A multicultural look at space and form

Note to readers: this is excerpted from a work in progress called The Visual: How it is Studied The second half of this text, titled “The Most Interesting Thing That Can be Done With Representation,” is forthcoming in a book on the artist Vik Muñiz Portions not required for “Issues in Visual and Critical Studies” are in red This text was originally posted on www.jameselkins.com Please send all comments, etc., to jelkins@artic.edu This text should be read onscreen; there are embedded links to illustrations, marked “(plate).” Some are noted as “not available.” I recommend skipping over those sections; the text is legible without them Revised October 2005 The pages that follow are from a work in progress, a book called The Visual: How It Is Studied The book is intended for first-year university courses, where I hope it will be used in place of the usual “art appreciation” textbooks Those books, which proliferate in all languages, are nearly always based on a rudimentary pedagogy of form, color, space, motion, and texture In such textbooks, linear perspective is inevitably introduced as the centerpiece of the Western archievement in visual art It was perspective, so these textbooks say, that allowed artists to develop realism and to represent the physical world in a quantitative, systematic fashion Although such rudimentary instruction is often ignored by professional art historians, it is compatible with much of what the discipline currently does Monographic accounts of the Renaissance continue to stress naturalism as a sine qua non of the Renaissance, and textbooks of world art continue to emphasize linear perspective at the expense of the many other representational forms developed worldwide.1 I not think The Visual will correct that imbalance, and I am not even convinced that it is correct to call it an imbalance Linear perspective is a unique project, and I not believe that a lengthy, sympathetic description of some other denotative system can realistically hope to replace the interest that perspective continues to attract What I hope The Visual will is show students, right from the beginning, that there is a tremendous amount outside of normative Western scholarship that is genuinely interesting, and often more challenging than the familiar constructions and achievements -2- of linear perspective Perspective has a traditional group of “others”: marginal and “incorrect” forms such as anamorphosis, “reverse” perspective, inverted perspective, curvilinear perspectives, “herringbone perspective,” stereoscopic perspective, anaglyphs, hyperbolic perspective, engineering drawing, and so forth Those “exotic” Others are actually the traditional accompaniments of the study of linear perspective, and they seldom reach beyond the West, or outside of painting The Visual will revisit some of those, but my principal interest is simply to begin from a different dramatis personae, and see what kind of drama develops -3- A Multicultural Look at Space and Form The word space is a bit abstract If we are talking about a particular picture, say Mu Ch’i’s famous ink painting of persimmons, then we can say certain things about the space, and about the forms in it The space in this painting, for instance, might be infinitely deep—perhaps it is a bright misty morning, hiding a view of blue mountains—or it may be paper-thin, no more than a film of dried ink on brittle silk The persimmons may be as spongy as they were when Mu Ch’i painted them eight centuries ago, as fluid as the ink and water he used to paint them Or they may be flat, fallen against one another like dried persimmon skins This kind of indecisive meditation is part of what it is to look carefully at a picture Such thoughts on space and form may lead, as they often do, to more concrete questions—I might want to ask about the elusive nature of reality in Zen practice, or the Buddhist sense of the transience and eternity of the world Thinking through space and form to other ideas is a stock in trade in the interpretation of pictures, perhaps even interpretation’s most indispensable moment But instead of continuing down this path let me emphasize the strangeness of what I have just done: I have opened the discussion of the picture by talking about not persimmons, inkbrush painting, Mu Ch’i, Zen, or Buddhism in general, but space and form Where did those ideas come from? Certainly not from the picture, which -4- says nothing about them And what they mean? Are “space” and “form” so well understood, that I can just begin by naming them, without thinking them out first? The more carefully you consider this problem, the more you will be dragged away from the picture and pushed up against basic philosophic problems: What is space in any picture, and what we want to call “space” itself? And what is a thing, that can exist in such an imaginary space?3 How is the space in a picture “in” the picture? (And as for sculpture: perhaps the space around a sculpture an essential part of the sculpture, but what exactly is that space? How far does it extend? Does it envelop the viewer, or glue viewer to sculpture?4 ) Can you think about space without forms in it? (If you think of Euclidean axes extending off to infinity, with nothing else around, then you are still thinking about forms in space.) And if it is not possible to imagine space without forms, how the two depend on one another? Do we know what space or form are? Do we know what they are in pictures? These are the kinds of questions that sound simple, or vague—but they lie at the heart of everyone’s ideas of what visual art is about Artists, critics, and historians continually use words like form, object, shape, and space, but the abstract tenor of the questions I have just asked sounds a little eccentric because those words are normally used to talk about particular artworks Yet behind the great majority of descriptions of artworks there are assumptions about what space and form are and how they are related, and those ideas silently guide peoples’ thinking and writing For that reason alone it may be worthwhile to pause try to think about the words themselves and how we want to put them to work I find it is a good generalization to say that, in the twentieth century at least, space tends to come before form Space may be the great topic of modern art, and it is difficult to find writing on architecture, photography, painting, or sculpture that does not depend heavily on the idea that space is what makes visual art possible Buildings are said to construct space, pictures to depict it, and sculptures to mold it Artworks are said to create and interact with space, so when it comes to thinking about art people tend to begin by positing some ideal empty space, and then they try to say what the artwork has done with that space Space is a natural first term in many discussions on art Yet there are reasons to wonder about this (Notice, for example, I just used the phrase “empty space.” But isn’t space empty by definition?)) It can be shown that the -5- preoccupation with space is typical of the twentieth century In past centuries critics didn’t need to bring up space as frequently as twentieth-century writers did The architectural historian Peter Collins has made an important observation about this: “it is a curious fact,” he writes, “that until the eighteenth century no architectural treatise ever used the word” space.5 Today, I think, it would be literally inconceivable to write a book on buildings, sculpture, painting, photography, or any other medium of art, without mentioning space “Space” is a relatively new word, but it is taken to be both universal and unproblematic So it seems best to be cautious about space, especially when it comes to studying artworks made before the twentieth century In this chapter I will go at this problem first by making an eclectic survey of kinds of space in visual art, trying not to emphasize what seems to be common or proper The single most important and universal kind of space in visual art, perspectival space, is a kind of roadblock to seeing other kinds of space By largely avoiding it, I am going to try to see the possibilities of the concept space in a slightly new light I want to widen the question and show how perspectival space does not have hegemony over the concept of space—and how spaces, in the plural, are more involved and less understood than they might seem Toward the end of the chapter I will have two further points to make: one is that all such talk about space is flawed, since it does not present space and form as coeval partners, equally involved in the creation and meaning of art; and the other is that no matter how reflective we are about spaces and forms, there is no adequate way of addressing space or form in artworks, since artworks spill out uncontrollably into the world The whole subject, in this sense, is refractory Space and form are not at all easy to talk about, unless you ignore what you not know about them and simply begin, as I did here, with some particular painting P ERSPEC TIVA L SPACE, EV ERYDAY SPACE, PSYCHOPHYSIOLOG ICAL SPACE, IMAGINARY SPACE Certainly the cornerstone of the current Western sense of space is perspectival space—that which is generated by applying the rules of linear perspective (A perspective picture is immediately recognizable by its receding lines but it is not easy to tell when a -6- picture is in correct perspective The great majority of photographs, movies, billboards, and magazine advertisements are in correct perspective.) Art historians tend to say that a fundamental turning point in Western art came when linear perspective was invented five and a half centuries ago.6 Pictures made before the adoption of perspective in the Renaissance, or in cultures that did not use perspective, tend to look flat, while perspective pictures tend to look like they possess depth Perspective was originally a series of methods painters used to give their pictures a quality that we now call “photographic” or “realistic.” To get that effect, perspective makes use of a particular kind of space Linear perspective is based on the idea that space has four qualities: it is three-dimensional (two-dimensional surfaces like paper not count as “space”), infinite (it extends in every direction without limits), isotropic (twelve inches is the same length whether it is measured vertically or side-to-side), and homogeneous (space is smooth and continuous, it has no lumps) If space is this way, then it is possible to construct perspective pictures, make photographic cameras, design video games that take place on infinite grids, and in general everything that depends on three-dimensional, infinite, isotropic, homogeneous space: navigate the Atlantic to find the New World, measure the landscape of Venus, and image fetuses with ultrasound In visual art terms like perspective space are used to what the rules of linear perspective produces, and scientifically-minded authors tend to call space based on the four characteristics I have named “Euclidean space” or “rational space.” It is a powerful conception, and it underlies virtually every book on art history—but it is not the only available sense of space Space is also something less formal and geometric, more like “an area provided for a particular purpose” such as sitting or walking around.7 It is simplest to call this second kind of space room or everyday space Everyone needs a certain amount of room to stand or sit That is different from the space occupied by an ocean or the solar system, because in order to measure such great distances you need some concepts of geometry, surveying, and astronomy Everyday space is intuitive, untechnical, and local—its limits are more or less those of the human body It gives us our sense of whether we can squeeze between two people in an elevator, or jump over a little stream Ergonomics is the study of everyday space in and around cars, machines, furniture, and workplaces Some artists and periods are more sensitive to everyday space than others Here there is room enough in the doorways and apertures for each of the figures to enter the -7- manger—even the ox and the ass could jump in if they wanted—but if they were all in the manger, it would be apparent that perspective has given them too much room The angel and the human figures would not be able to link hands, since the perspective has made the space too large That is extra space, supernumerary room, produced unthinkingly as the artist kept adding blocks to his perspective construction This picture is typical of the early years of linear perspective: the constructions, and the infatuation with space, have gotten the better of the artists Other pictures from this period, which are not in perspective, have just the right amount of room for their figures In Giotto’s pictures, people walk around in tiny rooms and walk in and out of small buildings; but if you not think of Giotto’s work as failed perspective, then the “tiny” architecture seems just right -8- Everyday space can sometimes be measured If you are thinking of squeezing into a crowded elevator, you can mentally compare your width to someone in the elevator, and estimate your changes of fitting in Linear perspective space is the very epitome of measurement: a space isn’t in perspective at all if it cannot be quantitatively measured Two other kinds of space cannot be measured at all One is psychophysiological space, which is the subjective sense we have of the larger world we live in Part of psychophysiological space is the space we sense, even though we can never touch it; I will call that visual space It is said that the moon never looks like it is more than one-half mile away (I think it looks more like five or six miles) If you look at a perfectly blue sky, on a day when there are no clouds, and if you forget whatever you know about the stratosphere, the ionosphere, and -9- outer space, then the sky will appear as a dome, slightly flattened on top.8 The same kind of thing can happen at night, when the stars suddenly seem to be perforations in a vast hemisphere Visual space is an everyday fact of perception The oversize term “psychophysiological” is meant in part to describe those subjective, body-oriented guesses when they apply to objects that we can touch A book may look larger than the empty place in the bookshelf that fits it perfectly The distance to the top of the stairs may look longer than the same distance when you get to the top and look back down This kind of space is three dimensional, but not homogeneous or isotropic: that is, it changes depending on how far away things are People can judge distances fairly well when things are close by, but much less accurately when things are farther away (Think of the difference between judging the separation of two piles of sand in a sandpile, and judging the separation of two mountains in the distance.) Psychophysiological space is partly psychological, and partly physiological (to with the motion of our bodies), and for that reason it is sometimes called kinesthetic space.9 If the staircase looks longer from below, it might be because your perception is influenced by the memory of the effort of climbing; and if it looks longer from above, perhaps you are thinking of the possibility of falling.10 The Japanese concept of ma may also be useful here; ma is used to speak of the space between two objects, but also between two sounds, or two events in time Ma is similar to what modern Western critics call negative space, the emptiness between figures in a painting or forms in a sculpture Negative space is a kind of opposite of what is painted—it is what is left over when the painted parts are mentally subtracted—and so it is elusive and intriguing to modernist eyes Ma is even less like distances in perspectival space: it does not distinguish very crisply between distances in space and time The mixture of memory and sensation conjured by ma might be a little closer to psychophysiological experience than to geometric space.11 And there is at least one other major kind of space It is our innate imaginary space, the sense we are all given that things have distance from one another People who are blind from birth understand imaginary space: they know that objects are separate, that one thing can be between another, and so forth.12 Some people think that infants are born with the idea of three dimensions, and others think they learn their sense of space by looking around and reaching for things The enigma of the inner sense of space is related to the mystery of the inner sense of time: if you are asked to close your eyes and count thirty seconds, you will probably be accurate to within five seconds But how did you it? Assuming humans - 10 - have something like an inner clock, you might say that you have learned by experience what a second is, and how to count thirty seconds; but that still leaves a deep mystery: how did you count that first second? How you know what an interval of time is?13 The philosophers who claim that we are born with a sense of time and three-dimensional space—such as Immanuel Kant—would say that all we have to is adopt out inner clocks and rulers to the scales we use in our society Other philosophers would say we know nothing when we’re born, and we gradually learn about time and space from our infantile experience Luckily I don’t have to decide that conundrum here; it’s only important that there is an inner sense of space that complements and perhaps also directs the more outward kinds of space Perhaps imaginary space should be called the idea of space itself Perspectival space, everyday space, psychophysiological space, and imaginary space are slippery concepts Each of them has been debated at length, and there is disagreement over their number and meaning The philosopher Henri Lefebvre, for example, has expanded elements of each of these four into politics and history, by talking about “social space.”14 The fourfold arrangement I have given here is only a starting place for discussion Almost everything that has to with art theory depends on perspectival space, with things that go wrong with perspective, and with schemes for producing pictures that look something like linear perspective (in addition to the canonical linear perspective, there is “herringbone,” “reverse,” and “curvilinear” perspectives, among many others15 ) It is a good idea to bear in mind that perspective is often at odds with other more intuitive or inner senses of space as well as with rival theories WHA T IS LIN EAR PERSPEC TIVE? It is easy enough to say what the basics of linear perspective are The picture plane is usually just the surface of the picture, and then there is the viewer’s eye (the center of projection) and the object There are a dozen or so other terms in textbooks on linear perspective, but the important fact here is that a perspective picture behaves like a tracing on a glass pane, exactly reproducing the contours that one eye sees The salient feature of the woman’s picture is that some lines converge to vanishing points, which are often lined up on a horizontal line that runs across the picture at eye level (the horizon line).16 Perspective - 46 - TH E MOST INTER ESTING THING THAT CAN BE DON E WITH REPR ESEN TA TION What is the most interesting thing that can be done with representation? The best way to begin answering that question, which is (or should be) of pressing interest to visual artists working in a variety of media, is to list some ideas that were once thought to be the most interesting things about representation: It is no longer interesting that photography means “painting is dead” (Paul Delaroche’s opinion, although he kept painting) If painting is dead, it is so in a far more curious fashion than anything photography could have inflicted on it (See Stephen Melville’s excellent catalogue As Painting.) It is no longer interesting, to most people outside of science, that machines can replicate features of the world apparently without human intervention (See Raine Daston and Peter Galison’s work on this subject.) Nor is it interesting, particularly, that machines can represent the world only by means of ideas articulated by the earlier history of visual representation (Many people have worked on this, from Peter Galassi to Daston and Galison; the best work is Joel Snyder’s.) It is not interesting, because it is not true, that cubism and Cézanne ruined naturalistic representation and substituted something entirely different (For a cogent critique see Leo Steinberg’s essay in Other Criteria.) It is especially uninteresting that the “age of mechanical reproducibility” has left us, so it is said, with a nostalgic yearning for the aura of unique artworks (Walter Benjamin, and his best expositors, including Max Pensky.) It is not interesting, anymore, that the obverse of Benjamin’s statement is also true: namely, that mechanically reproduced images have their own aura, so that they project a different and equally compelling sense of representation (as in Rosalind Krauss) And speaking for myself, it is not particularly interesting to demonstrate the suffocating sameness of representations (as Sherrie Levine has done), Or to exult in their weightlessness (Baudrillard, Paul Virilio), Or decry their terrible emptiness (Debord), 10 Or join the devil’s camp and reproduce them endlessly (Warhol, and now Erró), - 47 - 11 Or even to make all those previous approaches into the object of academic study (the field called visual studies; Nicholas Mirzoeff and others) So what is left to with representation? Among contemporary artists, Vik Muniz’s work is exemplary He makes photographs of materials such as ash, sugar, chocolate, and wire (plate) Before he photographs them, the materials themselves are made into images And the images are often taken from previous images and occasionally even photographs The ash picks out a painting by Caspar David Friedrich; the chocolate traces one of Namuth’s photos of Pollock painting (plate); the dirt is scraped and molded into an imitation of Courbet’s Origin of the World There are a number of reasons why Muniz’s work is more interesting than almost any other at the moment I agree with Muniz that part of the answer is to play—the word is crucial, but needs to be adjusted and constrained—in “a magical space” (magic, another essential word, which also needs to be qualified) “between realism and artifice.”42 “I want to make the worst possible illusion that will still fool the eye of the average person,” Muniz says “Something so rudimentary and simple that the viewer will think, ‘I don’t believe what I am seeing, I can’t be seeing this, my mind is too sophisticated to fall for something as silly as this.’” This is different from ordinary magic: it is postmodern magic, like one of Ricky Jay’s educational exhibitions where a lightning-fast exposition of the history and theory of magic goes hand-in-hand with the display of magic “Illusions as bad as mine,” he says, “make people aware of the fallacies of visual information and the pleasure to be derived from such fallacies These illusions are made to reveal the architecture of our concept of truth.”43 So, provisionally, representation is at its most interesting when it playfully demonstrates its insufficiency, in a particular manner which is related to magic, and in a mode that can be described as rudimentary or simple This seems to me largely right, and I want to try to develop it into a more formal account of the current state of representation To that I am going to return to the beginning of the twentieth century and consider cubism, the exemplary modernist intervention in representation I will read cubism’s relevant achievement through the most perceptive account that it has gotten to date, T.J Clark’s description in the book Farewell to An Idea - 48 - First I will mine Clark’s text for particular ideas about the mechanisms of success in analytic cubism in the crucial years 1909-1912, and then (and I hope Clark will pardon the sequel, which is not at all in the spirit of his book) I am going to set some of his ideas to work building a theory that is adequate to the current state of representation—a theory adequate to Muniz’s practice Cubism may seem an obtuse choice, given that my subject is contemporary representation I choose it because even today cubism is extremely poorly understood and more important than ever because of that fact I choose Clark because out of all the hundreds of theories about analytic cubism, his is by far the most reflective and complex, and therefore the best able to be appropriated, in the inevitably impolite fashion of postmodernism, to problems at hand Clark’s sense of cubism It needs to be said that Clark’s account of cubism is extremely analytically involved (so much that few of the book’s many reviewers except Karsten Harries and Jay Bernstein got much of the point), and also almost incredibly picky One of the questions his chapter tries to answer is this: Does analytic or “high” cubism have some high point, some absolute pinnacle? Cubism invites that kind of question, and it has been asked since its historiography got underway in the 1920s Most historians and critics are content to name a year (1909), or part of a year (the summer at Horta de Ebro) Some scholars prefer to point to a style (the treacherous approach to abstraction in the summer of 1910), or a genre (the three portraits of Vollard, Uhde, and Kahnweiler) Clark pushes much harder on the idea of the highest point, and he ends up looking just at a few paintings, and even at parts of individual paintings None of his praise is unqualified, a quality that is connected in his account to the nature of modernism itself, which has always made stumbling attempts to speak about impossible ideals, even while it was trying to achieve impossible destructions None of the reviewers of Farewell to An Idea made much of some astonishing passages in which Clark severely critiques cubism’s ostensible high points He thinks the portraits of Udhe and Vollard are “not very happy episodes (particularization in them seems not very distant from kitsch).”44 The third in the trio of canonical cubist portraits, the Portrait of Kahnweiler, is said to be “high-spirited (not to say a bit glib)” (212) The result is that cubism is reduced to a few hard kernels of - 49 - interest, and those are so obdurate, so welded to their times and places, that they could be successfully emulated, disseminated, or projected as a style “High” cubism then becomes something other than a movement that might possess a character and a more-or-less systematic method Even Braque, who Picasso liked to advertise as a fellow-traveler, is demoted What is cubism then, if it is not systematic enough to be the movement or style that it is universally taken to be? It is “not a language,” Clark says: “it just has the look of one” (223) Picasso was its only native speaker, but even he did not speak the language in the way that a person can choose which language to speak In Clark’s account, cubist painting is more akin to speaking in tongues: it came on Picasso in fits and starts, and when he emerged from one of his trances, he tried, inevitably and unsuccessfully, to continue in a logical fashion what he had just made in a less than logical fashion This is much stranger than it may seem at first The idea is basically that cubism was not a movement in the ordinary sense, but a kind of production by fits and starts Its truly successful moments were also moments of blindness to method and history, and even to the possibility of going on It’s not just that cubism is best imagined as a narrow set of works: it’s that the set itself is a fiction, comprised of secondary works that misunderstand their few inassimilable precedents It’s not just movements and their labels that are at stake in Clark’s chapter: it’s the coherence of modernism itself, because a movement shrunken to a few isolated half-failures ruins the smooth transitions that make art history possible What exactly were those half-successful moments? Take for example another canonized work, the painting Reservoir at Horta de Ebro (a similar painting here) Clark says that the painting’s “wager” is “that it would be precisely by fastening on the aporia and undecidables of representation”—the inevitable Necker cubes, the reversible convexities and concavities of space—“that a new system of spacing and singling out the parts of a world would be generated” (203) It’s necessary to read this slowly: it is not a claim that Gestalt psychology-style illusions were a plausible road forward for cubist painting in the summer of 1909 The idea is that the painting’s “wager” is to “run the machinery of illusionism for all it is worth,” so that the machinery opens “exactly there onto its opposite or ground” (203) The painting was a moment of clarity, and for that very reason it proved to be an unworkable wager In Cadaqués in the summer of 1910, Picasso pursued another purpose, which has been understood in retrospect as a flirtation with abstraction It was “at - 50 - last” a “‘solution’” (in quotation marks), but “of a profoundly inimical sort Picasso was the last person to want, or perhaps to see how, to pursue the Cadaqués solution to its logical conclusion (Mondrian being the first)” (192) What cubism needed and occasionally managed was something much harder To describe it I need first to say that among the many interlocutors in Clark’s account are the modernists (inevitably represented chiefly by Clement Greenberg but also by Michael Fried and William Rubin) and “their semiotic inheritors” (which tends to encompass chiefly Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, and the circle around the journal October) Clark’s route between the two sides is a matter of maintaining an ordinary kind of skepticism about the cliché modernist notion that “reference to the things of the world has simply ceased with high Cubism,” and at the same time keeping away from the “semiotic” notion that cubism was at heart about “the freer and freer play of the signifier, a set of devices discovering that simply the difference between them is enough to make a world” (181, 183) Briefly: modernists have inadequately described cubism as the first step away from illusionism and toward the purity of abstraction, and postmodern “semioticians” have seen it as the prototypical leap from semantic dependence on the world to self-referential system, to a code of signs that shift and play among themselves to create meaning Cubist painting becomes interesting when it avoids these two models in a very specific way, and here I come to the insight that seems so important for current work Cubism “had better be a stream of metonymies” (a set of self-referential signs) than “a neat metaphorical fix” (a namable destruction of illusionism, for example) But it can never be neat, one way or the other (185) Cubism has to negotiate the alternatives, and it does so in at least seven ways: Pretense Works of art “differ dramatically” in their “willingness to admit, or to ‘foreground,’ the arbitrariness of the sign” (185) Some cubist works are “fiercely unwilling,” but none except formulaic paintings forget that they are “pretending” to be painting in some full and untroubled sense Insufficient It follows that interesting work does not lose hold of “the metaphor of [its] own insufficiency.” Inefficient A painting that does lose hold is the overconfident upper portion of the unfinished painting Woman with a Mandolin (1912), where Picasso forgets that “acts of illusionism” are really just that: they must not be seen to “work too efficiently” (191) - 51 - Counterfeit Cubism was “not a devising of a new description of the world,” especially not one that was a response to new ideas in physics or philosophy (213) It was a way of “counterfeiting” such a description Note that counterfeiting is more complicated than simple mechanical reproduction: it is self-aware, and founded on the inevitable failure of perfect iteration Play Therefore cubism at its best plays at producing a new kind of illusion adequate to painting’s new situation: it mimics painting’s old métier as system Failure on several fronts simultaneously The most interesting moments in cubism are where both “brute or schematic likeness” and the “free play of signifiers” are partly demoted, given a new “subordinate status” (218) Base materiality Both these operations take place “on the surface”—on and with the paint—not as if they were projected from somewhere outside the painting’s materiality (221) Interesting representation That is as far as I am willing to condense Clark’s account Here is the moral I want to draw for contemporary work in representation: It must be aware that both the happy postmodernist free play of signifiers, untethered from the world, and the happy modernist rejection of appearances in favor of some new representational regime, are at once inadvisable and impossible within the project of visual art since cubism The two have to be posed by visual art, played as a game in which a win would constitute either a moment of misguided optimism or a moment of blindness that cannot be repeated The work of representation is to counterfeit the conditions under which an adequate representation might once have taken place, without giving up either game (the metaphoric and metonymic, or illusionist and semiotic, or modern and postmodern—however they are named) This is the context into which I would like to read Muniz’s formulas I have already mentioned play, which has much the same valence in Muniz’s work as it does in Clark’s description (essential but too easily unburdened) Counterfeiting can be fun, but it is uninteresting simply to make fun of illusionism Counterfeiting, real counterfeiting, is a very serious business, not a romp as it is for Jean Baudrillard or Paul Virilio To play and counterfeit I will add three more terms that are properly Muniz’s: - 52 - Magic is now clearly the state of affairs in which old-fashioned Zeuxis-style magic remains possible but can never be put in control of a picture The new magic is beleaguered: beset by carefully plotted evidence of its own impossibility, and teased by its own continued existence in pictures Illusionism “demonstrates its insufficiency,” as Muniz says, but not easily The best contemporary pictures, like the best cubism (the tradition is continuous, despite appearances) can be “fiercely committed” to denying their insufficiency, but in the end the denial cannot be deferred 10 The “worst possible illusion” that Muniz mentions is actually the best possible illusion, the one where the image’s possibilities are shown as the ruins that they have become: still working, but with rusted hinges, groaning, and about to give up Cubism was always a “worst possible illusion” (its muddy colors, its little brickwork brushmarks), and it is the precedent for all work that still needs to sink to the bottom of some barrel of illusionism These ten points, I think, are the beginnings of a viable theory of the contemporary state of illusion, and an answer to the question with which I started (There is one more, an eleventh, which I will save until the end.) Works like 6,200 Yards (Lighthouse), a photograph of a picture made out of string, works with each one of these criteria (similar image here) It is certainly “magic,” and the magic is definitely in quotation marks Muniz is extremely dexterous, a requirement for any magic: but he is also a magician bent on exposing some of the machinery—like Ricky Jay doing a trick with an enormous card, just to make sure the gestures are visible Despite Muniz’s skill at traditional, academic drawing, string just does not make good waves, and if you look closely you can see the threads looping back, as if the water was full of eels The string painting demonstrates its insufficiency, but reluctantly Materials like string, chocolate, wire, cotton, and sugar bring the works down— they are its “base materiality”—and play at the seriousness of high illusionism There are several reasons why Muniz’s images are better as photographs than as a unique pieces made with string, chocolate, wire, cotton, or sugar One reason is that the actual objects, exhibited by themselves, risk becoming campy (and playing into Baudrillard’s hands) or miraculous (and playing into Benjamin’s) But the most important reason, I think, is that the photograph introduces the theme of the counterfeit in a way appropriate for photography - 53 - The situation is not a continuous outgrowth of cubism, or an inevitable consequence of cubism, but it follows a logic inaugurated by cubism This is what representation has become, Muniz’s experiments are among the best and most promising current work Traps for representation The eleven points I have gathered are extremely difficult, and artists who shortcircuit them tend not to be playing the game seriously enough There are many ways of lightening the burden I will end with a sequence of photographs that show some of the more seductive options Plate is a reproduction of one of Rembrandt’s etchings of his friend Jan Six, and Plate is an enlargement (plates not available) I made these a few years ago to demonstrate some problems in teaching art using reproductions.45 Actually, these first two plates aren’t Rembrandt etchings, exactly They were made from a nineteenth-century photoetching of an original Rembrandt print Photoetchings can be remarkably close to the originals The print departments of museums in Europe used to keep collections of photoetchings and photoengravings to bring out to their naïve patrons, to save the wear and tear on the originals Only experts who knew better got to see originals (In my PhD program, we were taught to tell the difference, so we wouldn’t be duped when we went abroad.) But at the level of enlargement of Plate 2, there is no appreciable difference between the photoetching and the original That invisible difference is fairly interesting But it is a conceptual difference, and therefore a game the photographs are not playing This is one of the ways that picturemaking opts out of the challenging régime I have been describing—by substituting conceptual and theoretical differences for things worked out in the pictures themselves It gets a little more interesting if I point out that Plates and are not really photographs of photoetchings The image as you see it here (in either plate) is really a print of a photograph of a photograph of a print of a photograph of a print, because the original print was photographed, made into another plate, printed, and photographed; and then I sent the photograph to the publisher, where it was rephotographed (or scanned) and printed in many copies Schematically: (1) Original Rembrandt etching (2) Nineteenth-century photo of the etching - 54 - (3) That photo used to produce an etching plate (4) The photoetching in my collection (5) The photograph I took of that photoetching (6) The scanned file from my photograph (7) Plate as it is reproduced here, and in all other copies Now this kind of iteration serves as a source of pleasure among writers who follow Rosalind Krauss in finding value in the very concept of iteration The medievalist Michael Camille has written a wonderful essay on this subject called “The Très riche heures in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: in his essay each edition of the original medieval manuscript has a different value If you go to Chantilly outside Paris, you’ll be shown one of the reproductions, but you won’t be told it’s a reproduction Only a very few people have seen the original Camille hadn’t seen it when he wrote the essay, but that wasn’t a concern because Camille loves reproductions, sometimes even over originals Another medievalist, Herbert Kessler, got a look at the original Très riche heures, which are kept in Chantilly behind locked doors; he reports nuances that have not yet been captured by any photographic process.46 This story illustrates two further dangers for art that plays with reproducibility: it either falls into Benjamin’s devotion to the aura, or it slips into the diminishing joys of endless reproduction, and the pallid comfort of the notion that in the end the world is nothing but reproductions Both are too easy Plate is the same artwork, as it is reproduced in a book called Rembrandt: Experimental Etcher, published in 1969 That book has one of the best reproductions of the image In this detail you can see both the paper texture and, if you look closely, the halftone dots The smaller marks left by the etching needle are lost: the ones around Jan Six’s chin, for example In comparison with the first two plates, this one is worse, but it is the best most people can when they are interested in Rembrandt’s etchings That invidious comparison, the one I was after when I first made these pictures, points the photographs directly at the “metaphorical” ideal of illusionism that is still so common in the visual arts, and so exhausted Plate is a photograph of a slide from the teaching collection of the University of Chicago, as it looks projected onto a screen in a darkened seminar room It is distorted (Jan’s face is squeezed a little) because I took the photo from a seat a little off to one side of - 55 - the room, like most students’ seats would be I sat about fifteen feet back, so the texture of the screen itself is not visible—as it ordinarily wouldn’t be Plate is actually the end result of a different sequence of seven steps: (1) Original Rembrandt etching (2) Twentieth-century photo of the etching (3) Photograph used in an (unidentified) book (4) The university’s slide, taken from the book (5) My photograph taken in a classroom (6) The scanned file from my photograph (7) Plate as it is reproduced here The difference between Plate and Plate is itself interesting, and not just for what it shows about what students see It represents a different path, with an equal number of steps, from two different “originals” to their final forms That difference is a step in the right direction, because it exposes counterfeiting in addition to Benjaminian mechanical reproduction But the gain is ruined with my last example Plate is a photograph taken from a computer screen The image was a fairly large file, and filled half of a 17 inch monitor Its route, from “original” to final form, was different once again But this time the friction, the “base materiality,” is wholly absent This is the free-floating play that Baudrillard, Virilio, and so many others love so much For representation, it is a dead end If work on representation (as opposed to rote representation) is to go forward, it has to go more or less in the direction that Muniz is pushing it My last Plate comes the closest, and fails less obviously This is a photograph of two cockroaches (not available) The one on the bottom is a rubber roach Someone is holding it down, and using the broken end of a pencil to help lift one of its rubber wings to reveal the stamped inscription: “MADE IN / HONG KONG.” The one on the top is a real, live Madagascar hissing cockroach, said to be the largest species in the world The handler isn’t touching the real roach because its carapace is coated with a waxy substance that causes rashes, raises blood pressure, elevates the heart rate, and sometimes leads to arrhythmia (This is true despite the fact that contestants on the TV program “Fear Factor” ate live hissing cockroaches on a show that aired in winter 2002.) - 56 - Normally no one pats those cockroaches, although it is safe to let them crawl over your hand if you can stomach the little pricks of their feet as they pinch you to keep their grip This photograph is about illusionism, but self-reflexivity is not the only card it has to play It is a bit funny, but also sour It stages its counterfeit nature, but only reluctantly gives up its hold on illusion It tells a story about reproduction, but without proposing there is no such thing as an original It is playful, but not in a childish or simple way The problem with this image, and the reason it belongs with many other failed pictures, is that it does not work hard enough with either side of the equation metonymmetaphor, or illusionism-semiotics If Muniz had done it, both cockroaches might have been sculpted from little bugs That might have worked It is not easy to interesting work with representation, and one of the crucial rules is the one Clark insists on from the beginning, which I also find in Muniz’s work It’s my last criterion of interesting representation 11 Contingency There is a deep reason why Clark searches cubism for individual passages and fleeting moments, and concludes that cubism as a whole is not a language: because in modernism representation is no longer given It can cannot be recovered, in any form, from previous successes, and it cannot be made into a formula and repeated, or emulated, or codified into a school, style, or movement Interesting representation has to be rediscovered in each new context Muniz does this deliberately: a few cotton sculptures, some clay, some sugar, M&Ms, syrup… they may seem skittish or unsure, but it’s the opposite: they are faithful to the only way that representation know how to work Anything else would be programmatic, as Braque misread Picasso, as Picasso misunderstood himself Clark calls the absolute faithfulness to the unreproduceable context contingency, and he traces it through modernism starting with Jacques-Louis David Cubism works by “having one’s metaphors of matter reinstate… pure contingency at every point”—that is, making sure that the painting’s inventions, its “signs,” are remade in every passage and in each painting so they respond to the painting’s exact occasion (220-21) It would have been easier, at any point, for Picasso to mistake cubism for a manner, as Léger did, as Gris and Laurens and Metzinger and Kubis=ta and Filla and so many others did Contingency is not quite the same as the rule of the avant-garde There is a difference between Picasso’s ongoing innovations—very much a paradigm of the avantgarde—and his unfaithfulness to the exact requirements of the work at hand—the inevitable - 57 - slip away from rigorous contingency The avant-garde, as Greenberg said, demands perpetual motion, but that motion can often end up being thoughtless—nothing much more than a mindless impetus to change manners every season Muniz’s work is exemplary: even though his work continuously changes, it does not drift in the directionless fashion of the avant-garde: it remains fixed to the point of representation, to the material and strategy of the moment, in order to say the most interesting thing about representation that it is possible to say at each moment Notes For systematicity together with a critique of the emphasis on representation, see Robert Williams, “Italian Renaissance Art and the Systematicity of Representation,” Rinascimento, vol 43, pp 309-31 At the time I wrote “‘Das Nüßlein beisset auf, Ihr Künstler!’—Curvilinear Perspective in Seventeenth Century Dutch Art,” Oud Holland 102 (1988): 257-76, and “Did Leonardo Develop a Theory of Curvilinear Perspective?—Together with Some Remarks on the ‘Angle’ and ‘Distance Axioms’,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 51 (1988): 190-96, I thought that curvilinear perpsectives were a radical departure from linear perspective But in the wider field of representation, they are among its traditional — if obscure — accompaniments For more on this theme, see Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing? translated by W B Burton, Jr., and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967), 17 ff.; and Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by J Macquarrie and E Robinson (New York, 1962), 274 F David Martin, “The Autonomy of Sculpture,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34 (1976): 282, cited in G David Pollick, “The Sculptural Work of Art: Uniquely ‘Within’ the World,” in On the Aesthetics of Roman Ingarden, Interpretations and Assessments, edited by Bohdan Dziemidok and Peter McCormick (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 225-81 A Pérez-Gómez (1983), 175; P Collins (1965), 285 “Space” is now also coupled with “perspective” in the treatises; see for instance C Burnett (1966) and H R Butler (1923) Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin ([ ]) The American Heritage Dictionary, ed W Morris (Boston: [ ], 1979), v “space.” For the multiple meanings of “space” in the history of art, see K Badt, Raumphantasien Raumillusionen [ ] ([ ], 1963), especially pp 20-23, E Battisti, [ ] ([ ], 1980), 371, and M Jammer (1969) Marcel Gilles Jozef Minnaert, The Nature of Light and Color in the Open Air, translated by H M Kremer-Priest (New York: Dover, 1954), 153-155, H Dember and M Uibe, “Ueber die Gestalt des sichtbaren Himmelsgewölbes,” Annalen der Physik 61 (1920): 313335, and W Lohmann, “Ueber die Fragen nach dem Grưßserscheinungen von Sonne, Mond, und Sternen am Horizont und der Scheinbaren Form des Himmelgewölbes,” - 58 - [Notes, continued] Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane [Zeitschrift für Sinnesphysiologie] 51 (1920): 96-120 Gesenius Ten Doesschate, Perspective: Fundamentals, Controversials, History (Nieuwkoop, 1964), 63-66 I have changed his formulations somewhat 10 One of the problems here is the limitations of language See Willem J M Levelt, “Some Perceptual Limitations on Talking about Space,” in Andrea J van Doorn et al., editors, Limits in Perception, Essays in Honour of Maarten A Bouman (Utrecht: VNU Science Press, 1984), 323-58 11 Arata Isozaki, Ma: Space-Time in Japan (New York: Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1978) There is also a film: Taka Iimura and Arata Isozaki, “Ma: Space/Time in the Garden of Ryoan-Ji,” in the series Art on Film, Film on Art (The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the J Paul Getty Trust, 1989) 12 According to some writers, those who are congenitally blind can have full experience of Euclidean space See Denis Diderot, “Letter on the Blind,” discussed in Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, [ ] On the other hand, M von Senden, Raum- und Gestaltauffassung des operierten Blindgeborenen vor und nach der Operation (Leipzig: Barth, 1932), argues that congenitally blind people understand space in terms of time (the time it takes to walk to a given object, and so forth) 13 For a recent scientific assessment, see Michael W Young, editor, Molecular Genetics of Biological Rhythms (New York: Dekker, 1993) 14 Henri Lefebre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicolson-Smith (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), ff For “literary space” and other variants see my book The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), chapter 15 B A R Carter, “Perspective,” in H Osborne, editor, Oxford Companion to Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), [ ] 16 Carter, “Perspective.” 17 The Illustrated London News, March 1924, 336 18 For Gallego see J A Gaya Nuño, Fernando Gallego ([ ], 1958) 19 Stephen Melville, “The Temptation of New Perspectives,” October [ ] 20 More on this in my “The Question of the Body in Mesoamerican Art,” Res 26 (1994): 113–24 21 John White, Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), third edition, [section on Gaddi] 22 Samuel Y Edgerton, The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), chapter 23 M Schapiro, Paul Cézanne (New York, 1952) Reprinted 1962, in a “concise” edition, 1988., p 78 24 Schapiro, ed cit., 38 25 For the end-papers see Barbara Stafford, Body Criticism ([ ]) For faux- marble, Georges Didi-Huberman, [ ], Mélanges de lEcole franỗaise de Rome 98 (1986): 774, quoted in Stephen Bann, The True Vine, On Visual Representation and The Western Tradition (Cambridge, 1989), 99: “Or - 59 - [Notes, continued] rather, [the paintings] start from the aspect, that of variegated marbles, and make the transition, in analogical terms, from one dissimilarity—that of any aspect in relation to the divine—to another—that of pure colour in relation to any aspect—with a view to the image.” Didi-Huberman’s essay is expanded in Fra Angelico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [ ]) 26 See my “Clarification, Destruction, Negation of Space in the Age of Neoclassicism” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 56 no (1990): 560–82 27 Philip Fehl, “The Stones of the Parthenon Frieze,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute [ ] 28 For the Parthenon frieze see M Collignon, Le Parthénon (Paris, 1912) For fold-out plates see [ ] 29 See E Weber, Tabula Peutingeriana, Codex Vindobonensis 324 (Graz, 1976), and K Miller, Die Peutingersche Tafel, Oder Weltkarte des Castorius (Stuttgart, 1962 [1887/1888, 1916]) 30 This is expanded in my “Mannerism: Deformation of the Stage,” Storia dell’Arte 67 (1989): 257–62 31 H Christiansson, Sydskandinavisk stil (Uppsala, 1959), 148, quoted in C W Thomson, Studies in Upplandic Runography (Austin and London, 1975), 23 32 See further S B F Jannson, The Runes of Sweden (Stockholm, 1962), and B Bergman, Uppländsk run- och bildstensristning (Stockholm, 1946) 33 W Leitzmann, Visual Topology, translated by M Bruckheimer (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), 11-15 34 Slide projectors would distort the outlines, since their light rays diverge Descriptive geometry is a kind of “parallel projection,” and its “rays” all travel parallel to one another A closer analogy would be shadows cast by the sun 35 Charles de Tolnay, The Youth of Michelangelo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943), 65- 73 36 This list is due to Frank Piatek 37 Jacques Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle: l’autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1990); the theme is discussed at length in my Pictures, and the Words That Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chapter 38 Pliny, Historia naturalis xxxv.29 See David Summers, “Contrapposto: Style and Meaning in Renaissance Art,” The Art Bulletin 59 no (1977): 354 For the tonos in Alberti and Leonardo see M Kemp, The Science of Art (Yale, 1990), 266-67 39 M Poirer, “Studies in the Concepts of Disegno, Invenzione, and Colore in Sixteenthand Seventeenth-Century Italian Art and Theory,” PhD dissertation, New York University, 1976, and “The Role of the Concept of Disgno in Mid-Sixteenth Century Florence,” The Age of Vasari, exhibition catalogue (South Bend, Indiana, 1970), 53-68 40 H Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, translated by [ ], and Principles of Art History, translated by [ ] See also the retraction in [ ] 41 The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoff Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) - 60 - [Notes, continued] 42 Peter Galassi and Vik Muniz [interview], “Natura Pictrix,” Vik Muniz, exh cat (Paris: Centre National de la Photographie, 1999), 111 43 Vik Muniz and Charles Ashley Stainback [interview], in Vik Muniz, Seeing is Believing (San Francisco: Arena, 1998), 16 44 Clark, Farewell to An Idea: Episodes from A History of Modernism (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 427 n 36 Further references in the text 45 “What Are We Seeing, Exactly?,” contribution to a forum on digital images, The Art Bulletin 79 no (1997): 191-98 46 Personal communication, 1996 ... What is space in any picture, and what we want to call ? ?space? ?? itself? And what is a thing, that can exist in such an imaginary space? 3 How is the space in a picture “in” the picture? (And as... equally involved in the creation and meaning of art; and the other is that no matter how reflective we are about spaces and forms, there is no adequate way of addressing space or form in artworks,... the idea of space itself Perspectival space, everyday space, psychophysiological space, and imaginary space are slippery concepts Each of them has been debated at length, and there is disagreement