'rl~:

?~1;i:c iY

,,,T

...

..

Fig. 3. V. Darchez, cylinderfromNouveaux exercises. Notebookbelongingto Henri Jeannotte.

Fig. 4. Application,500 g. weight,from samenotebook belongingto HenriJeannotte.

PL. 21.

UH

/ II

I__.

~~~

3A4 h

Fig. 7 (this page). Ris-Paquot, pl. 21, use of the cube.

O

-3

F

"

Fig. 8 (opposite,left). Coffee grinderwithteacher's grade

.

'

from notebookbelongingto Roger Chardonnet,ca. 1920.

Fig. 9 (opposite,right). MarcelDuchamp. Coffee Mill. 1911. CollectionMrs. Robin Jones, Rio deJaneiro.

C)-

""

^

'..i..

..

i ,

cornices and T squares, how the combination into trapezoids led to the formation of watering cans and shoes. The student went on to master the figures of plane geometry, and then to those of solids. Simple drawing after decorative ornament was tried but there was no drawing after nature in the raw. The geometry moved in its own sphere, according to its own elemental logic. The figures of plane and solid geometry led to instruction in perspective and then to the introduction of projection drawing, on which mechanical drawing was based. This was achieved by laborious copying in notebooks: by the repetition of the cylinder, the cone, and the sphere, in their pure form and in their other guises. One can see the child laboring in the notebooks that survive, here Henri Jeannotte doing the lesson on the cylinder, the cone, and the sphere, in plan and elevation (fig. 3); at times there was resistance, forJeannotte at the point of the 500 gram weight, when, defying all limits, he let a speeding car invade the page (fig. 4).6 But mainly, the surviving notebooks show conformity, not to 6. The notebook is in the collection of the Musee National de l'Education in Rouen, which has a small but telling group from the period 1880-1940. Especially telling is the persistence of the Guillaume method even after the modificationsto the program in 1909, when some drawing after nature was essayed and color was allowed.

mention an extraordinary skill with the very straight line. The program continued. It took the student through the architectural orders, did the vases and balusters, and ended with the human head (figs. 5, 6). The visual set of the program was colorless, technical, and relentlessly geometrical. In the secondary schools, the lessons were extended: the drawing became ever more technical and exacting: there were copies after the antique and calculations of cast shadows. Once the student had passed puberty, the human body could be drawn, but never from life. These, in short, were the limits in this visual common sense. The projections and perspectives were critical. The child was learning that there were two kinds of representation: drawing that imitated the appearance of things to the naked eye and drawing that revealed the truth of things behind the surfaces of appearance; that is to say, there was perspective drawing and mechanical drawing. Each kept a relation to the object; one could have a coffee grinder both ways (fig. 7), but truth, significantly, was not optical. It was, rather, nonretinal, and clearly identified with the croquiscote, the blueprint for production, the working drawing for the commodity. In practice, the language base was hardly neutral; it cheerfully ratified the means and ends of industrial production; insofar as it was a language for everyday use, it was a language of work, a language of industry.

60

OCTOBER

At the heart of the program sat the object of everyday life, or better, objects, which were named and prescribed in the certification for drawing teachers and repeated (fig. 8), without actually being specified individually, in the manuals used in the schools.7 They were household objects and tools usually: tables, pails, flowerpots, frying pans, rakes, trestles, umbrellas. By and large, this elementary education was successful: the coffee grinder's appearance and being were registered by children and graded by teachers. The full implications of the normative lesson on the commodity and its required geometrical form were probably not grasped by the nine- to twelve-year-olds who received it; they were simply assumed; they came with literacy. And with literacy came another order of repetition, the kind of repetition that is called use. This language in use does not take its textbook form, of course. It is best considered speech, and sometimes it just popped out (fig. 9). As Marcel Duchamp told Pierre Cabanne: My brother had a kitchen in his little house in Puteaux, and he had the idea of decorating it with pictures by his buddies. He asked Gleizes, Metzinger, La Fresnaye, and, I think, Leger, to do some little paintings of the same size, like a sort of frieze. He asked me too, and I did a coffee grinder which I made to explode; the coffee is tumbling down beside it, the gear wheels are above, and the knob is seen simultaneously at several points in its circuit, with an arrow to indicate movement. Without knowing it, I had opened a window onto something else. The arrow was an innovation that pleased me a lot-the diagrammatic aspect was interesting. ... It was a sort of loophole. ... It was there I began to think I could avoid all contact with traditional pictorial painting .. .8 In fact, Duchamp had switched into the neutral, utilitarian mode of representation that he had learned along with everybody else, though it would seem not

7. For typical examples, see L. Malaval, Le vraidessin.Courspratiquedeperspective a vue.A l'usage detoutepersonne a dessinerd'apresnatureavecousansmaitre,Paris, Nouvelle Librairie queveutapprendre classique, 1888; and the various manuals for teachers and students by V. Darchez. It should be noted that the certifying exam for the teaching of drawing instituted in 1887 specified a set of objects to be learned and that the objects for men differed from those for women. 8. Marcel Duchamp, Dialogueswith PierreCabanne,trans. Ron Padgett, New York, Viking, 1971, pp. 31 and 37. The language is used in many corners of French culture. Its presence can be detected, for instance, in the fact that the generation of Frenchmen who grew up in the 1880s and '90s came to recognize merit in geometric abstractart. It probably allowed the work on the forth dimension, dependent upon an understandingof projection, to be of sufficientpopular interest to become a fad. It affected the way in which advertisers developed a mass-media image for the commodity. And it provided a base for French modernism, dada, purism, and surrealism, to use after World War I as it sought to make sense of the culture of consumption, of those commodities that were competing with art. Its assumptions reappear in Ozenfant's theory, Leger's Balletmecanique, and the objettrouve', as well as the ready-made.

Ready-Made Originals

61

to have been a conscious decision. The coffee grinder is painted in cross section and from above, maintaining the points of view of the mechanical drawing. It is a variation that ends up as a repetition; it moves through the loophole to the coffee grinder; a slip of the tongue produced one of the most common textbook objects of everyday life. As Duchamp abandoned easel painting, he lapsed into the language of industry, slipped back onto a ready-made base, one with a technical, nonart edge, pretentions to language, a nonretinal dimension, projections, and cast shadows. The notes for the Large Glass and the assortment of objects that accompanied its making are concerned to define and explore all of these things further. Duchamp by no means reproduced his elementary education; rather he used it against the interrogation by the shop window and its contents, commodities. Duchamp wrote in a note to himself in 1913: When one is interrogated by shop windows, one is also pronouncing one's own sentence. In fact, the choice is a round trip. From the demands of the shop windows, from the inevitable response to the shop windows, comes the end of choice. No obstinacy, out of absurdity, hiding the coitus through the glass with one or more objects from this shop window. The sentence consists in cutting through the glass and in regretting it once possession is gained. Q.E.D.9 Consumption is predetermined; consumption is regrettable since one cannot avoid becoming possessed by these objects; consumption can be demonstrated using geometry (Q.E.D.). Whatever his reservations about consumption, Duchamp did submit to the interrogation and he answered back. But he tried in his answer to break away from the mandatory round trip, to remain self-possessed in front of the windowpane. He took to symbolic violence rather than vandalism; in 1915 he bought a snow shovel and named it In Advanceof theBrokenArm (fig. 10). It was a logical move, a self-defense, and a reply in the appropriate native tongue. The ready-mades and the assisted ready-mades sometimes duplicate the object lessons of the Guillaume method (fig. 11) and sometimes extrapolate from them; at the very least, Duchamp always chose objects that come from the same generic family studied in the object lesson. They seem to have been plucked from a distant mechanical drawing in the mind, though they carry the textbook example to an adult conclusion: they producethe object from the drawing. In this reproduction came a literal possession of the object and its language. In the ready-mades, Duchamp seized control of the dialogue dictated by the shop window: the model is taken out of circulation, often given an absurd title, hung 9. Marcel Duchamp, Ecrits. Duchamp du signe, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, Paris, Flammarion, 1975, pp. 105-106.

Fig. 10. Marcel Duchamp. In Advance of the Broken Arm. 1915. Yale UniversityArt Gallery. Gift of KatherineS. Dreierfor the CollectionSociite Anonyme.

Fig. 11. V. Darchez, pl. XLVIII, tools.

in a limbo, and effectively silenced. This shovel will never be used, bent, rusted, or fall obsolete. And yet, Duchamp was not behaving as badly as little Henri. The language of industry was not dismissed out of hand but, rather, assumed and then subjected, sentenced to an ambiguous zone of Duchamp's own choosing. Duchamp was careful, however, to point out that originally it was never a question of condemning the ready-mades to art. The ready-made, then, was a response to a condition of everyday life. It was articulated through the visual set of the Guillaume method; it demonstrated Duchamp's literacy in the visual language of the quotidian. As a response, it fits perfectly into Voloshinov's description of everyday discourse, where the banal comment gains its meaning from a range of unspoken social conditions, a horizon that grounds the empty phrase.10 Voloshinov's example takes two men. 10. Y.N. Voloshinov, "Lediscours dans la vie et le discours dans la poesie"(1926), in Tzvetan Todorov, MikhailBakhtine:le principedialogiquesuivi de Ecritsdu Cerclede Bakhtine,Paris, Seuil, 1981.

Ready-Made Originals

63

One says, "Voila" (I have used a French translation). The other says nothing. By itself the voila is empty. But if one knows that it is May and that the two, presumably Russian men are standing by a window watching the snow fall before their very eyes and feeling a certain gloom, the voila speaks worlds. The shovel is a voila, a perfectly ordinary response in 1915 to a hardware store on Broadway, a purchase. It is an empty, banal thing that requires a native French speaker to get the non-dit, the snowfall, in it. The shovel is legible but closed: it is not a voila to be countered with another, like phrase, say, a depressed "Mais oui." The shovel leads nowhere in the terms of everyday discourse, except to a monologue by Duchamp. Duchamp's unpoetic monologue on everyday visual experience was strung out over the series of ready-mades, a succession of voilas. In themselves they say nothing much; their interest lies in Duchamp's use of the language. For Duchamp is attempting to master not only the commodity but also its means of communication, its language. If mastered, he would have the symbolic means of industry under his personal control. In 1920 Duchamp pretended to have done just that in the Fresh Widow (fig. 12), another object-type of the instruction, this one part of the required curriculum in the lycee by the time Duchamp attended (fig. 13)."1 Here we know that there is this very working drawing lodged somewhere in his memory, a design that reappeared twenty years later with a few details missing: the French has gone fresh; the window is a widow; the panes are made of leather; and it has been translated into English. The design was given to an American carpenter to get this small-scale model in blue. So the design is repeated and manufactured like a model for a patent office. It makes a joke at the expense of the French war widow. But this time around, Duchamp has inserted a bona fide word that takes the visual language into another order of discourse: the Fresh Widow is declared copyrighted by Duchamp's alias, Rose Selavy. The claim to copyright brings the interrogation by the shop window to a different halt: Duchamp has claimed a copyright for a window that is not only plagiarized but by definition not eligible for copyright: the window is an industrial good in the eyes of the law; if suitably innovative it might be patented but never given the droit d'auteur,not even in America. The copyright was a bluff. But with it, Duchamp subjugated the culture of the patent in no uncertain terms: by means of that one word, he pulled the culture of the patent over into the culture of copyright, the traditional culture, the culture of artists. In spite of all his efforts to remain com-

11. See Darchez, Nouveau cours de dessin geometriquea l'usage des eleves de l'enseignementprimaire superieur, des ecoles normaleset de 'enseignementsecondaire.Ridige conformnmentdes derniersprogrammes officiels, 3 vol., Paris, Belin, 1896-1898. It should be said that others besides Duchamp felt it important to master the Guillaume method, notably feminists. See Renee Pingrenon, De l'utilite du dessin dans 'existencede lafemme, Paris, Libraire du "Moniteur de Dessin," 1904; and Lydie Martial, Courspreparatoirea l'enseignementdu dessin, Paris, L'Ecole Franfaise de la Pensee, 1917.

64

Fig. 12. Marcel Duchamp. Fresh Widow. 1920. The Museum of ModernArt, New York, KatherineS. Dreier Bequest.

OCTOBER

Fig. 13. V. Darchez, Nouveau cours de dessin, 1896-98. No. 34, window.

monplace, art became the only way for him to escape the tyranny of the shop window. The idea that he could seize control of the visual means of industrial culture was, of course, misguided, pure fantasy on Duchamp's part. Nobody except industry gets control over its symbolic means, let alone its models of repetition, not even artists. By 1925 Duchamp seems to have realized that his monologue was powerless against the commodity. He fell silent for a while. And then, in the '30s, he began to work on the Green Box and the Valise, reproducing his old notes and his old work as documents for the history of art, boxed as a miniature museum without walls. This time around he was just plain repeating himself, doing the kind of artist's monologue we have come to expect, behaving now not as an ordinary citizen but as an old master. Outside, unperturbed, the industrial model of repetition rolled along under its own steam and the snow fell quite unnoticed.

Monet's Series: Repetition, Obsession*

STEVEN

Z. LEVINE

In a well-known letter written in the last months of his life, Claude Monet sought to discourage precisely the sort of discussion that I will offer here. To the biographer of his old friend and associate John Singer Sargent, Monet writes of his "horror of theories," and yet inevitably Monet engages in theory in his own further remarks: "My only merit lies in having painted directly in front of nature, seeking to render my impressions of the most fleeting effects, and I still very much regret having caused the naming of a group whose majority had nothing impressionist about it" (to Evan Charteris, June 21, 1926, w. 2626).1 In this disavowal of the group name, Monet very nearly identifies impressionism with his practice alone, this being a sort of police action by which a certain class of fugitive is arrested in mid-flight. The juridical form of this rendering, this surrender of the fugitive, is the notorious impression itself; and the ritual precinct for this visual remanding is "directement devant la nature." Devant not only means "in front of" but also somewhat less directly suggests "prior to," and it is the unruly indices of temporal anteriority and spatial alterity that are repressed in this version of Monet's account. In an earlier letter, however, this one written to his own biographer, Monet acknowledges the ontological priority of another's vision over the phenomenological immediacy of his own: As to what concerns my relations with the "king of skies" I think that * I would like to thank Rosalind Krauss for inviting me to participate in the 1986 College Art Association symposium on originality as repetition, and to acknowledge the enabling force of her own remarks on repetition found throughout her essays collected in The Originality of the AvantGardeand OtherModernistMyths, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, The MIT Press, 1985. I would further like to thank the Committee on Interpretation at Bryn Mawr College for its vigorous reading of an earlier version of this paper. 1. Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet. Biographie et catalogue raisonne, 4 vols., Lausanne and Paris, La Bibliotheque des Arts, 1974-85. Monet's paintings and letters are referred to in the text according to their Wildenstein numbers, an uppercase W being used for paintings and a lowercase w for letters. Vol. 1: 1858-81, W. 1-705, w. 1-226; Vol. 2: 1882-86, W. 706-1122, w. 227-766; Vol. 3: 1887-98, W. 1123-1500, w. 767-1433; Vol. 4: 1899-1926, w. 1434-2685. All translations from the letters are my own.

66

OCTOBER

I have already told you, I consider Eugene Boudin as my master.... I followed his counsel, and in concert we took long walks during which I did not cease to paint after nature [d'apres nature]. ... It must not be forgotten that he had received the lessons of a master, Jongkind, whose work, especially in his watercolors, is at the origin, along with Corot, of what has been called impressionism. I have said it and I repeat it: I owe everything to Boudin and am grateful [reconnaissant] to him for my success . . . (to Gustave Geffroy, May 8, 1920, w. 2348). My interest here is to place this version of Monet's account under the sign of what Norman Bryson has recently called the logic of recognition.2 Far from painting the world with an elusive but alluring directness of perception, Monet paints the world in a split and doubled gesture of recognition. This recognition is at once a primary form of acknowledgment and a secondary form of knowing. On the one hand, there is the oedipally ambivalent, Freudo-Bloomian recognition of the enabling anteriority of the master (and of the master's master);3 on the other hand, there is the narcissistically disenabling, Lacanian recognition that the imaginary possession of one's own private vision of the world depends upon the prior existence of a symbolic system whose repetitions and reflections one must be taught to know.4 Even the artist's innermost self is such an alien and reified system. As Monet twice writes after an initial bout of work on the motif, "[I] am beginning to recognize myself a bit in what I do" (to Auguste Rodin, April 3, 1889, w. 936; also see letter to Theodore Duret, February 2, 1884, w. 403). The formula of 1926 with which I began -"directement devant la nature" -is conjoined with the "d'apres nature" of 1920. This is to say that Monet's ultimate affirmation of the instantaneous copresence of nature and painter is contradictorily traversed by a penultimate acknowledgment of the differential, Derridian or Deleuzian, gap between art and world.5 Now Monet paints after nature, alienated from the directness of frontal contact by means of the overthe-shoulder authority of the master whose pictures Monet so singularly repeats. And for an anticipated gift of which, as he writes to Boudin sixty years 2. Norman Bryson, Traditionand Desire: From David to Delacroix, Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 21 and passim. 3. "[Freud's] peculiar subject was psychic overdetermination or unconscious bondage, or again, the inability to begin freshly rather than to repeat. Eros, he taught, is never free but always a repetition, always a transference in authority from past to present" (Harold Bloom, "Introduction," in Sigmund Freud, New York, Chelsea House, 1985, p. 2). 4. Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I" (1949), in Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York and London, W. W. Norton, 1977, pp. 1-7. 5. Jacques Derrida, "Differance" (1968), in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp. 1-27; Gilles Deleuze, Differenceet repetition,Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1968.

Monet's Series: Repetition, Obsession

67

earlier, he will be "grateful" (April 21, 1860, w. 4). When, thirty years later, an aging Boudin returns the compliment by requesting a picture from his former pupil as a souvenir, Monet once again repeats his fundamental gratitude: "I have not forgotten that it is you who first taught me to see and to understand" (August 22, 1892, w. 1162). Nevertheless, for all this recognition of Boudin's role in the formation of his vision, Monet defers immediate compliance with his erstwhile mentor's pressing demand for a tangible remembrance of time past. Back in 1860 Monet signs his youthful letter to Boudin "your pupil and friend," but soon he despairs of the structure of recognition in which his art seems uncannily trapped. To his closest friend, the painter Frederic Bazille, Monet writes of his frustrations from the coastal town of Honfleur: "Ah well, dear fellow, I want to struggle, scrape, begin again, for one can do what one sees and what one understands, and it seems to me, when I see nature, that I am going to do it all, write it all out, and then have a go at it ... when one is on the job" (July 15, 1864, w. 8). My emphasis in this letter is on the curiously retrospective-cum-prospective structure of present seeing and present doing that will always entail a painful reseeing of something already known in the past, as well as an anxiously anticipated redoing in the name of something not yet born into the future. Another letter to Bazille will sharpen this point: "There is a simple study that you did not see me commence, it is entirely done upon nature [faite sur nature], you will perhaps find in it a certain rapport with Corot, but it is that way completely without imitation. The motif and especially the calm and vaporous effect is the only cause" (October 14, 1864, w. 11).6 Even when working directly upon the body of nature herself, as it were, the Name of the Father- the one whom Monet later calls pere Corot - interdicts the immediacy of the junior artist's intercourse.7 But it is not through a hubristic or humble identification with the precursor that the rapport, the intimate relation which is also like a rifle's report, is laid bare; it is not his fault, it is hers, the fault of the natural effect which caused Monet to make a Corot. There were critics who thought that Monet made Corots throughout his career. Monet's parodic paintings were said to have "the charm of a Corot with an 'excess' unknown to the painter of the Morning Effect."8 Either these were 6. Compare Monet's TheRoadof theSaint-Simeon Farm,1864 (W. 29), to which the artist in his letter may refer, and Corot's Entranceto the Wood, Villed'Avray,1823-25, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland. 7. For a discussion of the displaced discursive erotics of the nineteenth-century critical response to landscape painting, see my "Ut PicturaAmor:Painting and Love in 1859," in Reflections and Repetitions: Meaningsin the WaterPaintingsof ClaudeMonet(forthcoming). Also see the recent dissertationby Carla M. Puppin, "The Critical Response to Landscape Painting, 1830-51," Bryn Mawr College, 1986. 8. Marcel Fouquier, "L'Expositioninternationale de peinture et de sculpture,"Le XIX' Siecle, June 17, 1886. Compare Monet's TheSeineNearGivery, 1885 (W. 1007), to which Fouquier may

68

OCTOBER

ClaudeMonet.Etretat, Heavy Seas. 1868. Louvre, Paris.

Corots with an outrageous oedipal supplement, or they were dreamlike, narcissistic interminglings of Monet and his alter ego: "This ideal and doubled landscape after a fashion, . . . a rare work, exquisite, due to the mysterious but certain encounter of Corot and Monet in an identical impression."9 Boudin and Corot were not the only predecessors whose pictures Monet found himself endlessly condemned to repeat. The paintings of Etretat seem to have been especially fraught with the negative consequences of Monet's repetition compulsion. Situated not far from the childhood beaches of Le Havre and Sainte-Adresse, Etretat had already hosted artists such as Delacroix, Jongkind, and Courbet before Monet settled there with his first family in 1868. From Etretat, "in the most perfect tranquillity," he insists to Bazille that "what I have referred,and the mirror-smooth backgroundreflectionsin Corot'sTheCompany of Diana (Morning Effect),1855, Bordeaux,Musee des Beaux-Arts.On pictorialparodyas dialectically TheTeachings productiverepetition,see LindaHutcheon,A Theory ofParody: of Twentieth-Century ArtForms,New Yorkand London,Methuen,1985(withusefulbibliography). 9. J. Buisson,"UnClaudeMonetde l'expositionPetit,"La Chronique desArtsetdela Curiosite, 1893(W. 1333), Winter, February25, 1899,pp. 70-71. CompareMonet'sTheSeineatBennecourt, to whichBuissonrefers,andthe monochromatic, mist-obscured reflectionsin Corot'sSouvenir of 1864,Paris,Museedu Louvre.Many otherCorotswouldserveas well. Mortefontaine,

Monet'sSeries:Repetition, Obsession

69

Etretat. 1865. Louvre,Paris. JohannBartholdJongkind.

will do here at least has the merit of resembling no one, at least I believe so, because it will simply be the expression of what I will have felt, personally" (December 1868, w. 44).10 Monet returns to Etretat in the 1880s as to a lost part of himself. His wife Camille is now dead and, in a letter to his mistress, Monet impulsively wishes that he were dead too. Alice Hoschede had replaced the sickly Camille in Monet's affections already during the latter's lifetime; at the time of writing, Mme. Hoschede is back home at Giverny where her estranged husband and Monet's former patron has come to pay an official birthday visit. So Monet is left alone at Etretat to work, "but my affairs stayed beside me on the beach, without my even thinking to open my box; I stayed looking stupidly at the waves, wishing that the cliff would crush me" (February 19, 1883, w. 334). Indeed the cliff very nearly does crush Monet. Earlier in the campaign Monet writes as follows: "I count on doing a large canvas of the cliff at Etretat, 10. Compare Monet's HeavySeasat Etretat,1868 (W. 127) and Jongkind's similarly framed 1865 drawing of the cliffs at Etretat, Paris, Musee du Louvre. It might be added that in this on theGrass drawingJongkind repeats the notorious riversidefigure grouping of Manet's Luncheon of 1863 on Etretat'srocky beach.

70

OCTOBER

ClaudeMonet. Etretat, Rough Seas. 1883.

even though it is terribly audacious on my part to do that after Courbet, who did it admirably, but I will try to do it otherwise" (to Alice Hoschede, February, 1883, w. 312). Otherwise, indeed; for Monet's doing must be an undoing and a redoing, too, not only of the priority of his father in art but, even more elusively, of the authority of his own prior products over his present process."1 Back home at Giverny a year and a half later, after yet another campaign at Etretat, Monet writes to his dealer as follows: "I brought back some canvases to Etretat. I could do nothing in spite of my desire, but the weather there became bad as soon as I arrived" (to Paul Durand-Ruel, September 6, 1884, w. 518). Monet is forever writing to Durand-Ruel about the repetitive opera11. Compare Monet's HeavySeasat Etretat,1868, 66 x 131 cm. (W. 127) and his later Etretat, RoughSeas, 1883, 81 x 100 cm. (W. 821) with the famous painting to which Monet must refer here, Courbet'sEtretat,the CliffaftertheStorm,1869, 133 X 162 cm., Paris, Musee du Louvre.

71

Monet'sSeries:Repetition, Obsession

GustaveCourbet.Etretat, the Cliff after the Storm. 1869. Louvre,Paris.

tions in which his endlessly deferred paintings are enmeshed: "At the last moment I wanted to sign them and do some retouching, but I did not have the time. I will do it therefore when I am in Paris" (October 2, 1881, w. 224); "after several days of good weather, here it is again that the weather has turned to rain, yet once more it is necessary to put to the side the commenced studies. I am going crazy on account of it and unhappily it is on my poor canvases that I take it out" (September 18, 1882, w. 288); "as I wrote to you, I have courageously set myself back at work" (September 26, 1882, w. 290); "if I get discouraged easily, you also know that I likewise lift myself up" (June 12, 1883, w. 359); "I do not have a single canvas that does not need to be reviewed and retouched with care, and that cannot be done in a day

.... Some of them might

be very good, I believe, and others, even those a bit vague, can become good things with careful retouching, but, I repeat it, that cannot be done from one day to the next" (April 27, 1884, w. 489); "I have not been able to bring to com-

72

OCTOBER

pletion, as I was hoping to do, the canvases that were underway for so long and that I would have done better to abandon weeks ago; I would have had time to redo others. Instead of that I have done nothing but do and undo. ... I leave [for Etretat] full of ardor and in order not to fall back into the same errors" (September 16, 1885, w. 585). As he writes to his second wife years later, however, "I lift up my head only often to fall back into that terrible discouragement familiar to you" (February 3, 1901, w. 1593).12 It is from Etretat that Monet first writes to Alice Hoschede about his pictorial repetitions. Initially repetition is simply a convenient way to get on with the difficult job at hand: "It is really disheartening, I have not been able to take up again any of my motifs of the Manneporte; when the tide was just what I needed the weather was not right. I started a good number of things yesterday, repetitions, in the hope of being able to work every day, but it does not go I have brought back some canvases and I really do not know how I quickly.... will bring all this back home again" (October 26, 1885, w. 598). Structures of repetition are reiterated here (1) in the already worked-upon but unfinished canvases which have been brought back to Etretat from Giverny; (2) in the ever-foreclosed enterprise of taking up again, of resuming, his prior motifs at Etretat from under the unpredictable gaze of variable waves and weather; (3) in the anxious anticipation of having to deal with the accreted canvases of Etretat back home at Giverny; and, most importantly perhaps, (4) in the pictorial reduplication of these canvases and motifs on the spot in the vain hope of undoing the disabling consequences of all these other repetitions. Monet is lured into his painted repetitions because "it always seems to me that in beginning again I will do better" (to Alice Hoschede, March 26, 1884, w. 462). The problem is that Monet cannot "refind"his effects, as he repeatedly says; indeed he also has difficulty in "refinding myself" (see letters to DurandRuel and Geffroy, January 24, 1893, July 5, 1899, w. 1174, 1468). From Bordighera on the Italian Riviera he writes that "happiness here is to find again each day one's effect" (January 29, 1884, w. 398). It turns out that even the constancy of the southern sun proves insufficient for the purposes of Monet's recurrent need to master variability and change. What is so striking about Monet's work is the way it repeatedly persists in seeking temporal and compositional invariance in the notoriously variable climates of Normandy, Brittany, and London: "At the beginning one always expects to find one's effects again and finish them: hence these unfortunate transformations that serve for nothIn preparing this paper I compiled a very rough index of 12. approximately thirty re- verbs of repeated action that reappear dozens of times during the long course of Monet's correspondence. The verbs I encountered most often were retrouver,remettre,reprendre,revoir, revenir, recommencer, retoucher,retravailler,refaire,repeter.Rather less frequently repeated were retomber,replonger,remonter, redonner, rabdcher, rapporter, repeindre, recouvrir, reessayer, retenter, rattraper, retourer, relire, revivre, renaitre,rajeunir,se ressaisir, se retrouver,se reconnaitre.Nouns such as reprise,rechute,and repetitionalso recur in the letters with what I take to be a revealingly perseverant insistence.

Monet's Series. Repetition, Obsession

73

ing"; "you can never get the same effects again and I should have made only sketches, true impressions. . . . Now, there are many effects that you cannot get again because of the new situation of the sun; but I have already told you all this, I am so disheartened that I repeat myself" (to Alice Monet, March 18, 1900, March 10, 1901, w. 1532, 1616). Rather than remember and learn from the painful lessons of the past, Monet regressively repeats them as tragic farce -rather like the France of 1851 in Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and rather like the patient in psychoanalysis in Freud's technical paper of 1914, "Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through." My own effort here is to make Monet sound rather like a melancholy philosopher of repetition as irrecuperable difference such as Nietzsche or Deleuze.'3 In his verbal and pictorial practices Monet endlessly re-presents the lost and lamented images of his past. Still from Etretat he repeats to Durand-Ruel the familiar litany of incompletion: "One needs so many things, to recapture one's effects with the tides low or high, calm or agitated, never, I believe, have I had so many difficulties, such variable weather. . . . But as I feel that in persisting a bit more I can bring back good things, at least, it seems to me, as I further put off my return" (November 25, 1885, w. 630). In order to insure that "good things" will result, henceforward the deferral of repetition is already built in to the presentness of work: "If some canvases are worth the pain, I will come back to complete them in March." In spite of this proleptic solace, Monet remains disconsolate: "I am absolutely disgusted, for the last few days that I have reworked, I make only trash; it is a lost voyage; everything is changed and the days much too short, and yet more than ever I need lots of canvases and very good ones . . . (to Alice Hoschede, December 10, 1885, w. 639). In this compulsive need for lots of good things there is an indubitable economic motive. As he writes, Monet needs these valuable commodities, these mass productions, for his dealers Durand-Ruel and Georges Petit.14 Economics, however, offers no reductive solution to the problem of repetition, for Monet's discourse persists long after wealth has been secured. Narcissistic economics must be taken into account as well, for the to-and-fro of pictorial repetition also functions to bind and forestall an agonizing drift into a limitless future of insatiable desire for the instantaneous impression that will never return. By the same token, that same token put into play in thefort-da game 13. For Deleuze's distinction between what he calls Platonic repetition, or the allegedly selfsame reinstantiation of an original identity, and Nietzschean repetition, or the persistent deferral of similitude in the face of inevitable disparity, see J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition. Seven English Novels, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1982, pp. 1-21. 14. Degas and Pissarro both criticized Monet for what they took to be his commercially motivated repetitions, his "art de vente." See Camille Pissarro, Lettresa sonfils Lucien, Paris, 1950, pp. 171-172 (July 10, 1888). On April 9, 1891, regarding the collectors' clamor for Haystacks, Pissarro exclaimed: "I do not know how it does not bother Monet to constrain himself to this are the terrible effects of success!" (p. 231). repetition-here

74

OCTOBER

that Freud situates beyond the pleasure principle and that Lacan cites as the tragic inauguration of desire-as-lack,15 Monet's repetitive practice threatens to deprive his paintings of whatever present vitality they may ever have had. Thus, after "repainting," "retouching," "reworking," and "redoing" the canvases of Belle-Ile much to the chagrin of his local porter and the reverberant pain of his absent correspondent Alice, Monet concedes that his pictures "are only repetitions of the same motifs" (see letters of October 11, 17, 25, 30, and 31 1886, w. 708, 714, 722, 730, 731). Moreover, these repetitions on the spot will not even count fully as paintings until they have been passed through yet a further process of repetition at Giverny. To Durand-Ruel he writes, "I have nothing finished, and you know that I cannot really judge what I have done until I look at it once again at home and I always need a moment of repose before being able to give the last touches to my canvases. I am still working a lot; unhappily I often have bad weather, and for many of the motifs I have difficulty in getting the same effect, and I will have a great deal to do once back home at Giverny" (November 9, 1886, w. 741). Recapturing his effect often proves impossible (see letters to Alice Hoschede, October 10 and 19, 1886, w. 742, 752), but the foreseen repetitions of the studio will redemptively, if illusorily, come to constitute the final performance for which the work on the spot turns out to have been only so many rehearsals.16 The problem with this scenario is that Monet can only rarely acknowledge the annulling consequences of the repetitive practices that already will have robbed, and will always turn out still further to rob, the work directementdevant la nature of its allegedly unmediated instantaneity: "I add and I lose certain things. In the end I am seeking the impossible" (to Alice Hoschede, April 9, 1892, w. 1151). So Monet does not paint directly in front of nature at all. On the spot Monet paints nature after previous pictures, after those of his masters and after those of his past; and in the studio he repaints those same pictures after the pictures on his walls. Sometimes the pictures that are repeated are even photographs, true instantaneous replicas of nature. This is alleged of the London paintings of 1905 by two English artists of Monet's acquaintance; his angry rebuttal to his consternated dealer in on-the-spot impressions is an unwitting manifesto avant la lettrefor the self-consciously alienated postmodern repetitions of photorealism today: "Whether my Cathedralsor my Londonsand other canvases are done after nature or not, that is no one's regard and it has no importance. I know so many 15. Lacan discusses the famous Freudian scenario of repetitive childhood play in Beyond the PleasurePrinciple (1920) as a linguistic (artistic) mastery of maternal loss by way of the reiterated dispossession and repossession of the (phallic) signifier in "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis" (1953), in Ecrits, pp. 103-104, 112, n. 113. 16. On the Belle-Ile series, see my "Seascapes of the Sublime: Vernet, Monet, and the Oceanic Feeling," New LiteraryHistory, no. 16 (Winter 1985), pp. 377-400.

Monet's Series. Repetition, Obsession

75

painters who paint after nature and make only horrible things .... The result is all" (February 12, 1905, w. 1764). Indeed, the result is all and always a repetition waiting to be recognized as such. Of course, such recognition is the product of theory, or perhaps allegory, "real-allegory," to use Courbet's famous phrase. Monet's disclaimers of theory notwithstanding, it is precisely my sense that Monet's professed possession of the world in mimesis is also on his own account the allegorical repetition of a mortal experience of dispossession and loss; in my words, an allegory of Narcissus.17 As Monet writes, bending over his paints and his pond: "These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. ... I have destroyed some . . . some I begin again" (to Gustave Geffroy, August 11, 1908, w. 1854).

17. "Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection" is the principle chapter of my forthcoming book. For some preliminary remarks, see my "Monet, Fantasy, and Freud," PsychoanalyticPerspectiveson Art, no. 1 (1985), pp. 29-55.

Courbet's Loriginedu monde: The Origin without an Original

LINDA NOCHLIN

Nothing could be more Freudian than the scenario I am about to rehearse in this narrative, for it concerns the endlessly repetitive quest for a lost original, an original which is itself, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word, an origin. I am referring to Courbet's painting, The Originof the World, a work which is known to us only as a series of repeated descriptions or reproductions--an Origin, then, without an original (fig. 1). But I shall also be discussing notions of origination and originality as they inform the discipline of art history itself: the founding notion that through the logic of research-i.e., the repetitive act of searching over and over again - one can finally penetrate to the ultimate meaning of a work of art. In the case of Courbet's Origin, this ultimate-meaning-to-be-penetrated might be considered the "reality" of woman herself, the truth of the ultimate Other. The subject represented in The Originis the female sex organ - the cunt - forbidden site of specularity and ultimate object of male desire; repressed or displaced in the classical scene of castration anxiety, it has also been constructed as the very source of artistic creation itself. The first part of my scenario has to do with a failure: the failure to locate the original of Courbet's Origin of the Worldfor a forthcoming exhibition of the artist's work. I had gone about my art-historical business in the usual way: tracing the work back to its origin in the Courbet literature, and then, working forward, attempting to discover its present location -to no avail. Not only was the original Origin impossible to find, but the clues to its location seemed to be perversely, almost deliberately misleading, fraught with errors in fact. Nor did the errors seem to me to be entirely fortuitous. Rumors that The Origin, now veiled behind a canvas by Andre Masson, was actually in the collection of Sylvie Bataille Lacan--former wife of both Georges Bataille and Jacques Lacan - seemed almost too good to be true, even when they were confirmed by a French expert who claimed to have seen the Origin in Mme. Lacan's apartment. This hot lead, sending my colleague and myself to a sure address in the sixth arrondissement, left us standing frustrated in the lobby. On a subsequent trip another French expert, the head of the Societe des amis de Gustave Courbet, assured us that the work was not in France at all, but in the United

Fig. 1. Gustave Courbet.The Origin of the World. 1866. (As reproducedin RobertFernier, La vie et l'oeuvre de Gustave Courbet.)

OCTOBER

78

Fig. 2. The Origin as reproducedin Neil Hertz, "Medusa'sHead."

Fig. 3. The Origin as reproducedin Peter Webb, The Erotic Arts.

States, in a collection on the West Coast the name of which he had forgottenperhaps the Norton Simon Collection, perhaps not. My heart leaped when I discovered a photograph of the work (fig. 2) accompanying Neil Hertz's provocative article, "Medusa's Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure,"' credited to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts - certainly the most unlikely possible location, one would imagine, for a work that might be thought of as prototypically "banned in Boston"! A call to the curator of the Boston Museum confirmed my doubts. After helpfully going through all the files of the museum, including those of visiting exhibitions, he assured me that there was no record of The Originin Boston. A call to Neil Hertz revealed that the attribution to the Boston Museum had been a printer's error-an error more recently repeated by Denis Hollier in his provocative article, "How to Not Take Pleasure in Talking about Sex":2 perhaps Boston is the literary critic's preferred mislocation of The Origin?Hertz told me that he had really meant to credit the Budapest-not the Boston- Museum of Fine Arts. Yet the hope that The Originmight be in Budapest was dashed by further research. Peter Webb, in his discussion of Courbet's work in his 1975 publication, The EroticArts, states that this painting (fig. 3) which had 1.

Neil Hertz, "Medusa's Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure," Representations,no.

4 (Fall 1983), pp. 27-54; with responses by Catherine Gallagher and Joel Fineman and a reply by Hertz, pp. 55-72. Denis Hollier, "How to Not Take Pleasure in Talking about Sex," Enclitic,vol. VIII, nos. 2. 1-2 (Spring-Fall 1984), pp. 84-93.

The Origin without an Original

79

in GeraldZwang, Fig. 4. The Origin as reproduced Le sexe de la femme.

been reproduced in hand-tinted full color (fig. 4) in Gerald Zwang's Le sexede la femme3- a limited edition, luxe, pseudoscientific, soft-porn production-with the provenance "Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, formerly collection of Professor Hatvany," was not in fact in the Budapest Museum any more than it had been in the Boston one. Says Webb, "In a communication to the author dated 4 February, 1972, the Director of the Museum of Fine Arts at Budapest (Dr. Klara Garas) wrote, 'Courbet's painting has never been in our museum; it was in a private collection in Budapest and disappeared during the war.'" Webb continues, "During a visit to Budapest in October 1972, the author learned that the painting had been stolen by the Germans during the war and had then been appropriated by the Russians. Professor Hatvany had bought it back and later taken it to Switzerland. Wayland Young, in Eros Denied,4 reports a rumor that the painting was sold in America in 1958." At this point, Webb simply throws up his hands in despair: "This painting has rarely been seen or even heard of, and judgment of its quality is difficult from the blurred photograph that remains." He concludes rather lamely, "This painting was last heard of in Budapest in 1945"5-which leaves us more or less where we began, although, to be sure, Robert Fernier, in his catalogue raisonne of Courbet's work, asserts, without fur-

3. 4. 5.

Gerald Zwang, Le sexede lafemme,Paris, La jeune Parque, 1967. Wayland Young, ErosDenied,London, Corgi, 1968, p. 96. Peter Webb, TheEroticArts,London, Seckerand Warburg, 1975, pp. 166, 451-452, n. 67.

80

OCTOBER

ther substantiation, that The Originreturned to Paris after the war, where it was sold to an unspecified "amateur" in 1955.6 More secure, in terms of the art-historical quest for the original Originis the reference to the Hatvany Collection. In his 1948 publication, Courbetet son temps, Charles Leger, one of the major Courbet scholars of the earlier twentieth century, states that the work was bought in about 1910 by the Baron Francis Hatvany of Budapest.7 Baron Hatvany had seen the painting at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in a double-locked frame, hidden by a panel representing, Leger asserts, not a "church in the snow" as Edmond de Goncourt had described it in his diary in 1889, but rather a "castle in the snow." Even the supplementary details relating to The Origin, it must be reemphasized, tend to be frought with error. One might almost say that no statement can be made about it - including my own - that does not contain some deviation from empirical factuality, much less from "truth" in the larger sense. Leger continues, "M. de Hatvany, with whom I was formerly in correspondence, for he owned The Wrestlersof Courbet [a work now in the Budapest Museum], naturally spoke to me about this Originof the World,acquired at Bernheim-Jeune, with the frame, while the little panel hiding the canvas, the Castle in the Snow, became the property of Baron Herzog, of Budapest."8 Working ever backward in our search for the original Origin, we come upon a sighting in June 1889, recorded in the pages of Edmond de Goncourt's Journal. Goncourt writes that a picture dealer had shown him a painting of a woman's bas-ventrewhich made him want to make "honorable amends to Courbet." That belly, declared Goncourt, "was as beautiful as the flesh of a Correggio."9 Also dating from the 1880s, May 27, 1881, to be precise, is Ludovic Halevy's account of Gambetta's spirited recollection of the work, which the latter had encountered, many years earlier, in the company of Courbet, at the home of its owner, the notorious art collector and Turkish ambassador to St. Petersburg, Khalil Bey.10 Here is Gambetta's rather scrappy reminiscence as recorded by Halevy in his memoirs: "L'originedu monde.A nude woman, without feet and without a head. After dinner, there we were, looking ... admiring.... We finally ran out of enthusiastic comments.... This lasted for ten minutes. Courbet never had enough of it. . . ." Still earlier, we have

6. Robert Fernier, La vie et l'oeuvrede Gustave Courbet,Paris and Lausanne, 1977-78, vol. II, p. 6, no. 530. 7. Leger does not reproduce the work; I have not been able to find any reproductions of the Origin dating before the 1960s. 8. Charles Leger, Courbetet son temps, Paris, 1948, p. 116. 9. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal. memoiresde la vie litteraire,Paris, Fasquelle, Flammarion, 1956, vol. III, p. 996. 10. For information about Khalil Bey, see Francis Haskell, "A Turk and His Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Paris," OxfordArt Journal, vol. 5, no. 1 (1982), pp. 40-47. 11. Ludovic Halevy, Trois diners avec Gambetta, ed. Daniel Halevy, Paris, Grasset, 1929, pp. 86-87.

The Origin without an Original

81

the notorious "hysterical" description of the work by Maxime du Camp in his four-volume denunciation of the Paris Commune, Les convulsionsde Paris, written ten years after the fact: To please a Moslem who paid for his whims in gold, and who, for a time, enjoyed a certain notoriety in Paris because of his prodigalities, Courbet . . . painted a portrait of a woman which is difficult to describe. In the dressing room of this foreign personage one sees a small picture hidden under a green veil. When one draws aside the veil one remains stupefied to perceive a woman, life-size, seen from the front, moved and convulsed, remarkably executed, reproduced con amore, as the Italians say, providing the last word in realism. But, by some inconceivable forgetfulness, the artist, who copied his model from nature, had neglected to represent the feet, the legs, the thighs, the stomach, the hips, the chest, the hands, the arms, the shoulders, the neck, and the head.'2 The search, then, ends, fruitlessly, in the dressing room of an Oriental bon vivant, or rather in a textual allusion to Khalil Bey, who commissioned the work from Courbet in 1866. Ultimately we find the origin of The Origin in the desire of its possessor, the exotic collector of erotica, Khalil Bey, but it is still an origin without an original: we have come no further in our search for the lost painting itself. In this almost parodic - because failed - rehearsal of a familiar art-historical scenario, which has turned into a kind of allegory of the scholar's enterprise itself, I wish to emphasize the repetitiveness at stake here, within the context of a discussion focused on originality and repetition. Each new find simply repeats, as though original, a new set of false clues. Each so-called discovery simply mimes the "truth"it supplants without bringing the quest any nearer to completion. One might go further and say that art-historical practice is itself premised on the notion of originality as repetition, an endless rehearsal of the facts which never gets us any closer to the supposed "truth" of the object in question. Yet the presumed origin of The Origin in masculine desire leads to still another scenario of origination, that of the origin of art itself. In an article entitled "The Origins of Art," Desmond Collins and John Onians attempted to "trace back" historically the origin of art to the engraving of crude but recognizable vulvas on the walls of caves in Southern France during the Aurignacian Period, about 33,000 to 28,000 B.C.'3 According to this scenario, masculine desire literally led lusting but frustrated Aurignacian males to represent in stone the desired, absent object -the female sex organ-and thereby to Maxime du Camp, Les convulsions de Paris, Paris, Hachette, 7th ed., 1889, vol. II, pp. 12. 189-190. 13. Desmond Collins and John Onians, "The Origins of Art," Art History, vol. I, no. 1 (March 1978), pp. 1-25.

82

OCTOBER

create the very first artwork. In the light of this assumption, all other artworks ought to be considered simulacra of this originating male act, and representation must itself be considered a mere simulacrum of that desired original. What a perfect example such art-historical scholarship offers of the assumption that "everything has to begin somewhere," referred to by Rosalind Krauss in her introduction to this discussion! What a perfect disregard of the "always already" is demonstrated by such an enterprise! It is equally clear that Courbet shared in this myth of the originating force of the artist's desire. To construct still another scenario implicated in the quest for the Originwithout an original, one must turn to TheArtist'sStudio, a work in which Courbet clearly and literally turns his back on the social and political contextualization which had marked his earlier achievements - The Stonebreakers or The Burial at Ornans. The central portion of The Studio (fig. 5) constitutes Courbet's most complex and profound meditation on art as an originating act and the position of the artist in relation to that act of origination. In The Studio Courbet positions himself at the very heart of what must be read as the oedipal triangle, classic site of origins, a configuration constituted by the female model - the mother- the little boy spectator - the son - and the dominating figure of the painter-the father. In a single, powerfully determined image, Courbet has locked into place patriarchal authority and pictorial originality as the inseparable foundations of Western art: great or ambitious art, needless to say.14 Turning away from the nude model and her forbidden sexuality, the patriarch-painter is absorbed in his act of progeneration, the supremely originating thrust of brush to canvas. And what he is represented as creating in the painting-within-a-painting is not an image of the nude model, who functions unthreateningly as a kind of motherly muse behind his back, but rather a landscape. The reading of landscape as a manifestation of the psychoanalytic process of displacement in Courbet's oeuvre becomes even clearer if we consider a work like The Sourceof theLoue- itself the representation of an origin, or source--whose morphological relationship to The Origin of the Worldhas often been asserted in the Courbet literature (fig. 6). Nor is it any accident, to continue this Freudian scenario, that, at the crucial heart of a crucial painting, Courbet-as-patriarch is represented as inscribing sheer matter-the actual pigment on the palette-as the origin of his creation. Not only is the pigment emphasized by its denseness, thickness, and brightness; not only is it unequivocally centralized; but also, by calling attention to the shape of the canvaswithin-the-canvas, as well as the shape of the actual support of the painting, the rectangular palette which supports that pigment focuses our attention on the manipulation of matter, the application of paint to canvas, as the originating 14. This is not the first, nor the last, time that a major artist will resort to such a gesture, needless to say; both Michelangelo in his Creation and David in The Oath of the Horatii offer memorable analogues. Fig. 5. Gustave Courbet. The Studio

(detail). 1854. Louvre, Paris.

of the Artist

-~ ~

~

~

I

~~~-

~

?:? "''.

~~~

~

~

~

~

~

~

~ ~

'

84

OCTOBER

Fig. 6. GustaveCourbet.The Source of the Loue. ca. 1865. NationalGalleryof Art, Washington.

act of the artist. It is this that makes his work authoritatively original. Here, the strict Freudian, or the reductivist one, might say that the patriarch/originator becomes identical with the child who plays with his feces. Which leads us to the final scenario: that of the quest for originality in Courbet's Origin. In the absence of the painted materiality of the original, that incontrovertible evidence of the father-generator's presence constituted by Courbet's unique mode of applying his matiereto the canvas; in the absence, in short, of all the identifying signs of the artist's imperious originality in the available images of the work, there is really no satisfactory way of differentiating Courbet's painting from a thousand ordinary beaver shots available at your local newstand. In its blurry, reproduced repetitions, most of which seem to have been printed on bread, The Origin is literally indistinguishable from stanit is identical with it (fig. 7). dard, mass-produced pornography-indeed, Critics have, understandably, attempted to read the signs of originality back into these inadequate reproductions of Courbet's Originof the World:it is a practice in which almost all of us who work with reproductions must inevitably

85

The Origin without an Original

::: -* a:., --air: :r i: :: :: : : :: : : : : :

* " ?*":-':8:i?" :, i; ::

i i:..a : : :'::^:a *:

r,: in Courbet und Fig. 7. The Origin as reproduced Deutschland.

engage. Here is Neil Hertz, in an otherwise exemplary article, having a try at establishing the authoritative originality of the Origin: The darkness of the paint combines with the pull of erotic fascination to draw the eye of that central patch, but this centripetal movement is impeded, if not entirely checked, by the substantiality of the figure's thighs and torso, by details like the almost-uncovered breast . . . and by what I take to be (judging from black-and-white reproductions) Courbet's characteristic care in representing the surfaces of his model's body-the care, at once painterly and mimetic, that can be observed in his rendering of the rocks surrounding the cave of the Loue. The Originof the World... explores a powerfully invested set of differences - the difference between paint and flesh, between a male artist and his female model, between sexual desire and the will to representation.15 15.

Hertz, p. 69.

86

OCTOBER

Surely, the last two sets of differences fail to distinguish Courbet's Origin from any other representation of the female nude, in whole or in part; and in the absence of the original, the first set of differences is unsubstantiated by the visual evidence. This passage simply indicates the degree to which eyes have been strained and discourse put under pressure in the vain attempt to find traces of the patriarchal caca, the spore of genius, in an unprepossessing black and white, infinitely repeatable, reproduction. But it is this infinite repeatability, ironically enough, which characterizes the very subjectof Courbet's Origin: a metonymy, which, in Lacanian terms, poses the question of lack and desire. Desire itself, according to Lacan, is a metonymy, for metonymy expresses itself as "eternally stretching forth towards desire for something else."16 Courbet's Originof the World, then, finally reenacts the infinite repetitiveness of desire, the impossible quest for the lost original. Or, to return to our original Freudian scenario, one might say that in the case of Courbet's Originof the World, as in that of the founding myth of Oedipus, the search for lost origins leads ultimately to blindness.

16. Jacques Lacan, "The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious," in F. and R. DeGeorge, The Structuralists:From Marx to Levi-Strauss, Garden City, N.Y., 1972, p. 313; see also Holly Wallace Boucher, "Metonymy in Typology and Allegory, with a consideration of Dante's Comedy,"in M. M. Bloomfield, ed., Allegory, Myth and Symbol, Harvard English Studies, no. 9, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981, p. 141.

Antiquity Now: Reading Winckelmann on Imitation

MICHAEL FRIED

In an essay that has long been recognized as perhaps the founding statement of international neoclassicism as well as one of the key early instances of modern thinking about the arts, Johann Winckelmann's Reflectionson the Imitation of the Painting and Sculptureof the Ancient Greeks(1755),' a desire not only to locate but actually to renew a lost origin is everywhere in play. But throughout that essay- Winckelmann's first published work--originality and repetition turn out to be implicated in one another in ways that threaten to derail, and in fact significantly reroute, the ostensible argument on which the successful realization of the desire for renewal is held to depend. Obviously no interpretation of the whole of the Reflectionsis feasible in the short space available here, but by making just a few points in some detail I hope at least to demonstrate both the complexity and the interest of a text that, in a certain sense, we may only now be learning how to read. My first point concerns the contrast Winckelmann repeatedly draws between the greatness of the ancient Greek artists and the inferiority of the moderns. More precisely, it concerns his attempt partly to account for that contrast by pursuing the implications of what he takes to be the historical truth that the ancient Greeks actually possessed an all but unimaginable degree of bodily beauty. "The most beautiful body among us [among the moderns]," he writes, "would perhaps be as much inferior to the most beautiful Greek body, as 1. References to the Reflections will be first to the English translation by Henry Fuseli, republished with minor cuts and alterations in David Irwin, ed., Winckelmann. Writings on Art, London, 1972, pp. 61-85; and second to a widely available edition of the German original, Gedanken iber die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, Stuttgart, Philipp Reclam, 1969. Fuseli's translation, now over two centuries old, takes liberties with the text while introducing headings absent in the original; adjustments in his English have therefore been made where it has seemed desirable (my thanks to Peter Starr for his assistance in this). I have kept footnotes to a minimum, for the most part designating only those passages in the Reflectionsactually quoted. A version of this essay was given as a paper at a symposium on art criticism and theory held jointly at the Johns Hopkins University by the Department of the History of Art and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in the spring of 1982.

88

OCTOBER

Iphicles was to his brother Hercules" (p. 62, p. 5). Nor is this vast difference purely an aesthetic one, as the term is usually understood. Throughout the Reflections, aesthetics, considerations of beauty, implies ontology, considerations of being: which is to say that the difference Winckelmann posits between the beautiful bodies of the ancients and the much inferior bodies of the moderns involves a contrast between a certain fullness of presence, as expressed by the noble, unifying contour that functions throughout the essay as a principal signifier of Greekness, and a weaker, more attenuated, either meager or flabby mode of presence associated with modernity. This immeasurable superiority is said to have come through a combination of natural and cultural factors; but more important than the factors themselves is the consequence that Greek artists had available to them living models of supreme physical perfection. Indeed the same institutions that promoted the development of bodily beauty gave the artist extraordinary opportunities for studying it as closely as could be desired. For example, philosophers and artists alike frequented gymnasia, where the young men of Greece exercised naked; the most beautiful youths danced unclothed in the theater; and numerous festivals provided the artist with the opportunity to familiarize himself with naked human beauty, to the inestimable advantage of his art. Here, however, Winckelmann's argument takes an unexpected turn. Surrounded by the most physically perfect human beings in all history, in circumstances that made possible intimate familiarity with their perfection, the Greek wasn't satisfied simply to represent the latter in his art. Instead the great, exemplary, originary achievement of the ancient Greeks turns out to have been grounded in a recognition of the need to go beyondnatural beauty in the direction of the ideal: These frequent opportunities to observe nature obliged the Greek artists to go a step further: they began to form certain general concepts of beauties more elevated than those of nature herself, concepts pertaining to single parts of the body as well as to the proportions of the whole frame. Their ideal was an immediately intuitable spiritual nature [eine bloss im Verstande entworfene geistige Natur] (p. 65, p. 10). What must be emphasized is that the contrast with the moderns in this regard is so complete as to threaten to undermine the distinction it is meant to explain. Whereas the moderns by and large have been content to depict faithfully (i.e., realistically) a nature that, in comparison with that of the ancients, must be considered radically degenerate, the ancients were led by their experience of a vastly superior nature to recognize the necessity of having in mind a still more beautiful and perfect nature in order to realize the highest aims attainable by art. This is tantamount to saying that the cultural primacy of the ancient Greeks, their very status as originals, had its origin in an ex-

Antiquity Now

89

perience of lack- in an intuition that even the most perfect nature, such as they had before their eyes, was in essential respects insufficient.2 But of course it is exactly in terms of lack and insufficiency - of less than full presence - that the world of modernity, of modern bodies, is characterized throughout the Reflections. And this means that the passages in question go a long way toward effacing the absoluteness of the distinction between the respective worlds of the ancients and the moderns that Winckelmann's text continually asserts. At the same time, and this too is crucial, such a gesture of effacement by no means eliminates or even reduces a certain distance between ancients and moderns; if anything it exacerbates it by making their utterly disparate responses to circumstances that are perhaps only quantitatively different appear all the more inexplicable and in a sense unmotivated. The second point I want to pursue concerns what everyone would agree is the central proposition of the Reflections:the claim, as Winckelmann puts it, that "the only way for us [for moderns] to become great and even, if possible, inimitable, is through the imitation of the ancients [by imitating the ancients]" (p. 61, p. 4). This statement has always been felt to be paradoxical. For one thing, whereas Winckelmann's essay begins by extolling the originality of the ancient Greeks, the statement just quoted appears to hold out the promise that the immeasurable distance between them and us can be bridged or even eliminated precisely by our giving up all aspiration to originality as that notion is usually construed and by seeking instead to imitate them. For another, the suggestion that by these means we moderns can aspire to become, if not original, at any rate inimitable, is immediately rendered problematic by the characterization as such first of Homer and then of the Laoco6ngroup: if they are in fact inimitable, what hope have we of successfully imitating them so as to become inimitable too? A traditional response to these difficulties has been to try to clarify Winckelmann's use of the concept of imitation. Toward that end commentators have explored the sources of the concept in the writings of earlier theorists such as Lomazzo and Bellori and have closely distinguished the various meanings given by Winckelmann not only to the concept of imitation but also to several others, most importantly Verstand,"understanding," with which it is associated in the Reflectionsand later writings. In both cases commentators have understood by imitation chiefly the process of representation by which the Greek artist brought his images into being, an emphasis that has led them to attach great importance to the distinction in a famous passage in the Reflectionsbetween im2. An experience of lack is implied by the most memorable of all images of the Greek body in the Reflections.In the gymnasia, Winckelmann writes, "one learned the movements of muscles and the body's contours; one studied the outlines of the body, orits contour as shownbytheimpression theyoungwrestlerleavesin thesand"(p. 64, p. 8, italics added). The contour thus revealed is the record of an absence, a negative configuration like that of the interior of a mold.

90

OCTOBER

itation and copying, the latter signifying merely the realistic portrayal of a single object (a practice Winckelmann deplores), and the former signifying the ancient Greek method by which general ideas of beauty led ultimately to the realization of the ideal (the practice Winckelmann advocates) (p. 67, p. 13). Now I don't wish to deny that the distinction between imitation and copying is important to Winckelmann, though it should be stressed that his use of those terms isn't perfectly consistent, and indeed that the distinction is transfigured almost beyond recognition in a portion of the Reflectionsto be discussed shortly. What I hope is clear, however, is that by treating imitation solely as a mode of representation, Winckelmann's commentators have failed to come to grips with the difficulties inherent in his call for an act of cultural reorigination which, by his own account, appears not only doomed to failure but unable to get started. Another approach to the problem is therefore in order. Winckelmann's central proposition expresses a relation between two terms, the ancients and the moderns, that in principle are presented as exhausting the historical field. But the reader of the Reflectionscontinually encounters a third term, located chronologically (and geographically) betweenthe ancients and ourselves, and in crucial respects it is the most important of all. That third term comprises the great classicizing Italian artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centurieschiefly Raphael and Michelangelo, with Poussin counting as an Italian by adoption -and my suggestion is that it plays a decisive role in the economy of Winckelmann's text precisely by virtue of its intermediate position. Not that the artists of the third term are ever explicitly designated as such. Rather, Raphael, Michelangelo, Poussin, et al. are repeatedly categorized as moderns and are described as having found themselves in a situation more or less identical to our own. But in contrast to other moderns-to moderns generallythey are seen as having responded to that situation in ways that make them fully as exemplary as the ancients themselves, whose representatives, even whose surrogates, they often seem to be. This double function-mediatory, substitutive, supplementary3 -becomes evident early in the Reflections. Immediately following Winckelmann's explanation of how the Greek artist was led to go beyond nature in the direction of the ideal, he writes: "Thus Raphael formed his Galatea, as we learn from his letter to Count Baldassare Castiglione: 'Beauty being so seldom found among women,' he writes, 'I avail myself of a certain idea in my imagination'" (p. 65, p. 10). Two points especially should be noted. First, Winckelmann, seeking an example to exemplify ideality as he conceives it, turns not to a work of ancient art but to Raphael's Galatea, a fresco painted in Rome in 1513. This 3. My argument here as throughout this essay is deeply indebted toJacques Derrida's notions of supplementarity and differance.See, for example, his reading of Rousseau in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, pp. 141-316.

Raphael. Galatea. 1513. Palazzo della Farnesina, Rome.

92

OCTOBER

is surprising, not because it makes no sense to see the Galateain that light, but because the specific context in which it is adduced would seem to demand an instance from ancient art. The pattern established here, one foreshadowed by the mention of Correggio in the essay's second paragraph, holds good throughout.4 Second, although Raphael is cited to exemplify an approach to art associated with the ancients, the state of affairs alluded to in his letter-the extreme scarcity of beautiful human beings - differs fundamentally from the situation with regard to bodily beauty that, according to what has gone before, prevailed in ancient Greece. One major strategy at work in the Reflectionsmay thus be summarized by saying that Raphael, Michelangelo, Poussin, et al. are repeatedly portrayed, in a contradictory or at least a double gesture, as at once ancients and moderns, originary and belated, southern and northern (southern relative to Stockholm, Dresden, and Paris, northern relative to Greece), originals worthy of imitation and successful imitators of antecedent originals. Such a gesture may be felt once again to threaten the distinction between ancients and moderns, and in a sense it does, but I think it would be truer to the peculiar logic of the argument we have been tracing to say that the terms of the distinction are not so much conflated as put in circulation in certain precisely regulated ways. In any case, the distinction between ancients and moderns remains fundamental to understanding the privileged status of the artists of the third term, who are held to be exemplary for us primarily because, having lived as we live, as moderns diminished must, in a world of scattered, diffuse, inferior beauties-of to a the nevertheless conclusion Winckelpursued triumphant presence-they mannian project of imitating the ancient Greeks and so made themselves inimitable, hence deserving of imitation, in their own right. This suggests that a way of resolving the difficulties inherent in the central proposition might be to read it as meaning that we are to imitate not the ancient Greeks but their representatives, Raphael and company, whose modernity we share and whose feat of imitation of the Greeks is tantamount to a second, temporally and geographically more proximate, and therefore presumably more accessible, invention of taste. But of course that suggestion overlooks a critical disparity between their situation and ours, namely that Raphael and the other artists of the third term lacked those prior and, by this account, enabling ex4. In that paragraph Winckelmann cites, as evidence that Greek taste seldom went abroad without loss, the fact that paintings by Correggio "served only for blinds to the windows of the royal stables at Stockholm" (p. 61, p. 3). Further on in the Reflections, in proof of the claim that "the last and most eminent characteristic of Greek sculpture is a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur in attitude and expression," Winckelmann begins by citing the Laocobn, but once again the artist who turns out chiefly to exemplify the qualities he most admires is not an ancient Greek at all but Raphael (pp. 72-75, pp. 20-25). Specifically, he praises certain figures in the Repulse of Attila in the Stanza d'Eliodoro (1513) and, more rapturously and at greater length, the Sistine Madonna (1513), which he would have seen in Dresden in 1754.

Antiquity Now

93

amples of successful imitation of the ancients that they represent to us. More than anything else, that lack establishes their distance from our modernitya distance perhaps more daunting, because less comprehensible, than the one separating us from the ancients. By following what appears to be Winckelmann's lead and taking the artists of the third term as surrogate ancients, the conceptual difficulty of the central proposition is not so much resolved as displaced: the original difference between the ancients and the moderns gives way to an at least equally unfathomable one within modernity itself.5 My third and last point focuses upon a section of the Reflections(misleadingly headed "Workmanship in Sculpture" in Fuseli's translation) that has received little attention, no doubt because its ostensible concerns appear remote from the major issues of Winckelmann's thought (pp. 76-80, pp. 25-32). The section begins by asserting still another contrast between the ancients and the moderns. Whereas the Greeks, we are told, made their models' (ihre erstenModelle, "their first models") in wax, the moderns tend to prefer clay or some other comparably malleable material as being fitter for representing flesh. (This is the first mention of models in the essay and seems to come from nowhere.) Winckelmann grants that clay would probably be better suited than any other substance for shaping figures could it preserve its moistness; but in fact it loses moistness when dried and fired and this in turn means that it loses physical bulk (there are other problems with it as well). Wax simply avoids these difficulties: it loses nothing of its bulk (never having been moist, it doesn't have to dry), and Winckelmann adds that there are means by which wax can be given the smoothness of flesh, i.e., by shaping a prior model in clay, forming a plaster mold around it, and then casting a second model-the original "first"model-in wax. (At this point the whole business of making a sculpture seems to have gone into reverse.) The vital task then becomes one of transferringthe model from wax to marble, that is, of exactly reproducing the form of the wax model in the more durable material. Here too, Winckelmann claims, the Greeks appear to have possessed advantages that have since been lost: in all their works, he writes, one sees the traces of a sure and confident hand, guided by rules more determinate and less arbitrary than we can boast of.

5. For Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Winckelmann's central proposition amounts to a "gigantic historical double bind [the last phrase is in English]; and as a consequence bears the threat of psychosis" ("Holderlin et les Grecs," Poitique, no. 40 [1979], p. 465). In that article LacoueLabarthe contrasts what he takes to be Winckelmann's views in this regard with those of Schiller and, especially, Holderlin, for both of whom, as he shows, the ostensibly antithetical terms of ancients and moderns turn out to be divided, riven by difference, from within. One implication of my reading of Winckelmann's treatment of the artists of the third term is that the Reflections'account of the relationship between the ancients and moderns is much closer to Schiller and indeed to Holderlin than Lacoue-Labarthe believes. My thanks to Werner Hamacher for bringing Lacoue-Labarthe's article to my attention.

94

OCTOBER

Winckelmann proceeds to discuss modern techniques for accomplishing the transfer, all of which involve some variant of overlaying a gridwork of horizontal and vertical lines on both the model and the marble block and then attempting to reproduce exactly the contents of each square (or "cube") of the model in the corresponding sector of the block. But, he says, this way of attacking the problem has serious drawbacks, and in general modern artists lack the means to carry over into the finished marble sculpture the precision of contour and proportions attainable in the model. He then goes on to propose a method for doing this, but before examining his proposal I want briefly to consider some implications of the pages I have just summarized. I remarked earlier that the strongly hierarchized distinction between imitation and copying has always been considered basic to the argument of the Reflections. What becomes apparent, however, if we are to take seriously the pages in question is that the conceptually elusive enterprise that Winckelmann calls imitation specifically involves a "moment" of copying, namely the operation by which the model in wax or plaster is brought over into marble and so made permanent. Indeed there is an important sense in which that "moment" of copying emerges as decisive for, if not constitutive of, the very enterprise of imitation: both because Winckelmann's remarks contain at least the hint that even modern artists might be capable of making a satisfactory first model, and because in the absence of any means for transferring such a model to marble the larger enterprise of which the copying stage is ostensibly merely a part is inevitably doomed to failure. It may seem that the distinction between imitation and copying is thereby undone, just as a while back it may have seemed that the distinction between ancients and moderns was collapsed both by the discovery of lack in Greek nature and by the role accorded to the artists of the third term, but here as in the earlier cases it would be truer to say that the terms of the distinction are displaced in ways that recast and, in effect, transform Winckelmann's argument without, on the one hand, utterly disrupting it or, on the other, resolving the conceptual difficulties that have drawn our attention. Thus it is his continued investment in the to him fundamental oppositions between the ancients and moderns and between imitation and copying that motivates the unacknowledged and finally unspecifiable distinction between modesof copying on which, according to this reading, virtually the entire project of the Reflectionsturns out to depend. In closing I want briefly to outline Winckelmann's solution to the problem of transferring the model to marble, a solution that involves the use of a simple but ingenious apparatus the invention of which he attributes to a great artist of the past. Not surprisingly, the alleged inventor is not an ancient Greek but rather an artist of the third term: Michelangelo.6 6. Actually Winckelmann suggests that Michelangelo followed by the ancient Greeks (p. 78, p. 29).

may have reinvented the method

Antiquity Now

95

Based on a few sentences in Vasari, Winckelmann imagines that Michelangelo immersed his model in a large container filled with water and crisscrossed on the interior walls with a network of guidelines matching those marked on the marble block.7 (We touch here on another reason why wax is preferable to plaster.) By drawing off some of the water, Winckelmann goes on to say, Michelangelo exposed to view the topmost portion of the model, which - with the aid of the guidelines - he proceeded to copy in marble. More water was then drawn off so as to expose more of the model, and this lower portion too was reproduced in marble. The operation was repeated until all the water was gone, the entire model stood revealed, and a corresponding figure had been carved from the marble block. To quote Winckelmann: His work [i.e., the figure carved from the block with the help of this method] had now got the first form, and a correct one: the levelness of the water had drawn a line, of which every prominence of the mass was a point; according to the diminution of the water the line sank in a horizontal direction, and was followed by the artist until he discovered the declinations of the prominence, and their mingling with the lower parts. Proceeding thus with every degree, as it appeared, he finished the contour and took his model out of the water (p. 79, pp. 30-31). But Michelangelo's task was not yet done. Winckelmann continues: [Michelangelo's] figure wanted beauty: he again poured water to a proper height over his model, and then numbering the degrees to the line described by the water, he noted the exact height of the protuberant parts; on these he levelled his rule, and took the measure of the distance, from its verge to the bottom; and then comparing all he had done with his marble, and finding the same number of degrees, he was geometrically sure of success.

7. Vasari writes that Cosimo di Medici owns "a statue of Victory over a prisoner, five braccia high, and four prisoners sketched, illustrating a safe method of making marble figures without spoiling the blocks. The method is this. One takes a figure of wax or other firm material and immerses it in a vessel of water; the figure is then gradually raised, displaying first the uppermost parts, the rest being hidden, and as it rises more and more the whole comes into view. This is the way to carve figures, and it was observed by Michelangelo in his prisoners, which the duke keeps to serve as a model for his academicians" (Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of thePainters, Sculptors,andArchitects, ed. William Gaunt, 4 vols., 1927; reprint: London and New York, Everyman's Library, 1963, vol. 4, p. 172). What Winckelmann doesn't mention, however, is that the figures of prisoners are notoriously rough-hewn (they are major instances of Michelangelesque nonfinito), a point that might have raised as a question the extent to which Michelangelo's device was suited to producing truly finished works. For the original text see Giorgio Vasari, La Vita de Michelangelo nelle redazionidel 1550 e del 1568, ed. Paola Barocchi, 5 vols., Milan and Naples, Riccardo Ricciardi, 1962, vol. 1, p. 119.

96

OCTOBER

Repeating his task, he attempted to express the motion and reaction of nerves and muscles, the soft undulations of the smaller parts, and every artistic nuance of his model. The water insinuating itself, even into the most inaccessible parts, traced their contour with the correctest sharpness and precision. This method admits of every possible posture. In profile especially, it discovers every inadvertency; shows the contour of the prominent and lower parts, and the whole diameter [cross section] (pp. 79-80, p. 31). This is a remarkable passage on several counts, but I will make just one final observation. It has always been taken as self-evident that, in the Reflections,Winckelmann advocates an art of stillness, perfection, finality: his preoccupation with beauty and its laws, his concern with contour as a means of determining form, and his advocacy of the expressive qualities of noble simplicity and quiet grandeur all appear to have the same unequivocal aim in view. And yet it is at least equally evident that his imaginary reconstruction of Michelangelo's method for transferring the model to marble implicitly but powerfully valorizes process over product: specifically, Winckelmann's altogether unexpected emphasis not simply on the circumscribing and reproducing of innumerable contours but also on the repetition (at least twice and perhaps more) of the entire operation from start to finish has the effect of deferring as if indefinitely any final result, or, say, of displacing the reader's attention away from that result to the various stages of the operation itself.8 In a broader perspective, Winckelmann's attempt in the Reflectionsto theorize the recovery of a lost origin of art issues here in an apparatus and a scenario that appear designed to gratify a

8.

The distance between operation and result becomes all the greater when it is recognized

that the contours circumscribedby Winckelmann'sversion of Michelangelo'sdevice are anything but standard views. By this I mean that being in effect cross sections through (i.e., around) the original model, they have little or no representational significance on their own, though presumably this doesn't prevent them from being experienced both as beautiful and as evoking fullness of presence (Winckelmann is not explicit on this point). Indeed there is an obvious sense in which such contours are unavailable to vision unless they are made available by these means, which is to say that Michelangelo's device confers visibility on aspects of the model that cannot otherwise be seen, not because they are invisible exactly, but because seeing the model as a "whole,"as one does under ordinary circumstances, in effect conceals them from view. The pages in question thus tacitly engage an entire problematicof visibility and its opposite that undergoes a rich development in Winckelmann'slater writings. See Barbara Stafford, "Beautyof the Invisible: Winckelmann and the Aesthetics of Imperceptibility,"Zeitschrift no. 43 fur Kunstgeschichte, (1980), pp. 65-78. Another implication of the valorization of process over product that surfaces in the account of Michelangelo's device is that the Reflectionsare thereby brought much closer to the processoriented and closure-resistant novels of Winckelmann's contemporaries Richardson, Sterne, and Diderot than its ostensible ideals would seem to allow.

Antiquity Now

97

desire for repetition so acute, absorbing, and physically immediate as to make the perfected sculpture in marble equivalent to a kind of death.9

9. Cf. Nathaniel Hawthorne's reference to "[the sculptor] Thorvaldsen's threefold analogythe clay model, the Life; the plaster cast [of the model, a stage elided by Winckelmann], the Death; and the sculptured marble, the Resurrection"(The MarbleFaun, New York, Signet, 1961, p. 273). Like Winckelmann, though for different reasons, Hawthorne is troubled by the need to transferthe original model to marble, and more generally by what he seems to regard as the sheer discontinuousness of the overall project of sculptural creation. Here is his account earlier in the novel of the sculptor Kenyon's studio in Rome: The studio of a sculptor is generally but a rough and dreary-looking place, with a good deal the aspect, indeed, of a stonemason's workshop. Bare floors of brick or plank, and plastered walls; an old chair or two, or perhaps only a block of marble (containing, however, the possibility of ideal grace within it) to sit down upon; some hastily scrawled sketchesof nude figures on the whitewash of the wall. These last are probably the sculptor'searliest glimpses of ideas that may hereafterbe solidifiedinto imperishable stone, or perhaps may remain as impalpable as a dream. Next there are a few very roughly modeled little figures in clay or plaster, exhibiting the second stage of the idea as it advances towards a marble immortality; and then is seen the exquisitely designed shape of clay, more interesting than even the final marble, as being the intimate production of the sculptor himself, molded throughout with his loving hands, and nearest to his imagination and heart. In the plaster cast from this clay model, the beauty of the statue strangely disappears, to shine forth again with pure white radiance in the precious marble of Carrara. Works in all these stages of advancement, and some with the final touch upon them, might be found in Kenyon's studio. Here might be witnessed the process of actually chiseling the marble, with which (as it is not quite satisfactoryto think) a sculptor in these days has very little to do. In Italy, there is a class of men whose merely mechanical skill is perhaps more exquisite than was possessed by the ancient artificerswho wrought out the designs of Praxiteles; or, very likely, by Praxiteles himself. Whatever of illusive representation can be effected in marble, they are capable of achieving, if the object be before their eyes. The sculptor has but to present these men with a plaster cast of his design, and a sufficient block of marble, and tell them that the figure is imbedded in the stone, and must be freed from its encumbering superfluities;and, in due time, without the necessity of his touching the work with his own finger, he will see before him the statue that is to make him renowned. His creative power has wrought it with a word (p. 89). manifest valorization of imitaReading back to Winckelmann, it is as though the Reflections' tion over copying finds itself called into question not only by the structuralinstability of an entire system of oppositions but also by the peculiar nature of the sculptural enterprise, in which the most deeply satisfying stage, that of the model, represents no terminus.

In Praise of Appearance

The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, by Svetlana Alpers, Chicago, The Universityof ChicagoPress, 1983.

LOUIS

MARIN

translated by RICHARD

MILLER

Svetlana Alpers has written a noteworthy- and much noticed- book on Dutch art in the seventeenth century. That, however, is only its subtitle. In calling her book The Art of Describing, the art historian has set for herself a far vaster and loftier ambition: to propose to contemporary art history a new theoretical and methodological model for the study of the visual arts. This model is proposed at a propitious moment for investigations in that field, and, more broadly, in the fields of history and the social sciences, as the book's international success has demonstrated. Thus its value goes far beyond seventeenth-century Dutch art, and yet, notwithstanding, the subtitle of The Art of Describingis still Dutch Art in the SeventeenthCentury:many of the questions and problems raised by the book stem from the relationship between its title and also a subtitle. A new theoretical and methodological model, indeed-but model whose artistic prototype is a historically and socially specific art; a model whose basic cognitive elements are fed by the theories, bodies of knowledge, and scientific practices contemporary with that art; a model, finally, that requires a study of that art -after two or three centuries, after Michelangelo, Reynolds, Fromentin, Claudel, to cite only those four names-for a yielding up of its historical truth, its expressive authenticity, and its aesthetic quality. Thus the aim, the goal, of Alpers's undertaking is to articulate the epistemological nature of the theoretical principles, methodological postulates, and analytic procedures that surround the historical and cultural particularity of a specific subject. The stimulating and provocative force of her work, however, also raises problems for art history and the social sciences, which is another aspect of the work's heuristic fecundity.

With superb clarity of both thought and style, Alpers draws, starting with her introduction, the broad outlines and qualities of her model, all of which share the remarkable structural characteristic of being capable of defining themselves by opposition, differentially. Yet those differential outlines are not

Jan Vermeer.The Art of Painting. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

100

OCTOBER

abstractly deduced,inferred (as in some structuralist undertakings) from some basic structure of signification; rather, they are discovered in history. Of course, a cursory reading of the book might give the impression that Alpers is attempting to give new credence to the old opposition between North and South, Holland and Italy. Yet such is not the case: in pursuing her structural labor simultaneously on the front of modern art history in Europe and of a history of that history in the same period, of the theory of that history and the history of its theory, Alpers is attempting to demonstrate that, if seventeenthcentury Dutch art can furnish a new working model, it can do so only through oppositionto Italian Renaissance art, to the precise extent that the latter has since the Renaissance provided artists, theoreticians, and art historians with an over-all and durable paradigm of the image of painting and its interpretation: To a remarkable extent, the study of art and its history has been determined by the art of Italy and its study. . . . Italian art and the rhetorical evocation of it has not only defined the practice of the central tradition of Western artists, it has also determined the study of these works. . . . Since the institutionalization of art history as an academic discipline, the major analytic strategies by which we have been taught to look at art or to interpret images . . . were developed in reference to the Italian tradition (pp. xix-xx). It is at just this point and in this investigation of contrasts and oppositions that Alpers comes up against a formidable problem-one she meets boldly. To define Dutch art as non-Italian, the image of Dutch painting as nonclassical, non-Renaissance, the Dutch landscape, still life, or portrait as non-Albertian, is still to refer to the Italian model, to its categorizations and to the interpretative language used in works written for that purpose. The differences between Dutch and Italian art are, of course, one of the guiding themes of the book, and yet what we read is in no way a book of comparisons - a comparative work; the body of differences is not its object,but only its theoretical and methodological condition,one that, by going beyond seventeenth-century Dutch art, reveals its epistemological validity for the analysis of all "non-Albertian" images, whether by Manet, Caravaggio, Velasquez, or Vermeer. Here we seem to be dealing with a variant of the methodological sphere once mentioned by Edgar Wind. It is obvious, of course, that the apparatus and methodological tools of the analysis have been created for seventeenth-century Dutch art as it is differentfrom classical, Italian Renaissance art, but it is no less obvious that that apparatus and those tools can be effective and operative throughout the field opened up and delimited by that difference. Yet how are we to endow that field and its objects, defined as nonclassical, non-Renaissance by negative reference to the Italian model, with the contents, in otherwordsthe notions and concepts, with categories and analytical schemata

In Praise of Appearance

101

that are independent of that reference and, as a result, operative outside the Dutch field and beyond the seventeenth century? Alpers is careful to clarify what she understands by "the notion of art in the Italian Renaissance." First, there is Alberti's definition of a picture as "a framed surface or plane situated at a certain distance from a viewer who looks through it at a second or a substitute world" (p. xix). Next, there is the definition of that world viewed through the paint of the picture as a theater stage on which human figures perform meaningful acts, "significant actions based on the texts of the poets" (ibid. ). Classical, Italian Renaissance art is an art of narrative in images. The anecdote constitutes the highest goal of painting to the degree that its pictorial narration relies both upon a knowledge of the texts in which it is recounted and upon a knowledge of the perceptible, corporeal, external signs by which the human actors display the inner passions that animate their deeds. We understand that those two kinds of definition do not concern a particular type of fifteenth-century Italian painting: rather, they construct a model in which seventeenth-century Dutch art has no part. Thus, the model Alpers has elaborated from the latter, whose prime characteristic is to be nonnarrative,that is, descriptive,and whose second characteristic is that the pictures are nonwindows (in the Albertian sense), that is to say, surfaces.Here too, description and surface do not concern a particular type of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Here too, we have a theoretical tool that articulateswhat Alpers sees as one of the two fundamental modes of pictorial representation. Her work should be examined, therefore, in the light of those two characteristics.

As a matter of fact, surface and description are not independent and discrete dimensions of the model constructed. Theoretically, they overlap: the author often speaks of the surface of description (or inscription) in characterizing the Dutch image of painting, just as she might, had such been her purpose, have evoked the phenomenal (or "superficial") descriptions that fairly well describe certain texts by Kepler or Huygens or even Bacon that are quoted in the book. One of them, however, surface, more directly concerns the image, for it includes the iconic aspect of the model; the other, description, is more precisely suited to language and its discursive aspect. We are led to wonder how that visualizing model for seventeenth-century Dutch art was elaborated in order to explain that specific mode of representation. It would seem that the author has arrived at the concept of the picture as surface and of the corresponding descriptive discourse through a twofold operation: first, she discerns a theoretical, critical, and historical discourse that has been more or less sublimated in art history since that discipline's institutionalization in academia; she then defines the particular historical "position" of seventeenth-century Dutch art in the precise sense in which that art is situated in a well-determined

102

OCTOBER

epistemological, scientific, cultural, social, and political context, which Alpers studies with vast erudition, essentially to extract from it the defining traits of its own model. In order to shed light on the author's determined will to "demote" a particular institutionalized art-historical discourse whose categories and even procedures were established by the Italian Renaissance and the discourse to which it has been subjected, we must read the pages she devoted to Alois Riegl in an earlier text, which contains a simultaneous assault on the Wolfflinian theory of style and on Panofskyan iconography: "Like structuralists today"-the piece was written in 1977--"Riegl turned to phenomena to which he stands by their nature, but also by his distance, in a non-participatory relationship. He chose in other words a position from which to see all the better the essentialstructure without an interpretative bias," and it was in that way-by studying the antique materials of the Middle East, the work of late antiquity, portraits of the Dutch school, or post-Renaissance Italian art -that Riegl "specifically avoided . . . the often unacknowledged normative center of art-historical studies -the art of the Italian Renaissance." According to Alpers, Riegl's structural analysis hews closely to the nature of the object being studied, but principally because that object places the observer at a distance and in so doing reveals the complicities and connivings, all the more pregnant in being less perceptible, that institutional art history shares with its favored field of study and with the objects it interprets through it, its "normative" and prescriptive center constituted as it is by the art of the Italian Renaissance, its history, and its theory. The distancing of the observer by the object of his observation is, in Riegl, accompanied by another trait that is of importance to Alpers as well, the fact that Riegl "sees the production of art as dependent on a particular maker or community of makers. The drive or the necessity of making is a matter of the psychological relationship established between man and his world. Art is in short -though the term is mine," Alpers writes, "and not Riegl's -a mediation between the maker and the world." And by this route we come to one of the strategies developed in The Art of Describing. "How . . . are we to look at Dutch Art?" the author wonders. "My answer has been to view it circumstantially... By appealing to circumstances, I mean not only to see art as a social manifestation but also to gain access to images through a consideration of their place, role, and presence in the broader culture" (p. xxiv). Here again, Alpers is obedient to what seems to me the essence of a structural progress in history: from that angle, the work of art is not first analyzed solely as a mirror of the historical and social reality of which it is supposed to be the exact and painstaking description, nor as the expression of ideals - even ideologies - prevalent at 1. Svetlana Alpers, "Style Is What You Make It: The Visual Arts Once Again," in Berel Lang, ed., The Conceptof Style, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979, p. 98.

In Praise of Appearance

103

the time in that society, nor even as the symptom of more-or-less concealed movements or tendencies that the work purports to bring to light. The pictures, the images, are taken in their historical and social functioning: why and how those images, precisely those images, at that period? To what intellectual, philosophical, religious needs, desires, are they responding? What is their place in the domain of scientific and technological knowledge? With Alpers, we shall henceforth read with new eyes, or we will reread Constantijn Huygens's Autobiography,Kepler's Paralipomenaor Dioptrics, or Bacon's Essays with other eyes.

The Art of Describing:that, then, is the major characteristic of seventeenthcentury Dutch art, of the Nordic tradition of which that art is a part, and, more generally, of a pictorial mode often, and too readily, described as realist, a model that is not restricted to Dutch art but that seems to take account of it better than any other category or notion and with greater precision through its opposition to or difference from Italian art, essentially, ideal-typically narrative as it is:

The stilled or arrested quality of these works [Caravaggio's Crucifixion of St. Peter, Velasquez's Water-seller,Vermeer's Woman with Scales, and Manet's Dejeunersur l'Herbe- and we note that only one of those works is Dutch] is a symptom of a certain tension between the narrative assumptions of the art and an attentiveness to descriptive presence. There seems to be an inverse proportion between attentive description and action: attention to the surface of the world described is achieved at the expense of the representation of narrative action (p. xxi). Saying that the picture is a nonwindow signifies, first, that it is a flat surface, a screen for inscription-description upon which is projected the world's "surface," where it represents, inscribes, or better, replicates itself. It is precisely on this point that the scientific and technological culture of seventeenth-century Holland provides Alpers with the device upon which her model can be, so to speak, "modelized"; the camera obscura, whose wonderful properties Huygens never tired of describing with awed admiration, "a device that allows light to pass through a hole (often fitted with a glass lens) into a box or darkened room to cast an image on a surface of the world beyond" (p. 12), a definition to which Alpers adds Huygens's remarkable text (originally written in French): I have in my home Drebbel's other instrument, which certainly produces admirable effects in reflection painting in a dark room. It is

104

OCTOBER

not possible to describe for you the beauty of it in words: all painting is dead in comparison, for here is life itself, or something more noble, if only it did not lack words. Figure, contour, and movement come together naturally therein, in a way that is altogether pleasing (p. 12). The camera obscura, for Huygens or Hoogstrat a paradigm of truly natural painting, was also for Kepler a paradigm of sight, and he defined vision as "a picture [pictura] of the thing seen being formed on the concave surface of the retina" (p. 34). We note that all those definitions imply a theory of sight as replication or duplication of the object. And when Kepler states that the psychological processes of sight do not interest him, Alpers draws from that remark the precise conclusion that the force of Kepler's "strategy" is to "de-anthropomorphize sight": the world is primal, projecting itself via light and colors into a "nonsentient eye." The model of sight, or of painting, is a passive model from which has been eliminated any constructor subject, that subject which, to adopt Kant's vocabulary, is the tireless operator of syntheses of the ever-changing aspect of sensate intuition upon the concepts of understanding and through the mediation of the imagination. As Kepler wrote, with superb irony: I leave it to natural philosophers to discuss the way in which this image or picture [the one inscribed on the surface of the retina] is put together by the spiritual principles of vision residing in the retina and in the nerves, and whether it is made to appear before the soul or tribunal of the faculty of vision by a spirit within the cerebral cavities, or by the faculty of vision, like a magistrate sent by the soul, goes out from the council chamber of the brain to meet the image in the optic nerves and retina, as it were descending, to a lower court (p. 36). All such metaphysical hypotheses come down to the same thing: none of them deals with the positive - i.e., positivist- definition of sight as a mechanical fabrication of the image, a mere passive fabrication of the image, a mere passive result of the instantaneous recording of light rays on the retinal surface. Whereas Huygens, in the description of the camera obscura he wrote out for the benefit of his wife, is awestruck by the device and by the image it produces, Kepler's eye is a nonsentient eye, and the glimmering world of appearances reproduces itself there through representations "in the dual sense of artifact and image (or painting)." Which clearly means that the "surface" of the world is identified in and through its image on the retinal "surface": Ut pictura, ita visio. Behind the model of the camera obscura, behind Kepler's machinelike eye, we can envisage the schematics of the photographic apparatus. The picture is a surface on which, as on a screen (the bottom of the camera obscura, the retina of the eye, the photographic plate), the visible world reproduces itself by pro-

In Praise of Appearance

105

jecting itself, "just as light focused through a lens forms a picture on the retina of the eye." As Alpers wrote in "The Viewing of Las Meninas," "In place of an artist who frames the world to picture it"-whence the importance of the frame and framing as a means of constructing the image painted by a subject, on the Italian model-"the world produces its own image without a necessary frame."2 Once again, the artist does not construct, compose, or create a world of paint on his canvas. The world offers itself to be seen "as if" in and by a nonregarding eye. If the surface is one of the features of the model Alpers is assembling, basing herself on the historical epistemological circumstances of seventeenthcentury Dutch painting, the model of that feature, in turn, is nothing but the image produced by the apparatus, an image that shares some of its fundamental characteristics with the "Nordic" mode of representation, those characteristics that give it all the power of the effect of reality: "fragmentariness; arbitrary frames; the immediacy that the first practitioners expressed by claiming that the photograph gave Nature the power to reproduce herself directly unaided by man" (p. 43). Further, Alpers notes that the conditions of production and manufacture of the photographic image, like those of Dutch painting, "place it in what I call the Keplerian mode" (in contrast to the Albertian mode) of representation (p. 44). By "conditions of production," therefore, we understand not so much the historical, social, and cultural determinants of fabrication as the theoretical, epistemological presuppositions of production, the basic category of which is not, in Pierce's sense, the icon or the symbol, but the index--in other words, the trace, the print, the mark of the thing itself. It is very much as if on the surface of the canvas the world, in all its own surface appearances, were aping itself, reduplicating itself, reproducing its exact replica on the fascinated and attentive eye of an onlooking witness, the artist. And the artist thus has no function or task other than to be, like Stendhal two centuries later in his novels, a mirror held up to the world. Thus Dutch painting in the golden era or in the reign of the liberated surface, obviously: but that surface is paradoxically both that of the world and that of the picture, identified in an almost magical conjuncture of which Huygens's awe before the image in the camera obscura is the sign. Consequently, in Alpers's work the camera obscura, the nonsentient eye, the photographic apparatus are at once models and metaphors. The models she extracts from the spatiotemporal, historical, and cultural circumstances of her subject and the presuppositions of a theory of visual perception and an empiricist-phenomenist - theory of knowledge. The metaphors evoke specific expressive and emotive qualities: the painted image is in a way more "real"than the object of which it is the image; the simulacrum, in the Platonic sense of the word, 2. Svetlana Alpers, "Interpretation without Representation, Representations,no. 1 (February 1983), p. 37.

or, The Viewing of Las Meninas,"

OCTOBER

106

possesses a higher degree of being than the paradigm it nonetheless reproduces; in its painted projection the visible world takes on a charm and a sorcery it had lacked. Again we turn to Constantijn Huygens's words describing the admirable effects of reflected painting in a camera obscura: "all painting is dead in comparison, for here is life itself, or something more noble, if only it did not lack words." Words fail the image just as they do Huygens when he tries to describe its beauty: "It is not possible to describe for you the beauty of it in words." Thus, the camera obscura is no longer the device constructed in Kepler's nonsentient eye. It is the creator of a spell, a natural magic--an image, and yet alive--the device whose effects of anamorphosis (not metamorphosis) Mersenne, Niceron, Maignan, on the "Italian," Albertian side, were investigating at the same period from the legitimate perspective of portrait representation or of religious and historical narrative. A return to the surface is therefore the watchword of the "new art history" that, thanks to Alpers's book, can find in seventeenth-century Dutch painting the historically, culturally, aesthetically, theoretically privileged subject with which to construct operative schemata: the surface as the ambivalent site, at once painting and semblant world, image and object, a space of indices, outlines, markings. Of course, we should understand that watchword in all its amplitude: is there not such a non-Albertian, nonnarrative, nonclassical, nonItalian plane to be considered in any painted image? We must remember that Poussin, for example, who appears in Alpers's book as representative of the "prospect," of theatrical, narrative, Italian "prospect" versus Dutch "aspect," the mere appearance of things -this is the same Poussin who, at the end of his life, in the same years as Alpers's Dutch painters, defined painting as "an imitation with lines and colors on a particular surface of everything to be seen under the sun," and the enjoyment of which represents the loftiest goal. We must therefore come back to that surface inscribed with lines and colors on which the whole labor of painting is exercised: beyond the iconographic level, even beyond the level Panofsky dubbed preiconographic, the painted surface defines a scientific "level," not deeper or more hidden; on the contrary, superficial, but overlooked. There we shall find the singular "conditions" of painted representation: "In what manner, under what conditions is the man represented in paint on the surface of a canvas?" Alpers asks in her article in Representations.3 The question of "secondary," conventional, iconographic meaning is replaced by the question not of meaning, but of the conditionsof possibility of the work in its singularity, the transcendental aesthetic question in the Kantian sense. To ask such a question and to begin to formulate an answer to it demands that the analyst-I do not say the interpreter-approach the picture very "almost too because he has been so far back, almost closely, closely," standing too far back; the analytical discourse cannot occur without that oscillation. 3.

Ibid., p. 35.

In Praise of Appearance

107

Then, with Alpers, he will discover that the Nordic, Flemish, or Dutch masters have in a way done his work for him: "Attention to the surface of the world described is achieved at the expense of the representation of narrative action," a formulation the author illustrates with a text by Panofsky: Jan van Eyck's eye operates as a microscope and as a telescope at the same time ... so that the beholder is compelled to oscillate between a position reasonably far from the picture and many positions very close to it. ... However, such perfection had to be bought at a price. Neither a microscope nor a telescope is a good instrument with which to observe human emotion . . . (p. xxi). And because the signs of human emotions are what enable a narrative to be recounted in images, Alpers is right to criticize here Panofsky's normative reference to Italian art. The oscillation, as described by Panofsky, could easily be illustrated, however, not only by Van Eyck, but, on the Italian side, by Leonardo's drawings which, by revealing the structural equivalence between a flower and a heavy rain, a lock of hair and the current in a river, capillary veins and a flood, in their isomorphism inscribe before the spectator's gaze the cognitive, theoretical, scientific and visionary, fictional and imaginative effects of the oscillation between too close and too far away. A fragment of Pascal written at approximately the same period might serve as an introduction to the question of description and the descriptive mode that, in contrast to the narrative mode, forms the other dimension of Alpers's model: "From far away, a city and a countryside is a city and a countryside. But as one draws nearer, it turns into houses, trees, tiled roofs, foliage, vegetation, ants, the ants' legs, and on to infinity. The whole thing can be enveloped in the word countryside"(Pascal, Pensees, 113-155). Under the same conditions posited by Pascal in his experiment, the movement of approaching (that of a "strolling" body, of a microscope) has the effect of effacing all the constructing data of Albertian representation: the fixed viewpoint, the framing of the scene within rigorous and immobile limits, the exact fixing of the eye on the transparent level of representation. The gaze turns the world into a "nature artifact" even before it is painted in lines and colors onto the canvas. The whole program of a will to representation, to a mastery and appropriation of nature, is articulated in the gesture of freezing contemplation into a point of view, in the gesture of limiting the "distraction" of the gaze within the framework of the visual window, in this secret calculation of an optimal view. Set in motion, the point of view displaces not only the visual site but the frame and distance as well; the subject being looked at, the distanced spectacle of the world, is dispersed before our very eyes. It is dissolved in the proliferation of singularities: the apparent fecundity of objects. "Nature diversifies and imitates," Pascal wrote in another of his enigmatic Pensees(953-120): a repetition not of sameness, but of difference.

108

OCTOBER

What nature imitates is the diversity, or rather the differentiation, that animates it. It ceaselessly repeats its prodigious difference, its power to produce singular things, but in so doing, in that very imitation, nature attains to reflection in and through the figure of the eye, which, as it draws near, distinguishes houses, trees, tiled roofs, and so on and on, abandoning "in the last analysis" its enumeration of nature's offerings by dubbing it with the descriptive word: infinity. And against that word is opposed, or rather superimposed, another: "The whole thing (i.e., houses, tiled roofs, foliage) can be enveloped in the A name, a term, fixes a term, a limit, that of linguistic convenword countryside." of infinite difference, a name that "covers" the infinite to the movement tion, and minuscule singularity of each object, the abyss of difference, without ever managing to eradicate it. That is the reverse of the peaceful and bourgeois Dutch certainties of the Great Century, the problem, or rather the aporia and the paradox, of the describing surface in its relationship to language and to discourse that a picture utters. As Alpers notes with considerable finesse, one remark is frequently made in critical and art-historical discourse with regard to Dutch painting, and that is that there is nothing to be said about such pictures: the picture shows exactly all that can be named; it brings all the names to its surface and its whole "substance" seems to consist in that showy and always nameable articulation of its surface or, more precisely, of the level of representation. The picture is thus a surface of description that is exactly coextensive with and perfectly transparent to the descriptive discourse that utters it and which it exhausts in a "smooth" tautology between image and language. "A city, a countryside (from a distance) is a city and a countryside. But as one draws nearer. .. ." Now, can we say--with Panofsky, looking at a picture of Van Eyck's maturity - that the "Nordic," "Dutch" picture forces us to draw closer the better to see it? "The beholder," Panofsky writes, "is compelled to oscillate between a position reasonably far from the picture"-a position distant from the subject that is not merely a gaze but a point of view, not only visual power but the ability to totalize, that not only creates the over-all scene by bringing objects together within the opening of its visual angle, but that also reduces those objects to the ordered unity of a synthesis whose geometrical, linear, and true perspective defines the operative conditions - "and many positions very close to it." Pascal, a writer, a man of language, condemned to the linearity of linguistic signifiers and their monotonous succession, was perfectly aware that Panofsky's manypositions, which he views as simultaneouslyveryclose to the picture, are, in fact, and for the discourse uttering them, successivelybroughtcloserand closer:the eye ceases to see a city and a countryside and sees houses and trees, tiled roofs and foliage and then grass, and on the blades of grass, ants. . . . The description of the picture's surface of description is a thread of language upon which is strung, like pearls on a necklace, an open-ended list of terms, an interminable thread-unless it is peremptorily broken off by naming the interminability:

In Praise of Appearance

109

infinity. Every description is aporetic, and thus the Panofskyan spectator keeps his distance, draws back, and speaks the picture's title, which is its exact description: "It's a city and a countryside." The strength (and perhaps the excess) of Pascal, or, in another "affective" tonality, of Leibnitz, is to query the iconic and discursive notion of description and, thence, the metaphysical notion of reality. Every description is aporetic because it envelops the infinity of realityunless it arreststhat flux of reality Pascal so powerfully describes in the fragment about the two infinities and of which Leonardo's studies of water currents could stand as emblems, the reality that the discourse and the image always lack (through excess), unless it can site the differential elements in linguistic conventions and iconic codes: There are plants on the ground; we see them.- We do not see the moon.-And there are hairy things among the plants, and inside those hairy things there are tiny animals. But then, nothing.--O presumptuous one! Mixtures are made up of elements, and the elements, no-O presumptuous one, look at that delicate line. One must not say something is that one does not see. - So one must speak as others do, but not think like them (Pascal, Pensees, 942, 266). To speak like others-"There is a city, a countryside"-but to think, in the difference between oneself and them, the infinite difference of reality, without ever being able to utter it or represent it. Thus, if observation is the methodological means of recapturing nature in all its purity and transparency-the eye of empirical induction, without prejudice or preconceptions, that confines itself to amassing the constituent givens of its knowledge -then we must perceive--and here, again, it was the great strength of Pascal the experimenter, the physician, the mathematician, to have perceived it -that the iconic and discursive description embodied in the act of recording can find its theoretical conditions of possibility, its epistemological legitimacy, its foundation, and, in its development, its cognitive stability, only by having recourse to the philosophical paradigm of conventionality: each thing has its name, each thing its appearance, each thing, in its nameand its appearance,is at once proper to itself. Precise knowledge thus consists in recapturing the world's "originating" iconic and linguistic lexicon, beyond the excess baggage of tradition, the built-up sediments of beliefs, and the unconscious rigidities of mentally fixed or incorporated habits of thought. But "as one draws near. .. ," doesn't that figurative and nominal lexicon begin to come apart? Just as Pascal's eye, "living" because in motion, draws closer and closer to the surface of the world to become lost in what it has precisely qualified, by outline and name, as "a city, a countryside," so the spectator's gaze, drawn by a picture by Vermeer, moves closer to the surface to the point of total myopia, and, whether it is the View of Delft or TheArt of Painting, it

110

OCTOBER

discovers on its surface, with Lawrence Gowing or Svetlana Alpers, the same strange, paradoxical failure through descriptive excess: Vermeer seems almost not to care, or not even to know, what it is that he is painting. What do men call this wedge of light? A nose? A finger? What do we know of its shape? To Vermeer none of this matters, the conceptual world of names and knowledge is forgotten, nothing concerns him but what is visible, the tone, the wedge of light (p. 37). With this quotation from Gowing, Alpers illustrates the Keplerian motion, to her specific, by means of which the astronomer not only defined the retinal image as a representation but also turned away from the real world to concentrate on the world depicted on the membrane of the eye. Without, I feel, sufficiently emphasizing the paradox, Alpers notes: "This involves an extraordinary objectivity and an unwillingness to prejudge or to classify the world so imaged" (p. 37). The description of the picture (in both the objective and subjective sense of the genitive), of its "quasi-retinal" surface of inscription, which is that of the world as well, catches the eye up in a fascinating adventure: "If we concentrate on a detail [the motion of drawing closer, the key parameter of Pascalian experimentation] -the hand of the painter, for example, in the Art of Painting- our experience is vertiginous because of the way the hand is assembled out of tone and light without declaring its identity as a hand" (p. 37). A vertiginous experience: the eye loses itself in the surface on which representations of things rid themselves completely of the words that designate and identify them. If such a loss in such an excess-the vertigo, as Alpers so well describes it - does not call the concept of description into question, at least it questions its operativeness: it becomes a question of passing from the nominationof figurative "contents" to the conceptualizationof "means" or "ways" of seizing them and fixing them on the surface, a conceptualization that-it cannot be overemto do with phasized-has nothing "descriptive," metaphorical, or poetic imwhich can have its value but which concerns only indirectly the pressionism, in In works art this of connection, perhaps one must go farhistory. knowledge ther than Alpers in drawing up categories of description, refining them and making them more complex through a constant interplay between, on the one hand, the epistemic equipment made available to the painter by historical, social, and cultural "circumstances" to create a "description" of the world in lines and colors on the surface of his canvas, and, on the other hand, the spectator's methodological methods, provided him by the social sciences. The latter will become operative, however, only through an extreme attentiveness in looking at the painted surface, in other words, only on condition that there is a precise theoretical pertinence in the questions that such an examination raises for him.

In Praise of Appearance

111

From this viewpoint, evaluating the exactitude of that pertinence in Alpers's book, and because her work is situated, as we have noted, in the structural opposition between the narrativeness of Italian Renaissance art and the descriptiveness of seventeenth-century Dutch art, the linguist or semiotician might feel that her references to "narrative" and "description" are at once too narrow and too unfocused. This is not the place to go into such a critique, particularly since - and this is both a strength and a weakness in her book - Alpers has in fact constructed that opposition only in the domain of the visible and with the sole aim of taking account of two visual modes of representation in art history, in its theory and its methods. Thus, she limits herself to marginal references to linguistic or semiotic models (cf., in particular, note 11 in the Introduction and note 56 in Chapter 2). Her "narrativeness" is in fact the "idealtypical" narrativeness of Italian Renaissance art: the subject of the picture is a story being played out by human actors and actresses in a theatrical space created through use of the laws of perspective, a tale from antique mythology or Christian tradition whose reference is basically a literary text, sacred or profane. The stress of the critical discourse and the orientation of the analysis are thus displacedtoward the construction of the scenic site in the picture, which implies that such a space be created by a constructor subject-gaze on a representational plane precisely contained within a frame (per spectiva) and whose distance from that plane and whose position vis-a-vis that plane will rigorously determine the placement of the personages and their scale within an illusory depth of perspective. It may well be that the whole problem of narrative representation in paintin ing general, and in "classical" painting in particular, should be considered in the light of that displacement. It would then be necessary for us to go into the various figurative methods of articulating the narrative, in general, and into the (historically variable) constraints they bring to bear upon its "iconic" narration and the sensitive, visual, optic, geometric, and so forth, "definitions" of the space represented on the plane of representation. I have, in fact, attempted to construct models of such articulations, in particular of paintings of classical subjects in which the friezelike disposition of the narrative figures is the result, at the level of utterance, of a process of transformation through the figuration, rotation, and lateralization of the structure of the device of representation, i.e., of the formal apparatus of its "utterance."4 Such investigations are a deliberate extension of Emile Benveniste's seminal article on the distinction between discourse and history. Perhaps the consideration of that distinction and the many other works to which it has given rise would have enabled Alpers to refine the 4. See my "Toward a Theory of Reading in the Visual Arts: Poussin's The ArcadianShepherds," in S. Sullivan and I. Crossman, eds., The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audienceand Interpretation, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1980, pp. 293-324.

112

OCTOBER

notion of description, a model of which she attempts to construct based on the golden century of Dutch art. It is true that between discourse and history the status of the notion of description is ambiguous, possessing as it does both narrative and discursive traits. From that viewpoint, the frequent reference in the book to Ann Banfield's work, which is also based in part on Benveniste, is very valid.5 It would be worth pursuing and enlarging upon it in the sphere of the painted image and along a path down which The Art of Describingis a significant milestone. In any event, the magnificent appreciation of appearance and surface contained in this volume's study of seventeenth-century Dutch art culminates, in the aforementioned direction, with a challenging of the "Albertian" subject (in Chapters 4 and 5 in particular) on behalf of a multiple, fragmentary subject seen from more than one angle, or on behalf of the subject I recognized, in my investigations into utopia and the methods of cartographic representation in the seventeenth century, as a nonsubject, at once everywhere and nowhere, but a subject whose disappearance has the paradoxical result of animating objects themselves, in their representation, with a kind of visual autopresentation, a kind of "object-consciousness," and which today, amidst the chaotic decline postmodernist methods are experiencing, even reminds me of the motifs of Leibnitz or Pascal that have formed the background of my reading of a book that is of significance for both art history and the social sciences.

5. Ann Banfield, UnspeakableSentences. Narration and Representationin the Language of Fiction, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982.

Manet's Imagery Reconstructed The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, by T.J. Clark, New York,Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

KLAUS

HERDING

translated by JOHN WILLIAM GABRIEL At issue here are aspects of the methodology of Clark's much-praised and much-maligned book, though his substantial findings and conclusions, well documented and quite impressive, certainly also deserve attention. The key question for me is whether and how Clark's study alters generally accepted views of Manet and his contemporaries and of the place of their paintings within the nouveau Paris. Let us assume that there exists the following consensus about how Manet's painting should be understood: it represents one man's penetrating, sometimes even cynical reaction to the modern bourgeois world; it skeptically applies Baudelaire's definition of modernite,and also investigates the degree to which Haussmann's conception of modernismcorresponds to that definition; it is the art of a man who, in his work if not in his life, affirmed the process of urban transformation and yet at the same time stood coolly aloof from it. Clark both confirms and denies this ambivalence. Though he emphasizes the fact that Manet, Monet, Degas, and Seurat were indeed "bound," he places still more weight on their being "detached." While insisting that they were socially conditioned by the nouvellescouchessociales, he maintains that they were in an isolated position -not as people, but as painters who had to consider the needs of a rising middle class yet who produced work that was hardly compatible with those needs (only Seurat, he believes, was on the verge of finding a modus vivendi). The sign of this "uncertainty of class," Clark says (p. 238), was that city and nature now came to be seen and used as spectacle(by city and nature he invariably means western Paris as transformed by Haussmann and the fields and vacant lots on its periphery, which the Baron also oversaw). Clark defines spectacle as the sum of all the recreational opportunities offered to the bourgeois Parisian which gave him the spurious sense of social advancement. The hypothesis of the book boils down to this: "The two main histories dealt with in this book, the commercialization of leisure and the beginnings of suburbia, are both forms ... in which the 'nouvelles couches sociales' were constructed as an entity apart from the proletariat" (p. 235). This would imply that from the 1860s on, this stratum and its artists were increasingly involved in a crisis of identity. Its resolution was in not only their

114

OCTOBER

own interest but also that of Haussmann, the man Clark sees as the character mask of the Second Empire and principal agent of that twofold spectacle which held such fascination for French artists. But what was theirrole in all this? Did they exacerbate the conflict (assuming they were at all capable of recognizing it as such)? did they oppose Haussmann's strategy? or possibly even contribute to it? To elucidate these questions Clark reviews the places at which the spectacle was staged (e.g., the Salon of 1865, the Alcazar and Eldorado cafes-concert, La Grande-Jatte island) and characterizes the people who managed and performed their parts in it, or who experienced and observed it. Among the observers the painters, writers, and journalists are the focus of Clark's investigation. The problem he sees them grappling with is a self-abetted disorientation in their systems of signs and values caused by the reorientation of the leisure sector (cf. p. 243). Manet dealt with this problem, Clark explains, not by transfiguring reality in his art but by doing just the opposite: by leaving in his compositions gaps, contradictions, inconsistencies that apparently reflected the historical circumstances, that "must have been felt to be somehow appropriate to the social forms the painter had chosen to show" (p. 252). Clark justifies his conclusions with reference to a few selected paintings, without degrading them to mere proof of some preconceived historical hypothesis. He focuses his attention on three canvases: Olympia(1865), Argenteuil, les canotiers(1874), and Un bar aux Folies-Bergere(1882). This frame of reference is expanded by other Manet images of the new Paris -La musiqueaux Tuileries (1862) and L'expositionuniversellede 1867 (1867)- and by Seurat's treatments of the city's environs, Une baignadea Asnieres(1883-84) and Un dimancheapres-midia ltle de la Grande-Jatte(1884-86). Though, of course, he discusses a number of other works as well (including some by lesser known artists such as Raffailli, Goeneutte, and Vollon), Clark concentrates on the paintings just listed, presenting observations of great subtly and penetrating descriptive analysis. The research data is extremely varied. Clark reviewed police records of the 1870s and '80s, collected political and erotic songs from the cabarets and cafes, and, as in his previous books,' made ample use of salon criticism and contemporary literature (for example, Zola and the Goncourts). Also cited are sources from the fields of sociology, criminology, and philosophy. But though Clark does refer to Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Norbert Elias, he entirely neglects postwar German art-historical scholarship.2

1. See my reviews of Imageof thePeoplein Kunstchronik, no. 30 (1977), pp. 438-452; and of The AbsoluteBourgeoisin KritischeBerichte,vol. 6, no. 3 (1978), pp. 39-50. It would have been very much in line with Clark's argumentation had he made use of, 2. for example, Karl Hermann Usener, "EdouardManet und die Vie moderne,"MarburgerJahrbuch no. 19 (1974), pp. 9-32 (the text of a lecture given at the Institut fur ftir Kunstwissenschaft, Sozialforschung, Frankfurt); or Werner Hofmann, Nana: Mythos und Wirklichkeit,Cologne, M. DuMont, 1973.

Manet'sImageryReconstructed

115

The German reader might also bridle at Clark's use of the term Huns for Germans and the equation of "Teutonic thoroughness" with brutality. The volume is divided into an introduction and four chapters, followed by a summing-up that actually amounts to a fifth chapter, since it is at this point that Clark brings in his discussion of La Grande-Jatte.Let me briefly review the main points of these chapters. In the "Introduction" we are challenged to "unlearn our present ease with impressionism," and to help us do so Clark returns to the earliest commentary on the movement, particularly to Laforgue's Melangesposthumesof 1903, reconstructing the shock initially triggered by the impressionists' "interruptions and paradoxes in perception" (p. 17). This reaction is then analyzed on two levels. Clark asks first what causes lay behind the reduction of objects in space to a flat surface and, second, what factors led to the demise of that "informal and spontaneous sociability" (p. 3) which the Goncourts, among others, so loved. Both concern a disruption of previously valid habits of perception and behavior. Then Clark gingerly approaches the issue of the historical determination of form. Might flatness, he inquires, have served as a barrier against the deceptive beauty of naive illusionism? Might the collapse of bourgeois manners3 have been linked with the spread of popular (that is, proletarian) patterns of behavior? These questions lead logically to an investigation of the various social strata that began to mingle, or were alienated from one another, in the caf6s, salons, and tourist activities of the 1860s and '70s and the implications of these shifts for the transformation of visual perception. The chapter entitled "The View from Notre Dame" is concerned to explain why the new painting initially ignored the new Paris. Clark points out that Manet depicted none of Haussmann's new boulevards, choosing instead either narrow lanes like the rue Mosnier or the neuralgic zones of the urban periphery, the no-man's land between suburban industrial sites and surrounding fields (a category in which Clark rightly includes Argenteuil). But why did the new painting choose to depict these desolate margins, uncultivated even in the capitalist sense? Apparently because they were zones of change which, unlike the western quarters of Paris, partially retained the raw, unimpressive appearance which thus visualized the capitalist exploitation of the land in an unfiltered way. But how long could this strategy continue? One wonders why Van Gogh was still picturing these areas as unfinished, heterogeneous, intermediate zones in the 1880s if it was true as far back as 1869 that "the factories were working on the Plaine Saint-Denis. The edge of Paris was an image already" (p. 45). Of course, not only the city's margins but also its core was plowed under, a natural metaphor of the kind to which Clark attaches great value; indeed, 3. Cf. Jiirgen Hofmann, Die Versachlichungder Personenals Personifizierungder Sachen:Hypothesen zu einer Theoriedes unterhaltendenVerkehrsim Kapitalismus, Berlin (privately published), 1974.

116

OCTOBER

"Haussmannization" was experienced "like a force of nature" (p. 37), violent and inexorable. Some of the photographs of the renewal of the Petite Pologne quarter recall the violence of Courbet's Paysages de mer. The main arguments against the new Paris -it favored the upper classes, was impersonal and cold, was vice-ridden, and so forth - came from the petite bourgeoisie, who feared the loss of Paris pittoresqueand of the quarters from which they derived their identity.4 As a result of this violent transformation, Manet felt that there were two incompatible definitions of modernity: that of Baudelaire, who assigned the role of marginal figure to the individual no longer solidly rooted in his class; and that of Haussmann, whose faith in technological progress worked toward coherence in both the social and the visual sense. In the first case, the city was conceived as an incoherent field of signs; in the second, as a bound, determined system of signs, of which Haussmann's unified bus lines and the grands magasins are concrete examples. With these conflicting positions in mind, Manet's canvases can be interpreted in a new way. Between 1862 (La musique aux Tuileries) and 1867 (L'expositionuniversellede 1867) the old codes disintegrated. While the former painting still evinces clearly defined characters, in the second we find, as Clark puts it, a hasty, summary all-over. Thus for him the Tuileries image is "hardly a picture of modernity at all, as it is sometimes supposed to be, but rather a description of'society's' resilience in the face of empire" (p. 64), while of the later painting he aptly notes: "These people want the Paris that goes with such transparent citizens. . . . These things are all part of the same disembodied flat show, the same spectacle" (p. 62). One is tempted to conclude from this that painting had to decide whether it was to be Haussmann's handmaiden or his adversary. But the options, of course, were not so clearly defined as that. Playing the adversary proved impossible because the painters had no chance to conceive an effective counterposition to Haussmann's modern entertainment strategy. The chapter on Olympiashifts the scene from the margins of the city to the margins of society. Olympia was a common name among prostitutes of the day. Clark does well to compare the fiction of the courtesan, the nobleservant of lust, with the facades of the new Paris, a comparison that illuminates the - "to anticourtesan meaning of his statement that Manet chose Olympia-the represent the truth of the city Haussmann had built" (p. 78). The author's analysis of salon reviews is particularly fruitful in this context. Apparently the fact that Olympia was hung directly beneath Jisus insultepar les soldats was not considered nearly so scandalous as the daring gesture of her hand, which was perceived as being shockingly self-confident and yet at the same time, like a fig leaf, irritating in its intimation of refusal. But if the critics called Olympia"informe" and "indechiffrable," there must have been something else in the image 4. On the relationship of old to new Paris, one of the best recent studies is Margret KampdesSecondEmpire,dissertation, Hamburg, 1985. meyer, Paris in derDruckgraphik

Manet's ImageryReconstructed

117

which frighteningly "eluded their usual frame of reference." Clark examines the anxieties the painting aroused when he speaks of a "shifting, inconsequential circuit of signs" (p. 79). In hindsight it is difficult to grasp how the picture of a prostitute could have released all the explosive force of class conflict. But Clark's sources leave no doubt that this subject matter held considerable significance for the male members of the nouvellescouchessociales (who defined themselves in terms of their leisure activities), because it fed their illusion of unlimited pleasures, that is, the fiction of their rise to the upper class. Manet's painting seemed designed to destroy this illusion and provoke those who held fast to it. Olympia may be equipped with every traditional attribute of the cliche courtesan-flowers, curtain, servant-girl-but the incredible candor of the depiction dispells any illusion of exclusiveness or nobility. Yet the debunking character of this image, which excludes the male figure (and thus, in oldfashioned parlance, draws the spectator into the picture), is of an entirely different kind than that of Nana, whose theme, as Werner Hofmann notes, is a triangular and voyeuristic relationship within the haute bourgeoisie. The chance to compare Nana with Olympia is one Clark should not have let pass. Manet "proletarianized" the image of prostitution without resorting to overt social criticism; he destroyed semantic unity by disrupting semiotic coherency (cf. p. 100). What Clark writes in this connection about eros and ideal nudity, and about the destruction of sexual identification patterns, is one of the most closely argued passages in the book.5 Also highly subtle is the link he establishes between the astonishing salon review by Ravenel (= Sensier) and his own analysis (pp. 88, 99, 141 ff.). Sensier already remarked that in this "suburban lady" Manet combined Poe with Sue, a Baudelairean connection through which, for the first time ever, he made a critique within painting of the noble image of the courtesan and the exotic charm of the odalisque. Perhaps it would have been enlightening in this context to discuss the role of contemporaneous nude photography. A fine example of the dissolution of normative attitudes is found in a photo sequence of about 1860 (fig. 1), which seems like a visual commentary on Clark's discussion because instead of the noble sphere of the courtesan it illustrates trivial sexual positions.6 The focus of the third chapter is an analysis of Manet's Argenteuil, les canotiers,interpreted as an attempt to overcome the crisis of identity described above. But this "effort to put things together" (p. 163) apparently failed, for its "signs, things, shapes . . . do not fit together" (p. 166). Again, Clark is most convincing where he applies his critical acumen to the image itself (e.g., p. 164). He is also very lucid on the contrast between Manet and Monet, who 5. Though in this context, too, one might have expected reference to the work of others, for example, Werner Hofmann, "Courbets Wirklichkeiten," in Courbetund Deutschland, Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle, 1979, pp. 589-613. 6. For details see Marianne Marcussen, in MeddelelserfraNy CarlsbergGlyptotek,no. 34 (1977), p. 69.

118

OCTOBER

ca. 1860. Ny Carlsberg Fig. 1. Albumof photographs, Glyptotek,Copenhagen. amalgamated industrial and natural, recreational landscapes. The questions Clark asks about Monet reveal more clearly than those in any other context that form can be understoodonly throughhistory: Was there a way now for landscape to admit the new signs of man in the countryside-the chimneys, the villas, the apparatus of pleasure? Could the factory be added to the series which went from wilderness to working river? (And if not, why not?) Was the city with determinate edge to be joined, in painting, by the city without one? How much of inconsistency and waste could the genre include and still keep its categories intact? So landscape was to be modern; but if it was . . . would the landscape not be robbed of what the painters valued most in it? (pp. 184-186). Though Clark is not fond of Monet, it would seem to me that he is the first commentator really to do him justice. In the last chapter, the caf6-concert reveals itself to be the true pivot of that ingenious recreation strategy which Clark attributes to Haussmann alone.

Manet's ImageryReconstructed

119

Limited participation in the spectacle lent the lower middle class a modicum of identity; visitors to caf6s-concert felt themselves a part of the show: "Nous aimons a poser, a nous donner en spectacle, a avoir un public, une galerie, des temoins de notre vie" (p. 304). Everything and everyone mingled there; mundane subculture could be enjoyed in one's Sunday best; workers and office employees, the rich and respectable, pimps and prostitutes rubbed elbows. Only in the field of entertainment and leisure was a mingling of the classes still possible, which is why Un baraux Folies-Bergerecan be seen as a key image of contemporary Parisian society. Clark's analysis of the picture is so fascinating that it deserves to be quoted at some length: Behind the girl is a mirror. ... A mirror it palpably is: one has only to notice the edge of the marble counter reflected in it, or the back view of the bottle of pink liqueur, for the illusion to be inescapable .... Looking out at us, the woman is symmetrical, upright, immaculate, composed; looking in at him, the man in the mirror, she seems to lean forward a little too much, too close, while the unbroken oval of her head sprouts stray wisps of hair. ... It is perfectly possible, in fact, to imagine the barmaid's face as belonging to a definite state of mind or set of feelings: that of patience perhaps, or boredom and tiredness, or self-containment. We might even have it be "inexpressive." . . . But the problem is that all these descriptions fit so easily and so lightly, and none cancels out or dominates the rest; so that I think the viewer ends by accepting-or at least by recognizing - that no one relation with this face and pose and way of looking will ever quite seem the right one . . . the equation fails to add up (pp. 249-251). Might we conclude that Baudelaire's vision of the modern was realized in Un bar aux Folies-Bergere?It would almost seem so, if only Manet had not created a new aura with this painting (in contrast to Daumier's nonauratic lithograph of the same subject matter [fig. 2]). Beginning with Manet, Baudelaire's concept of the "Immuable" could be applied to the modern movement itself, and not only to "l'autre moitie de l'art," that is, to ancient art. The conclusion of the book is surprising. While in Seurat's AsnieresClark had read an isolation of the bathers that suggested the ambiguity of the "factory-nature" that surrounded them, in La Grande-Jattehe sees Sunday strollers (petite bourgeoisie) united on the island with Monday visitors (working people) in contrast to the common visual practice of keeping the two classes as separate as they were in reality. The result is an ironically divided coexistence, a paradox in which Clark nonetheless finds evidence of the picture's realism, its adequacy to the social facts of the period. What La Grande-Jattesuggests, in essence, is that people ought to be satisfied with "small freedoms," restricted as these may be, for what freedom remains to them is still full of vitality. Clark's slightly re-

120

OCTOBER

Fig. 2. Daumier.La muse de la brasserie. 1864. signed cast of mind reveals itself in arguments such as this, almost as though he were relying on the consolations of vitalistic philosophy. Clark's book has been treated harshly in the American reviews, though his critics have rarely condescended to discuss the few points at which his interpretation is objectively open to question. It might be useful, therefore, to mention several of these points here. The statement that Victor Hugo anticipated Haussmann's vision of the new Paris (p. 32) seems hardly tenable. Hugo was completely absorbed by the picturesque and grotesque aspects of medieval Paris; his view was worlds apart from Haussmann's ahistorical technicism. Since the Salon des Refuses was established in 1863 by the emperor himself,7 it is quite misleading to say that pictures exhibited there were "officially beyond the pale of Art" (p. 94). Many of the examples Clark gives of verbal and visual criticism of les environsde Paris were prefigured by the 1850s. Clark's choice of later, secondrate caricatures (e.g., p. 151ff.) is a bit unfortunate when one considers that 7. Cf. Genevieve Lacambre, in L'artfranfaissousle SecondEmpire,Paris, Grand Palais, 1979, p. 294.

121

Manet's ImageryReconstructed

Daumier had depicted similar phenomena twenty years earlier in his Les bons bourgeoissequence. And mid-century caricaturists had already noted the dual dilemma faced by artists on country outings - being able neither to paint nor to make love.8 Nor were Manet and Guillaumin the first to conceive industry as "part of landscape"; they were anticipated in this by Bonhomme.9 Manet's incongruency and contingency were prefigured in Courbet, whose Lutteurswas analyzed in this regard a few years ago.10 All of these points make one doubt the interpretation that the identity crisis of the nouvellescouchessociales resulted solely from "Haussmannization." Wasn't the crisis-with all the consequences of an epochal transition-already full blown by 1857?11 Were the impressionists' attempts to deal with it not in fact belated? And if they were, why? Why was it not until 1886 that the factory smokestacks of Paris entered fine art, with Van Gogh,12 while Randon had depicted them in a caricature as early as 1852 (fig. 3)?

de la gande cite. Panorama

Vue prise d'unelacarne de la butte des Moulins.

antasvanitatum!

Fig. 3. Randon,Panorama de la grande citle. 1852.

8. For Daumier, see for example, lithograph D. 1519 (1847). For an interpretation, see my essay in Daumier,Berlin, Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst, 1974, pp. 101-126; a slightly different French translation appears in Nouvellesde l'Estampe,paris, 1982. For the dual dilemma on outings, see, for example, E. de Beaumont, "Ayantquitte Paris . . ,"Le Charivari,September 5, 1851. 9.

Francois Bonhomme,

Vue de Fourchambault,ca. 1838; cf. La representationdu travail, Le

Creusot, 1977-78, p. 12; and similarly Andreas Achenbach, NeusserHutte, 1860; cf. Die DusselDusseldorf, Kunstmuseum, 1979, p. 144. dorferMalerschule, 10.

Jahrbuch der HamburgerKunstsammlungen,no. 22 (1977), pp. 137-174 (the French version of

this text is notauthentic). 11. On the transition to a new era about 1857, cf. Georg Maag, KunstundIndustrieim Zeitalter der ersten Weltausstellungen,Munich, 1985. My own similar observations appear in StadelJahrbuch

(Frankfurt), no. 5 (1975), pp. 159-199. vol. 11 (1966), fig. 12. Basel, Offentliche Kunstsammlungen; cf. PropylaenKunstgeschichte, 255a.

Fig. 4. Trimolet. L'estaminet. ca. 1850. BibliothequeNationale, Paris.

Men in hats do not stand for vulgarity, as Clark suggests (p. 216), but for propriety and social homogeneity; Courbet kept his hat on when he sat at the Caf6 Andler.13 And when Trimolet, in 1850, pictured people with hats in a less elevated gathered outside an estaminet(fig. 4), he depicted-though manner-that "mingling of classes" which Clark describes. Manet's new depictions of leisure would have stood out more strongly against the backdrop of old depictions of this type. Analyses of the images are often preceded by extensive passages of sociological discussion. This procedure is justified insofar as it dispells the fiction that spontaneous emotional empathy is the only source of valid insight into art. Yet conclusions relevant to a painting cannot be drawn indiscriminately from every historical circumstance or detail. The basic question remains whether a critical historian might not be better advised to concentrate first and foremost on the visual findings. Though form can only be explained historically, many of the questions Clark so convincingly raises can nevertheless be asked a priori. By no means are they always deducible from the historical material. And couched in inductive terms, such questions could be better linked with the imagery itself. It would seem more reasonable to postpone the inquiry into historical links until the actual visual facts of a painting prove impervious to direct analysis or pose a dilemmathat only background information can solve. Another point of contention is Clark's categorization of Monet, Degas, Caillebotte, Pissarro, and Seurat as mere "followers" of Manet. The crisis in social conditions and the fragmentation of the system of visual signals certainly need not be reproven in each artist's case, ad infinitum, but their replies to this 13. Cf. Margret Stuffmann, "Courbet:Zeichnungen,"in CourbetundDeutschland, p. 341, fig. 311.

Manet's ImageryReconstructed

123

twofold challenge did take different forms. Even with Manet one is obliged to ask if his artistic reaction to the new Paris can be adequately explained without reference to such key paintings as Le dijeunerdans latelier, Le balcon, Nana, or La serre. All of these concerns raise questions of method. Why did Clark's book cause such a violent response? Probably because most art historians still expect the very things from art history which Clark denies to Manet's painting: entertainment and edification (p. 11). That an art historian should ask why, should raise the issue of the historical genesis of form (and not merely, like Bialostocki, inquire into the relationship of form to its historical framework), is still anathema, particularly in a country where many art historians still habitually abstract from questions of content. Then, too, the attempt to read deep significances into the most miniscule of visual signs, that is, to imply a conscious intention on the artist's part, may well strike some as a relic of the rationalist thinking that was so widespread during the late 1960s. And finally, when an author conceives painters as critical witnesses to their times, his aesthetic credentials, his feeling for art, stand accused; for, of course, to an inveterate modernist, the function of a work of art consists precisely in its having no function at all.14 The basic questions behind Clark's study (how were the bourgeoisie deprived of their habits and attitudes? and how did painters react?) are as simple as his methodological web is complex and finely spun, and his opponents have certainly entangled themselves in it. If Clark had merely treated prostitution and the proletariat, the experts would have maintained an embarrassed silence. The violence and fact-twisting of attacks such as those of Hilton Kramer and Frangoise Cachin, tirades like the Apollo editorial, or Richard Shiff's allegation that the artists never entered Clark's field of vision15 -the only explanation for these, certainly, is the fact that Clark employs both social criticism and structural analysis, gives as much weight to semiotics as to iconography, takes questions of color semantics as seriously as the shock produced among Manet's contemporaries by his disruption of accepted canons of content. Certain aggressions were obviously triggered by Clark's semiotic approach (though he employs it with great circumspection). This approach is certainly adequate to the period under discussion, since the notion of signs concerned not only the ideologues of the first French revolutionary period but above all Baudelaire. That Clark treats strikes (p. 53) or urban behavior in general (p. 63) in semiotic 14. Cf. Gottfried Boehm, "Kunstgeschichte ohne Kunst," Merkur, no. 430 (December 1984); Willibald Sauerlinder, "Kunst ohne Geschichte?" Kritische Berichte, vol. 13, no. 4 (1985), pp. 61-65. 15. Hilton Kramer, "T. J. Clark and the Marxist Critique of Modern Painting," New Criterion, vol. 3, no. 7 (March 1985), pp. 1-8; FranCoise Cachin, "The Impressionists on Trial," New York Review of Books, May 30, 1985, pp. 24-30; Denys Sutton, "'Leftspeak' at Harvard," Apollo, vol. CXXII, no. 285 (1985), p. 326; Richard Shiff, "Radicalizing Impressionism," New York Times Book Review, March 3, 1985, p. 16.

124

OCTOBER

terms may be unusual, but his meaning becomes quite clear in the discussion of the "new circuit of signs" and its inherent contradictions (e.g., pp. 139 and 166). It is precisely his combination of semiotics with historical reflection that allows Clark to apply this method, with a detective's acumen, to the analysis of paintings like Olympia and Un bar. The vituperative polemics against Clark were probably also touched off his unconventional diction. The concreteness of his eccentric and indeed by often egocentric "ordinary language" apparently disturbs many art historians' notions of proper style. Yet his case may well be similar to that ofJules Valles, who worked very hard to give his language the appearance of spontaneity. On the whole, Clark's critics have descended to the level of the critics of the 1865 Salon, treating his book much like Louis Leroy did Manet's Olympia: "Come now, if ever I write one line in praise of Olympia, I authorize you to put me on exhibit somewhere with the article around my neck."16 So to put the record straight, despite all the objections one may have to details of his treatment, Clark has woven historical context and unique artistic achievement into a fabric so close and logically argued that the reader is confronted for the first time with the intereststhat helped determine the visual world, the imagery, of Manet and the impressionists. Modernity, as the reaction to his book itself shows, consists in the capacity to endurea marginal position.

16. "Allez, si jamais j'ecris une ligne a la louange de l'Olympia,je vous autorise a m'exposer quelque part avec ce bout d'article au cou" (in Le Charivari,May 3, 1965).

Painting as Model Fenetre jaune cadmium, ou, Les dessous de la peinture by Hubert Damisch, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1984.

YVE-ALAIN

BOIS

translated by JOHN SHEPLEY "What does it mean for a painter to think?"(p. 59)- this is the old question to which Hubert Damisch has returned in connection with the art of this century, and which he alone in France seems to take seriously. Not only what is the role of speculative thought for the painter at work? but above all what is the mode of thought of which painting is the stake? Can one think in painting as one can dream in color? and is there such a thing as pictorial thought that would differ from what Klee called "visual thought"? Or again, to use the language current some ten years ago, is painting a theoretical practice? Can one designate the place of the theoretical in painting without doing violence to it, without, that is, disregarding painting's specificity, without annexing it to an applied discourse whose meshes are too slack to give a suitable account of painting's irregularities? Nowhere in Damisch's book are there broad examinations of the idea of "the pictorial." Instead there is, in each instance, the formulation of a question raised by the work of art within a historically determined framework, and the search for a theoretical model to which one might compare the work's operations and with which one might engage them. This approach simultaneously presupposes a rejection of established stylistic categories (and indirectly an interest in new groupings or transverse categories), a fresh start of the inquiry in the face of each new work, and a permanent awareness of the operating rule of painting in relation to discourse. For Damisch's question is also, as we shall see: what does the painter's pictorial thought mean for one who has undertaken to write? Damisch's book stands alone in France, as it is resolutely opposed to: (1) the stamp-collecting approach of traditional art historians, whose veritable terror of the theoretical has gradually turned their texts into the gibberish of documentalists and antiquarians -in the sense that Nietzsche gave this word (with very few exceptions, twentieth-century art has remained untouched in France by this ravenous sort of discourse, empirical at best, and with nothing of history about it except the name); (2) the ineptitude of art criticism, a form of journalism all the more amnesiac for having constantly to adapt itself to market trends; (3) that typically French genre, inaugurated on the one hand by Baudelaire

126

OCTOBER

and on the other probably by Sartre, of the text aboutart by a literary writer or philosopher, each doing his little number, a seemingly obligatory exercise in France if one is to reach the pantheon of letters or of thought. While Damisch's book exposes the fundamental incompetence of the first two prevailing discourses (demonstrating to the historians their refusal to ask themselves about the type of historicity of their subject; teaching the critics the necessity of discovering what it is that calls into question the certitude of their judgments), it is in relation to the third and absolutely hegemonic kind of text that his lesson seems to me most important. Why? Because Damisch teaches us above all to rid ourselves of the stifling concept of imageupon which the relation of this kind of text to art is founded-arrogant, ignorant, predatory texts that consider painting a collection of images to be tracked down, illustrations to be captioned. One example: Jacques Lacan is reproached for having invoked "abstract models from the start" when faced with FranCois Rouan's braidings (Lacan's everlasting Borromean knots) rather than examining "on the evidence" the detail of the fabric (pp. 280-281). Not that Damisch has anything against abstract models in themselves; he simply says that the work produces them by itself for anyone who takes the trouble to notice, and that in this case neither Rouan's painting nor the theory of knots gains anything by the demonstration in the form of a priori advice from the eminent psychoanalyst.' Nor is it that Damisch becomes the prosecutor trying to pin down all the scornful remarks that characterize the discourse of his contemporaries on the subject of art. There is little of polemics in Fenetrejaunecadmium,which consists of essays written between 1958 and 1984. Or rather there is a polemiqued'envoi,as one speaks of a coup d'envoi, a "kickoff," which governs, if not the whole book, at least the texts of the first and second parts, entitled respectively "L'image et le tableau" and "Theoremes." The PerceptiveModel Although they may seem somewhat foreign to anyone reading them today, the pages Damisch devotes to Sartre are decisive, and I would say today more than ever. These concern Sartre's thesis that there is no such thing as aesthetic perception, the aesthetic object being something "unreal," apprehended by the "imaging consciousness." This thesis, from Sartre's L'imaginaire, 1. Jacques Lacan's text on Rouan, illustrated with some seventeen figures of knots, began as follows: "Franrois Rouan paints on bands. If I dared, I would advise him to change this and paint on braid." This text, originally published in the catalogue of the Rouan exhibition at the Musee Cantini (Marseilles, 1978), was reprinted in the catalogue of the Rouan exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 1983), a catalogue for which Damisch wrote the preface, reprinted in Fenetrejaunecadmium. Damisch's answer is simply that the braids were there all along in Rouan's painting for those who were able to see them.

Painting as Model

127

states that, in Damisch's words, "a portrait, a landscape, a form only allows itself to be recognized in painting insofar as we cease to view the painting for what it is, materially speaking, and insofar as consciousness steps back in relation to reality to produce as an image the object represented" (p. 67). Such a thesis would at best hold true for a type of illusionistic painting that, assuming it had existed at all, would only have existed at a particular moment in history. That Sartre's aesthetic is an aesthetic of mimesis, in the most traditional sense of the word, is neither difficult nor fundamentally useful to demonstrate, although it may have had a considerable stake in its time. What is important about Damisch's text is that he takes this aesthetic to be emblematic in developing his polemic in an essay on an "abstract" painter, one of the most complex of them, namely Mondrian. For it is not only that what Sartre calls "the imaging attitude" blinds our literati and philosophers to the rupture constituted by "abstract painting," it is also this "imaging attitude" that still today governs studies by the majority of art historians, for the most part Americans, who take an interest in this kind of painting. If theses abound that would make Malevich's Black Square a solar eclipse, Rothko's late works stylized versions of the Pieta and Deposition, or Mondrian's BroadwayBoogie Woogiean interpretation of the New York subway map, it is because the kind of relation to art denounced by Damisch is not only very much with us but, in the current hostility to theory, stands a good chance of becoming absolutely dominant. Damisch's text shows us, however, that we don't have to search for "une femme la-dessous" in order to remain tied to the system of interpretation of which Sartre was the eponym. One has only to be inattentive to the specificity of the object to be led back to this system; hence Damisch's interest in the detail of the signifier, the texture of the painting, everything that, according to Sartre, insofar as it is real, "does not become the object of aesthetic appreciation."2 The case of Mondrian is symptomatic. How many purely geometric readings (indifferent to the medium of expression), how many interpretations resulting from blindness to the paintings' subtle games have given rise to the pregnant image of a grid imposed upon a neutral background? As early as this formidable text of 1958, and from the point of view of his controversy with Sartre, Damisch sees in Mondrian a painter of the perceptive aporia, precisely the opposite of the "geometric abstraction" genre of which he is supposed to be the herald. For the first time, so far as I know, the enterprise of destructioncarried out by the Dutch painter is understood as a concerted operation governing every detail of his painting. In order to comprehend, for example, the abandonment of all curves, there is no need to get mixed up in the theosophical 2. "What is real, as one should never tire of stating, are the results of the brushstrokes, the layer of paint on the canvas, its texture, the varnish that is applied over the colors. But all of this is precisely what does not become the object of aesthetic appreciation"(Jean-Paul Sartre, L'imaginaire,Paris, Gallimard, 1940, p. 240).

128

OCTOBER

nonsense with which the artist's mind was momentarily encumbered. It is because the line has the function of destroying the plane as such that it will have to be straight: The interdiction of any other line but the straight corresponded to the experiential fact that a line curving inward on a canvas or piece of paper defines "full" or "empty" spaces, which the imaging consciousness is irresistibly led to consider for themselves to the detriment of the line that serves as their pretext. Mondrian's paintings are made to counter such impulses and to hinder the movement whereby an unreal object is constituted from the tangible reality of the painting, the eye being ceaselessly led back to the painting's constituent elements, line, color, design (p. 69). Damisch's thesis is rigorously anti-Sartrean: in opposition to the "imaging consciousness," which necessarily has as its purpose the constitution of an image, he sees in Mondrian's canvases, in Pollock's, in Picasso's Portraitof Vollard,each with its own modality, "an ever-reversed kaleidoscope that offers to aesthetic perceptiona task both novel and without assignable end ... the 'meaning' of the work consisting precisely in this swarming and ambiguous appeal" (p. 78). Or again: "If the painter has chosen to prohibit the imaging consciousness from giving itself free rein ... it is for the purpose of awakening in the spectator the uneasiness with which the perception of a painting should be accompanied" (p. 71). Now, this task of the painter is the stake of his art; it is what makes his canvas a specific theoretical model, the development of a thought whose properly pictorial aspect cannot be circumvented: One cannot give way to reverie in front of a Mondrian painting, nor even to pure contemplation. But it is here that there comes into play, beyond the sensorial pleasure granted us by Sartre, some more secret activity of consciousness, an activity by definition without assignable end, contrary to the imaging activity which exhausts itself in the constitution of its object. Each time perception thinks it can go beyond what is given it to see toward what it would constitute as meaning, it is immediately led back to the first experience, which wants it to falter in constituting that white as background and this black as a form (ibid.). I would call this theoretical model introduced by Damisch perceptive,but by antiphrasis, because for the painters studied it is a question in each case of "disturbing the permanent structures of perception, and first of all the figure/ ground relationship, beyond which one would be unable to speak of a perceptive field" (p. 110, in connection with Dubuffet). With the exception of one or two texts, especially the one of 1974 on Valerio Adami, all the articles in Fenetre jaune cadmiuminsist on this point: "Painting, for the one who produces it as for

Painting as Model

129

the one who consumes it, is always a matter of perception" (p. 148). And all the examples chosen (except for Adami and Saul Steinberg) assign to modernity the preliminary task of confusing the figure/ground opposition, without the assurance of which no perception could establish itself in imaging synthesis. It is this "perceptive model" that allows Damisch not only to compare Pollock and Mondrian but also to establish the ambiguity of the figure/ground relationship as the very theme of the American painter's interlacings and to reject as particularly unproductive the divide that some have tried to enforce between Pollock's great abstract period, that of the all-over works of 1947-50, and his so-called figurative canvases of 1951 and the years that followed. Likewise, Dubuffet's great period (the 1950s) is deciphered, by direct appeal to MerleauPonty, as an essential moment in this history of perceptive ambiguity: By treating the figures as so many vaguely silhouetted backgrounds whose texture he strives to decipher and--conversely-by carrying his gaze toward the less differentiated backgrounds to catch their secret figures and mechanics, this painter has restored to the idea of form its original meaning, if it is true that form cannot be reduced to the geometric outline of objects, that it is bound up with the texture of things, and that it draws simultaneously on all our senses (p. 117). The phenomenological theme of the original unity of the senses often returns in Damisch's writing, but it would be vain to see in these studies an application of Merleau-Ponty's theory. And this is not only because this recurrent theme is seriously questioned with regard to Fautrier (p. 134) or because the criticism of "pure visibility" is reoriented through psychoanalysis (pp. 262-263), but also because phenomenological apprehension in Damisch opens onto a second model, copresent with the first. The TechnicalModel In opposition to the "optical" interpretation that has been given to Pollock's all-over paintings by leading American formalist critics (Greenberg, Fried), an interpretation that partakes in a certain way, but much more subtly, of Sartrean unreality,3 Damisch proposes from the start a reading that I would call technical. It begins (but this also applies to the texts on Klee, Dubuffet, or Mondrian) with an insistence on the real space set in play by these canvases (of course, it is always a question of countering the Sartrean imaginary or unreal-

3. On the notionof opticsand the"relativeindifference to the materialprocessof elaboration" of the work,typicalof ClementGreenbergand MichaelFried,seeJean Clay, "Lapeintureen charpie,"dossierRyman,Macula,nos. 3-4 (1978), pp. 171-172.

130

OCTOBER

ity). From this deliberately down-to-earth, ground-level apprehension flows a quite special attention to the process of the work as a place of formation, prior to its effects. Against the deliberately obfuscating attitude of the art historians, always ready to erase ruptures, Damisch establishes a chronology, or rather a technical logic, of invention: it would be wrong to see in the gesturality of The Flame (1937), or in the scribbled margins of Male and Female(1942) and She-Wolf (1943), the preliminary signs of Pollock's great art. In the first case, "the touch enlivens the paint that still remains alien to it," while "Pollock's originality will later consist precisely in connecting so closely the gesture deployed on the canvas with the paint it spreads there that the latter will seem to be its trace, its necessary product" (p. 76). In the second case, we are dealing only with a borrowing, from Max Ernst or Masson, if you like: "The invention takes place, indeed, at the decisive moment when the painter raised this process [dripping] which after all had been only a means of'padding'- to the dignity of an original principle for the organization of surfaces" (ibid.). For there is technique and technique, or rather there is the epistemological moment of technique, where thought and invention take place, and then there is all the rest, all the procedures that borrow from tradition or contest it without reaching that threshold that it is a question of designating -the reason that one can speak of technique "indifferently, that it matters and does not matter for art" (p. 94). It is by remaining at the elementary level of the gesture, of the trace, that Damisch discovers this threshold in Pollock, first in connection with Shimmering Substance(1946), where "each touch seems destined to destroy the effect born of the relation between the preceding touch and the background" (p. 78), then in the great all-over works of 1947-50: "Lines that plow the canvas through and through, in a counterpoint that no longer develops in width but in thickness,and each of which has no meaning except in relation to the one that precedes iteach projection of color succeeding another as though to efface it" (p. 80). This reading marks a beginning, first of all because it is the only one that makes it possible to understand the manner in which Pollock was working against surrealism (it is impossible in his case to speak of automatism, despite appearances: cf. p. 85), then because it points to the very place where Pollock's painting abandons, or rather destroys, the order of the image, "which is reduced to a surface effect, without any of the thickness that is the particular quality of painting," as Damisch says later on regarding Frangois Rouan (p. 296). Damisch is rapidly led, in Pollock's work, to make this category of thickness in the order of technique (which has since been reexamined by others alerted by his text)4 the equivalent of the figure/ground confusion (to which it is linked)

4. See especially Jean Clay, "Pollock, Mondrian, Seurat: la profoundeur plate," in Hans Namuth, L'atelierdeJackson Pollock, Paris, Macula, 1982.

Painting as Model

131

in the order of perception. From then on it becomes one of the essential question marks of Damisch's inquiry, functioning almost as an epistemological test in his discourse. The reemergence of the hidden undersides in Dubuffet (p. 114), the exchanges of position between outer surface and underside in Klee (p. 213), the interweavings of Mondrian and later of Rouan- all of these become theoretical models that demonstrate the painting of this century just as perspective demonstrated that of the Renaissance. It is therefore no accident that the book appears under the sign of Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu;the essay devoted to the novel provides the subtitle to the collection: "The Undersides of Painting." If one is to believe Frenhofer, it looks as though painting should produce its full effect only insofar as it proceeds, in its most intimate texture, from a predetermined exchange of positions that would be the equivalent of a kind of weaving in which the threads would go up and down alternatively, the same strand passing now above and now below, without the possibility of being assigned a univocal sign (p. 16). Frenhofer's name is invoked in no less than five texts in this collection in addition to the one devoted to the "philosophical study" of Balzac ("whoever writes proceeds in a way not dissimilar to one who paints, using a quotation that he had first singled out for completely different purposes, to start out on a new development,in every sense of the word" [p. 258]). Far removed from recent romanticist interpretations,5 the Frenhofer of Damisch has been, from his first Cezanne texts, the emblem of a conversion, the signal of invention-with one a new should Seurat-of thickness that c'est add, ("Frenhofer, moi") and, would no longer borrow from the old academic recipes: And if one wants modernity in painting to be signaled by the replacement of the superimposition of preparations, of underpainting, glazing, transparencies, and varnish, by another craft based on flatness, the juxtaposition of touches, and simultaneous contrast, how can we not see that the problem of the "undersides" will only have been displaced or transformed, painting having necessarily kept something of its thickness, even if it were aiming only at surface effects? (p. 37). Here, from the beginning, a metaphor intervenes to help us see that this technicalmodel is irreducible to the perceptivemodel as it was earlier described, although it is its corollary: that of the figure inscribed on the chessboard, "in its

5. I refer to the excellent collection Autourdu Chef-d'oeuvre inconnude Balzac,ed. Thierry Chabanne, Paris, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs, 1985. For a still different approach, see Georges Didi-Huberman, La peintureincarnee,Paris, Minuit, 1984.

132

OCTOBER

full spaces as in its empty ones, but in the superimposition and overlapping of its layers as well" (p. 158), inaccessibleas such to pure vision. The work on the thickness of the plane is for Damisch a technical model par excellence, because it implies a knowledge and a speculation (p. 279): we are dealing, as close as its topological possible to the paint, with one of the most abstract-in inventions of the of this backgroundpictorial thought century. "Without recourse to theory or to mathematics, a painter may very well come to formulate, by means all his own, a problematic that may later be translated into other terms and into another register (as happened in its time with perspective)" (p. 288). It is because he acknowledges that painting can provide theoretical models that Damisch will be able to single out in Pollock the moment of thickness and from then on rewrite a portion of the history of modern art. The SymbolicModel It is the fashion nowadays to ask oneself about the ways and means by which the passage from painting to the discourse that takes it over is supposed to operate - if not about the end of this transference. It is even one of the most frequent commonplaces in our artistic and literary culture, a toposfrom which very few escape who, without claiming to be "art critics" (that is behind us), make it their profession, if not their work, to write about painting or about painters. Without remembering that this question, which one would like to see preceding any commentary, has already been decided by culture, which is at all times responsible for organizing the game, distributing the roles, and regulating the exchanges between the two registers of the visible and the readable, between the painted and the written (or the spoken), the seeing and the hearing, the seen and the heard. If this question today professes to be such, and a question to which culture, our culture, would not furnish a ready-made answer, it is still culture, our culture, that will have wanted it that way, and that always makes us ask it all over again (p. 186). If the numerous passages that Damisch devotes in this collection to the relation between painting and discourse avoid as much as possible the cliche that he denounces, it is partly because he demonstrates that his text can only belong to it. Like the Foucault of This Is Not a Pipe, whose analyses he anticipates as early as 1960, Damisch likes to draw a historical map of the connections between practices. Here he stresses the extent to which the mode of relation of painting to discourse has become in this century, thanks to abstraction and structural linguistics, a particularly necessary stumbling block in the analysis. It is because he considers painting a key to the interpretation of the world, a key neither mimetic nor analogical, but, as for science or language, symbolic(more

133

Painting as Model

in Cassirer's sense than Lacan's), and because he assigns to painting a cultural task equal to and different from the discourse that deals with it, that the archeological or epistemological reading takes an unexpected turn in Damisch, as though finding in certain pictorial advances theorems of anthropological mutations. Many pages in Fenetrejaunecadmiumconcern the relations that mathematics and painting maintain at the symbolic level, whether it is a question of the role of mimesis in algebraic invention (p. 51) and notation (p. 196) or the common ground (projective plane) on which geometry and perspective construction work (p. 295). Furthermore, it is probably after having successfully shown how the invention of pictorial perspective in the Renaissance anticipated by two centuries the work of mathematicians on the notion of infinity6 that Damisch was tempted to pursue the transserial inquiry into modern times. The long article on Paul Klee's Equals Infinity, which compares the 1932 painting with the discoveries of Cantor and Dedekind on the power of the continuum, sufficiently shows the interest as well as the difficulty of a thought in which, beyond the accepted division of the work, the inherited separation of the fields of knowledge and significance, the differencesamong the practices known as "art," "science," "mathematics," and "painting" cease to be thought of in terms of exteriority in order to be thought of-whatever one understands thereby - in terms of relations of production, i.e., of history(p. 215). Partly because this is not my field, I prefer to leave it and insist instead on one of the symbolic models developed by Damisch for the art of this century, a model that moreover has the particular feature, according to Bataille, of ripping the frock coat philosophy gives to what exists, the "mathematical frock coat." One will recognize here the famous definition, given in Documents in 1929, of the informe,a term, again according to Bataille, that servesto declassify. Among the references that return at several points in this book (Frenhofer, Alberti, Ripa, and others), there is one that I consider emblematic of the reading that I am here seeking to circumscribe: it is those pages devoted by Valery to Degas in which Valery observed, in Damisch's words, that the notion of form is changed - if not cast in doubt altogetherby the projection onto the vertical plane of the canvas of the horizontal plane of the floor, which no longer functions as a neutral and indifferent background but as an essential factor in the vision of things, and can - almost - constitute the very subject of the painting (p. 111).

6.

See Hubert Damisch,

Theoriedu nuage, Paris, Seuil, 1972, pp. 214-248.

134

OCTOBER

Already in the essay devoted to Dubuffet in 1962- anticipating by a few years Leo Steinberg's invention of the concept of the flatbed picture plane in connection with Rauschenberg- then in more recent studies, the confusion of the vertical and horizontal proposed by one side of modern painting was taken for an essential mutation, participating, if you like, in a critique of optics, whose importance is yet to be measured.7 This model includes Dubuffet's twin desires "to force the gaze to consider the painted surface as a ground viewed from above, and at the same time to erect the ground into a wall calling for man's intervention by line or imprint" (p. 112); Pollock's grounds,"an area, a space of play, attacked by the artist from all sides at once, which he did not hesitate to penetrate in person and which . . . put up a physical resistance to him" (p. 149); Saul Steinberg's Tables (p. 231), but I would be tempted to say of these, contrary to Damisch, that they do not come "directly into the inquiry," and are among "those that proliferate in its wake" (p. 130). Even Mondrian's work, as I have tried to show elsewhere,8 touches on this symbolic model, this taxonomic colbetween representation and lapse, this overturning of oppositions-especially action-on which our whole Western aesthetic is founded. Damisch probably had an intuition of this, since for him the study of Mondrian's work is "an invitation to createunder its most concrete aspects" (p. 72). The revelation of this model is one of the most fruitful points of Damisch's book. From cubism to minimalism, from the abstraction of the 1920s to that of the '50s and '60s, I would almost go as far as to point to all the high points of modern art as verifications of this discovery, as demonstrations of its validity. The StrategicModel Shortly before his death, "and as though in passing," Barnett Newman confided to Damisch "that everything he had been able to do had meaning only in relation to Pollock's work and against it" (p. 154). I like to think that Damisch recalled this remark when he read Levi-Strauss's Voiedes masques,and that from long knowledge of this kind of secret, then from its sudden emergence as evidence, a fourth model emerged in Damisch's text, a strategic model.9 Like 7. Leo Steinberg, "OtherCriteria"(1972), reprinted in the collection of the same name, New York, Oxford University Press, 1972, pp. 55-91. For a reading of Giacometti's "surrealist" oeuvre, based on the informeof Bataille and analyzing in it the vertical/horizontalreversal under discussion here, see Rosalind Krauss, "No More Play," in The Originalityof theAvant-Garde and OtherModernistMyths, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1985, pp. 43-85. 8. My essay on Mondrian's New YorkCityI, 1942 (in CahiersduMuseeNationald'ArtModerne, no. 15 [1985], pp. 60-85) owes much, entirely unconsciously, to Damisch's text on the Dutch cadmium. painter, as to a good number of texts reprinted in Fenetrejaune 9. "It would be misleading to imagine, therefore, as so many ethnologists and art historians still do today, that a mask and, more generally, a sculpture or a painting may be interpretedeach for itself, according to what it represents or to the aesthetic or ritual use for which it is destined. We have seen that, on the contrary, a mask does not exist in isolation; it supposes other real or

Painting as Model

135

chess pieces, like phonemes in language, a work has significance, as LeviStrauss shows, first by what it is not and what it opposes, that is, in each case according to its position, its value, within a field -itself living and stratifiedwhich has above all to be circumscribed by defining its rules. Levi-Strauss's condescending remarks about art historians, unable, in his opinion, to understand the structural or rather the strategic nature of signification, are not strictly deserved, at least if one considers art history in its earlier phases and not for what it has largely become today. As we know, W6lfflin conceived the baroque paradigm as incomprehensible unless measured against the classical; and Riegl demonstrated in a thick volume how the Kunstwollenof sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch art was at first negatively defined in relation to that of Italian art of the same period. Such readings are, in any case, commonplace in Fenetrejaunecadmium(see, for example, the comparisons between Pollock and Mondrian) and have the merit of no longer taking seriously the autonomy of what is called style. Likewise, since strategy means power stakes, there are many observations in this book on the history of the artistic institution in its relation to production, whether it has to do with the role of criticism, the museum, the market, the public, or even the relationship (fundamentally changed since Cezanne, p. 123) that the painter maintains with his or her canvas. But the interest of the strategic model does not reside so much there as in what it allows us to think historically of the concepts revealed by the other models as well as the ties that they maintain among themselves. One will notice, by the way, that this fourth model was not born directly from a confrontation with the works themselves: it does not immediately take account of pictorial invention itself, of the status of the theoretical in painting, but of the conditions of its appearance, of what establishes itself between works; it finds itself with respect to the other models in a second, metacritical position, and this is why it allows us to ask again the question of the pictorial specificity (of invention) and survival of painting, without getting stuck once more in the essentialism to which American formalist criticism had accustomed us. "It is not enough, in order for there to be painting, that the painter take up his brushes again," Damisch tells us: it is still necessary that it be worth the effort, "it is still necessary that [the painter] succeed in demonstrating to us that painting is something we positively cannot do without, that it is indispensable to us, and that it would be madness-worse still, a historical error-to let it lie fallow today" (p. 293).

potential masks always by its side, masks that might have been chosen in its stead and substituted for it. In discussing a particular problem, I hope to have shown that a mask is not primarily what it represents but what it transforms, that is to say, what it chooses not to represent. Like a myth, a mask denies as much as it affirms. It is not made solely of what it says or thinks it is saying, but what it excludes" (Claude Levi-Strauss, The Way of Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1982, p. 144).

136

OCTOBER

Let us again take the strategic metaphor par excellence, that of chess: Damisch uses it to clarify his historical point. Let us suppose that Newman and Pollock are opponents. How can we determine in their moves what is of the order of the match, belonging in particular to its new although replayable developments, and what is of the generic order of the game, with its assigned rules? One can see what is displaced by this kind of question, such as the problem of repetitions that had so worried Wolfflin: It is certain that through the problematic of abstraction, American painters [of the abstract expressionist generation], just as already in the 1920s the exponents of suprematism, neoplasticism, purism, etc., could nourish the illusion that, far from being engaged merely in a single match that would take its place in the group of matches making up the game of "painting," they were returning to the very foundations of the game, to its immediate, constituent donnees.The American episode would then represent less a new development in the history of abstraction than a new departure, a resumption-but at a deeper level and, theoretically as much as practically, with more powerful means - of the match begun under the title of abstraction thirty or forty years earlier (p. 167). The strategic reading is strictly antihistoricist: it does not believe in the exhaustion of things, in the linear genealogy offered to us by art criticism, always ready, unconsciously or not, to follow the demands of the market in search of new products, but neither does it believe in the order of a homogenous time without breaks, such as art history likes to imagine. Its question becomes "one of the status that ought to be assigned to the match'painting,' as one sees it being played at a given moment in particular circumstances, in its relation to the game of the same name" (p. 170)- and the question can be asked about any of the models (perceptive, technical, and symbolic) described above, as well as about the relations they maintain among themselves at a given moment in history. Such questioning has the immediate advantage of raising doubt about certain truisms. Is the "alleged convention of depth"- rejected by the pictorial art of this century because, according to Greenberg, it is unnecessary- necessarily of the order of the "match" more than of the game (p. 166)? Also, concerning what Damisch observed of the "undersides of painting," should we not rather consider that a series of displacements will have modified their role (the position on the chessboard)? And is it not the same for the convention of "chiaroscuro" (ibid.)? Without thereby becoming a theoretical machine encouraging indifference, since on the contrary we have to take a position about it, the strategic approach has the advantage of deciphering the pictorial field as an antagonistic field where nothing is ever decided, and of leading the analysis back to a type of historicity that it had neglected, that of long duration (to which the symbolic model par excellence also goes back). Hence Damisch's supremely

Painting as Model

137

ironic attitude toward the apocalyptic tone adopted today concerning the impasse in which art finds itself, an impasse to be taken simply as one of the many interrupted matches to which history holds the secret.10

The problem, for whoever writes about it, should not be so much to write about painting as to try to do something with it, without indeed claiming to understand it better than the painter does, . . . [to try to] see a little more clearly, thanks to painting, into the problems with which [the writer] is concerned, and which are not only, nor even primarily, problems of painting- if they were, all he would have to do would be to devote himself to this art (p. 288). Because he considers painting a theoretical operator, a producer of models, because he agrees with this statement by Dubuffet given as a quotation - "painting may be a machine to convey philosophy - but alreadyto elaborate it"(p. 104), and because he means in his work to receive a lesson from painting, Hubert Damisch offers us one of the most thoughtful readings of the art of this century, but one that also remains as close as possible to its object, deliberately situating itself each time at the very heart of pictorial invention. For what the perceptive, technical, and symbolic models aim primarily at demonstrating are the mechanisms of this invention, and what the strategic model takes account of is its mode of historicity.

10. "Hence the fiction - basically ideological - according to which art, or whatever goes under that name, would today have reached its end, a fiction whose only meaning is to confuse the end of this or that match (or series of matches) with the end of the game itself (as if a game could have an end): the rule requiring henceforth that all matches (or series of matches) have an end, even in the highly symptomatic manner of the impasse, while the moves follow each other at an ever increasing pace" (p. 171).

Lequeu

AnArchitectural Enigma

PhilippeDuboy

Foreword by Robin Middleton "Jean-Jacques Lequeudoes in fact hide behindthe most enigmaticand controversialsmile in the historyof art,' writes PhilippeDuboyin a bookthat is one of the most tantalizingexamples of architecturalinvestigationever produced. Itis an extraordinarycompilation-part speculative biography,part meticulousresearch, withhundredsof

Now inpaperback

intriguingdrawings,many in color-that unravelsthe mysteryof this eighteenthcenturymaverickartistwhose drawings have established himvariouslyas a visionaryarchitectassociated with Boullee and Ledoux,forerunnerof surrealism,and inventorof bad taste. Lequeu'sarchitecturaldrawingsfrom the legendaryportfoliosArchitecture civile and Nouvellemethode are presented here in theirentirety,along with his "LewdFigures." 91/4x 123/8 368 pp.

8 pp. color

417 illus,

$65.00

of the TheOriginality AvantGardeandOther Modernist Myths RosalindE. Krauss

Inthese essays Kraussexplores the ways in whichthe breakin style that producedpostmodernism has forced a change in ourvariousunderstandingof 20th centuryart, beginningwiththe almost mythicidea of the avant-garde. "Allof her observations are unfailinglyoriginal and provocative."-ArtDocumentation 320 pp. 162 illus. $9.95 paperback (Cloth$19.95)

I

The

MIT

Press

28 Carleton Street, Cambridge, MA 02142

GEORGES 5ATAILLE

EROIK ISM DEATH C--:288 pages

$10.95

Please add $1.50 postage & handling.

City LightsBooks

261 Columbus Avenue San Francisco, CA 94133

-

SELNSUALITY - -------

Taboo and sacrifice, transgression and language, death and sensuality - Georges Bataille pursues these themes with an original, often startling perspective. He challenges any single discourse on the erotic. The scope of his inquiry ranges from Emily Bronte to Sade, from St. Theresa to Claude Levi-Strauss and Dr. Kinsey; and the subjects he covers include prostitution, mystical ecstasy, cruelty, and organizedwar.Investigatingdesireprior to and extending beyond the realm of sexuality, he argues that eroticism is "a psychologicalquest not alien to death."

Corso

Peterson Wagner Mekas hage

b

TURE

anwCJ per McAdams Wieland Collective

Kobland Rainer Ramer Cornell McBride Leacock Marinetti

A journaldedicatedto all genresandperiodsof film, witha specialemphasison filmas visualandsoundartform.Featuresincludeprimarysource contemporary materialby filmmakers,translationsandreprintsof rarefilmtexts,artists,poets, fictionwriterson film, reviewsof currentNew Yorkscreenings,filmstills, photographs,drawings,letters,andinterviews. Subscriptions: One Year/3 Issues Individual: $11 U.S.A. Foreign

Send Checks with Name and Address to:

MOTION PICTURE

Institutions:$18

41 WhiteStreet

Individual:$20 Institutions: $26

New York, NY 10013 Published by The Collectivefor Living Cinema

OCTOBER/Back Issues OCTOBER 6 Beckett's ... but the clouds ... , Kristeva,Pleynet, and Sollers on the USA, and texts by Michael Brown, Tom Bishop, Octavio Armand, others OCTOBER 7 Soviet RevolutionaryCulture: A Special Issue Alfred Barr'sRussian Diary, 1927-28, documentsby Lunacharsky,Dziga Vertov, Pasternak,and texts by Margit Rowell, Paul Schmidt, Annette Michelson, others OCTOBER 10 HubertDamisch on Duchamp, Lyotardon Daniel Buren, interviewswith TrishaBrown and RichardSerra, texts on Dan Graham,and Robert Smithson OCTOBER 12 BenjaminBuchloh, Rosalind Krauss,and Annette Michelson on Beuys, Joel Fineman and Craig Owens on allegory, and texts by James Benning, RobertMorris, others OCTOBER 14 Maya Deren's 1947 notebook, Eisentein'sletters from Mexico, interview with Pierre Boulez, Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Annette Michelson on the centennial Ring at Bayreuth OCTOBER 15 Film reviews by Borges, film script by Joseph Cornell, HubertDamisch on Delacroix'sJournal, Crimp and Krausson photography, and texts by Serge Guilbaut, Joel Fineman, others

OCTOBER 17 The New Talkies: A Special Issue Jamesonon Syberberg, Copjec on Duras, Frampton, Wollen, Rosier on filmmaking, and texts by Philip Rosen and Mary Ann Doane OCTOBER 18 Danto on Sartre, Polan on Barthes, Melville on Acconci, Crimp on Serra, texts by Copjec, Krauss, and Solomon-Goudeau OCTOBER 23 Film Books: A Special Issue ArthurDanto, Joan Copjec, FredricJameson, StuartLiebman, Nick Browne, Noel Carroll on new film books OCTOBER 24 John Rajchmanand JeanMarie Alliaume on Foucault, Marc Chenetieron Debray, interview with Beth and Scott B, poetry by Marinetti OCTOBER 26 Louise Lawler'sphotographs, Pierre Rosenstiehl and Yve-AlainBois on Barthes, ChristopherPhillips on calotype aesthetics OCTOBER 27 Jean Clay on Manet, Nancy Troy on Mondrian, Gilles Deleuse on the simulacrum, poetry by Velimir Khlebnikov

OCTOBER 29 Michelson on the Eve of the Future, Yve-AlainBois on Serra, Georges DidiHubermanon the Shroud of Turin, interview with Jonas Mekas, texts by George Melies and Joseph Rykwert OCTOBER 30 WalterGrasskampon Hans Haacke, Haacke interview, Crimp on the art of exhibition, Buchloh on Productivism, Bois on late Picabia OCTOBER 31 Roger Caillois on mimicry, Denis Hollier on Caillois, Caillebottedossier, Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Ryanon East Village gentrification OCTOBER 34 Shklovskyon trans-sense language, Malevich's autobiography,ChristianMetz on photography,Hal Foster and Homi K. Bhabhaon colonialism OCTOBER 35 WalterBenjamin'sMoscow Diary, prefaceby Gershom Scholem OCTOBER 36 Georges Bataille, writings on Laughter,Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Un-Knowing, essays by Krauss, Michelson, Weiss

OCTOBER 28 Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis Texts by Laplanche, Roustang, Bersani, Homi Bhabha,Joan Copjec, JenniferStone, Perry Meisel

Back issues are $12.00 each. Prepayment is required. Order directly from The MIT Press, Journals Department, 28 Carleton St., Cambridge, MA 02142 USA

The editors of OCTOBER wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Pinewood Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency; and the New York State Council on the Arts.

OCTOBER 38 & 39 Krzysztof Wodiczko Douglas Crimp, Rosalyn Deutsche, and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth

Public Projections

A Conversationwith Krzysztof Wodiczko

Rosalyn Deutsche

Wodiczko'sHomeless Projection

Wieslaw Borowski, Andrzej Turowski, et al.

Foksal GalleryDossier

Allan Sekula

The Body and the Archive

Abigail Solomon-Godeau

The Legs of the Countess

Slavoj Zizek

The Troublewith Harry

Jacques Lacan

Television

Jacques-Alain Miller

On InterviewingLacan