1The ‘field’ of research on word-and-image relations may be approached in terms of the ways in which the infinite dialogue between language and image has been engaged (Louvel 2004). So doing we will wonder if there is such a thing as a ‘common measure’ between the two irreducible media (Durand 20–31), and if such is the case, about the status of a particular kind of word-and-image relation, that of the writings on art: ‘Les écrits sur l’art’. So we will move on from art in writing to writing about art.
2Starting from observation, it is easy to note that literature is not the only case in which a painting, an image spontaneously seem to trigger discourse, sometimes in an immoderate way as is the case with Las Meninas, The Ambassadors or Duchamp’s Fountain which have endlessly provided food for interpretation and still do. While visiting an exhibition, looking at an advertisement, or in critical essays, in writings on art, people/critics tend to express themselves about the visual. The analysis of the kind(s) of discourse art generates will be the topic of the tentative approach I offer, a research idea that will hopefully find greater scope and space elsewhere.
3Let us first start from the recognition that there is no image without language: ‘But what sort of meaning is that which cannot be expressed in words. What is a picture when it has rid itself of the companionship of language and of music?’ Virginia Woolf asks (Woolf 1966, 243). Must the access to aesthetic pleasure be inevitably mediated by language? Is there such a thing as ‘pure’ contemplation without the detour by language as a means of access to meaning and to the perception of the reasoned ‘jouissance’ of the eye constituting a link betwen aisthesis and aesthetic? But uttering painting is another way of saying that it is language first. What about an unutterable painting, without a conscience to reflect it, to ‘say’ it? What is a ‘pictorial’ reading? An artistic language? Is there such a thing as the ‘readability’ of a painting, of an image? All kinds of questions we will have to ask.
4Let us heed François Wahl’s statement: ‘comme sujets, constitués au langage . . . toute expérience est pour nous de langage’ (Wahl 42); a point which Barthes also made:
le monde, c’est-à-dire: expérience de très anciennes images, obscures et profondes sensations du corps, nommées poétiquement par des générations, sagesse des rapports de l’homme et de la nature, accession patiente de l’humanité à une intelligence des choses à travers le seul pouvoir incontestablement humain: le langage. (Barthes 1146)
5Régis Durand asks the following question: is there a ‘common measure between language and the image’ or are they incommensurable? Here one finds oneself again in the company of art history, for incommensuratio (as in Piero della Francesca’s Annunciation), was a way of thinking God’s incarnation, the boundless, the infinite rendered visible in the finite.
6The argument in favour of a possible ‘common measure’ between the two media rests on their alleged common origin: writing and the visual (Vouilloux 38) are linked by the same gesture as etymology recalls it: graphè, graphein. For Hillis Miller, evoking the series of Klee’s late works, in the manner of stripes of alphabet: ‘[These strange signs] are not yet either pictures or letters. They are the originating point where both coincided before their separation into the different sign functions of picturing and writing’ (Miller 173). J. Hillis Miller also insists on the ambiguity of the word ‘graphic’ at the origin of so many conflicts: ‘The warfare in question is present within the word ‘graphic’ which can refer either to writing or to picture’ (Miller 174). ‘[W]arfare’ also refers to the paragone, and the age-old rivalry between ‘the sister arts’. This antagonistic way of construing the relationships between poetry and painting, could be reconsidered on an irenic mode. To wit, the ‘common measure’ offered by the overlapping of the two arts in the polysemous ‘graphic’.
- 1 ‘[S]ans commune mesure, donc, ce qui signifie à la fois une absence de registre commun, mais aussi (...)
7Yet they are irreducible in spite of their convergence and complementarity. Hubert Damisch evokes this characteristic in the following terms: ‘la traversée réciproque du langage par l’image’ (Damisch 27), the reciprocal crisscrossing of the two media, in spite of, or because of their irreconciliable disparities. The image for Jean-Luc Nancy is the absolute Other of discourse. Being material, it is, by nature, distinct from discourse, ‘matière du distinct’, close to Henri Michaud’s ‘matière-image’. So it belongs to an order which is without common measure with language and yet, for Régis Durand, the absence of any common ground between the two media does not preclude that there lies something exceptional, something beyond the norm.1 This is also the reason why it constitutes such an intriguing field of research.
8For the aporia lies in the above-mentioned acknowledgement that the image has to be mediated by language: there is no image without a text, be it overt or covert and vice versa.
9Yet we can also conversely affirm that there is no language without an image. For Martin Heusser, if the image requires language it is also entirely part of it as Nietzsche, Kant, Benjamin advocated: ‘there is no direct or non metaphorical way of speaking’ (Heusser 14). One reads and interprets the world (its image) even before speaking for Benjamin: ‘auditory and visual impressions have always carried signification, have always been language for us’ (Heusser 14). In neo-platonistic logic, the world is perceived as a text: ‘the world is a monumental book full of signs’ (Heusser 14). On the other hand, ever since the Middle Ages, pictures have been seen as giving access to a kind of knowledge language could not reach. It was an unlimited source of meaning. Thus if the image depends on language to fully ‘work’, language also includes a pictorial dimension. Hubert Damisch recalls in his Preface to the French translation of Words, Script and Pictures. Semiotics of Visual language by Meyer Schapiro:
tout se passe au contraire comme si le langage—et a fortiori le langage poétique—était travaillé, dans son fonctionnement même, par la question de la figurabilité. [. . .] En sorte qu’on serait tenté de substituer à la traduction reçue de l’adage classique qui établissait un parallèle entre poésie et peinture—ut pictura poesis, ‘la poésie comme la peinture’—une autre traduction, celle-là délibérément anachronique, risquée, et qui frise le contresens: ‘pour qu’il y ait peinture, il faut qu’il y ait poésie’, et réciproquement, l’une n’allant pas sans l’autre. [. . .] le fait qu’à un moment, à un titre ou un autre, le travail de peinture puisse ou doive en passer par les mots et, fût-ce à son corps défendant, se colleter avec eux, a pour corrélat, sémiotiquement parlant, que dans sa forme autant que dans sa substance, en son fond scripturale, toute expression linguistique participe peu ou prou du régime qu’on dira ‘pictural’ de l’image. (Damisch 27)
10The word and image interaction is necessary as practice proves it, literature first and foremost.
11If language is metaphoric and thus endowed with an image-like dimension, the image often only provides an incomplete or a limited knowledge. Then glossing becomes necessary, to such an extent it may alter everything when word and image intergloss one another, are held in conversation or dialogue. Therefore the function of a text in its relation to an image has to be examined, from its simplest level, that of the title, to its most complex one. In Régis Durand’s terms, then, ‘[p]lus généralement, le texte fonctionne souvent comme un programme plus ou moins explicite de l’image: programme narratif ou iconographique, ou programme interprétatif’ (Durand 25). Then, two extreme positions may be discerned: beyond the image, a discursive excess produces a narrative, short of the image, insufficient language triggers free and ‘wild’ associations. For an image works as a machine producing associations, that is to say discursive forms.
12The notion of a text as generating a programme (be it interpretive, narrative or iconographic, overt or covert) and its consequences—on the one hand, playing the part of a virtual straightjacket to the image or on the other, ‘wildly’ resulting from the openness of the image—accurately reflects word-and-image relations. It provides a way of thinking and analysing them, as well as warning against possible errings. The word/image structure allows us to think the structure of the devices it generates. It lies at the core of the conceptual thought of artists and theoreticians as will be seen.
13The coupling of a painting and its title is a thrilling instance of such a pairing and would deserve, of course, greater scope. Martin Heusser offers facetious variations on the theme:
- 2 Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, chapter 44, ‘City Sights’ quoted by Martin Heusser, 16.
If we do not know what a given image depicts, the image has no way of conveying the knowledge to us. There is thus more than mere facetiousness in mark Twain’s saucy remarks about the oil painting representing ‘Stonewall’ Jackson’s last interview with General Lee, which he saw in the Washington Artillery building in New Orleans:
Both men are on horseback. Jackson has just ridden up, and is accosting Lee. The picture is very valuable, on account of the portraits, which are authentic. But, like many another historical picture, it means nothing without its label. And one label will fit it as well as another:—
First interview between Lee and Jackson.
Last interview between Lee and Jackson.
Jackson Introducing Himself to Lee.
Jackson Accepting Lee’s Invitation to Dinner.
Jackson Declining Lee’s Invitation to Dinner—
with Thanks.
Jackson Apologizing for a Heavy Defeat.
Jackson Reporting a Great Victory.
Jackson Asking Lee for a Match.
It tells one story, and a sufficient one; for it says quite plainly and satisfactorily, ‘Here are Lee and Jackson together’. The artist would have made it tell that this is Lee and Jackson’s last interview if he could have done it. But he couldn’t, [sic] for there wasn’t [sic] any way to do it. A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a tone of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture. (Heusser 16)2
14A few more examples will demonstrate how the word/image relation is put to the test in what may seem superfluous (the title) but is often more than necessary until some instances of contemporary art judge otherwise making it disappear or merely assimilating it to exhibition numbers.
15One of Andy Warhol’s paintings dated 1967, exhibited in the Musée de Lyon, is entitled: Ten-Foot Flowers. This descriptive and denominative title produces a redundant or mirror-like effect between the title, the painting and the production of a self-conscious description: ‘these are (very big) flowers (painted) and not . . . a pipe?’ This instance of self-referential painting circles back on itself, together with a deictic title and a hint of narcissistic megalomania. Another example, in the same museum, deserves attention: Nature morte avec un paon, un singe et un perroquet, (Still Life with a Peacock, a Monkey and a Parrot), François Desportes, 1717. Beyond the signs dutifully designated and identified, the title and the painting allude to its generic choice, ‘une nature morte’, ‘a still life’, with ‘animated’ subjects. They acquire the dimension of a ‘metapictorial’ discourse enunciated by the painter and the result of both his training and his culture. The peacock stands as a symbol of vanity, as much as the monkey and the parrot represent servile and imitative painting. They seem to constitute the painting as a kind of warning against the dangers of vanity and of the easy satisfaction that may lie in wait for the painter when he is too readily flattered. But here again, even if the spectator possesses the required symbolic referents, he/she has to resort to language to transmit them, to formulate the painting’s so-called ‘discourse’. The recognition of symbols, allegory, biblical or mythological references, and the movements of thought, work their way from eyes to speech. The same goes with quotational practice in painting, the examples of which are numerous and can be found in Vermeer, Velasquez, Picasso, Bacon, Freud, etc. Interpictoriality must be formulated by language, otherwise, one will only operate a visual see-saw movement between the representing painting and the other works that are represented or alluded-to. A last example of the complex relationship between title and work, may be found of course in Duchamp’s practice of ‘nominalism’. L’objet dard, among many other examples, is a truly thought-provoking device allying the object and its reference, bringing about a logic of the event and not a logic of the concept, according to Catherine Perret among others:
L’intensité de l’objet-dard est tout entière dans son titre, dans ce rendez-vous qui ne comble pas l’attente d’objet mais la relance seulement, la re-projette. [. . .] Ce titre est non seulement ce par quoi arrive l’objet-dard, mais ce en quoi il consiste, à tel point qu’il puisse suffire à le faire exister. [. . .] La logique que [Duchamp] met en œuvre est une logique de l’événement et non une logique du concept. [. . .] Ce qui arrive est une ‘image’, ce qu’avec Walter Benjamin on aimerait nommer ‘image-pensée’ (Denkbild) pour le démarquer à la fois du signe trop vite récupérable par le symbolique, et de cette apparition spéculaire reproductible qu’est la simple image. (Perret 165–167)
16The object becomes a work of art: it stands as an operation, an event, a performance, ‘an installation’, a video (as was the case with Sam Taylor Wood’s Still Life, National Gallery 2005). The interlocution between word and image in a humorous and ironical way, is lost in the translation of the French (bawdy) pun, which testifies to the importance of language under the guise of the title in this instance. The object itself may remain cryptic if one is unable to see the shape beneath the shape, the joke and the backlash effect of Duchamp’s ‘art’ used versus former other forms.
17Thus, when one is visiting an exhibition, experience, perception trigger affect and thought is verbally uttered. First for him/herself, the spectator comments on the rules of composition, the source of light, the disposition of the characters or the vibration of colour expanses or drippings. He/she deciphers symbolism and wonders at the inventiveness of the composition. He/she checks dates, locations and subject. At the National Gallery, he is given much more than that to put it mildly: the work has been done for him/her and most spectators even tend to read the description before looking at the painting proper.
- 3 See Pierre Bergounioux, Le moyen de parler, Verdier, 2004, on interior discourse and endophasia.
18The perceiving subject then formulates this ‘thought’ of painting doubling up upon itself and its devices, and expresses it in a very articulate thought, a case of endophasia.3 The commenting discourse can also be addressed to the other, one’s companion also visiting the exhibition, sharing the experience, and discussing it. Lastly, the discourse generated by a work of art may be addressed to a potential reader, the other of the critic who has to write about it and about the exhibition. All this discursive production is triggered by the visual, a production which might seem superfluous (which it is at times) for it is non-inherent in the work on view. Yet, all this flow of speech is necessary, as much as the interior discourse of the painter when he is engrossed in creating and making his aesthetic choices. For instance, choosing a particular shade of colour, he already makes an utterance such as: ‘Naples yellow is more appropriate than ochre for the effect I have in mind.’
19Beyond the spontaneous everyday life experience, the same applies to literature but in a more formal and deliberate way. If one takes up the example of modernism with its cult of the hybrid, the image does not fail to produce narratives, fiction and daydreaming. A short story by Virginia Woolf ‘The Fascination of the Pool’ (Woolf 1989, 26), is a vast narrative expansion on the theme of contemplation. A reclining character lying by a pool starts discerning animated figures looming under the mirror-like surface, lending it a depth from which characters from the past will emerge, as well as forgotten voices. The fascination of the gaze produces the hypnotic effect triggering a series of dreamlike images.
20Let it be noted that the image may a fortiori trigger the discourse of an essay writer strongly akin to fiction or even poetry. It is the case when a writer tries his/her hand at writing on art like Virginia Woolf in front of Walter Sickert’s L’ennui, in ‘Walter Sickert: A Conversation’ (Woolf 243), or Jeanette Winterson’s Art and Lies.
21For the true essay writer, the critic, the discursive expansion will take on the form of an interpretation, of a fiction revolving around intention, of a formal research. Thus Hillis Miller endows Turner’s painting with an intention in a covert way:
Just as when verbal inscription and graphic representation are set side by side, each turns the other into a form of itself, so the effect of Turner’s double, triple or quadruple representation of the sun in The ‘Sun of Venice’ Going to Sea is to affirm that whatever the real sun can do, his painting can also do. (Miller 178)
22Beyond the assertion of the interchange between visible and readable representation, the use of the verb ‘to affirm’ inscribes a speech act due to the effect of the demultiplied representation of Turner’s sun (the discourse of the image), and reinforces the oddness of the possessive ‘his’. If ‘the effect of . . . representation’ ‘affirms’, what it does affirm is that in the rivalry between the sun and the painter, the painter comes unscathed. Yet, ‘his’ relates to Turner and not to ‘effect’ or ‘representation’ as one could expect in grammar logic. Thus we can assert that an intention is granted to the painter who eventually is said to ‘affirm’ that his pictorial prowess equals that of ‘real’ sunshine. The critic’s discourse, resulting from the study of one of the paradoxical signifiers of the painting, produces the fiction of an intention founded on psychological analyses we can question. For describing already entails interpreting and, as Louis Marin put it: ‘la description est interprétation’ (Marin 1994). But also, and this is even more obvious in the case of ‘read’ and ‘reread’ paintings such as The Ambassadors and Las Meninas, it is also a discourse about technique which obsfucates its marks at the same time as it uses them to ground the work.
23Therefore one can disagree with this type of discourse, devoid of any ‘truth’ beyond the expression of subjectivity. Thus Svetlana Alpers, in her latest book (Alpers 2005) sees Rembrandt’s Syndics as complementary to The Oath of Claudius Civilis. She sees the syndics as posing and not looking at the viewer. On the contrary, what seems to be striking in the painting in the Rijksmuseum, is the way they still directly engage the viewer nowadays, all of them excepted one, as they then probably looked at the painter himself. And I contend that this series of arrested movements caught from a low angle view, are a way of paying homage to the painter. One of the syndics has even just stood up to greet him on his staged arrival, much to his neighbour’s surprise. The picture could read as money paying homage to art. But here, in my turn, I am putting word to image, making of my contemplation an interpretation, a piece of fiction.
24In front of a painting we tend to become verbose. The image produces discourse in excess. The infinite dialogue or ‘the infinite relation’ Michel Foucault evoked, puts in parallel word and image. The famous formula he coined a propos Las Meninas: ‘on a beau dire ce qu’on voit, ce qu’on voit ne loge jamais dans ce qu’on dit’ (Foucault 25), expresses the difficulty of de-scribing the image, of the process of transaction or transposition at work when one has to find a ‘common measure’. This also poses is a kind of enigma: how can one ‘say’ painting, an image, how can one ‘render’ painting, its colours, thanks to words?
25Not only does the image produce discourse but it has also been seen as producing its own discourse. François Wahl conceives of it as a sentence, as a series of propositions. It produces a ‘pictorial discourse’ complete with a process of uttering and an utterance. The painting formulates its subject, conveys its meaning, thanks to its own devices, its signifiers, its immanence. Then interpretation may take place. This conception has seemed too restrictive to some, among whom Gérald Hess, who in the wake of Nelson Goodman, prefers to evoke languages in the plural:
Du moment que la représentation artistique est bel et bien l’expression d’un langage, il convient, je le rappelle, d’envisager en réalité autant de langages qu’il y a de médiums. [. . .] On peut se demander à ce sujet si ces divers langages artistiques sont réductibles au langage verbal, comme semble le croire F. Wahl, et plus précisément au modèle de la phrase. (Hess 28, 30 note 16)
26Linguistic terms have been used to ‘render’ the image such as: ‘the grammar of a painting’, the reading of it, ‘the syntax of the visible’. In Scénographie d’un tableau, Scheffer patiently submits Paris Bordone’s painting to a fine dissection of its signifiers, a study the methodology of which he rejects now. Nicolas Poussin himself used to conceive the gestures of his characters as as many alphabet letters corresponding to the different emotions he planned to represent. Louis Marin also borrowed from the semiotic system of language to elaborate his own method of analysis. Deixis, for instance, will be represented by the designating gesture, by the figure of the admonitor pointing to what the spectator has to focus his attention on. The binary system: representing space/represented space, is borrowed from the uttering/utterance system. But of course, ‘like’ does not mean identical.
27Meyer Schapiro differentiates the character’s gaze looking out at the spectator and engaging him/her in a ‘dialogue’ on the you/me model, ascribing the spectator a ‘homodiegetic’ position, from the inward gaze, turned towards the other actors of the scene, this time ascribing the spectator a ‘heterodiegetic’ position. Then the characters will be designated by he/she, them.
28Mieke Bal also evokes a ‘first-person narrative’ resorting to ‘visual narratology’ when the presence of the painter may be felt thanks to ‘an emphatic inscription in the hand of the artist’ as with De Kooning and Pollock. She uses ‘third person narrative’ in the case of ‘images that eliminate references to the painting process’ (Bal 215). She distinguishes between a ‘deictic’ kind of painting referring to a character, the place or time of its utterance (here its elaboration) and a ‘diegystic’ painting drawing attention to its content, its diegesis: ‘in both cases, if the content can be described in terms of a sequence of events, we can use the terminology of narrative’ (Bal 215). A dedicated narratologist, she transposes this system to that of painting, even to that of museology: ‘I also want to demonstrate how narratology can inform our reading of painting, including non figurative painting’ (Bal 217). This ‘visual narratology’ ties in focalisation with vision, a fact N. Bryson acknowledges in his introduction to Looking In (Bal 17): ‘focalization belongs to the story; it is the layer between the linguistic text and the fabula.’ Thus, a series of paintings in a museum will constitute a syntax, ‘museal discourse’, ‘a museum installation is a discourse, . . . an exhibition is an utterance within that discourse. The utterance consists not of words or images alone, nor of the frame or frame up of the installation, but of the productive tension between images, caption (words), and installation (sequence, height, light, combinations)’ (Bal 17).
29Henri Meschonnic mingles rhythm and light in his study of Soulages. To each critic his/her own projection onto the analysis of painting! Rhythm supposedly enables the spectator to see what is concealed by the opaqueness of language, Meschonnic offers, evoking the paradoxical painter whom he sees using the colour black to illuminate it up thanks to rhythm, what he terms ‘le noir lumière’:
Le rythme comme sujet, forme-sujet, et le sujet comme rythme peuvent dire et voir ce que le langage, mot, signe empêche de voir et de dire. En quoi la pensée de l’oralité, étrangement, se trouve solidaire d’une pensée de la peinture. Comme il y a une chaîne des paradigmes du signe, il y a une chaîne du rythme, du continu, de l’historicité dans l’art et dans le sujet. Une contre-cohérence du rythme. (Meschonnic 190)
30Then the question of time, particularly so that of the gaze, is called upon:
La nécessité d’y inclure les mouvements du regard fait que la lumière devient du temps, le temps devient de la lumière. (Meschonnic 190, Louvel 2002)
31Michel Picard, perceptively signals a linguistic lack in French: there is no term symmetrical to the term ‘reader’ to designate the person who is looking at a painting. Amateur, spectator, viewer, observer, receptor, voyeur do not coincide with the activity:
On ne saurait se contenter d’invoquer un vague flottement terminologique banal, un ‘simple problème de vocabulaire [. . .] Faut-il donc croire qu’une question de vocabulaire, ce trou dans le lexique d’où est partie cette réflexion, constituerait l’indice d’une déficience épistémologique majeure et décèlerait rien moins qu’un ignorance pure et simple de ce qu’est, en somme, l’art? Le mot manque, bel et bien. [. . .] ce mécanisme de mystification peut parfaitement apparaître comme une caricature grossière mais dénonciatrice d’un phénomène beaucoup plus vaste, dont la scotomisation du public, l’absence de forme verbale capable de désigner l’activité artistique en elle-même et la réduction de l’art à une chose sont les manifestations les plus flagrantes’. (Picard 2002)
32If one evokes the ‘discourse’ of painting then the spectator becomes a reader who must decipher a ‘text’. If one prefers to refer to its ‘spectacle’ then it entails a contemplating activity, seeing before formulating. Must one remain a voyeur suspended in front of the hidden forbidden view?
33In no way at all must the image be ‘submitted’ to language in the gendered way Lessing submitted the ‘feminine’ image to the ‘masculine’ language. Another adjacent question to be debated too, a consequence of the above discussion, would be that of the so-called ‘readability’ of painting. Must one go through the experience of ‘reading’ a picture? Is there such a thing as ‘reading’ a painting? One should also interrogate the link between thought and pictorial practice.
34How can one say then with Daniel Arasse or Régis Durand, for instance, that painting or photography think thanks to their means. How does art question art? A point Duchamp made when he called upon artists to ‘make art by asking art questions’. Isn’t it all simply a matter of seeing how the image conveys the thought, the emotions, the theoretical choices of its creator? Let us acknowledge that the origin of a visual piece of art rests on a conception of painting, a theoretical stance which are transcribed, activated in the final work and can be retranslated at the other end of the chain in the viewer’s mind according to the triad ‘uniting two subjects and an object’ to follow Michel Picard. In the process, the blurring effect of the translating operation causes loss of information. Painting offers food for thought and not only food for view, when it compels the subject to rethink ‘the disposition of all things seen under the sun’ (to speak like Poussin) and their representation, by resorting to techniques such as perspective which symmetrically produces a thought of itself, of the representation of the place of man in the universe. A fact which, according to Daniel Arasse, shows its power, as, for instance, during the Renaissance, it rendered visible the infinite before it was even conceivable. By the enacting of a preexisting thought coexisting with the plastic work, the latter reveals its theoretical, philosophical and artistic prerequisites. Thus, perspective stages the thought of painting in/by painting.
35To make itself ‘heard’ (the synesthesia is fully justified), painting adopts its own devices like perspective, colour, design, the transgression of models, self-quotation and external quotation such as the presence of famous paintings (see Las Meninas), the choice of representing the painter’s studio, or the gallery or the amateur’s cabinet (Stoichita), and the reference to pictorial genres.
36For Hillis Miller interrogating the paradoxical sun painted by Turner in The ‘Sun of Venice’ Going to Sea it all starts with the name of the boat itself:
[T]he painting on the sail duplicates the painting which duplicates the real scene, in a mise en abyme of receding representations within representations, of which the faint reflection in the water of the fishing boat and its sail is the last in the series. Painted sun and painted Venice are doubled in reverse in the sea, where the painted sun is mirrored as a dull yellow spot in the water, as though to anticipate the swallowing up of all these suns by the sea, the real sun and its simulacra. (Miller 178)
37The mise en abyme is a metapictorial means used to show that painting is like a reflection. Then, the spectator is free to reformulate in his/her turn the discourse painting suggests thanks to the signifiers inscribed in the painting. It becomes a discourse on painting when interpretation tends to move away from the recognition of the major signifiers and when another subjectivity (no longer that of the encoder but of the decoder) takes over and is revealed as in Miller’s case, by the telling use of the comparison: ‘as though to anticipate the swallowing up of these suns by the sea’ (emphasis mine). A fact that will produce the ambiguous assertion I remarked upon above, when the production of discourse on painting verges on fictional or personal projection.
38The painter also has to have his say. For Mark Rothko, painting expresses an abstract, a mystical thought beyond the visible:
The most interesting painting
is one that expresses more
of what one thinks
than of what one sees.
Philosophic or esoteric thought,
For example. (my emphasis) (Rothko)
39 . . . ‘expresses’ but how? Whom for? Concerning Rothko I could venture that the wide expanses of colour and their vibrations plunge the fascinated spectator in a kind of visually-induced trance. Then, an abstract thought of the painting may find its locus but only once it has been caused by sensation first and foremost even before the percept.
40A contrario, for Duchamp, the danger lies in a non-objective ‘peinture-pensée’—‘thought-painting’—one has to get free from thanks to the title as a means to differ the fetichization of the work of art by disconnecting ‘ces deux fonctions principales [dans le système de la langue] que sont la référence d’une part et la représentation de l’autre’ (Perret 174). This is glossed in the following terms:
Il s’agit d’empêcher l’espèce de coagulation imaginaire qui bloque la dynamique représentative, et qui entrave la pensée, au profit de cette image inobjective qu’est l’image-pensée. La question de Duchamp pourrait donc se résumer ainsi: comment libérer ‘un peu’, comment émanciper cette puissance représentative des liens imaginaires tout en l’objectivant? . . . Ce temps de retard sur l’objet, procrastination qui en modifie le statut même d’objet, qui le ‘dénature’, c’est ce rendez-vous où l’on se le promet juste, c’est le titre . . . Le titre constitue en ce sens le mode d’objectivation de l’œuvre. Est-ce à dire que l’œuvre consiste dans un pur effet de langage? et qu’avec Duchamp, on passerait, pour reprendre une formule de Broodthaers, de l’Art comme langage au langage comme Art? (Perret 173)
- 4 The work consists of a bird cage filled up with sugar cubes made of marble and surmounted by a ther (...)
41The see-saw movement between title and exhibited object, not yet a work of art, an ‘objet dard’, truly enables the work to find its meaning when the spectator-viewer tries to find La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même . . . and wonders: Why not Sneeze, Rrose Sélavy?4 ‘Poetry like painting’, together with it, against it, endlessly produces meaning. In the relationship between word and image discussions have been—still are—held about what the text was bringing to the image and vice versa.
42I offer to end up with a question and to tackle an interesting hybrid discursive production articulating word and image, that of the writings on art. In bookshops a new category has of late tended to find room on the shelves, that of the so-called ‘writings on art’, ‘Écrits sur l’art’ in French.
43When starting to write about this particular category of art criticism, I was confronted with a telling issue, that of its translation into English: should I evoke, for instance Virginia Woolf’s ‘work on art’ or Antonia Byat’s ‘writings on art’? Is there a French specificity here? Cheryl Mare recalls:
The best art criticism in late nineteenth century France was produced by great poets and novelists (among them, Gautier, Baudelaire, Zola, and Mallarmé). By way of contrast, as S.P. Rosenbaum observes, the history of English literature and art criticism is marked by ‘discontinuity’. Quentin Bell points out that ‘the first Englishman to make art criticism a major prose form’ was the professional art historian and critic John Ruskin and that among Ruskin’s predecessors ‘only Walter Pater was able to produce work that could in any way be compared to his’. (Mares 59)
44‘Essays’ on art are gathered together in a collection indicating an intention as Dominique Vaugeois showed it in her contribution (Vaugeois 13–52), whereas ‘writings on art’ are collected bits and pieces published here and there without their author’s deliberate intention of seeing them appearing on their own. This is usually the work of a later editor collecting the writings on art and selecting them according to subject, which gives the volume its coherence. Moreover, the term ‘essay’ points to a specific genre or category, whereas ‘writings’ usually put in the plural, are more haphazard in their form and place of publication. They usually represent a writer’s own attempt at writing about an artist or a work, not usually aiming at being theoretical or close to art history. Thus they pose a particular generic problem. This is the reason why I am interested in them as they are a hybrid form close to spontaneous—although I realize this is an illusion of course—expression of thought or opinion.
45For instance, Woolf’s introduction to her sister’s exhibition or her ‘essay’ entitled ‘Walter Sickert: a Conversation’ (Woolf 1966) are close to fiction in more ways than one and are definitely close to their enunciator’s position and frame of mind if not to her personal opinion and relational problems with her sister’s art.
46Woolf starts with pictorial signifiers such as colour, the name of the painter, then she moves on to a very different piece of writing. Staging the work of the painter, she annexes painting and weaves a piece of fiction out of her commentary. She thus produces a hybrid narrative essay. Entitled ‘A Conversation’ it stages the discourse of the other of painting, poetry, and challenges Vanessa whose three paintings entitled A Conversation, allude to their favourite pastime ‘a good old gossip’ (Garnett 173). For Virginia, the issue at stake was that of the rivalry between the sister arts and with painting she saw in terms of reticence, of silence, she could not help but triumph over by filling it with words.
47The category entails risk taking and a commitment to other fields of knowledge, banking on the future, that is, banking on something or someone, speaking as a prophet . It also marks the marginal position of writings on art, as they necessarily stand on the margin of works, and of a writer’s own work, a metaphor Virginia Woolf aptly resorted to in her essay on Walter Sickert. One may remark that the term is coined in the plural and that ‘writings on art’ may also be considered as a kind of laboratory, as a workshop of some sort, in the same way as the short story stands in comparison to the novel. Consequently, they are held in an inferior position.
48‘Le sens de l’écrit sur l’art n’est pas d’ordre essentialiste, mais varie avec les conceptions de l’art et des rapports entre les arts’ (Vaugeois 20). So, writings on art are not what we can properly term a ‘genre’, but a practice, with a variable corpus defined by each author according to the different cases in point. The corpus may comprehend all kinds of genres: a novel, a poem, ‘Salons’, catalogues, essays on painting. It can be more specific to a particular writer (for instance essays on painters like Virginia Woolf writing on Walter Sickert, Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry, or Jeanette Winterson’s Art and Lies, or Art Objects). But to be published under the reference ‘writings on art’ the work has to be substantial as is the case with Francis Ponge in France or with Walter Sickert as a recent publication shows (Sickert 2005).
49Which conversely may help us rethink the relation to art of the author of the writings on art, to rethink his own art, his own scriptural practice. The piece on art, defined as an unstable category allows one to take a good look at a writer’s or a creator’s practice and thought, at his generic choices too. Hence his relationship to literature, creation and art is made visible. This was the case with Diderot’s Salons which take on a conversational turn, and represent a shared moment of exchange not devoid of didacticism when addressing the Grimm brothers. Do writings on art then hold up a mirror looking back onto the text, with or without ‘common measure’? Art or/and Lies?