October journal No.19 Winter (1981)

Art I Theory

I Criticism I Politics

OCTOB

Rosalind Krauss Richard Howard Leo Steinberg Stephen Melville

Yve-Alain Bois Douglas Crimp

$5.00/Winter 1981

The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism New Translations of Flowers of Evil Velazquez' Las Meninas Notes on the Reemergence of A llegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism Ryman's Tact The New French Culture: An Interview with Guy Hocquenghem

Published by the MIT Press for the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies

OCTOB

editors Rosalind Krauss Annette Michelson managing editor Douglas Crimp editorial associate Joan Copjec

OCTOBER (ISSN 0162-2879) is published quarterly by the MIT Press for the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. Subscriptions: individuals $20.00; institutions $45.00; students and retired $16.00. Foreign subscriptions outside U.S.A. and Canada add $4.00 for surface mail or $18.00 for air mail. Prices subject to change without notice. Address subscriptions to OCTOBER, MIT Press Journals, 28 Carleton Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142. Manuscripts, accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelope, should be sent to OCTOBER, 8 West 40 Street, New York, N.Y. 10018. No responsibility is assumed for loss or injury. Application to mail at second-class postage rates is pending at Boston, Ma. Postmaster: send address changes to OCTOBER, MIT Press Journals, 28 Carleton Street, Cambridge, Ma. 02142. OCTOBER is distributed in the USA by B. DeBoer, Inc., 113 East Centre St., Nutley, N.J. 07110 OCTOBER is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Copyright ? 1981 by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The editors of OCTOBER are wholly responsible for its editorial contents.

19

Rosalind Krauss Richard Howard Leo Steinberg Stephen Melville

Yve-Alain Bois Douglas Crimp

Cover photograph: Brassai. Graffitti. c. 1930.

The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism New Translations of Flowers of Evil Velazquez' Las Meninas Notes on the Reemergence of A llegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism Ryman's Tact The New French Culture: An Interview with Guy Hocquenghem Letters

3 35 45

55 93 105 118

2

YVE-ALAIN BOIS is a research fellow at the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique, Paris, and a founding editor of Macula. GUY HOCQUENGHEM is a staff writer for Liberation and the author of Homosexual Desire (Allison &cBusby, Ltd., 1978). His first novel, L'Amour en relief, will be published this January by Albin Michel. RICHARD HOWARD's new translation of Les Fleurs du mal is scheduled for publication this spring by David Godine. STEPHEN MELVILLE teaches English at Reed College, Portland, Oregon. LEO STEINBERG is Benjamin Franklin Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently at work on the 1982 Mellon Lectures (chiefly on Michelangelo's Last Judgment) to be delivered this spring at the National Gallery in Washington.

OCTOBER

The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism*

ROSALIND

KRAUSS

I open my subject with a comparison. On the one hand, there is Man Ray's Monument to de Sade, a photograph made in 1933 for the magazine Le Surrealisme au service de la revolution. On the other, there is a self-portrait by Florence Henri, given wide exposure by its appearance in the 1929 Foto-Auge, a publication that catalogued the European avant-garde's position with regard to photography.' This comparison involves, then, a slight adulteration of my subjectsurrealism-by introducing an image deeply associated with the Bauhaus. For Florence Henri had been a student of Moholy-Nagy, although at the time of FotoAuge she had returned to Paris. Of course the purity of Foto-Auge's statement had already been adulterated by the presence within its covers of certain surrealist associates, like Man Ray, Maurice Tabard, and E. T. L. Mesens. But by and large Foto-Auge is dominated by German material and can be conceived of as organizing a Bauhaus view of photography, a view that we now think of as structured by the Vorkors's obsession with form. Indeed, one way of eavesdropping on a Bauhaus-derived experience of this photograph is to read its analysis from the introduction to a recent reprint portfolio of Henri's work. Remarking that she is known almost exclusively through this self-portrait, the writer continues, Its concentration and structure are so perfect that its quintessence is at once apparent. The forceful impression it produces derives principally from the subject's intense gaze at her own reflection .... Her gaze passes *

Originally presented as a colloquium paper at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington, D.C., February 12, 1981, this essay is the result of research supported by a fellowship from the center. I am grateful for the atmosphere of support and exchange provided by this remarkable institution and its director, Henry A. Millon. Based upon the preliminary returns of this research, an exhibition of surrealist photography is being planned for 1983 as a collaboration between myself and Jane Livingston, Associate Director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Two scholarly resources were particularly useful for this subject: Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, London, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978; and Nancy Hall-Duncan, Photographic Surrealism, Akron, Ohio, The Akron Arts Institute, 1979. 1. Franz Roh, Foto-Auge, Stuttgart, 1929; reprint Tu'bingen, Verlag Ernst Wasmuth, 1973.

Florence Henri. Self-Portrait. 1928.

dispassionately through the mirror and is returned-parallel lines made by the joints in the table .... The balls-normally

to the symbols

of movement-here strengthen the impression of stillness and undisturbed contemplation.... They have been assigned a position at the vertex of the picture .. their exact position at the same time lends stability to the structure and provides the dominant element of the human reflection with the necessary contrast.2 In light of the writer's determination to straightjacket this image within the limits of an abstracting, mechanically formalist discourse, the strategy behind a Florence Henri Portfolio, Cologne, Galerie Wilde, 1974, introduction by Klaus-Jiirgen 2. Senbach.

Man. Ray. Monument to de Sade. 1933. Published in 9 Le Surrealisme au service de la revoliition_ Mna 193i

6

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of its sexual pleasure. And two further aspects of this image bespeak the structural reciprocity between frame and image, container and contained. The lighting of the buttocks and thighs of the subject is such that physical density drains off the body as it moves from the center of the image, so that by the time one's gaze approaches the margins, flesh has become so generalized and flattened as to be assimilated to printed page. Given this threat of dissipation of physical substance, the frame is experienced as shoring up the collapsing structure of corporeality and guaranteeing its density by the rather conceptual gesture of drawing limits. This sense of the structural intervention of frame inside contents is further we could call the visual deepened by the mnorphological consonance-what rhyming-between shape of frame and shape of figure: for the linear intersections set up by the clefts and folds in the photographed anatomy mimic the master shape of the frame. Never could the object of violation have been depicted as more willing. In Florence Henri's self-portrait there is a similar play between flatness and fullness, as there is a parallel sense of the phallic frame as both maker and captor of the sitter's image. Within the spell of this comparison, the chromed balls function to project the experience of phallicism into the center of the image, setting up (as in the Man Ray) a system of reiteration and echo; and this seems far more imperatively their role than that of promoting the formal values of stillness and balance. It can, of course, be objected that this comparison is tendentious. That it is a false analogy. That it suggests some kind of relationship between these two artists that cannot be there since they operate from across the rift that separates two aesthetic positions: Man Ray being a surrealist and Florence Henri being committed to an ideology of formal rigor and abstraction received initially from Leger and then from the Bauhaus. It can be argued that if there is a kind of phallicism in Henri's portrait, it is there inadvertently; she could not really have intended it. As art history becomes increasingly positivist, it holds more and more to the view that "intention is some internal, prior mental event causally connected with outward effects, which remain the evidence for its having occurred," and thus, to say that works of art are intentional objects is to say that each bit of them is separately intended.3 But, sharing neither this positivism nor this view of consciousness, I have no scruples in using the comparative method to wrest this image from the protective hold of Miss Henri's "intention" and to open it, by analogy, to a whole range of production that was taking place at the same time and in the same locale. Yet with these two images I do not mean to introduce an exercise in comparative iconography. As I said, the area of interest is far less in the contents of these photographs than it is in their frame. Which is to say that if there is any question of phallicism here, it is to be found within the whole photographic 3.

Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, New York, Scribners, 1969, pp. 226, 236.

The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism

7

enterprise of framing and thereby capturing a subject. Its conditions can be generalized way beyond the specifics of sexual imagery to a structural logic that subsumes this particular image and accounts for a wide number of decisions made by photographers of this time, both with regard to subject and to form. The name that an entirely different field of critical theory gives to this structural logic is "the economy of the supplement."4 And what I intend to reveal in the relatedness of photographic practice in France and Germany in the 1920s and '30s is a shared conception of photography as defined by the supplement. But I am getting ahead of my argument. My reason at the outset for introducing my subject by means of comparison is that I wish to invoke the comparative method as such, the comparative method as it was introduced into art-historical practice in order to focus on a wholly different object than that of intention. The comparative method was fashioned to net the illusive historical beast called style, a prey which, because it was transpersonal, was understood as being quite beyond the claims of either individual authorship or intention. This is why Wolfflin believed the lair of style to be the decorative arts rather than the domain of masterpieces, why he looked for it-Morelli-fashion-in those areas that would be the product of inattention, a lack of specific "design"-going so far as to claim that the "whole development of world views" was to be found in the history of the relationship of gables. Now it is precisely style that continues to be a vexing problem for anyone dealing with surrealist art. Commenting on the formal heterogeneity of a movement that could encompass the abstract liquifaction of Miro on the one hand, and the dry realism of Magritte or Dali on the other, William Rubin addresses this problem of style, declaring that "we cannot formulate a definition of Surrealist painting comparable in clarity with the meanings of Impressionism and Cubism."5 Yet as a scholar who has to think his way into and around the mass of material that is said to be surrealist, Rubin feels in need of what he calls an "intrinsic definition of Surrealist painting." And so he produces what he claims to be "the first such definition ever proposed." His definition is that there are two poles of surrealist endeavor-the automatist/abstract and the acatwo poles corresponding to "the Freudian twin props demic/illusionist-the of Surrealist theory, namely automatism [or free association] and dreams." Although these two pictorial modes look very unlike indeed, Rubin continues, they can be united around the concept of the irrationally conceived metaphoric image. Now, in 1925 Andre Breton began to examine the subject surrealism and 4. The seminal text is Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 1974. The references throughout this paragraph are to Rubin's attempt, at the time of the Museum of 5. Modern Art exhibition Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, of which he was curator, to produce a concise synthetic statement which would serve as a theory of surrealist style. See William Rubin, "Toward a Critical Framework," Artforum, vol. V, no. 1 (September 1966), 36.

8

OCTOBER

painting, and from the outset he characterized his material in terms of the very twin poles-automatism and dream-and the subject matter of Rubin's later definition.6 If forty years afterward Rubin was so unhappy with Breton's attempt at a synthetic statement that he had to claim to have produced the first such definition ever, it is undoubtedly because Rubin, like everyone else, has been unconvinced that Breton's was a definition in the first place. If one wishes to produce a synthesis between A and B, it is not enough simply to say, "A plus B." A synthesis is rather different from a list. And it has long been apparent that a catalogue of subject matter held in common is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce the kind of coherence one is referring to by the notion of style. If Rubin's nondefinition is a mirror-image of Breton's earlier one, this relationship is important, because it locates Breton's own theory as a source for the problem confronting all subsequent discussions. But Breton, as the most central 6. Andre Breton, "Le Surrialisme et la peinture," La Revolution surrealiste, vol. 1 (July 1925), 26-30. The complete series of essays was collected in Breton, Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor, New York, Harper & Row, Icon edition, 1972. Further references are to this translation.

Maurice Tabard. Hand and Woman. 1929.

Raoul Ubac. La Nebuleuse. 1939.

The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism

9

spokesman for surrealism, is an obstacle one must surmount; one cannot avoid him, if the issue is to deal with the movement comprehensively-as one must if a synthetic notion like style is involved. The same failure to think the formal heterogeneity of Mir6 and Magritte into something like stylistic unity plagues every effort of Breton as theoretician of the movement. Attempting to define surrealism, Breton produces instead a series of contradictions which; like the one between the linearity of Magritte and the colorism of Miro, strike one as being irreducible. Thus, Breton introduces "Surrealism and Painting" with a declaration of the absolute value of vision among the sensory modes. Rejecting the late nineteenth-century dictum that all art should aspire to the condition of music, an idea very much alive among twentieth-century abstract artists, Breton insists that "visual images attain what music never can," and he bids this great medium farewell with the words, "so may night continue to descend upon the orchestra." His hymn of praise to vision had begun, "The eye exists in its savage state. The marvels of the earth ... have as their sole witness the wild eye that traces all its colors back to the rainbow." And by this statement he is contrasting the immedi-

Brassai.Temptation of St. Anthony. 1935.

10

OCTOBER

acy of vision-its perceptual automatism, as it were-to the premeditated, reflective gait of thought. The savageness of vision is good, pure, uncontaminated by ratiocination; the calculations of reason (which Breton never fails to call "bourgeois reason") are controlling, degenerate, bad. Besides being untainted by reason, vision's primacy results from the way its objects are present to it, through an immediacy and transparency that compels belief. Indeed, Breton often presents surrealism-as-a-whole as defined by visuality. In the First Manifesto he locates the very invention of psychic automatism within the experience of hypnogogic images-that is, of half-waking, half-dreaming, visual experience. But as we know, the privileged place of vision in surrealism is immediately challenged by a medium given a greater privilege: namely, writing. Psychic automatism is itself a written form, a "scribbling on paper," a textual production. And when it is transferred to the domain of visual practice, as in the work of Andre Masson, automatism is no less understood as a kind of writing. Breton describes Masson's automatic drawings as being essentially cursive, scriptorial, the result of "this hand, enamoured of its own movement and of that alone." "Indeed," Breton writes, "the essential discovery of surrealism is that, without preconceived intention, the pen that flows in order to write and the pencil that runs in order to draw spin an infinitely precious substance."7 So, in the very essay that had begun by extolling the visual and insisting on the impossibility of imagining a "picture as being other than a window," Breton proceeds definitively to choose writing over vision, expressing his distaste for the "other road available to Surrealism," namely, "the stabilizing of dream images in the kind of still-life deception known as trompe l'oeil (and the very word 'deception' betrays the weakness of the process)."8

Now this distinction between writing and vision is one of the many antinomies that Breton speaks of wanting surrealism to dissolve in the higher synthesis of a surreality which will, in this case, "resolve the dualism of perception and representation."9 It is an old antinomy within Western culture, and one which does not simply hold these two things to be opposite forms of experience, but places one higher than the other. Perception is better, truer, because it is immediate to experience, while representation must always remain suspect because it is never anything but a copy, a re-creation in another form, a set of signs for experience. Perception gives directly onto the real, while representation is set at an unbridgeable distance from it, making reality present only in the form of substitutes, that is, through the proxies of signs. Because of its distance from the real, representation can thus be suspected of fraud. In preferring the products of a cursive automatism to those of visual, 7. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, p. 68. 8. Ibid., p. 70. 9. Andre Breton, "Oceanie" (1948), reprinted in Breton, La Cle des champs, Paris, Sagittaire, 1953, 1973 edition, p. 278.

The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism

11

imagistic depiction, Breton appears to be reversing the classical preference of vision to writing, of immediacy to dissociation. For in Breton's definition, it is the pictorial image that is suspect, a "deception," while the cursive one is true.10 Yet in some ways this apparent reversal does not really overthrow the traditional Platonic dislike of representation, because the visual imagery Breton suspects is a picture and thus the representation of a dream rather than the dream itself. Breton, therefore, continues Western culture's fear of representation as an invitation to deceit. And the truth of the cursive flow of automatist writing or drawing is less a representation of something than it is a manifestation or recording: like the lines traced on paper by the seismograph or the cardiograph. What this cursive web makes present by making visible is a direct experience of what Breton calls "rhythmic unity," which he goes on to characterize as "the absence of contradiction, the relaxation of emotional tensions due to repression, a lack of the sense of time, and the replacement of external reality by a psychic reality obeying the pleasure principle alone."" Thus the unity produced by the web of automatic drawing is akin to what Freud called the oceanic feeling-the infantile, libidinal domain of pleasure not yet constrained by civilization and its discontents. "Automatism," Breton declares, "leads us in a straight line to this 10. Thus, Breton insists that "any form of expression in which automatism does not at least advance undercover runs a grave risk of moving out of the surrealist orbit" (Surrealism and Painting, p. 68). 11. Ibid.

Roger Parry. Illustration

Banalite, 1928.

for Leon-Paul

Fargue,

J.-A. Boiffard.Illustration for Andre Breton, Nadja, 1928.

region," and the region he has in mind is the unconscious.12 With this directness, automatism makes the unconscious, the oceanic feeling, present. Automatism may be writing, but it is not, like the rest of the written signs of Western culture, representation. It is a kind of presence, the direct presence of the artist's inner self.'3 This sense of automatism as a manifestation of the innermost self, and thus not representation at all, is also contained within Breton's description of automatic writing as "spoken thought." Thought is not a representation but is that which is utterly transparent to the mind, immediate to experience, untainted by the distance and exteriority of signs. But this commitment to automatism and writing as a special modality of presence, and a consequent dislike of representation as a cheat, is not consistent in Breton, who contradicts himself on this matter as he contradicts himself on almost every point in surrealist theory. In many places we find Breton declaring, "It makes no difference whether there remains a perceptible difference between beings which are evoked and beings which are present, since I dismiss such differences out of hand at every moment of my life."14And as we will see, the welcome Breton Ibid. 12. In Breton's words, "The emotional intensity stored up within the poet or painter at a given 13. moment...." (Surrealism and Painting, p. 68). 14. Ibid., p. 2.

Left: Man Ray. Untitled (rayograph). 1923.

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J:"^.^ >Right:

Max Ernst. A Gala. 1922.

accords to representation, to signs, is very great indeed, for representation is the very core of his definition of Convulsive Beauty, and Convulsive Beauty is another term for the Marvelous, which is the great talismanic concept at the heart of surrealism itself. The contradictions about the priorities of vision and representation, presence and sign, are typical of the confusions within surrealist theory. And these contradictions are focused all the more clearly if one reflects on Breton's position on photography. Given his aversion to "the real forms of real objects," and his insistence on another order of experience, we would expect Breton to despise photography. As the quintessentially realist medium, photography would have to be rejected by the poet who insisted that "for a total revision of real values, the plastic work of art will either refer to a purely internal model or will cease to exist."15 But in fact Breton has a curious tolerance for photography. Of the first two artists that he claimed for surrealism proper-Max Ernst and Man Ray-one of them was a photographer. And if we imagine that he accepted Man Ray on the 15. Ibid., p. 4. Breton goes on to express his distaste for what he calls photography's positivist values, asserting that "in the final analysis it is not the faithful image that we aim to retain of something" (p. 32).

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OCTOBER

Brassai. Illustration for Andre Breton, L'Amour fou, 1937.

basis of the presumed anti-realism of the rayographs, this is in fact not so. Breton protested against characterizing the rayographs as abstract or making any distinction between Man Ray's cameraless photography and that produced with a normal lens.16 But even more than his support for specific photographers, Breton's placement of photography at the very heart of surrealist publication is startling. In 1925 he had asked, "and when will all the books that are worth anything stop being illustrated with drawings and appear only with photographs?"17 This was not an idle question, for Breton's next three major works were indeed "illustrated" with photographs. Nadja (1928) bore images almost exclusively by Boiffard; Les Vases communicants (1932) has a few film stills and photographic documents; and the illustrative material for L'Amour fou (1937) was divided for the most part between Man Ray and Brassai. Within the high oneiric atmosphere of these books, the presence of the photographs strikes one as extremely eccentric-an appendage to the text that is as mysterious in its motivation as the images themselves are banal. In writing about surrealism Walter Benjamin focuses on the curious presence of these "illustrations." In such passages photography intervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets, gates, squares of the city into illustrations of a trashy novel, draws off the banal obviousness of this ancient architecture to inject it with the most pristine intensity towards the events described, to which, as in old chambermaids' books, word-for-word quotations with page numbers refer.'8 But photography's presumed eccentricity to surrealist thought and practice must itself be reconsidered. For it was not injected into the very heart of the surrealist text only in the work of Breton; it was the major visual resource of the surrealist periodicals. The founding publication of the movement, La Revolution surrealiste, bore no visual relation to the vanguardist typographic extravaganzas of the Dada broadsheets. Rather, at the instigation of Pierre Naville, it was modeled specifically on the scientific magazine La Nature. Conceived almost exclusively as the publication of documents, the first issues of La Revolution surrealiste carried two types of verbal testimony: specimens of automatic writing and records of dreams. Sober columns of test carrying this data are juxtaposed The protest was against attitudes like that of Ribemont-Dessaignes, who, in introducing a 1924 16. Man Ray exhibition, honored "these abstract photographs ...that put us in contact with a new universe." This question had begun, "The photographic print... is permeated with an emotive value that 17. makes it a supremely precious article of exchange" (Surrealism and Painting, p. 32). Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," in Reflec18. tions, trans. Edmund Jephcott, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, p. 183.

1I.

: flw n0rossa-l A PARIS LA TOUR SAINT-JACQUES (p. 55) CsIANCEAINTE...

with visual material, most of it Man Ray's photographs, all of it having the documentary impact of illustrative evidence. Naville's hostility to the traditional fine arts was well known, and the third issue of the journal carried his declaration: "I have no tastes except distaste. Masters, master-crooks, smear your canvases. Everyone knows there is no surrealist painting. Neither the marks of a pencil abandoned to the accident of gesture, nor the image retracing the forms of the dream ...."

But spectacles, he insists, are

acceptable. "Memory and the pleasure of the eyes," Naville writes, "that is the whole aesthetic." The list of things conducive to this visual pleasure includes streets, kiosks, automobiles, cinema, and photographs.l9 One of the effects of the extraordinary 1978 Hayward Gallery exhibition, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, was to begin to force attention away from the pictorial and sculptural production that surrounds surrealism and onto the periodicals, demonstrating the way that journals formed the armature of these 19. Pierre Naville, "Beaux-Arts," La Revolution surrealiste, vol. 1 (April 1925), 27. It was in deference to Naville and others that, when later in the year Breton launched his support of the enterprise of the fine arts, he had nevertheless to begin by referring to "that lamentable expedient which is painting."

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The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism

17

movements. Witnessing the parade of surrealist magazines-La Revolution surrealiste, Le Surrealisme au service de la revolution, Documents, Minotaure, Marie, The International Surrealist Bulletin, VVV, Le Surrealisme, meme, and many others-one becomes convinced that they more than anything else are the true objects produced by surrealism. And with this conviction comes an inescapable association to the most important statement yet made about the vocation of photography: Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and from there to one of the phenomena that Benjamin speaks of in the course of sketching the new terrain of art-after-photography, namely, the illustrated magazine, which is to say, photograph plus text. At the very moment when Benjamin was making his analysis, the surrealists were quite independently putting it into practice. And that they were doing so is something that traditional art history, with its eye focused on works of fine art, has tended to miss. If we add these two things together: namely the primacy the surrealists themselves gave to the illustrative photograph, and the failure of stylistic concepts derived from the formal, pictorial code-distinctions like linear/painterly or representational/abstract-to forge any kind of unity from the apparent diversity of surrealist production, the failure to arrive, that is, at what Rubin called an intrinsic definition of surrealism, we might be led to the possibility that it is within the photographic rather than the pictorial code that such a definition is to be found-that is, that issues of surrealist heterogeneity will be resolved around the semiological functions of photography rather than the formal properties operating the traditional art-historical classifications of style. What is at stake, then, is the relocation of photography from its eccentric position relative to surrealism to one that is absolutely central-definitive, one might say. Now, it may be objected that in turning to photography for a principle of unification, one is simply replacing one set of problems with another. For the same visual heterogeneity reigns within the domain of surrealist photography as within its painting and sculpture. Quickly examining the range of surrealist photographic forms, we can think of 1) the absolutely banal images Boiffard created for Breton's Nadja; 2) the less banal but still straight photographs made by Boiffard for Documents in 1929, such as the ones made for Georges Bataille's essay on the big toe; 3) still "straight," but raising certain questions about the status of photographic evidence, the documentations of sculptural objects that have no existence apart from the photograph, which were immediately dismantled after being recorded (examples are by Hans Bellmer and Man Ray); moving, then, into the great range of processes used to manipulate the image; 4) the frequent use of negative printing; 5) the recourse to multiple exposure or sandwich printing to produce montage effects; 6) various kinds of manipulations with mirrors, as in the Kertesz Distortion series; 7) the two processes made famous by Man Ray, namely solarization and the cameraless image of the rayograph-the latter having a rather obvious appeal to surrealist sensibilities because of the cursive, graphic quality of J.-A. Boiffard. Illustration for Georges Bataille, "Le Gros Orteil," Documents, no. 6, 1929.

Man Ray. Man. 1918.

Hans Bellmer.La Poupee. 1934.

the images against their flattened, abstracted ground and because of the psychological status these ghosts of objects seem to have attained-Ribemont-Dessaignes calling them "these objects of dreams," Man Ray himself locating them more within the domain of memory by their effect of "recalling the event more or less clearly, like the undisturbed ashes of an object consumed by flames";208) the technique Raoul Ubac called bruilage, in which the emulsion is burned (which literalizes Man Ray's evocative description of the rayograph), the process having arisen from an attempt to assimilate photography fully into the domain of automatic practice, just as the series of graphic manipulations that Brassai made in the mid-1930s attempted to open photographic information to a direct relationship with a kind of automatist, drawn image. Long as this list is, there is one form still missing from it, namely, photomontage. This form, pioneered by Dada, was rarely employed by surrealist photographers, though it was attractive to certain of the surrealist poets, who made photomontages themselves. One important example is Andre Breton's 1938 self-portrait entitled Automatic Writing. Breton's self-portrait, fabricated from various photographic elements, is not only an example of photomontage-a process distinct from combination printing insofar as the term refers, for the most part, to the cutting up and reassembling of already printed material-but it is also an instance of construction en abyme. It is the microscope as representative of a lensed instrument that places within the field of the representation another representation that reduplicates an aspect of the first, namely the photographic process by which the parts were originally made. And if 20.

Man Ray, Exhibition Rayographs 1921-1928, Stuttgart, L.G.A., 1963.

Andre Kertesz. Distortion. 1933.

Breton does this, it is to set up the intellectual rhyme between psychic automatism as a process of mechanical recording and the automatism associated with the camera-"that blind instrument," as Breton says. His own association of these two mechanical means of registration occurs as early as 1920, when he declared that "automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the 19th century, is a true photography of thought."21 But if an icon of the lens's automatism is placed inside this image entitled Ecriture-Automatique, what, we might ask, of the concept of writing itself? Is that not entirely foreign to the purely visual experience of photography-a visuality itself symbolized as heightened and intensified by the presence of the microscope? Faced with this image and its caption, are we not confronted with yet another instance of the constant juxtaposition of writing and vision, a juxtaposition that leads nowhere but to theoretical confusion? It is my intention to show that this time it leads not to confusion but to clarity, to exactly the kind of dialectical synthesis of opposites that Breton had set out as the program for surrealism. For what I wish to claim is that the notion of ecriture is pictured inside this work through the very fabric of the image's making, that is, through the medium of montage. Throughout the avant-garde in the 1920s, photomontage was understood as a means of infiltrating the mere picture of reality with its meaning. This was achieved through juxtaposition: of image with image, or image with drawing, or image with text. John Heartfield said, "A photograph can, by the addition of an 21. In a text introducing Ernst's Fatagaga photomontages, reprinted in Max Ernst, Beyond Painting and Other Writings by the Artist and His Friends,New York, WittenbornSchultz, 1948, p. 177.

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OCTOBER

unimportant spot of color, become a photomontage, a work of art of a special kind."22 And what kind this was to be is explained by Tretyakov when he wrote, "If the photograph, under the influence of the text (or caption), expresses not simply the fact which it shows, but also the social tendency expressed by the fact, then this is already a photomontage."23 Aragon seconded this insistence on a sense of reality bearing its own interpretation when he described Heartfield's work, "As he was playing with the fire of appearance, reality took fire around him.... The scraps of photographs that he formerly manoeuvred for the pleasure of stupefaction, under his fingers began to signify."24 This insistence on signification as a political act, on a revision of photography away from the surfaces of the real, was preached by Bertolt Brecht, who said, "A photograph of the Krupp works or GEC yields almost nothing about these institutions.... Therefore something has actively to be constructed, something artificial, something set-up."25 This was a position that was uncongenial to the 22. John Heartfield, Photomontages of the Nazi Period, New York, Universe Books, 1977, p. 26. Ibid. 23. Louis Aragon, "John Heartfield et la beaute revolutionnaire" (1935), reprinted in Aragon, Les 24. Collages, Paris, Hermann, 1965, pp. 78-79. In Walter Benjamin, "A Short History of Photography," trans. Stanley Mitchell, Screen, vol. 13, 25. no. 1 (Spring 1972), 24.

The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism

21

proto-surrealist Max Ernst, who dismissed the Berlin dadaists with the words, "C'est vraiment allemand. Les intellectuels allemands ne peuvent pas faire ni caca ni pipi sans des ideologies."26 But photomontage was nonetheless the medium of the Fatagagas and remained an abiding principal in Ernst's later work; and when Aragon wrote about the effect of the separate elements in Ernst's montages he compared them to "words."27By this he refers not only to the transparency of each signifying element (by contrast with the opacity of the pieces of cubist collages), but also to the experience of each element as a separate unit which, like a word, is conditioned by its placement within the syntagmatic chain of the sentence, is controlled by the condition of syntax. Whether we think of syntax as temporal-as the pure succession of one word after another within the unreeling of the spoken sentence; or whether we think of it as spatial-as the serial progression of separate units on the printed page; syntax in either dimension reduces to the basic exteriority of one unit to another. Traditional linguistics contemplates this pure exteriority as that fissure or gap or blank that exists between signs, separating them one from the other, just as it also

26. 27.

|

Cited in Dawn Ades, Photomontage, New York, Pantheon, 1976, p. 19. Louis Aragon, "La Peinture au defi," in Les Collages, p. 44.

C

' 'u, ) i .

,

Far left: Andre Breton. L'Ecriture automatique. 1938.

14

IiQsC"

~ !'Z# <'f

I

Left:John Heartfield.Durch Licht zur Nacht. May10, 1933.

This page: Raoul Hausman. ABCD. 1923-4.

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OCTOBER

thinks of the units of the sign itself as riven into two parts-one irremediably outside or exterior to the other. The two parts are signified and signifier-the first the meaning of the sign, a meaning transparent to thought held within consciousness; the second, the mark or sound that is the sign's material vehicle. "The order of the signified," Derrida writes, stating the position of traditional linguistics, "is never contemporary, is at best the subtly discrepant inverse or parallel-discrepant by the time of a breath-from the order of the signifier."28For Derrida, of course, spacing is not an exteriority that signals the outside boundaries of meaning: one signified's end before another's onset. Rather, spacing is radicalized as the precondition for meaning as such, and the outsideness of spacing is revealed as already constituting the condition of the "inside." This movement, in which spacing "invaginates" presence, will be shown to illuminate the distinction between surrealist photography and its dada predecessor. In dada montage the experience of blanks or spacing is very strong, for between the silhouettes of the photographed forms the white page announces itself as the medium that both combines and separates them. The white page is not

28.

Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 18.

This page: Hannah Hoch. Cut with the Cake-Knife. 1919. Right: Man Ray. Lilies. 1930. Far right: Roger Parry. Illustration for Leon-Paul Fargue,Banalite, 1928.

ili

The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism

23

the opaque surface of cubist collage, asserting the formal and material unity of the visual support; the white page is rather the fluid matrix within which each representation of reality is secured in isolation, held within a condition of exteriority, of syntax, of spacing. The photographic image, thus "spaced," is deprived of one of the most powerful of photography's many illusions. It is robbed of a sense of presence. Photography's vaunted capture of a moment in time is the seizure and freezing of presence. It is the image of simultaneity, of the way that everything within a given space at a given moment is present to everything else; it is a declaration of the seamless integrity of the real. The photograph carries on one continuous surface the trace or imprint of all that vision captures in one glance. The photographic image is not only a trophy of this reality, but a document of its unity as thatwhich-was-present-at-one-time. But spacing destroys simultaneous presence: for it shows things sequentially, either one after another or external to one anotheroccupying separate cells. It is spacing that makes it clear-as it was to Heartfield, Tretyakov, Brecht, Aragon-that we are not looking at reality, but at the world infested by interpretation or signification, which is to say, reality distended by the gaps or blanks which are the formal preconditions of the sign. Now, as I said, the surrealist photographers rarely used photomontage. Their interest was in the seamless unity of the print, with no intrusions of the

L -

25

The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism

white page. By preserving the body of the print intact, they could make it read photographically, that is to say, in direct contact with reality. But without exception the surrealist photographers infiltrated the body of this print, this single page, with spacing. Sometimes they mimicked photomontage by means of combination printing. But that is the least interesting of their strategies, because it does not create, forcefully enough, an experience of the real itself as sign, the real fractured by spacing. The cloisonne of the solarized print is to a greater extent testimony to this kind of cleavage in reality. As are the momentarily unintelligible gaps created by negative printing. But more important than anything else is the strategy of doubling. For it is doubling that produces the formal rhythm of spacing-the two-step that banishes the unitary condition of the moment, that creates within the moment an experience of fission. For it is doubling that elicits the notion that to an original has been added its copy. The double is the simulacrum, the second, the representative of the original. It comes after the first, and in this following, it can only exist as figure, or image. But in being seen in conjunction with the original, the double destroys the pure singularity of the first. Through duplication, it opens the original to the effect of difference, of deferral, of one-thing-after-another, or within another: of multiples burgeoning within the same. This sense of deferral, of opening reality to the "interval of a breath," we have been calling (following Derrida) spacing. But doubling does something else

B'

Top left: Man Ray. Published in La Revolution surrialiste, no. 1 (1924). Lower left: Frederick Sommer. Illustration for VVV (1944). This page: Bill Brandt. Perspective of Nudes.

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besides the transmutation of presence into succession. It marks the first in the chain as a signifying element: it transmutes raw matter into the conventionalized form of the signifier. Levi-Strauss describes the importance of pure phonemic doubling in the onset of linguistic experience in infancy-the child's dawning knowledge of signs. Even at the babbling stage the phoneme group /pa/ can be heard. But the difference between /pa/ and /papa/ does not reside simply in reduplication: /pa/ is a noise, /papa/ is a word. The reduplication indicates intent on the part of the speaker; it endows the second syllable with a function different from that which would have been performed by the first separately, or in the form of a potentially limitless series of identical sounds /papapapa/ produced by mere babbling. Therefore the second /pa/ is not a repetition of the first, nor has it the same signification. It is a sign that, like itself, the first /pa/ too was a sign, and that as a pair they fall into the category of signifiers, not of things signified.29 Repetition is thus the indicator that the "wild sounds" of babbling have been made deliberate, intentional; and that what they intend is meaning. Doubling is in this sense the "signifier of signification."30 From the perspective of formed language, the phonemes /pa/ or /ma/ seem less like wild sounds and more like verbal elements in potentia. But if we think of the infant's production of gutturals and glottal stops, and other sounds that do not form a part of spoken English, we have a stronger sense of this babbling as the raw material of sonic reality. Thus /pa/ moving to /papa/ seems less disconnected from the case of photographic doubling, where the material of the image is the world in front of the camera. As I said above, surrealist photography exploits the special connection to reality with which all photography is endowed. For photography is an imprint or transfer off the real; it is a photochemically processed trace causally connected to that thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to that of fingerprints or footprints or the rings of water that cold glasses leave on tables. The photograph is thus generically distinct from painting or sculpture or drawing. On the family tree of images it is closer to palm prints, death masks, the Shroud of Turin, or the tracks of gulls on beaches. For technically and semiologically speaking, drawings and paintings are icons, while photographs are indexes. Given this special status with regard to the real, being, that is, a kind of deposit of the real itself, the manipulations wrought by the surrealist

Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. J. and D. Weightman, New York, Harper 29. & Row, 1970, pp. 339-340. Ibid. See Craig Owens, "Photography en abyme," October, no. 5 (Summer 1978), 73-88, for 30. another use of this passage in the analysis of photography.

Hans Bellmer. La Poupee. 1934. Maurice Tabard. Solarized Guitar. 1933.

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photographers-the spacings and doublings-are intended to register the spacings and doublings of that very reality of which this photograph is merely the faithful trace. In this way the photographic medium is exploited to produce a paradox: the paradox of reality constituted as sign-or presence transformed into absence, into representation, into spacing, into writing. Now this is the move that lies at the very heart of surrealist thinking, for it is precisely this experience of reality as representation that constitutes the notion of the Marvelous or of Convulsive Beauty-the key concepts of surrealism.31 Towards the beginning of L'Amour fou there is a section that Breton had published on its own under the title "Beauty Will Be Convulsive...." In this manifesto Breton characterizes Convulsive Beauty in terms of three basic types of example. The first falls under the general case of mimicry-or those instances in nature when one thing imitates another-the most familiar, perhaps, being those markings on the wings of moths that imitate eyes. Breton is enormously attracted to mimicry, as were all the surrealists, Documents having, for example, published Blossfeldt's photographs of plant life imitating the volutes and flutings of classical architecture. In "Beauty Will Be Convulsive" the instances of mimicry Breton uses are the coral imitations of plants on the Great Barrier Reef and "The Imperial Mantle," from a grotto near Montpellier, where a wall of quartz offers the spectacle of natural carving, producing the image of drapery "which forever defies that of statuary." Mimicry is thus an instance of the natural production of signs, of one thing in nature contorting itself into a representation of another. Breton's second example is "the expiration of movement"-the experience of something that should be in motion but has been stopped, derailed, or, as Duchamp would have said, "delayed." In this regard Breton writes, "I am sorry not to be able to reproduce, among the illustrations to this text, a photograph of a very handsome locomotive after it had been abandoned for many years to the delirium of a virgin forest."32 That Breton should have wanted to show a photograph of this object is compelling because the very idea of stop-motion is intrinsically photographic. The convulsiveness, then, the arousal in front of the object, is to a perception of it detached from the continuum of its natural existence, a detachment which deprives the locomotive of some part of its physical self and turns it into a sign of the reality it no longer possesses. The still photograph of this stilled train would thus be a representation of an object already constituted as a representation. Breton's third example consists of the found-object or found verbal instances of objective chance-where an emissary from the fragment-both external world carries a message informing the recipient of his own desire. The found-object is a sign of that desire. The particular object Breton uses at the 31. Louis Aragon's 1925 definition of the Marvelous reads, "Le merveilleux, c'est la contradiction qui apparait dans le reel" ("Idees," La Revolution surrealiste, vol. I [April 1925] 30). Andre Breton, L'Amour fou, Paris, Gallimard, 1937, p. 13. 32.

The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism

29

opening of L'Amour fou is a perfect demonstration of Convulsive Beauty's condition as sign. The object is a slipper-spoon that Breton found in a flea market, and which he recognized as a fulfillment of the wish spoken by the automatic phrase that had begun running through his mind some months before-the phrase cendrier Cendrillon, or Cinderella ashtray. The flea-market object became something that signified for him as he began to see it as an extraordinary mise-en-abyme: a chain of reduplications to infinity in which the spoon and handle of the object was seen as the front and last of a shoe of which the little carved slipper was the heel. Then that slipper was imagined as having for its heel another slipper, and so on to infinity. Breton read the natural writing of this chain of reduplicated slippers as signifying his own desire for love and thus as the sign that begins the quest of L'Amour fou.33 If we are to generalize the aesthetic of surrealism, the concept of Convulsive Beauty is at the core of that aesthetic: reducing to an experience of reality transformed into representation. Surreality is, we could say, nature convulsed into a kind of writing. The special access that photography has to this experience is its privileged connection to the real. The manipulations then available to we have been calling doubling and spacing-appear to photography-what document these convulsions. The photographs are not interpretations of reality, decoding it, as in Heartfield's photomontages. They are presentations of that very reality as configured, or coded, or written. The experience of nature as sign, or nature as representation, comes "naturally" then to photography. It extends, as well, to that domain most inherently photographic, which is that of the framing 33.

Ibid., pp. 35-41.

PXETIT S-0.7It:IuR

Man Ray. Illustration for Andre Breton, L'Amour fou, 1937.

FATiSANT

(COP

A

s3IviNo?JOAN1saIfIUls

The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism

31

edge of the image experienced as cut or cropped. But I would add, though there is no space here to expand on it, that what unites all surrealist production is precisely this experience of nature as representation, physical matter as writing. This is of course not a morphological coherence, but a semiological one. No account of surrealist photography would be complete if it could not incorporate the unmanipulated images that figure in the movement's publications-works like the Boiffard big toes, or the "Involuntary Sculptures" photographed by Brassai for Salvador Dali, or the straight image of a hatted figure by Man Ray made for Minotaure. Because it is this type that is closest to the movement's heart. But the theoretical apparatus by which to assimilate this genre of photograph has already been developed. And that is the concept of spacing. Inside the image, spacing can be generated by the cloisonne of solarization or the use of found frames to interrupt or displace segments of reality. But at the very boundary of the image the camera frame which crops or cuts the represented element out of reality-at-large can be seen as another example of spacing. Spacing is the indication of a break in the simultaneous experience of the real, a rupture that issues into sequence. Photographic cropping is always experienced as a rupture in the continuous fabric of reality. But surrealist photography puts enormous pressure on that frame to make it itself read as a sign-an empty sign it is true, but an integer in the calculus of meaning: a signifier of signification. The frame announces that between the part of reality that was cut away and this part there is a difference; and that this segment which the frame frames is an example of nature-as-representation, nature-as-sign. As it signals that experience of reality the camera frame also controls it, configures it. This it does by point-ofview, as in the Man Ray example, or by focal length, as in the extreme close-ups of the Dali. And in both these instances what the camera frames and thereby makes visible is the automatic writing of the world: the constant, uninterrupted production of signs. Dali's images are of those nasty pieces of paper like bus tickets and theater stubs that we roll into little columns in our pockets, or those pieces of eraser that we unconsciously knead-these are what his camera produces through the enlargements that he publishes as involuntary sculpture. Man Ray's photograph is one of several to accompany an essay by Tristan Tzara about the unconscious production of sexual imagery throughout all aspects of culture-this particular one being the design of hats. The frame announces the camera's ability to find and isolate what we could call the world's constant writing of erotic symbols, its ceaseless automatism. In this capacity the frame can itself be glorified, represented, as in the photograph by Man Ray that I introduced at the outset. Or it can simply be there, silently operating as spacing, as in Brassai's seizure of automatic production in his series on graffiti. And now, with this experience of the frame, we arrive at the supplement. Throughout Europe in the twenties and thirties, camera-seeing was exalted as a special form of vision: the New Vision, Moholy-Nagy called it. From the Inkhuk Brassai. Photographs for Salvador Dali, Sculptures Involontaires. Published in Minotaure (1933).

OCTOBER

32

to the Bauhaus to the ateliers of Montparnasse, the New Vision was understood in the same way. As Moholy explained it, human eyesight was, simply, defective, weak, impotent. "Helmholtz," Moholy explained, "used to tell his pupils that if an optician were to succeed in making a human eye and brought it to him for his approval, he would be bound to say: 'This is a clumsy piece of work.'" But the invention of the camera has made up for this deficiency so that now "we may say that we see the world with different eyes."34 These, of course, are camera-eyes. They see faster, sharper, at stranger angles, closer-to, microscopically, with a transposition of tonalities, with the penetration of X ray, and with access to the multiplication of images that makes possible the writing of association and memory. Camera-seeing is thus an extraordinary extension of normal vision, one that supplements the deficiencies of the naked eye. The camera covers and arms this nakedness, it acts as a kind of prosthesis, enlarging the capacity of the human body. But in increasing the ways in which the world can be present to vision, the 34.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, Chicago, 1947, p. 206.

Man Ray. Illustration for Tzara, "D'un Certain Automatisme du Gout," Minotaure (1933).

Umbo. Self-Portrait. c. 1930.

camera mediates that presence, gets between the viewer and the world, shapes reality according to its terms. Thus what supplements and enlarges human vision also supplants the viewer himself; the camera is the aid who comes to usurp. The experience of the camera as prosthesis and the image of it figuring in the field of the photograph is everywhere to be found in the New Vision.35 In Umbo's self-portrait the camera is represented by a cast shadow whose relationship to the photographer's eyes involves the interesting paradox of all supplementary devices, where the very thing that extends, displaces as well. In this image the camera that 35.

See my "Jump over the Bauhaus," October, no. 15 (Winter 1980), 103-110.

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literally expands Umbo's vision, allowing him to see himself, also masks his eyes, nearly extinguishing them in shadow. Florence Henri's self-portrait functions in similar ways. There the camera's frame is revealed as that which masters or dominates the subject, and the phallic shape she constructs for its symbol is continuous with the form that most of world culture has used for the expression of supremacy. The supplement is thus experienced emblematically, through the internalized representation of the camera frame as an image of mastery: camera-seeing essentialized as a superior power of focus and selection from within the inchoate sprawl of the real. Throughout Europe in the 1920s there was the experience of something supplemental added to reality. That this was coherently experienced and actively configured in the photography made with the supplementary instrument accounts for the incredible coherence of European photography of this period-not, as is sometimes suggested, its diffraction into different sects. But it is my thesis that what the surrealists in particular added to that reality was the vision of it as representation or sign. Reality was both extended and replaced or supplanted by that master supplement which is writing: the paradoxical writing of the photograph.

Flowers of Evil New Translations of Baudelaire by Richard Howard

A Martyr Drawing by an Unknown Master Among decanters, ivories and gems, sumptuous divans with gold-brocaded silks and fragrant gowns trailing languid folds, where lilies sorrowing in crystal urns exhale their final sigh and where, as if the room were under glass, the air is pestilent, a headless corpse emits a stream of blood the sopping pillows shed onto thirsty sheets which drink it up as though it flowed through sand. Pale as the visions which our captive eyes discover in the dark, the head, enveloped in its sombre mane, emeralds still in its ears, watches from a stool, a thing apart, and from the eyes rolled back to whiteness blank as daybreak emanates an alabaster stare. The carcass sprawling naked on the bed displays without a qualm the splendid cynosure which prodigal Nature bestowed-betrayed;

36

pink with gold clocks, one stocking clingsa souvenir, it seems;

the garter, gleaming like a secret eye, darts a jewelled glance. Doubled by a full-length portrait drawn in the same provocative pose, the strange demeanor of this solitude reveals love's darker sideprofligate practices and guilty joys, embraces bound to please the swarm of naughty angels frolicking in the curtains overhead; yet judging from the narrow elegance of her shoulders sloping down past the serpentine curve of her waist to the almost bony hips, she still is young!-What torment in her soul, what tedium that stung her senses gave this body to the throng of wandering, lost desires? In spite of so much love, did the vengeful man she could not, living, sate assuage on her inert and docile flesh the measure of his lust? And did he, gripping her blood-stiffened hair lift up that dripping head and press on her cold teeth one final kiss? The sullied corpse is still. -Far from a scornful world of jeering crowds and peering magistrates, sleep in peace, lovely enigma, sleep in your mysterious tomb:

OCTOBER

Flowers of Evil

37

your master roves, and your immortal form keeps vigil when he sleeps; like you, no doubt, he will be constant too, and faithful unto death.

A Voyage to Cythera My heart flew up like a bird before the mast, circled the shrouds and mounted free and clear; the ship rolled on beneath a cloudless sky like an angel drunk on the glory of the sun. What is that dreary island-the black one there? Cythera, someone says, the one in the song where good old lechers go when they die. Look: it isn't much of a place, as you can see. Island of feasting hearts and secret joys! Like a fragrance, the voluptuary ghost of Aphrodite floats above your shores, inflaming minds with languor and with love. Island green with myrtle, rich with bloom, revered forever by all mortal men from whose adoring hearts wells up a sigh soft as the fallen petals of a rose or the relentless moan of doves .. . Cythera now was nothing more than a thistled promontory vexed by the wheeling gulls' indignant cries. Yet there was something... I could see it now; no temple sheltered by its sacred grove, no priestess gathering blossoms, her loose robe half-opened to the breezes as they passed, her flesh ignited by a secret fire;

Flowers of Evil

37

your master roves, and your immortal form keeps vigil when he sleeps; like you, no doubt, he will be constant too, and faithful unto death.

A Voyage to Cythera My heart flew up like a bird before the mast, circled the shrouds and mounted free and clear; the ship rolled on beneath a cloudless sky like an angel drunk on the glory of the sun. What is that dreary island-the black one there? Cythera, someone says, the one in the song where good old lechers go when they die. Look: it isn't much of a place, as you can see. Island of feasting hearts and secret joys! Like a fragrance, the voluptuary ghost of Aphrodite floats above your shores, inflaming minds with languor and with love. Island green with myrtle, rich with bloom, revered forever by all mortal men from whose adoring hearts wells up a sigh soft as the fallen petals of a rose or the relentless moan of doves .. . Cythera now was nothing more than a thistled promontory vexed by the wheeling gulls' indignant cries. Yet there was something... I could see it now; no temple sheltered by its sacred grove, no priestess gathering blossoms, her loose robe half-opened to the breezes as they passed, her flesh ignited by a secret fire;

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but as we cleared the coastline-close enough to scare the shorebirds with our flapping sailswe saw what it was: black against the sky, no cypress but a branching gallows-tree. Perched on their provender, ferocious birds were ravaging the ripe corpse hanging there, driving their filthy beaks like cruel drills into each cranny of its rotten flesh; the eyes were holes, a coil of heavy guts the greedy creatures, had peck by vicious

and from the ruined groin had tumbled outgorged on hideous sweets, peck castrated him.

Down below, among a whining pack that waited, muzzles lifted, for their share, some bigger beast was prowling back and forth like a hangman huge among his underlings. Inhabitant of Cythera, rapture's child, how silently you suffered these affronts in expiation of your shameful rites and sins that have proscribed your burial. Ludicrous carcass! I hung there with you, and at the sight of your insulted limbs I tasted, like a vomit in my mouth, the bitter tide of age-old sufferings. Knowing what you were and what you are, I felt each saber-tooth and jabbing beak of jet-black panthers and of carrion-crows that once so loved to lacerate my flesh. . . . The sky was suave, the sea serene; for me from now on everything was bloody and black as if in a shroud -the worse for me-and my heart lay buried in this allegory.

Flowers of Evil

39

On Aphrodite's island, all I found was a symbolic gallows where my image hung... Lord give me strength and courage to behold my body and my heart without disgust!

Lesbos Mother of Latin games and Greek delights, Lesbos! where the kisses, languid or rapt, cool as melons, burning as the sun, adorn the dark and gild the shining days given to Latin games and Greek delights; Lesbos, where the kisses, like cascades, teeming and turbulent yet secret, deep, plunge undaunted into unplumbed gulfs and gather there, gurgling and sobbing till they overflow in ever-new cascades! Where Phryne's breasts are judged by her own kind and every sigh is answered... by a kiss; where Aphrodite envies Sappho's rite at shrines as favored as the Cyprian's own, and Phryne's judges never are unkind; Lesbos, where on suffocating nights before their mirrors, girls with hollow eyes caress their ripened limbs in sterile joy and taste the fruit of their nubility on Lesbos during suffocating nights! What if old Plato's scowling eyes condemn? Kisses absolve you by their sweet excess whose subtleties are inexhaustible! Queen of the tender Archipelago, pursue what Plato's scowling eyes condemn

Flowers of Evil

39

On Aphrodite's island, all I found was a symbolic gallows where my image hung... Lord give me strength and courage to behold my body and my heart without disgust!

Lesbos Mother of Latin games and Greek delights, Lesbos! where the kisses, languid or rapt, cool as melons, burning as the sun, adorn the dark and gild the shining days given to Latin games and Greek delights; Lesbos, where the kisses, like cascades, teeming and turbulent yet secret, deep, plunge undaunted into unplumbed gulfs and gather there, gurgling and sobbing till they overflow in ever-new cascades! Where Phryne's breasts are judged by her own kind and every sigh is answered... by a kiss; where Aphrodite envies Sappho's rite at shrines as favored as the Cyprian's own, and Phryne's judges never are unkind; Lesbos, where on suffocating nights before their mirrors, girls with hollow eyes caress their ripened limbs in sterile joy and taste the fruit of their nubility on Lesbos during suffocating nights! What if old Plato's scowling eyes condemn? Kisses absolve you by their sweet excess whose subtleties are inexhaustible! Queen of the tender Archipelago, pursue what Plato's scowling eyes condemn

40

and win your pardon for the martyrdom eternally inflicted on ambitious hearts that yearn, far from us, for a radiant smile they dimly glimpse on the rim of other skiesyou win your pardon for that martyrdom! Which of the Gods will dare to disapprove and chide the pallor of your studious brow? Until Olympian scales have weighed the flood of tears your rivers pour into the sea, which of the Gods will dare to disapprove? What use to us are laws of right and wrong? High-hearted virgins, honor of the Isles, your altars are august as any: love will laugh at Heaven as it laughs at Hell! What use to us are laws of right and wrong? For Lesbos has chosen me among all men to sing the secrets of her budding grove; from childhood I have shared the mystery of frenzied laughter laced with sullen tears, and therefore am I chosen among men to keep my lookout high on Sappho's Cliff, vigilant as a sleepless sentinel gazing night and day for the bark or brig whose distant outline shimmers on the blue; I keep my lookout high on Sappho's Cliff to discover if the sea is merciful and if, out of the sobbing breakers' surge, there will return to Lesbos, which forgives, the cherished corpse of Sappho who left us to discover if the sea is mercifulof virile Sappho, the lover and the poet, fairer than Aphrodite whose blue gaze

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Flowers of Evil

surrenders to the sombre radiance of ash-encircled burning eyes-the eyes of virile Sappho, the lover and the poet! Fairer than the Anadyomene scattering her bright serenity and all the treasures of her golden youth upon old Ocean dazzled by his childfairer than the Anadyomene was Sappho on the day she broke her vow and died apostate to her own command, her lovely body forfeit to a brute whose arrogance avenged the sacrilege of Sappho, lost the day she broke her vow ... And from that time to this, Lesbos laments. Heedless of the homage of the world, she drugs herself each night with cries of pain that rend the skies above her empty shores, and from that time to this Lesbos laments!

Damned

Pensive as cattle resting on the beach, they stare out to sea; their hands and feet creep toward each other imperceptibly and touch at last, hesitant then fierce. How eagerly some, beguiled by secrets shared, follow a talkative stream among the trees, spelling out their timid childhood's love and carving initials in the tender wood; others pace as slow and grave as nuns among the rocks where Anthony beheld

Women

41

Flowers of Evil

surrenders to the sombre radiance of ash-encircled burning eyes-the eyes of virile Sappho, the lover and the poet! Fairer than the Anadyomene scattering her bright serenity and all the treasures of her golden youth upon old Ocean dazzled by his childfairer than the Anadyomene was Sappho on the day she broke her vow and died apostate to her own command, her lovely body forfeit to a brute whose arrogance avenged the sacrilege of Sappho, lost the day she broke her vow ... And from that time to this, Lesbos laments. Heedless of the homage of the world, she drugs herself each night with cries of pain that rend the skies above her empty shores, and from that time to this Lesbos laments!

Damned

Pensive as cattle resting on the beach, they stare out to sea; their hands and feet creep toward each other imperceptibly and touch at last, hesitant then fierce. How eagerly some, beguiled by secrets shared, follow a talkative stream among the trees, spelling out their timid childhood's love and carving initials in the tender wood; others pace as slow and grave as nuns among the rocks where Anthony beheld

Women

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the purple breasts of his temptations rise like lava from the visionary earth; some by torchlight in the silent caves consecrated once to pagan rites invoke-to quench their fever's holocaustBacchus, healer of the old regrets; others still, beneath their scapulars, conceal a whip that in the solitude and darkness of the forest reconciles tears of pleasure with the tears of pain. Virgins, demons, monsters, martyrs, all great spirits scornful of reality, saints and satyrs in search of the infinite, racked with sobs or loud in ecstasy, you whom my soul has followed to your hell, Sisters! I love you as I pity you for your bleak sorrows, for your unslaked thirsts, and for the love that gorges your great hearts!

Meditation Behave, my Sorrow! let's have no more scenes. Evening's what you wanted-Evening's here: a gradual darkness overtakes the town, bringing peace to some, to others pain. Now, while humanity racks up remorse in low distractions under Pleasure's lash, grovelling for a ruthless master-come away, my Sorrow, leave them! Give me your hand...

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the purple breasts of his temptations rise like lava from the visionary earth; some by torchlight in the silent caves consecrated once to pagan rites invoke-to quench their fever's holocaustBacchus, healer of the old regrets; others still, beneath their scapulars, conceal a whip that in the solitude and darkness of the forest reconciles tears of pleasure with the tears of pain. Virgins, demons, monsters, martyrs, all great spirits scornful of reality, saints and satyrs in search of the infinite, racked with sobs or loud in ecstasy, you whom my soul has followed to your hell, Sisters! I love you as I pity you for your bleak sorrows, for your unslaked thirsts, and for the love that gorges your great hearts!

Meditation Behave, my Sorrow! let's have no more scenes. Evening's what you wanted-Evening's here: a gradual darkness overtakes the town, bringing peace to some, to others pain. Now, while humanity racks up remorse in low distractions under Pleasure's lash, grovelling for a ruthless master-come away, my Sorrow, leave them! Give me your hand...

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See how the dear departed dowdy years crowd the balconies of heaven, leaning down, while smiling out of the sea appears Regret; the Sun will die in its sleep beneath a bridge, and trailing westward like a winding-sheetlisten, my dear!-how softly Night arrives.

Even She Who Was Called Beatrice by Many Who Knew Not Wherefore Wandering a wasteland at high noon where only ashes echoed my lament to leafless nature, whetting as I went the dagger of my mind against my heart, I saw a dismal stormcloud bearing down upon my head, bristling with vicious imps as cruel as they were inquisitive. Coldly this coven took me in; the way people with nothing better to do will stare and marvel at a madman, these would laugh, nudging each other and exchanging winks, and whisper (loud enough for me to hear): "Take a good look at this caricature of Hamlet or-with his dishevelled hair, his indecisive gaze-of Hamlet's Ghost! You can't help laughing when you see this shabby aesthete, this artistic sham, this ham, this clamorous comedian who knowing his abracadabra inside out attempts to interest eagles (and crickets too), even flowers and fountains in his ranted woes, reciting his routines at the top of his lungs to us as well, who hatched the whole damned thing!"

Flowers of Evil

43

See how the dear departed dowdy years crowd the balconies of heaven, leaning down, while smiling out of the sea appears Regret; the Sun will die in its sleep beneath a bridge, and trailing westward like a winding-sheetlisten, my dear!-how softly Night arrives.

Even She Who Was Called Beatrice by Many Who Knew Not Wherefore Wandering a wasteland at high noon where only ashes echoed my lament to leafless nature, whetting as I went the dagger of my mind against my heart, I saw a dismal stormcloud bearing down upon my head, bristling with vicious imps as cruel as they were inquisitive. Coldly this coven took me in; the way people with nothing better to do will stare and marvel at a madman, these would laugh, nudging each other and exchanging winks, and whisper (loud enough for me to hear): "Take a good look at this caricature of Hamlet or-with his dishevelled hair, his indecisive gaze-of Hamlet's Ghost! You can't help laughing when you see this shabby aesthete, this artistic sham, this ham, this clamorous comedian who knowing his abracadabra inside out attempts to interest eagles (and crickets too), even flowers and fountains in his ranted woes, reciting his routines at the top of his lungs to us as well, who hatched the whole damned thing!"

44

I might (my pride is mountainous-a match for clouds and crowds of demons and their jeers) have simply turned away and wandered past, had I not seen among that nasty crew -nor was the sun unsettled by this crimethe queen of my heart (I recognized those eyes) laughing at my pain with all the rest and giving them now and then a filthy kiss.

OCTOBER

Velazquez' Las Meninas

LEO STEINBERG

(Self-addressed memo: Explain under what circumstances this piece was composed, why it was shelved, and why retrieved after sixteen years.) Vassar College, 5:27 P.M. on a Tuesday in the autumn of '65: a promising lecture on Velazquez is thwarted when the slide projector suddenly falters and the screen behind the professor blacks out. The projectionist shrugs and shows guiltless hands; then she and the rest of us subside in obscurity. But this darkness, we soon discover, dims all of Vassar, engulfs all Poughkeepsie, encompasses the state of New York and more. It was Con Edison's darkest hour, for we are speaking of November 9, 1965, and of the Great Northeastern Power Failure which, from my vantage, began with the fading out on the screen of Las Meninas. To make up for the lecture lost, I wrote it out and sent each student enrolled in the course her own copy for Christmas. And that's how these presents came to be written. Then the question arose whether to publish or not. But before I could make a move, Michel Foucault produced "Les Suivantes," a remarkable meditation whose opening lines confirmed Las Meninas as an epistemological riddle.l Other essays, book chapters, even entire monographs crowded after. To prolong the procession at its tail end seemed tiresome, like joining a dismally long line at the supermarket; better move on. But, of course, one keeps reading the literature. And the literature on Las Meninas is an epitome of recent thinking about illusionism and the status of art. This picture of 1656, which an eighteenth-century admirer had dubbed "The Theology of Painting"-and which the Prado formerly blazoned in huge letters of brass as the OBRA CULMINANTE DE LA PINTURA UNIVERSAL-has 1. Foucault's "Les Suivantes" is the first chapter of his Les Mots et les choses, Paris, 1966 (englished as The Order of Things, New York, 1973). Along with a letter dated November 15, 1966, Annette Michelson sent me the book-"not solely for what it may propose in its non-art-historical way concerning Velazquez, but simply because it is the work of one of the most interesting people now thinking and writing." That I never acknowledged her gift is one of my shabbier misdemeanors-for which I take this occasion to offer apology.

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become a cherished crux for modern investigators, for geometricians, metaphysicians, artist-photographers, semioticians, political and social historians, and even rare lovers of painting.2 Last year brought two more essays in tandem on Las Meninas.3 The first, written by a paradox-loving philosopher, erred (like Foucault's) in its initial assumption about the viewer's implied position. The second, correcting the first, belabored the obvious-granting that "the obvious" is what one normally overlooks. (The viewer's position in Las Meninas is self-evident and should never have been a problem.) Though this latter essay was unusually conscientious, and despite its plea that the picture "be understood as an inexhaustible emblem of the power of painting," in the end-to my mind, at least-the interpretation suffered from misplacement of emphasis.4 What I miss in this-and in more historically minded recent approaches to Las Meninas-is the necessary engagement with the whole painting, the sense that every part of it matters. Whether the picture's essential meaning is discovered in the cross of the Order of Santiago on the proud painter's doublet, or in the effect of the mirror on the rear wall, a disproportionate acreage of the canvas remains unaccounted for. To say it another way: the ontological or epistemological puzzles now being discerned in Las Meninas are posed in earlier paintings with vastly less apparatus. Parmigianino's tiny Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror in Vienna is quite as paradoxical as some believe Las Meninas to be. (Do you, when you look at it, become Parmigianino?) Or Pontormo's Portrait of Duke Alessandro de'Medici in Philadelphia: the subject looks straight out of the picture while drawing a woman's face, evidently from life. What does this make of the viewer who is patently the object of the depicted draftsman's attention?5 Both these works are emblems (though perhaps not "inexhaustible") of the power of painting. And I would mention one other in this series of pictures whose subject, design, and illusionism place the actual world in a dependent position. I have in mind a large foursquare painting by Frans Floris, created originally (1556) for the clubhouse of the Antwerp Painter's Guild-that is to say, as a professional emblem. The picture shows a painter, presumably a likeness of Floris himself, seated before his easel, at work on a panel of which we see only the back. Nor would we know what or

See Kenneth Clark, Looking at Pictures, New York, 1960, pp. 31ff. 2. 3. John R. Searle, "Las Meninas and the Paradoxes of Pictorial Representation," Critical Inquiry, vol. 6, no. 3 (Spring 1980), 477-88; Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen, "Critical Response. Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost," Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 2 (Winter 1980). 429-47. 4. Having established the absolute geometric certainty of the perspectival viewpoint (wvhich makes it impossible for the mirror to reflect the royal couple directly), Snyder and Cohen concede, in their envoi, that the picture allows, even encourages, precisely this "mistaken opinion." They suggest that the viewer is meant to realize his mistake in a "further realization." But this is not holw a picture works. If two readings are allowed, then both are effectively present and ambiguously meant. I suspect that Snyder and Cohen would not disagree. 5. See Leo Steinberg, "Pontormo's Alessandro de'Medici, or, I Only Have Eyes for You," Art in America, vol. 63, no. 1 (January-February 1975), 62-65.

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whom he is painting were it not for the incongruous presence of St. Luke's symbolic ox at his feet. The placid beast identifies him as St. Luke, patron of painters, so that his hitherward gaze, averted from the panel to study his model, cannot but be directed at the Madonna and Child. The outright glance, from the picture forth into the actual world, defines the artist as one whose eyes arefixed on reality. At the same time, this glance makes known that the Virgin and Christ are with us-just as the king and queen are "with us" when we confront Las Meninas. Thus it appears that what recent interpreters have thought most extraordinary in the Velazquez is demonstrably present in these sixteenth-century precedents. And still Las Meninas remains incomparable. But a survey of interpretations that have seen the light (or obscured it) in recent years is not my purpose. A 11I have in hand is a short revision of the paper I wrote sixteen years ago after that famous failure of power. The typescript was

Frans Floris. St. Luke. 1556. (Antwerp: Musee Royal des Beaux-Arts)

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dusted off several months ago when the artist-filmmaker Juan Downey asked me to read parts of it into the sound track of a film he was shooting about mirror images. His invitation gives the present retrieval its proximate cause. The remote cause lies in the cheerful acknowledgment that every description of Velazquez' picture remains, in one way or another, inadequate, as I understand mine also to be. Writing about a work such as Las Meninas is not, after all, like queuing up at the A&P. Rather, it is somewhat comparable to the performing of a great musical composition of which there are no definitive renderings. The guaranteed inadequacy of each successive performance challenges the interpreter next in line, helping thereby to keep the work in the repertoire. A lternatively, when a work of art ceases to be discussed, it suffers a gradual blackout.

What exactly does this famous key monument have to offer a person unaware of its fame and unread in the literature luxuriating about it? What does Las Meninas actually show? At center, downstage, a little girl is being offered a drink of water in which she's not interested. Near her, coming in at the margin, a boy dwarf teases a drowsy dog, who couldn't care less. A woman in middle distance talks to a man who seems not to be listening; he's looking at us instead. Way in the back, a courtier in solid black, seeing nothing much to detain him, prepares to leave; his parting legacy being a backward glance and an attempt (unsuccessful) to let a little sunshine in by the door. What he leaves behind is a room full of pictures that are nearly invisible for lack of illumination, since the windows are shuttered and the lights on the ceiling are out. Most disappointing of all: the great canvas at left-on which, for all we know, something remarkable is taking shape-turns its back on us, adding a massive No to the list of negations. No wonder that the dramatis personae (all but three of them, to be exact) look straight out of the picture-there just isn't enough on their side of things to hold anybody's attention. How is it, then, that this picture maintains such a steadfast grip on one's consciousness? Being so negligible in subject, and in appearance so loosely improvised, what makes it so confident of regard? It must be a force, an energy issuing from the picture that arrests and invites and ends by drafting us into its orbit. Looking at Las Meninas, one is not excluded; one hardly feels oneself to be looking at it, as one would at a thing over there-a painted surface, a stage set, or gathering of other people. Rather, we enter upon Las Meninas as if we were part of the family, party to the event. But what is the event? What are we party to? The painter gives it to us to decide. He leaves it an open question whether these courtly characters have just

Diego Velazquez. Las Meninas. 1656. (Madrid: Prado)

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joined us or whether we've just walked in to interrupt them.6 Either way, the picture is a disturbance of what a moment before must have been perfect stillness-witness the settled pose of the dog.7 A kind of reciprocity, then: as if we on this side of the canvas and the nine characters in it were too closely engaged with each other to be segregated by the divide of the picture plane. Something we bring to the picture-the very effectiveness of our presence-ricochets from the picture, provokes an immediate response, a reflex of mutual fixation evident in the glances exchanged, the glances we receive and return. And what else is he showing us, this royal painter? A dim spacious hall, hung with pictures and alive with intruders, the entourage of a little princess. The event represented hardly deserves the term-for there is nothing eventful about a spoiled little girl of five being offered a drink of water. But it appears that a picture is being painted-the big canvas at left is under attack. Standing some distance behind, or rather before, his canvas, the painter seems to be hesitating, considering his next stroke, or perhaps waiting for things to settle. Meanwhile, his sight converges with the general concentration of glances upon his models, the parents of the little Infanta, Philip IV of Spain and Queen Mariana. The location of their 6. The former alternative was espoused in 1961 by the Madrid cartoonist Mingote. Some serious art historians remain similarly convinced that the "narrative" of Las Meninas can be rationally reconstructed; see the quotation adduced in Snyder and Cohen, pp. 432f. The slumbering pet is a traditional index of tranquility: eg., the cat asleep in Barocci's etching 7. of the Annunciation conceived as a silent moment; or the dog, cat, or lion of St. Jerome as token of what Melanchthon, following Plato, called the "sacred silences" attending mental labor. Significantly, an author portrait published in 1503 labels the attendant dog in the lower right "APATHES."

"Hay dias en que no se le ocurre a uno nada" ("Some days nothing seems to be happening"). Cartoon by Mingote. Published in Mundo Hispanico, February 1961, 75.

Author portrait of Bernardino Corio. Woodcut from his Chronicle of Milan, 1503.

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mirror reflection on the rear wall assures us that the royal couple stand on our left. Consequently, those many looks that dart hitherward out of the picture must be their due rather than ours. But we also are implicated since we see ourselves seen. All of us-the implied presence of royalty, the persons depicted, and ourselves returning their glances-together we round out that sphere which the partitioning picture plane cuts in two. It follows that the picture alone, the picture without its complementary hemisphere, is but one half its own system, hence seemingly centerless. Or, to put it more accurately, the picture's focal center keeps shifting. Ask where the center is, and the answer returned by the picture is not any one point, nor any two, but three and four; it depends on what you are centering. If you address the width of the canvas, taking its measure from side to side, you discover the median in the little Infanta-at her left eye, precisely. Like a jewel in the dip of a necklace, she pinpoints the lower center. Yet a glance at the perspective construction makes the centric point shift. The given orthogonals-the horizontals along the right wall and the procession of ceiling lights-converge upon the man on the stair inside the doorway. Halting to look, so that looking becomes his whole task and function, this man personifies the vanishing point of the central perspective, the point opposite our vantage. No question but that the perspective locates him at center. On the other hand, if you consider the room we are in-a room whose full width is revealed by the rear wall with its doors, pictures, and mirror-you discover that the room's central axis falls to the left of the open door. No mistaking it: the light fixtures overhead clearly trace the midline of the ceiling, and the mirror, charged with the image of royalty, appropriates the midpoint of the wall. And that gives us three middles. Just as the Infanta marks the midline of the canvas; just as the man on the stair looms at the centric point of the perspective; even so does the looking glass define the centerline of the room. Three centers, nicely triangulated: the canvas as a physical object, the perspectival geometry, and the depicted chamber-each maintains its own middle. Three kinds of center, which in a simpler painting might have remained coincident to avoid unnecessary confusion, are here deliberately dispersed.

The scatter effect is accentuated by the dispersion of the three adult men in the picture: the one standing with folded hands against the right wall, the man in the door, and the painter. All three gaze on the royal pair this side of the picturetheir convergent glances homing like spokes on their hub. We begin to suspect that Velazquez made his composition seem improvised and unstable, not only by deploying within the picture three middles instead of one, but, more importantly, by conceiving his whole cast of characters as

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subordinated to yet another centrality. For he located the picture's dramatic and psychological focus outside itself, displaced from what the picture actually shows to what it beholds. It is as though the depicted scene were a dependency, caught in reaction to its deferred center. That center, of course, is on our left. It resides in the royal pair bestriding the room's central axis in line with the looking glass in which their reflection appears. But here a problem arises. We have found the perspectival vanishing point well to the right of the mirror, in the man on the stair. Now, in any coherent perspective, such as Velazquez employs, this vanishing point defines itself as the point directly opposite the viewer's eye. Thus the vanishing point in Las Meninas assures us that the station from which we perceive the scene lies oblique to the mirror-not perpendicular. Therefore, whatever the mirror may show to the king and queen, what it reveals to us, standing off to the right, can only be a reflection of something off to the left. It follows that what we see in the mirror must necessarily be a part of the painting in progress on the big canvas.8 The result is an elegant ambiguity: a mirror that transmits data from two disparate places, from the king-and-queen's painted likeness and from where they stand in the flesh. Yet the two are the same. The reflection which the mirror imparts to us at an angle is one with the image which we know the king and queen to be getting in direct confrontation. We discover that Velazquez' summary looking glass conflates two distinct things into one: what the king and queen view from their station and what we see from ours-the real thing and the painting of it-the mirror reveals as identical, as if to grant that the masterpiece on the canvas mirrors the truth beyond any mirror's capacity to surpass. In this sense, Las Meninas may be taken to celebrate the truthfulness of the painter's art. But praise of the mimetic powers of painting-though brought off here with staggering originality-is still conventional seventeenth-century ideology. And Las Meninas is in no sense a conventional picture. It undertakes a lot more, being concerned with nothing less than the role vision plays in human self-definition. The picture induces a kind of accentuation of consciousness by summoning the observer's eye to exert itself in responsive action and in intensified multiple acts of perception. And here the whole picture cooperates. That is why, in Las Meninas, the radiant signals are received from all over. An uncanny sensitivity to nuance of illumination differentiates every portion of matter. The background alone contrasts dull surfaces with the luster of a scintillant mirror, the sundazzle of outdoor space with the sparse gleam of a concealed window; while the remembered glow of extinguished lamps irradiates the dark ceiling. Most of the space represented is

The question has been asked whether double portraits figure in the Spanish tradition of royal 8. portraiture. The answer is positive. Apart from Titian's half-length Charles V with the late Isabella of Portugal, we have record that Alonso Cano's first royal commission, after his appointment at court in 1638, was for a double portrait of Ferdinand and Isabella (see Ilarold E. Wethey, Alontso Caoto, Princeton, 1955, p. 18).

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sheer transparency, literally a per-spective, a "seeing-through." All is diaphane, and whatever residue of opaque matter might interfere is given over to promoting perception: an opened door, windows, lamps, mirror, and pictures. No other so much as a chair to sit down on. appurtenances, no other functions-not but for what was And created the light itself rising everywhere to Nothing sight. the occasion: lurking in the depth of a mirror; breaching a door; beckoning from a distant unshuttered window; and finally, in full flood up front, dissolving the picture plane, and spreading through the retreating gloom a diffused watchfulness that merely crystallizes in eyes and faces. There is surely no painting in which the emission of sight from human eyes becomes quite so structural, no painting wherein sight lines sustain so much of the hidden armature of the design, no painting whose dramatis personae are grouped and ranked according to what they see. This last observation is worth spelling out: "grouped and ranked according to what they see." Begin at the foreground, right of center, where we-or rather our royal neighbors-are eyed by three watchers; a threesome composed in strict symmetry by the Infanta, the curtseying lady-in-waiting, and the female dwarf dressed in blue-three attentive young persons in triangular disposition. Notice next that each corner of this inner triangle is precisely backstopped by attendants whose positions stake out a larger, similar triangle: the boy with his foot on the mastiff, the kneeling menina before the Infanta, and, thirdly, behind the curtsey, the talkative chaperone. Finally the remaining three figures, the shadowy guard, the painter, and the valedictorian on the back stair, form a third outfielder's triangle-congruent with the second, similar to the first. Think of their places on the projected floorplan, and our nine dispersed characters describe three equilateral triangles, each group differentiated according to what it perceives. The girls of the inner triad look straight out, open to what they confront. The three backstopping figures see less; caught up in play, in service, or in conversation, they only see what preoccupies them. Lastly again, the three adult outfielders: they are so placed with respect to the painter's canvas that they alone see a complex of interrelations, or two worlds at a glance-their own and another; a stage to serve in and a painted equivalent purely visionary. To round out the system, it remains for the viewer to lend his attentive presence-I mean the individual consciousness that salutes the picture alongside a king and queen. It remains for this self, ennobled by association, not only to complete the last triad that brings the company up to twelve, but, above all, to see the magic loop closed. As the royal presence is seen from within the picture to inspire a painting, so the viewer sees the averted painting engender its mirror image, which in turn guarantees the royal pair's real presence. The painter gives us the real, the reflected, and the depicted as three interdependent states, three modalities of the visible that cause and succeed one another in a perpetual round. Reality, illusion, and replication by art conspire in ceaseless recirculation. But none of this works unless one agrees to participate. Accept the summons,

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and the picture reduces the real world and the symbolic to psychic equivalence, like the two pans of a scale, each acted on by the other. Then, what one faces in Las Meninas is not only a framed object, a beautiful surface, an illusory space, a simulated event-though the painting is all of these. Rather, the picture conducts itself the way a vital presence behaves. It creates an encounter. And as in any living encounter, any vital exchange, the work of art becomes the alternate pole in a situation of reciprocal self-recognition.9 If the picture were speaking instead of flashing, it would be saying: I see you seeing me-I in you see myself seen-see you seeing yourself being seen-and so on beyond the reaches of grammar. Confronted mirrors we are, polarized selves, reflecting one another's consciousness without end; partaking of an infinity that is not spatial, but psychological-an infinity not cast in the outer world, but in the mind that knows and knows itself known. The mirror within Las Meninas is merely its central emblem, a sign for the whole. Las Meninas in its entirety is a metaphor, a mirror of consciousness.

9. Several passages in Baltasar Gracian's El Criticbn (1651-57) indicate that self-recognition by way of encounter would have been in Velazquez' world a familiar notion. In the opening chapter of this sagacious allegorical novel, Gracian's hero Andrenio, who has grown up on a desert island and has never before seen a fellow man, speaks thus to the shipwrecked Critilo: "You, Critilo, ask who I am, yet this is what I desire to learn of you; you are the first man I have seen till this day, and in you I find myself more vividly imaged than in the mute crystal springs which my curiosity often besought and my ignorance recommended." (Gracian knew Velazquez and regarded him as the foremost of modern painters.)

Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism

STEPHEN

MELVILLE Another drawback of these grand constructions is that it is necessary to have recourse to allegory, so cold in poetry, so obscure and unbearable in painting. Fools willingly call allegory the poetry of painters; for my part, I think that nothing so testifies to an artist's lack of genius as resorting to allegory. -Friedrich Melchior Grimm, as cited by Michael Fried in Absorption and Theatricality, Appendix A Now I want to suggest that in the Homere recitant that strategy has been carried further by the provision of an entire audience, from which the beholder feels himself to be excluded, listening to and presumably absorbed in Homer's recitation. In addition, the poet himself is depicted as aware of the presence of that audience, for which indeed he is performing. The position of the beholder in this regard is at once deprived and privileged, much like one backstage or in the wings at a theatrical production. -Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, Appendix C

These notes are at once scattered and ambitious: that they are scattered will no doubt pass as a sign of the pluralist times; that criticism and theory of criticism

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appear here as the site for a certain kind of intellectual ambition may strike some as more deeply problematic. Robert Pincus-Witten once feared that criticism had become sophisticated and powerful enough to crush "genuine" artistic ambition. This is nonsense (of a peculiarly critical sort)'-the deep risk for criticism is that it might crush or lose itself and that it might do so through its profoundest achievements. This is the central risk of the ambition embodied in these pagesthat, as Paul de Man would have it, its insight is exactly its blindness as well. It will become apparent that these remarks are not a preliminary apology-with them we are already in midstream. Mere: A boundary; also, an object indicating a boundary, a landmark. Mere: la. Of wine: Not mixed with water. Obs. lb. Of a people or their language: unmixed. Pure, Chiefly in Mere Irish... now often misunderstood as a term of disparagement, the adj. being apprehended as in sense 5. Ic. Of other things, material and immaterial: Pure, unmixed. Obs. MERELY A GRAMMAR

5. Having no greater extent, range, value, power, or importance than the designation implies; that is barely or only what it is said to be. Mere: ... 4. A marsh, a fen. Mere: A mother. -from the OED

The reemergence of "allegory" as a central term in recent criticism of literature and art is an event of some interest and complexity.2 These notes are an attempt at charting some (perhaps neglected) aspects of this event. 1. See Robert Pincus-Witten, "Naked Lunches," October, no. 3 (Spring 1977), 116. In literary criticism, I would point to the work of Paul de Man in particular. Relevant writings 2. include "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Charles S. Singleton, ed., Interpretation: Theory and Practice, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 1969, pp. 173-210; Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, New York, Oxford, 1971; and Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, New Haven, Yale, 1979. The present essay is a response to a series of essays recently published in October. TIheyinclude: Douglas Crimp, "Pictures," no. 8 (Spring 1979), 75-88; and "On the Museum's Ruins," no. 13 (Summer 1980), 41-57; Joel Fineman, "The Structure of Allegorical Desire," no. 12 (Spring 1980), 47-66; Craig Owens, "Einstein on the Beach: The Primacy of Metaphor," no. 4 (Fall 1977), 21-32; and "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism," parts 1 and 2, no. 12 (Spring 1980),

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The charting will take place to a perhaps surprisingly large extent within the terms and at the limits of the formalist program of the middle and late sixties (the terms and limits of "Art and Objecthood" above all)-and of the historical elaboration that program has received in Michael Fried's subsequent writings, particularly those collected under the title A bsorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. This essay takes this book as an opportunity to review an argument and a career.3Where this can claim to be something more than a mere review, it can perhaps still be no more than an appendix to Fried's work, to Fried's appendices especially. My concern will be to explore the extent to which the formalist program is and is not still that in which we move and write and engage our issues-to explore the current condition of criticism at least; how far formalism touches the condition of art may remain an open and contested question. Allegory has come to appear for us as "the trope of tropes"4-and my concern is then with who we are now and what it means for us to find ourselves before this appearance. Allegory has come to appear for us as the trope of tropes-and this should be astonishing. What we are inclined to forget is that for most of us allegory has been-where it has been anything at all-a term of denigration, a way of naming the merely rhetorical: the brute fact of and constraint to ornament, convention, artifice-opposed variously to the depth and integrity, spontaneity and organic holism, of metaphor and symbol. Grimm's sense of cold and boring artifice has been, by and large, our own as well: One thinks that one justifies these enormous constructions by saying that they are meant less to touch us than to arouse our admiration. But admiration is a rapid feeling, a sudden thrill that does not last and that becomes tiresome and cold as soon as one wants to prolong it. It is always produced by the simplicity and sublimity of a 67-86, and no. 13 (Summer 1980), 61-80. I will refer also to Owens's "Robert Wilson: Tableaux," Art in America, vol. 68, no. 9 (November 1980), 114-117. Joan Simon, "Double Takes," Art in America, vol. 68, no. 8 (October 1980) provides a useful overview of the discussion about allegory and painting that is currently taking place, together with a useful short bibliography. 3. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California, 1980. This book revises, expands, and gathers together a number of previously published essays. Reference will be made throughout this essay to Fried's controversial "Art and Objecthood," which first appeared in Artforum, vol. V, no. 10 (Summer 1967), and has since been extensively reprinted. My references are to the reprint in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, New York, E. P. Dutton, 1968. Other works by Fried of relevance to this essay are Morris Louis, New York, Abrams, n.d.; Three American Painters, Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum, 1965; "Manet's Sources: Aspects of His Art, 1859-65," Artforum, vol. VII, no. 7 (March 1969); "Thomas Couture and the Theatricalization of Action," Artforum, vol. 8, no. 10 (June 1970); "The Beholder in Courbet: His Early Self-Portraits and Their Place in His Art," Glyph 4, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 1978, pp. 85-129. 4. Fineman, "Allegorical Desire," p. 48.

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thought or work of poetry, in painting or in music, whereas those complicated works can cause only a kind of cold astonishment. The most artistically arranged brilliance soon bores and repels. This is not to mention the numerous added ornaments and inevitably out of place accessories that a composed work of a certain size entails. Grimm goes on to remark that, these reflections necessarily lead to another. It is incredible how much havoc and harm have been wrought in all the arts by imitation. Imitation alone is responsible for the audacity and success of mediocre people, the timidity of men of true genius, and the discouragement the latter feel.5 Fried appends Grimm's text to his book because of its bearing on "unity, instantaneousness, and related topics"-topics that underlie and inform Fried's central distinction between "absorption" and "theatricality." We will be turning to this material shortly, but for the time being we do well to remark, in Grimm and in ourselves, the extent to which the recognition of "mere allegory" is embedded in a larger "mere structure" which links (as if necessarily) "mere allegory," "mere ornament," and "mere imitation." "Mere rhetoric" has its place in this chain; in England "mere Protestantism" holds a place in crucial adjacency to it. I am neither historian nor scholar enough to draw this picture in detail, but some of the central nodes in the history organized by this chain-some, for example, of the literary figures on whom the risk of "mereness" most nearly and powerfully pressed-are, I think, obvious enough: Sidney (who lived through the transformation of "mere" from the praise of "pure, unmixed" to its current and derogatory sense); Milton (of course); and (closest to us perhaps) those condemned to follow and find themselves in Milton's poetic wake. In the English tradition there are a certain number of texts that seem to draw their peculiar strength from the manner in which they are intertwined with the terms of this structure: sermons by Donne and Andrewes, Swift's Tale of a Tub, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, the career and apology of Cardinal Newman. No doubt the idea and experience of America have their place here as well. This "mere structure" is the logical concomitant of the twin (and in England simultaneous) movements of Reformation and Renascence. The risk inherent in such repetition and return to origin is that of "mere repetition" (a term to name the chain as well as figure in it). This is one way of fleshing out Stanley Cavell's skeletal characterization of modernism: The essential fact of (what I refer to as) the modern lies in the relation

5.

Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, p. 164.

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between the present practice of an enterprise and the history of that enterprise, in the fact that this relation has become problematic.6 An age whose relation to its past has become problematic in this way will be led to find and guarantee itself and its work through detour and delay-works and devices of indirection, complex barriers to and recoveries of presence. Implicit here is a notion of "necessary indirectness"-a notion Cavell has explored with some delicacy in an essay on Kierkegaard. This, then, is a very particular literary problem, a problem concerning a very particular situation of language, not one... in which there are alternative vehicles for expressing a thought, one of which can be said to convey it directly, the other indirectly; nor ... a situation in which there is no alternative vehicle of expression for the thought and therefore no way in which it can be conveyed differently (directly or indirectly). It is one in which, while there is only one vehicle of expression, there are two thoughts it can express, and moveover the thoughts are incompatible, mutually defeating ... [The] message is of such a form that the words which contain its truth may be said in a way which defeats that very truth.7 This we have called "irony." We are being taught now to see in it "allegory" as well. Laurie Anderson speaks of the gesturing figure on Apollo 10, "Do you think they will think his hand is permanently attached that way? Or do you think they will read our signs? In our country, good-bye looks just like hello?" Craig Owens comments: Two alternatives: either the extraterrestrial recipient of this message will assume that it is simply a picture, that is, an analogical likeness of the human figure, in which case he might logically conclude that male inhabitants of Earth walk around with their right arms permanently raised. Or he will somehow divine that this gesture is addressed to him and attempt to read it, in which case he will be stymied, since a single gesture signifies both greeting and farewell, and any reading of it must oscillate between these two extremes. The same gesture could also mean "Halt!" or represent the taking of an oath, but if Anderson's text does not consider these alternatives that is because it is not concerned with ambiguity, with multiple meanings engendered by a single sign; rather, two clearly defined but mutually incompatible readings are engaged in blind confrontation in such a way that it is impossible to choose between them ... this works to problematize the

6. 7.

Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, Cambridge University, p. xix. Stanley Cavell, "Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy," Daedelus, 1964, pp. 967-968.

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activity of reading, which must remain forever suspended in its own uncertainty.8 "Allegory," as it (re)appears for us now, appears as a belated rewriting of "irony."9 What intervenes between the one and the other, what is rediscovered between "irony" and "allegory," is just the fact and necessity of reading, of criticism. Cavell wrote of Kierkegaard, In using such words directly the relation between what one says and what there is in those words to be heard and understood is ironic, and, depending on the context and the consequences, comic or tragic.10 More recently he has had this to say (of Wittgenstein): Putting together the ideas that noticing an aspect is being struck by a physiognomy; that words present familiar physiognomies; that they can be thought of as pictures of their meaning; that words have a life and can be dead for us; that "experiencing a word" is meant to call our attention to our relation to our words; that our relation to pictures is in some respects like our relation to what they are pictures of; -I would like to say that the topic of our attachment to our words is allegorical of our attachments to ourselves and to other persons. Something of this we were prepared for. My words are my expressions of my life; I respond to the words of others as their expressions, i.e., respond not merely to what their words mean but equally to their meaning of them. I take them to mean ("imply") something in or by their words; or to be speaking ironically, etc. Of course my expressions and my responses need not be accurate.11 Irony slides toward allegory as it recognizes its involvement with other minds and persons-and as it does so it confuses and complicates the line between what we might otherwise want to distinguish as, for example, literature and life. When Cavell writes that "the idea of the allegory of words is that human expressions, the human figure, to be grasped, must be read," he returns us to Laurie Anderson's rumination on our attempts to communicate with extraterrestrials. And when Cavell extends his meditation, by suggesting that "the human body is the best picture of the human soul"

8. Owens, "Allegorical Impulse," part 2, pp. 60-61. This is more obviously true for recent developments in literary criticism than in art, since 9. literary criticism has for some time explicitly valorized irony as the principle of literary unity. In both regions allegory offers the possibility of moving beyond too narrow an understanding of the purity of the work. 10. Cavell, "Existentialism," p. 968. 11. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Knowledge, and Mlorality,New York, Oxford, 1979, p. 355. The ensuing quotation is from p. 356.

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-not, I feel like adding, primarily because it represents the soul but because it expresses it. The body is the field of expression of the soul. The body is of the soul; it is the soul's; a human soul has a human body..., and when he goes on to recall Hegel's assertion that "[the] human shape [is] the sole sensuous phenomenon that is appropriate to mind," we should be recalled to "Art and Objecthood"'s terms of criticism: ... what is wrong with literalist work is not that it is anthropomorphic but that the meaning and, equally, the hiddenness of its anthropomorphism are incurably theatrical.'2 What Fried objects to in the work of Tony Smith is the way in which it offers itself to its beholder as (not simply a person but) a person who then refuses to allow one a human relation to itself-it is work that distances itself from (the subject it thereby forces to become merely) its beholder. It refuses to let itself mean-be taken as meaning; it is soulless, it enforces the condition Cavell calls "soul-blindness" on its viewer.'3 We have known people with this kind of irony-who would make us the decider of their ensouledness, who would make us decide for them the humanity of their expressions. We are not (yet) Martians to ourselves, and if it is true that hello and goodbye look just the same in our country and that there are therefore senses in which our reading of one another is forever suspended in its own uncertainty, it is also and no less true that we do in fact read each other (felicitously or no). We wave back, greeting or parting or both. (As Derrida might sometimes have it: it is a condition of the mail's going astray that it be sometimes delivered.) We stand here in any case, our arms raised to modernism, to "Art and Objecthood," to Tony Smith and Vito Acconci and Robert Smithson, Stanley Cavell and Jacques Derrida, one another.

12. Fried, "Art and Objecthood," p. 130. 13. "If it makes sense to speak of seeing human beings, then it makes sense to imagine that a human being may lack the capacity to see beings as hiuman. It would make sense to ask whether someone may be soul-blind.... "So to speak of seeing human beings as human beings is to imply that we notice that human beings are human beings; and that seems no more acceptable than saying that we are of the opinion that they are (cf. Investigations, p. 178).-What is implied is that it is essential to knowing that something is human that we sometimes experience it as such, and sometimes do not, or fail to; that certain alterations of consciousness take place, and sometimes not, in the fact of it" (Cavell, The Claim of Reason, pp. 378-379). Our concern throughout this essay-perhaps most explicitly in the section entitled "'Ihe Truth of Allegory and the Necessity of Rhetoric"-is with the continuing and twin possibilities of soul- and art-blindness.

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THE DIALECTICS OF PURITY

The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thereby each art would be rendered "pure," and in its "purity" find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. -Greenberg, "Modernist Painting"

I have now to tell a double story, a history of purity and its vicissitudes and a history of the critical appreciation of the complexities of that purity. Clement Greenberg's central formulation already hedges its bet. The scarequotes set about "purity" mark a moment of hesitation, recoil, anxiety that becomes, in "Art and Objecthood," an extended unease, dividing and hiding itself between two well-separated footnotes. The first reads in part: . . . flatness and the delimitation of flatness ought not to be thought of as the "irreducible essence of pictorial art" but rather as something like the minimal conditions for something's being seen as a painting; and ... the crucial question is not what these minimal and, so to speak, timeless conditions are, but rather what, at a given moment, is capable of compelling conviction, of succeeding as painting. This is not to say that painting has no essence; it is to claim that that essence-i.e. that which compels conviction-is largely determined by, and therefore changes continually in response to, the vital work of the recent past. The essence of painting is not something irreducible. Rather, the task of the modernist painter is to discover those conventions that, at a given moment, alone are capable of establishing his work's identity as painting.14

In the opening Fried gives us we should pause to note just how far the diverse works of the past decade have forced this-can the work of, for example, Vito Acconci be "seen as painting"? What would it mean to see it so-and would that be different from seeing it some other way (as theater or TV or poetry)? RoseLee Goldberg (among others) has tried to present performance as its own genre, backed with its own (short) historical pedigree; how far can we be inclined to buy this? How far are we inclined to see performance as answering always to the criteria-and problems-of some other art-painting, sculpture, (real) theater? And what of earthworks and conceptual art and process art and a hundred other forms of post-Minimalist enterprise? How seriously are we to take these activities,

14.

Fried, "Art and Objecthood," pp. 123-124.

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and on what terms? The questions end where Fried closes his opening on us. The truth is that the distinction between the frivolous and the serious becomes more urgent, even absolute, every day, and the enterprises of the modernist arts more purely motivated by the felt need to perpetuate the standards and values of the high art of the past.15 The "purity" that Fried thus surrenders with one hand is (almost) silently recovered with the other (and for those concerned with tracing the genealogy of a new allegorism it is far from irrelevant that the recuperating hand here is one concerned to fence the high and serious art of Morris Louis off from the degenerate and theatrical flatbed tableaux of Robert Rauschenberg). The uneven, stumbling rhythm at work between Fried's footnotes-the broken-legged, limping dialectic of "purity"-is crucial to the formalist program; it is between and across purity's eclipse and recovery of itself that the work of this criticism is achieved. Its work is that of separating, impossibly, the "mere" from the "pure"; where its rhythm ceases, where the jagged hesitations of "purity" are reduced to the punctual simplicity of "that which is unique and absolutely fundamental" to every art, criticism is lost-mere purity is the forgetting of modernism (if such a forgetting and such an impulse to puritanism were not also a hallmark of what we call modernism in its double impulse to repetition and origination). But we are running ahead of ourselves here and likely to become entangled in our own legs. Michael Fried has, in support of "Art and Objecthood," a story to tell. It is the story of painting's effort to purge itself of (what it would call) the merely theatrical. It goes-schematized nearly to parody-like this: At a certain time and in a certain country, art saw-saw what? It is not easy to say what it is that we are to take it that art somehow obscurely glimpsed in its experience of and reflection on itself (it is not even clear how far this "glimpsing" is to be taken literally, how far metaphorically). -Art saw that it was seen, and it saw-in this exposure of itself to an audience, a beholder-itself at risk (at risk, then, just where it succeeds, when it succeeds). Painting came to fear that it could lose itself and that it could lose itself as if in broad daylight. Something of this fear and its difficulty is at work in the first of the two footnotes we have cited from "Art and Objecthood," leading Fried into the major complexities of: To begin with, it is not quite enough to say that a bare canvas tacked to a wall is not "necessarily" a successful picture; it would, I think, be less of an exaggeration to say that it is not conceivably one. It may be countered that future circumstances might be such as to make it a successful painting; but I would argue that, for that to happen, the

15.

Ibid., p. 142.

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enterprise of painting would have to change so drastically that nothing more than the name would remain.'6 "Nothing more than the name would remain": How could we-how can we-know that this has not in fact already happened? that it is not in fact happening at every instant in the history and world of painting? What if painting ("painting") is everywhere invaded by its own loss-what would we then want to say about painting, and how? Let us say, to get on with the story, that around the time of Diderot painting glimpsed a possible future in its recent and rococo past and saw that, in this future, it was-wallpaper, Muzak for the eyes, panels of vague and pleasant prettiness. What it thus saw is not without its truth. Painting is or was right to be scared; it is there only to be looked at and unless it could take control of this fact it would seem to be condemned to the merely decorative. (And then we have to note that the claim to an allegorical postmodernism is coincident with a new valorization of the decorative impulse and of pattern painting-these two movements can then appear to be the same, as any modernism and literalism can appear to be the same.) Painting saw, in its experience of itself, something obscure, barely palpable, and dangerous-something about how it might lose itself. It could, of course, have been wrong (we all make mistakes). The history Fried has worked through would then reduce to an unfortunate error, a prolonged moment of overreaction to the Enlightenment and its rationalist "put up or shut up." Postmodernism would then name painting's recovery from its long night of anxiety-much, perhaps, as literary modernism sought to understand itself as the recovery of a certain poetry from its dark night of dissociation and groundless fear. On such a view, painting will have always been secure in itself, its essential core safely buried inside itself all along, authenticating the work that continued to count and discounting the rest. This view reads "purity" as "that which is unique and absolutely fundamental" to each art. It assumes that "radical self-criticism" is the name of a certain test imposed by and in reaction to the "rational criticism" of the Enlightenment-a test that religion, for example, is taken to have failed, but which painting, in its (re)discovery of flatness will pass. It is the arid formalism against which so many artists and critics claimed to be reacting in the late sixties and the seventies; it is what we keep claiming to be beyond or outside. That this sort of formalism is stifling and absurdly restrictive goes now without saying. But we still need to understand how it could ever have been a powerful guide to and for painting-what power we may be passing over in our anxiety for the recovery of a new beyond. We need to grasp the historical rhythm and complexity opened by the notion of purity before it subsided into the truth of

16.

Ibid., p. 123.

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painting (as we will need to grasp the rhythm of allegory before it too subsides into its own truth). This is where Fried's work over the past decade counts profoundly. His deep story-as against the apparent tale in Greenberg-is not that of the truth of painting, but rather that of painting's continuing effort to recover itself through and across its denials and evasions of its necessary conditions. The story is dialectically charged, but is, in principle at least, not submitted to the authority of any Absolute. At the same time, it is a story that cannot be told except through the postulation of some Absolute somewhere. It would be radically existential, having us see how painting makes itself, but it cannot avoid having somewhere to assume It is an account that, in its essence, is open to attack and a fixable-made-self. that cannot reach at least as far as this inner openness to attacks controversy-but will interest for it. be without controversy How, then, does the story go? Painting realized a certain possibility of loss of itself in the face of its presence to a beholder and undertook to expel that possibility from itself by refusing that very fact. The history begins with a denial of "the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld,"17 and, as with any such denial, time tells of its failures, its inevitable betrayals of itself: one can, for example, deny the fact and fear of castration-but at the expense of the sanity of one's little finger. Painting's little finger is its relation to theater and theatrical performance. This relation would be one of mere and mutual externality-two arts each organized around its own rational core. The only problem they face would be a certain tendency to confusion, a confusion to which adequate vigilance could put a stop. For painting, "theater" would be the name of a central failure-a failure that remains within the general sphere of the aesthetic and forecloses the possibility of any radical fall out of art altogether. The risk is not that the work might be taken for wallpaper but that its tableau might be misinterpreted as theatrical-might be taken to demand rather than to deny or absorb its beholder. The category of "theatricality" conceals and constrains a crossing between questions about whether something is art and about whether it is good art; this is part of what it means to write, as Fried does, that "what lies between the arts is theatre. "18

Out of this nest of fictions, displacements, and deferrals, painting constructs for itself a project that can appear as one of rational self-criticism: the task of painting will be to cut itself off everywhere from the merely theatricaleverywhere exclude from itself that which continues to pose the persistence of an exterior beholder-and so work always toward that in itself which is capable of absorbing its viewer.

17. 18.

See Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, p. 93. Fried, "Art and Objecthood," p. 142.

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As this project unfolds in time, it will necessarily have the character of a series of reinterpretations of the meaning of "absorption" as each given grasp of it falls before the inevitable and ineluctable fact of the beholder. The beholder, always there, gazing, is the silent motor that drives the history of modern painting forward, forcing it to find behind its ever more radical claims to absorption always the same brute fact of theater. The details of this history are the critic's work, and I cannot pretend to do any justice to (let alone evaluate) Fried's analyses and readings. It is important, however, that we have some feel for the overall shape and logic of the story. The project of absorptive painting begins, as if naturally, from the painterly idea that the most absorptive works are those that present absorption itself. This idea is itself open to a variety of realizations-sleep can appear as a paradigmatically absorbed state, but so also can states of waking reverie, or intense concentration, or deep emotion. What appears when as an adequate vehicle for this thematic approach to the project of absorbing the viewer will depend very much on what has appeared when and how it appeared then. -Can still life be a vehicle for absorptive painting? In principle anything can appear as such a vehicle, but only when it does (and when it does it will appear as an argument for its own necessity). The constraints are existential and historical. Now (and here we collapse a complex history that is properly articulated only through the paintings that embody it into a single and ridiculous chain of tortured conditionals): if the representation of action, crucial action in particular, comes to seem an adequate vehicle for absorptive painting, then history painting (of a certain kind) will become a privileged genre; and if history painting becomes so privileged in a country whose political history is prone to pose itself more or less explicitly as a repetition of an earlier history (as the French the Roman), then that history painting will be, at least implicitly and so finally explicitly, a political painting as well, so that at a certain point it will have "Frenchness" as an issue internal to the project of painting itself and determining the history of absorptive painting as having been all along a history essentially "French," thus encouraging the posing of the problem of authoritative painting as a problem of breaking out of "Frenchness" and regaining contact with the greatness of (what now appears as) European painting: so that at various points on the road to what appears in America in the mid-twentieth century as a formalist art and criticism the terms in which painting will have counted and will demand to be appreciated will vary from the thematic to the political to the art historical.19 With respect to this history we can say either that "formalism" names only one, relatively late moment within it, or that "formalism," properly understood, entails a critical responsiveness to the way in which painting poses itself in itself and for itself in

The focus on "Frenchness" in this paragraph is derived primarily from "Manet's Sources"; the 19. reader may also wish to consult the essays on Couture and Courbet.

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each given instance. "Form" and "medium" are correlatives, and if, as Cavell writes, "the medium is to be discovered or invented out of itself,"20 "formalist" criticism is a criticism that must always rediscover and reinvent itself out of the work it considers. Another feature of our history: inscribed within its initial logic is a moment in which the painter will come to realize that he stands himself as beholder to his own work (here we touch on the problematic metaphoricity of the claim that "painting sees...") and that the work will then inevitably remain theatrical unless it can come to absorb him as well-a moment of radical narcissism, selfportraiture, that marks also a shift from a thematic grasp of absorption to a more formal one.21 There may well be ways in which we will want to see in much performance work a belated renewal and repetition of this moment; Courbet and Acconci may meet in an insistence that the empirical self, the artist's self, is not exempt from the notion of "radical self-criticism." (What Acconci gazing at his own body has to do with a history that assumes "painting sees.... ") Another feature: the history we have recounted is organized by its radical determination to maintain the fiction that painting is not submitted to a beholder and is related to the theater only externally and, as it were, accidentally. Sooner or later, there will be a corner to be turned-the corner of no longer trying to turn the corner into purely absorptive painting. For Fried, Manet is this corner-the point at which painting accepts the internality and inevitability of its relation to theater, acknowledges its own theatricality. Henceforth, paintings that continue to insist on the kind of abstract purity underlying the (traditional) project of absorption will now appear as irrecuperably theatrical, and paintings that explicitly pose (and master) their own theatricality become capable of exercising the claim upon our attention that "absorption" had meant to name. This, of course, looks like the dialectical overcoming of Diderot's opposition-except that what "theatricality" has been naming all along is the inevitability of distance-between painting and its viewer at first, but now a distance acknowledged as internal to painting itselfwhich will always keep painting from the sort of radical coincidence with itself promised by dialectical closure. Painting continues to engage itself in, as it were, midair, held by its own bootstraps between theatricality and absorption, wallpaper and the Absolute. Painting prolongs itself as it purloins itself from itself: the punning is Derridean, and the formulation intends to recall the radical complications Derrida imposes upon any history or story that would claim to deliver its message to its proper receiver (stories too obviously built around a message they would deliver we frequently recognize as allegories). From David to Couture to Courbet to Manet and on down to the controversies of the sixties, painting is submitted to an impulse to purity-to presentness-

20. 21.

Cavell, Must We Mean, p. 221. These remarks are derived primarily from "The Beholder in Courbet."

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and to the transgression or critique of that impulse-and so also is criticism: neither within painting nor within criticism nor within the relation of the one to the other do purity and impurity exclude one another simply. ... it seems clear that starting around the middle of the eighteenth century in France the beholder's presence before the painting came increasingly to be conceived by critics and theorists as something that had to be accomplished or at least powerfully affirmed by the painting itself; and more generally that the existence of the beholder, which is to say the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld, emerged as problematic for painting as never before. -Fried, Absorption and Theatricality

THREE OR FO

MSEUMS

From Fried's account, we can envision Diderot as imposing upon painting a simple test-a test of its "stopping power," its ability to transfix and absorb in an instant its beholder. The application of this test-by, for example, a stroll through the salon-would end by distinguishing two groups of paintings; the successfulabsorbing-paintings could then be gathered up and hung elsewhere where they would, together, figure as so many examples of, simultaneously, art and good art, painting and good painting-a simple and perfect museum. This imaginary museum is, however, given the lie by the corruptions of time; nothing is more merely theatrical than yesterday's high and absorbing drama. Greuze gives way to David who gives way to Courbet.... The shows must be changed ever faster and the very walls of the museum become unstable. The museum/salon is supplanted, in this imaginary history, by the museum, as well as Flaubert's22-a museum that museum/encyclopedia-Manet's is organized as a bulwark against time and its undoing of power. It is a museum that would recover and maintain an openness to "the great art of the past," protecting painting from the provinciality of the moment and the region, offering painting (to) the European tradition (a museum that cannot take kindly to the intrusion of geological time and site). The museum/salon argued nothing. Its license was, radically, the experience of paintings, and in each case the experience of presentness was sufficient justification for the work. Time existed in this museum only to the accidental

Here I simply want to register the explicit crossing of my museums with the museum discussed 22. by Douglas Crimp in "On the Museum's Ruins"; my imaginings embroider here on his.

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extent that one had to get one's beholding self from moment of presentness to moment of presentness. The museum/encyclopedia would acknowledge the facts of time and master them (the "facts of time" are here a new name for the "primordial convention that paintings exist to be beheld"). Individual paintings surrender their claim to the simplicity of presence, taking instead their place within a tradition of painting, unfolding in time, through which all claims to presentness are mediated, either implicitly (in, for example, our attempts to recall the vanished power of Greuze) or explicitly (in, for example, Manet's work). In the latter instance, we see that the explicit recovery of time in and for painting is also its explicit acknowledgment of the inevitable theatricality of painting, in itself and in its relation to the past. We will be inclined to condemn as merely-that is, disguisedly-theatrical those works that do not take on time for themselves, but rather leave it in the hands of the viewer, to shape as he or she sees most fit: ... the experience (of literalist art) persists in time, and the presentment of endlessness that, I have been claiming, is central to literalist art and theory is essentially a presentment of endless, or indefinite duration.... The literalist preoccupation with time-more precisely, with the duration of the experience-is, I suggest, paradigmatically theatrical: as though theatre confronts the beholder, and thereby isolates him, with the endlessness not just of objecthood but of time; or as though the sense which, at bottom, theatre addresses is a sense of temporality, of time both passing and to come, simultaneously approaching and receding, as if apprehended in an infinite perspective.... This preoccupation marks a profound difference between literalist work and modernist painting and sculpture. It is as though one's experience of the latter has no duration-not because one in fact experiences a picture by Noland or Olitski... in no time at all, but because at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest.23 The museum/encyclopedia has time as a problem, recognizing that the corruptions to which the museum/salon was exposed were not accidental: a theater was always there in advance of the drama of the moment-how else could we have recognized it as drama? Diderot's criticism as it is unfolded by Fried makes a knot of time and theater such that the prospect of absorptive painting emerges between the past (and present) theatricality of the stage and the future possibility of that stage renewed by its discovery of the real drama bodied forth in successful painting. The "tableau" is the difficult seam here between the canvas and the stage. The museum/encyclopedia would exist without contradiction, at once guaranteeing and guaranteed by the Tradition. The visitor could then walk easily

23.

Fried, "Art and Objecthood," pp. 144-145.

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from painting to painting, recovering each from each, experiencing newly not only the works on the wall but also the space between, the space of art history, the sense and appreciation of painting. There is in such a museum no deep scandalno outrage history cannot place and heal, place at heel. "Art and Objecthood" and its attendant controversies might be said to mark the end of this dream of a museum. It rides uneasily its contradictions and those of the history it would close, protect, and finally guarantee. It rests uneasily as well within its understanding of itself as criticism. "Art and Objecthood" figures for us here as an attempt to defend the adequacy and integrity of the museum/encyclopedia-an attempt to show that the coincidence of art and good art can be maintained. We might say that the museum/encyclopedia has for its internal threat what appears as the "institutional theory of art"-the idea, most simply, that the museum means nothing, that art is nothing more than what makes it into the museum and that the appearance of the museum as at once guaranteeing and guaranteed by the history of art is simply and finally empty. Institutional theories would have us believe that there is nothing radically scandalous in art or its history-not because of the way art builds itself in and out of its history, but because the museum can absorb anything (Fountain is the proof). Against such a theory, the museum/encyclopedia proves itself through the historically and systematically grounded exclusion of that which is irredeemably theatrical: the scandal of Tony Smith or Donald Judd or Robert Rauschenberg. The claim has now been advanced that we live in and on the ruins of this the wake of "Art and museum-in and on the failure of its exclusions-in in these we should ruins what we have that I recognize Objecthood."24 suggest come to call "the artworld"-a complex and contradictory network of (among other things and persons) museums, galleries, alternative spaces, sites, nonsitesarenas of various and mutual exclusions. This "artworld" is, in a sense, the artworld of the institutional theorist, but brought down to earth and stripped of its simplicity and homogeneity-so that if at one level this artworld as a whole is capable of absorbing all the scandals with which it is presented, it can do so only by absorbing them as scandals, by taking internal controversy and radical dissension as proper to itself. To appreciate a work in this new "museum" is with a new explicitness to map its world, and to do so partially with prejudice. What is surrendered or radically transformed in the passage from museum/encyclopedia to artworld is any faith in the homogeneity, simplicity, or univocity of art history: the scene is ineradicably plural. It it also and explicitly a scene-an acknowledgment of just how deeply and

24. Crimp all but makes explicit the connection between the museum and the problematic of "Art and Objecthood" in his attempt to relate Rauschenberg and Manet through Fried's essay on Manet's sources; see "On the Museum's Ruins," p. 45.

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pervasively we are submitted to theater and theatricality. The emergence of the artworld marks an invasion of the museum, of art history and art criticism, by the very terms, problems, and crises it would more externally survey. This is what Smithson early and polemically picked out as the difficulty with "Art and Objecthood": Michael Fried has . . declared a "war" on what he quixotically calls "theatricality." In a manner worthy of the most fanatical puritan, he provides the artworld with a long-overdue spectacle ... Fried has set the critical stage for manneristic modernism.... What Fried fears most is the consciousness of what he is doing-namely being himself theatrical.25

But it is important to see that Fried could not have said what had to be said except by exposing himself to just this charge. "Art and Objecthood" can accomplish its critical work only by posing a crisis for criticism to which it is not, by itself, adequate. The core of the issue has been brought out by Stanley Cavell: There are no such proofs possible for the assertion that the art accepted by a public is fraudulent; the artist himself may not know; and the critic may be shown up, not merely as incompetent, nor unjust in accusing the wrong man, but as taking others in (or out); that is, as an imposter.... He is part detective, part lawyer, part judge, in a country in which crimes and deeds of glory look alike, and in which the public not only, therefore, confuses the one with the other, but does not know that one or the other has been committed; not because the news has not got out, but because what counts as the one or the other cannot be defined until it happens; and when it has happened there is no sure way he can get the news out; and no way at all without risking something like a glory or a crime of his own.26 In this light, Smithson's attack seems accurate, but also too easy. If "Art and Objecthood" is significantly a piece of theatrical criticism, we are going to want to say also that "absorption" and "theatricality" end not as concepts recovered from and on behalf of the history of art and criticism, but as means to the staging of (a certain) history of modern art-devices of visibility and articulation, but also devices of invisibility and silence. What makes Smithson's attack too easy is his sense that in calling Fried "theatrical" he has managed to put him aside-in just 25. Robert Smithson, in Nancy Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson, New York, New York University, 1979, p. 38. 26. Cavell, Must We Mean, pp. 190-191. Crimes and deeds of glory look alike, I want to say, in much the same way hello and good-bye look alike, and differ in much the same way; for Fried, "the same developments" differ as they are seen theatrically or not (see "Art and Objecthood," p. 136). This play of identity and difference is at the heart of allegorical double vision.

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the way Fried put Tony Smith aside. But of course Fried was "wrong," and so also was Smithson. We are no more free to walk away from the complications imposed on criticism by an acknowledgment of its theatricality than Fried is to walk away from the complications imposed on the history of art by the persistence of a Smith or a Rauschenberg. In each instance the stake is something that would proclaim itself in some sense "postmodern." Brecht calls for new relations between an actor and his role, and between the actor and his audience: theater is to defeat theater. But in Beckett there is no role towards which the actor can maintain intelligence, and he has nothing more to tell his audience than his characters' words convey. Theater becomes the brute metaphysical fact of separateness; damnation lies not in a particular form of theater, but in theatricality as such. If against that awareness, theater were to defeat theater, then while theater loses, it thereby wins; we have not found our way outside, we have merely extended the walls. -Cavell, "Ending the Waiting Game"

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THEATER

What is "theatricality"? Like "absorption," it is a term caught up in a dialectic that everywhere redefines and transforms it-and it is so because it is, like "absorption," impossible. "Theater" is what pure painting would exclude from itself-what it thus fails to exclude and is, in the end, obliged to acknowledge as its inward capacity to go always astray from itself (we could even say: to be always astray from itself). But, as Fried reads Diderot, this very theater can be divided against itself, sorted out into the merely theatrical and the truly dramatic. The stage-to name the neutral thing on which the dialectic both breaks and rests-shows forth not only the threat to or failure of painting, but also that which is most powerful and absorbing in it: The recognition that the art of painting was inescapably addressed to an audience that must be gathered corresponds to the exactly concurrent recognition that the theater's audience was a gathering not simply of auditors but of beholders ... in both cases the problems were to be resolved by the instrumentality of the tableau, whose significance for

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each art was in a sense complementary to its sense for the other.27 For Diderot, if theater names the dumping ground of painterly failure, painting reserves the right to name the success of theater: this is the source of the "complementarity" Fried finds in the twin valorizations of the tableau. A theater of the tableau would be, for Diderot, a theater purged of theatricality-a pure theater such as exists nowhere and such as could come into existence only at its own cost, unable to recognize itself. A certain impossibility of theater ufndergirds what Fried presents as Diderot's "Supreme Fiction"-and we will see that if there has been something (in art, in criticism) like a turn from the modern to the postmodern, that turn has taken place within the shelter of this impossibility. Fried writes: Diderot's advocacy of tableaux as opposed to coups de theatre is to be understood chiefly in this light. "Un incident imprevu qui se passe en action, et qui change subitement l'etat des personnages, est un coup de theatre," he writes in the Entretiens. "Une disposition de ces personnages sur la scene, si naturelle et si vraie que, rendue fidelement par un peintre, elle me plairait sur la toile, est un tableau." . . . A tableau was visible, it could be said to exist at all, only from the beholder's point of view. But precisely because this was so, it helped to persuade the beholder that the actors themselves were unconscious of his presence. Diderot's use of the term theatre in this connection reveals the depth of his revulsion against the conventions then prevailing in the dramatic arts. But it also suggests that he despaired that those conventions, and the consciousness of the beholder they embodied, would ever be fully overcome for once and for all. ... Presumably Diderot felt that if the theater were to be reformed along the lines proposed in the Entretiens and the Discourse, painters would be able to look to the stage for inspiration without dooming themselves to mediocrity or worse. But he continued to express his distaste for the theater as he knew it and in his writings on painting used the term le thedtral, the theatrical, implying consciousness of being beheld, as synonymous with falseness.28 It is important to see in such passages how profoundly complicated the negotiations between theater and painting have become-how deeply purity and 27. Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, p. 93. 28. Ibid., pp. 95, 100. Fried translates: "An unexpected incident that happens in the course of the action and that suddenly changes the situation of the characters on the stage, so natural and so true to life that, faithfully rendered by a painter, it would please me on canvas, is a tableau."

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impossibility, achievement and failure, have become entangled with one another-and how the tableau emerges as the lie that binds. It is just here that we want to cite Craig Owens on the roots of Robert Wilson's theater-and we do so in order to see both what is powerful in its insight and what it too easily passes over: As I have written elsewhere, Wilson is indeed Artaud's heir, but the priority he assigns to visual imagery over written text aligns his work more with the history of recent art than with that of theater or, rather, points to a crucial link between the two-the tableau. In French, of course, "tableau" signifies both a painting and a theatrical scene; this semantic overlap is not without its consequences for both arts, as Roland Barthes observes: "As is well known, the whole of Diderot's aesthetic rests on the identification of theatrical scene and pictorial tableau: the perfect play is a succession of tableaux, that is, a gallery, an exhibition." This link between painting and theater was, however, suppressed with the ascendancy of modernism in the arts. Brecht was the last theatrical artist to conceive his works as successions of tableaux, and modernist painters in their single-minded pursuit of medium-specificity, have sought to distinguish their art from other arts, theater in particular. Thus Michael Fried, in his famous 1967 attack on Minimalism, "Art and Objecthood," could claim with impunity that "art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theater"--a pronouncement which, in the late 60s, gave rise to a storm of controversy over theatricality in art. It was into this polemical atmosphere that Wilson, who had studied painting with George McNeil and taken a degree in architecture at Pratt, emerged. In works like Deafman Glance (1971) and The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1973) he unequivocally identified the tableau as the meeting ground of painting and theater.29 If this statement appears both powerful and powerfully problematic, it is because we are now able to read an essay like "Art and Objecthood" with a much greater awareness of its internal complexity and historical depth. What should interest us is that the closer we get to what we mean or want to mean by "postmodernism" the closer we also get to the heart of Fried's critical and historical project. A summary statement from the end of "Toward a Supreme Fiction" points to the final, metaphysical stakes of this project: As we have seen, the recognition that paintings are made to be beheld and therefore presuppose the existence of a beholder led to the demand for the actualization of his presence: a painting, it was insisted, had to attract the beholder, to stop him in front of itself, and to hold him there

29.

Owens, "Robert Wilson: Tableaux," p. 115.

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in a perfect trance of involvement. At the same time ... it was only by negating the beholder's presence that this could be achieved; only by establishing the fiction of his absence or nonexistence could his actual placement before and enthrallment by the painting be secured. This paradox directs attention to the problematic character not only of the painting-beholder relationship but of something still more fundamental-the object-beholder (one is tempted to say object"subject") relationship which the painting-beholder relationship epitomizes. In Diderot's writings on painting and drama the objectbeholder relationship as such, the very condition of spectatordom, stands indicted as theatrical, a medium of dislocation and estrangement rather than of absorption, sympathy, self-transcendence; and the success of both arts, in fact their continued functioning as major expressions of the human spirit, are held to depend upon whether or not painter and dramatist are able to undo that state of affairs, to detheatricalize beholding and so make it once again a mode of access to truth and conviction.... What is called for, in other words, is at one and the same time the creation of a new sort of object-the fully realized tableau-and the constitution of a new sort of beholder-a new "subject"-whose innermost nature would consist precisely in the conviction of his absence from the scene of representation.30 Diderot's dream, Fried's dream, is finally of a world to which we can be simply present and in which we can be simply present to one another, undivided and unposed, graceful. These are dreams about the possibility at once of community and integrity. And here we have to say that if theater and painting are two separate arts in search of their individual, pure, and detheatricalized selves, it is no longer clear that or how they are separate-even as it remains clear that there is no overcoming of their individualities. Their intercourse is complex. As they name in each other their various perils and promises, they show themselves to be so entangled that there cannot but come a time in which painting (for example) will have to recognize its theatricality not only as risk inherent in its still proper "inside," but as an "exterior" entanglement as well: the path of painting will inevitably cross that of a really existing theater (as my path crosses yours). Radical self-criticism cannot stop short of acting itself out on the occasion of and in terms of empirical selves (even if this is not its real achievement). So also the painterly acknowledgment of theatricality has, at its limits, an interest in theater as such-and especially in that theater most deeply engaged in its own selfcriticism-a theater caught up in-confused and torn by-the demand for detheatricalization precisely insofar as that demand is at once means and barrier to the realization of theater: a theater that would then ground itself on the display of 30.

Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, pp. 103-104.

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its own impossibility; a theater that would show itself in and through the failure of theatricality, its inability to count as theater; Artaud's theater perhaps-an impossible theater that counts for painting in a way no other theater can. In an essay on "the theater of cruelty and the closure of representation," Jacques Derrida writes: Perhaps we can now ask, not about the conditions under which a modern theater would be faithful to Artaud, but in what cases it surely is unfaithful to him. What might the themes of infidelity be, even among those who invoke Artaud in the militant and noisy fashion we all know? We will content ourselves with naming those themes. Without a doubt, foreign to the theater of cruelty are: 1. All non-sacred theater. 2. All theater that privileges speech or rather the verb, all theater of words . . . 3. All abstract theater which excludes something from the totality of art, and thus, from the totality of life and its resources of signification: dance, music, volume, depth of plasticity, visible images, sonority, phonicity, etc.... 4. All theater of alienation .. . [Derrida's gloss touches Diderot and is worth noting: "There is no longer spectator or spectacle, but festival. All the limits furrowing classical theatricality . .. were ethicometaphysical prohibitions, wrinkles, grimaces, rictuses-the symptoms of fear before the dangers of festival."] 5. All non-political theater... 6. All ideological theater, all cultural theater, all communicative, interpretive. . . theater seeking to transmit a content, or to deliver a message . . . that would make a discourse's meaning intelligible for its listeners; a message that would not be totally exhausted in the act and present tense of the stage, that would not coincide with the stage, that would not be repeated without it.31 Artaud too dreams the dream of presence. What real theater could exist within the limits of this dream? Derrida remarks that "Artaud kept himself as close as possible to the limit: the possibility and impossibility of pure theater." To the extent that Artaud committed himself wholly to such purity, the theater of cruelty exists only as the theory of its own impossibility, with neither instance nor legacy.

31. Jacques Derrida, "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago, 1978, pp. 243-245.

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I, Antonin Artaud, am my son my father, my mother, and myself. From this pure incest there is no issue: And now I am going to say something which, perhaps is going to stupefy many people. I am the enemy of theater. I have always been. As much as I love the theater, I am, for this very reason, equally its enemy.32 The uneven dialectic of "purity" is at work in these lines-even in their shape-so that even as Artaud would choke off the possibility of theater altogether, he reopens it once again. The possibility of (what would be) a pure theater is, in effect, recovered across the admission of its impurity: the theater of cruelty (re)appears as a theater always already torn from itself, and as a theater whose cruelty is first of all a cruelty toward itself-a measure of its division from itself. Derrida writes: "Presence, in order to be presence and self-presence, has always already begun to represent itself, has always already been penetrated."33The scene of representation persists. Call this a theater of images-a theater that cannot be a theater, that must be counted elsewhere. If we can say convincingly (and we can) that "Wilson is indeed Artaud's heir," this is in large measure because both are joint heirs to a much more complex and divided legacy-a legacy the testamentary conditions of which are tangled by incest and cross-marriage, bizarre codicils and intervening deaths and disappearances (a legacy coincident with real history) to the point that it will never emerge from probate (not, at least, until its resources and those of its contestants are spent). Within this legacy there are terms under which theater, in its impossibility, can appear for painting-count for painting-in a way that it cannot for itself. (And in this play between the arts, the notion of audience and of beholder takes on a new depth of complication.) The tableau is the seam along which modern theater and painting have been historically bound to one another. The undoing of this seam would presumably free painting from the threat of theatricality; but this would also release painting from itself, from its possibility of achievement. We recognize Wilson's theater as relevant to the current situation of painting to the extent that it appears to us as a

32. 33.

Cited by Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 249. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 248.

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theater of tableaux-a theater willing to find itself within a certain complex nonpresence to itself. Such a theater, appearing for an audience given (whether it will it or no) to finding itself in the wake of "Art and Objecthood," appears to decenter or deconstruct the play of mere presence and pure presentness through which Fried would have excluded the radical theater of Minimalist literalism. The slippage between his two terms-a slippage Fried implicitly claims to control, to be able to sort adequately into an experience of theater and a counterpoised experience of grace-this slippage now appears as deeply internal to this theater of images (so that what is perhaps being undone or rethought is the mythology of presence and presentness, transcendence and temporality, that underlay both sides of the earlier controversy-a present already penetrated by something other will find itself neither in a moment of grace nor in the experience of duration). Wilson's theater would make allegorists of us-and would do so whether we interest ourselves in it as painters or as critics; allegory has always been a mode of both reading and writing, creation and criticism inextricably mixed. The painterly claim to the recovery of allegory unfolds into the situation of criticism as well. (But then every event in the history of painting Fried recounts rebounds upon and determines its criticism-what is new then is just the way this connection is displayed for [even forced upon] us now, the way in which criticism is newly called upon to acknowledge its relation to the work that is its occasion. It may be that we needed a rediscovery of allegory in order to see that Fried has been saying this all along.) The new difficulty which comes to light in the modernist situation is that of maintaining one's belief in one's own HOW THINGS SEAM enterprise, for the past and the present become problematic together. I believe that philosophy shares the modernist difficulty now everywhere evident in the major arts, the difficulty of making one's present effort become a part of the present history of the enterprise to which one has committed one's mind, such as it is. (Modernizers, bent merely on newness, do not have history as a problem, that is, as a commitment . . ) -Cavell, Foreword to Must We Mean What We Say? "There is no there for you, where objects are. There are no individual exits from the world of objects into your dream. There are no individual marks or features by virtue of which you can pick out the real from the

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unreal. Criteria come to an end. Hallucination and dreaming happen all at once, seamlessly; they are world-creating, hence they are world-depriving . .." I find that I do not accept this idea of the seamlessness of projection. The others do not vanish when a given case fails me. My experience continues to affix its seam. -Cavell, The Claim of Reason The claim we are considering is that "over the past decade we have witnessed a radical break with the modernist tradition, effected precisely by a preoccupation with the 'theatrical.'"34 On this account, the break with modernism has been effected through a shattering of the "integrity of modernist painting and sculpture" which makes it "clear that the actual characteristics of the medium, per se, cannot any longer tell us much about an artist's activity." This obliteration of boundaries has opened art's way to theater and its privileged experience of temporality. This is, very generally, the picture we have assumed and complicated throughout these notes. We do well to note not only that Fried's criterion of "seriousness" continues to preside over this development, but also that the claim made by Crimp on behalf of the new "aesthetic activities" that transcend or confuse media-the claim that these activities free us from a literal construal of the notion of medium-repeats exactly Fried's distinction of himself from Greenberg in the passage cited from "Art and Objecthood" at the very beginning of this essay. This should lead us to keep an eye on the peregrinations of the-literal in Crimp's summary of the current situation: An art whose strategies are thus grounded in the literal temporality and presence of theater has been the crucial formulating experience for a group of artists currently beginning to exhibit in New York. The extent to which this experience fully pervades their work is not, however, immediately apparent, for its theatrical dimensions have been transformed, and, quite unexpectedly, reinvested in the pictorial image. If many of these artists can be said to have been apprenticed in the field of performance as it issued from minimalism, they have nevertheless begun to reverse its priorities, making of the literal situation and duration of the performed event a tableau whose presence and temporality are utterly psychologized; performance becomes just one of a number of ways of "staging" a picture.35

34. 35.

Crimp, "Pictures," p. 76, as also the quoted phrases in the next sentence. Ibid., p. 77.

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One can be tempted to name this passage "Fried's Revenge." Perhaps even "Greenberg's Revenge." (Who put the scare-quotes on "staging" and to what effect? It happens in families that members are disinherited or otherwise excluded, and that children born to such members are nonetheless acknowledged and welcomed back into the bosom of the larger family.) Michael Fried's writing is, in any case, interesting now in a way that it may not have seemed to have been for the past ten years or so. Its claim upon our attention has been renewed and it has been renewed by picturing's recovery of itself from the theatrical. As Crimp's paragraph continues, we should remark not only the presence of Artaud (in the wings as it were), but also the persistence of a problematic of beholding behind the phrase "conditions of intelligibility." Thus the performances of Jack Goldstein do not, as had usually been the case, involve an artist's performing the work, but rather the presentation of an event in such a manner and at such a distance that it is apprehended as representation-representation not, however, conceived as the re-presentation of that which is prior, but as the unavoidable condition of intelligibility of even that which is present. It is this presentation of representation, this insistence on surrendering presence-of any kind-to its permeation by something other than itself, that lies at the heart of what is now being called "allegory." "Postmodernism"-insofar as it is characterized by its allegorical impulserepresents the freeing of painting from its prison of opticality as well as its recovery of subject matter beyond itself and the logic of its medium. But we do well to see how small a liberation this is. If it is true that the past fifteen or twenty years have seen the hegemony of the optical dismantled, it is still true also that "paintings are made to be beheld"-"opticality" is but one name for, interpretation of, this "primordial convention" (just as the literal construal of the medium is but one construal among others of the medium of painting). We cast "postmodernism" at a deeper level if we say that the allegorical impulse is one which would acknowledge explicitly the futility of trying to sort the "mere" from the "pure"-an impulse to embrace the heteronomy of painting.36 Such an acknowledgment demands that we accept-as best we can-that the field we call "painting" includes, and cannot now be defined without reference to, its violations and excesses-performance work in particular. (Performance continues then to lie between the arts and has always to be asked what it counts 36. But there is a knot here. For us the major theorist of the heterolnomous andl helteological is, o( course, Derrida. And Joel Fineman is quite right to say that "Derrida's project is tft'ectivcly to)a)ply Heidegger's

critique of Western metaphysics

to Heidegger

himself,"

and that therei is in this insistence

something of an "ever-vigilant, vaguely messianic, deconstructive Puritanismll (Finemall, "'litw Significance of Literature: The Importance of Being Earnest," October, no. 15 [Winter 19801, 81). Heteronomy

and purity are, as it were, in each other's service; neither escapes or stands aplart from the

other. Purity and its quotation marks together are essential to xwhatwe mlcan by moderinism.

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as-for whom it counts. We will want to say-in this context at least-that performance is not [yet] an art in itself, but a way in which various arts may find themselves outside themselves. It is not clear to me what it would take for performance to establish itself as an art-what, that is, its "proper" medium is. The undeniable fact that performance has established itself as an artistic practice, even a central practice, tells us nothing about how and where it counts.) If we thus say that painting is now to be defined through its discontinuity with itself, its inability to attain a presence that is not also represented and deferred, the history of painting becomes open to us in new ways. We might remark here, for example, the ways in which abstract expressionism is becoming newly available-its period and sense newly readable. For some, abstract expressionism has become interesting not as a step on the road to the Absolute of the Allover, but as an attempt to gain access to and present deep and private images and symbols of the self (and this may mean that Pollock is no longer the necessary genius and achievement of the movement-figures like Gottlieb and Baziotes and Stamos may take on new interest, and the itinerary of a Philip Guston can become exemplary for others). By the same token, a parallel demystifying impulse may choose to read in Pollock's drips mere and empty signs of freedom, bearing away their own implicit claim to spontaneity and depth. In either case we are rewriting failure and achievement out of our own impulse to heterology-creating a history to which an allegorical painting can be responsive. The duplicity of this rewriting should remind us that "allegory" has always been-and in the hands of a critic especially-a trope of both demystification and revalorization. It replaces the exclusive duality of the mere and the pure with the inclusive puzzle of what a thing "really" is, what the story really is. Allegorical painting, as it has emerged for recent criticism, is bound particularly to time and to story, to narrative. Sherman's mock film stills and Longo's drawings and reliefs (I would have you call these things "paintings") are understood as exemplary presentations of "hinges" whose significance is neither simply present nor simply borne away into story, but is rather given (not here, now now) as an undecidable crossing of possible narratives-stories of death or dancing, histories of menace or aspiration. To the extent that these paintings are for us the occasion of new and deep recognitions of painting as it constitutes itself in the intertwining of history and convention, they can recall us to "the essential fact of (what I refer to as) the modern" as it "lies in the relation between the present practice of an enterprise and the history of that enterprise, in the fact that this relation has become problematic."37 Allegory has its way of insisting on this problematic-on the uncertainty, at every moment, of the relation between a given present or claim to presence and the narratives-stories and histories-by which it is traversed and in

37.

Cavell, Must We Mean. p. xix.

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which it could figure. The painting that matters will matter as it figures just such complex shuttling within and "between" the history of painting. It lets us say that one of the essential facts of the modern, now newly visible, is that from within it the relation between the practice of an enterprise and its past has always already become problematic: modernism has always already invaded the history and tradition from which it would distinguish itself, and so is capable of finding itself wherever it looks within that history (a point of muddled controversy between Greenberg and Steinberg). There are then ways in which the critical claim to the postinodern appears to find its deepest sense if the postmodern is understood to be itself an allegory of the modern. This possibility lies at the heart of these notes, setting the terms in which I would pose the question of Michael Fried's continuing visibility for and relevance to contemporary criticism. At the conclusion of his compelling two-part essay on "The Allegorical Impulse," Craig Owens writes, "This deconstructive impulse is characteristic of postmodernist art in general and must be distinguished from the self-critical tendency of modernism."38 (Derrida likewise writes of his own deconstructive project, "Si elle en etait restee, ce qu'elle n'a jamais fait qu'aux yeux de ce qui tiraient benefice de n'y rien voir, a une simple deconstitution semantique ou conceptuelle, la deconstruction n'aurait forme qu'une modalite-nouvelle-de l'auto-critique interne de la philosophie. Elle aurait risque de reproduire la propriete philosophique, le rapport a soi de la philosophie, l'economie de la mise en question traditionelle."39) I want to cast such suspicion as I can-not on Owens's imperative, which is a late and necessary repetition of the imperatives we have seen in Greenberg and Fried-but on the possibility of our making, successfully, such a distinction, however imperative it may be (remember Fried's insistence on the necessity of distinguishing the serious and the frivolous). I want to say that it is precisely because Owens repeats belatedly and for criticism the attempt at radical distinction and exclusion that Fried attempted for painting in "Art and Objecthood" that the distinction will not hold up-will break down just the way Fried's does-which is to say: powerfully, insistently, centrally. ... la dissemination qui ne joue pas, comme on le croirait trop facilement, avec le pluriel, le disperse, l'Vpars, pas entre le multiplicit' et l'unite, mais entre l'unique. -Derrida, "Pas"

38. Owens, "Allegorical Impulse," part 2, p. 79. 39. Jacques Derrida, "Ou commence et comment finit un corps enseignant," in Dominique Grisoni, ed., Politiques de la philosophie, Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1976, p. 64.

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Aux metaphores. Ce mot ne s'ecrit THE TRUTH OF ALLEGORY qu'au pluriel. S'il n'y avait qu'une metaphore possible, reve au fond de la philoAND THE NECESSITY sophie, si l'on pouvait reduire leur jeu OF RHETORIC au cercle d'une famille ou d'un groupe de metaphores, voire d une metaphore "centrale," "fondamentale," "principale," il n'y aurait plus de vraie metaphore: seulement, a travers une metaphore vraie, la lisibilite assuree du propre. Or c'est parce que le metaphorique est d'entree de jeu pluriel qu'il n'echappe pas d la syntaxe; et qu'il donne lieu, dans la philosophie aussi, a un texte qui ne dans la s'epuise pas dans l'histoire de son sens..., de son visible ou theme invisible, (sens et presence, verite de I'etre). -Derrida, "La Mythologie Blanche" Allegory is indirect discourse. It is so either because directness is forbidden which case its indirectness is merely its disguise, to be removed as soon as the (in coast is clear) or because directness is impossible for reasons inherent to that which would otherwise be communicated (in which case removing the disguise is removing the thing, revealing nothing-the ineffability to be communicated the it to extent that is, being present, precisely in-by virtue of-the disguise). divides itself into moments of Allegory concealing and revealing, covering over and bodying forth-and this division will generate the terms in which we will evaluate allegorical works, condemning those that appear to be artificial, merely coded, and playing simply upon the hiding of sense, and praising those that appear as more purely and properly allegorical, showing forth that which can be shown only as deferred and in deferral-postmodern decorum. This is, of course, an attempt to separate the merely allegorical from the purely so, and is, as such, condemned to the fate of all such projects. It is the details of this fate that are of interest to us. Allegory without a key-pure allegoresis, as it were-is no longer recognizable as allegory (allegory as such is lost in a pure play of signifiers and ungrounded process of semiosis-allegoresis by itself either falls below or passes beyond the region we want to call rhetorical). Allegory that is merely keyed, translatable, is dispensable and uninteresting, a code and nothing more. Allegory is undone by-lost in-its truth at both extremes; whether we take it literally, discarding the rhetorical shell to eat the inner meat, or take it literally, as the pure structure of purloined sense, allos agoreuein, we lose it.40Allegory enforces its rhetoricity-its complexity-upon us. 40.

For the figure of the shell and kernel (and its link to translation), see Jacques Derrida, "Me-

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This rhythm internal to allegory should recall the rhythm internal to criticism. To put it another way: allegory maintains itself between-and is deeply, internally menaced by-two automatisms, automatisms of sense and of semiosis. In different ways, each offers the double possibility of the achievement and the undoing of allegory. Allegory remains its own doing only for so long as it is unachieved, seaming, in time, semiosis and sense, succumbing to neither. Allegorical work that presents a claim upon us does so because of the way it insists on time, recognizing it can exert that claim only in time, so perhaps only for a time (history is its condition). A new wrinkle in the dialectic of absorption and theatricality: a work can remove us from the time in which we come to it only by rewriting that time as its own. The claim to allegory takes up a definite position in relation to and in terms of the dialectic explored in Fried's work. If the theatrical temptation in Greuze (for example) is that we will be drawn into the work only to lose ourselves and it in the narrative that flows through it and plunges us back into the time we thought to transcend (the paintings appear finally sentimental), the new works would explicitly pose their openness to narrative(s) in such a way that one cannot be simply swept away by the story. (Cindy Sherman's pictures are perhaps nostalgic, but would be rigorously unsentimental.) The work thus becomes an emblem of narrativity ("as such") and gains its (difficult) presence-its claim upon us-

Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to the Translation of 'The Shell and the Kernel,' by Nicolas Abraham," trans. Richard Klein, Diacritics, vol. 9, no. 1 (Spring 1979), and, in the same issue, Abraham's essay "The Shell and the Kernel," trans. Nicholas Rand. On the purloining of sense, see Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,' " trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies, no. 48. The original French text appears in Lacan, Ecrits, Paris, Seuil, 1966, and a transcript of the actual seminar from which the essay emerged appears in LIacan,Le Moi dans la theorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse (Le Seminaire, livrc 2), Paris, Seuil, 1978. Derrida's rejoinder, "Le Factetir de la verite," first appeared in Poetique and is now' available in La Carte postale: de Socrates a Freud et au-dela, Paris, Aubier-Flammarion, 1980; a translation, "The Purveyor of Truth," appears in Yale French Studies, no. 52 (some of the footnotes in this committee translation are seriously muddled). The controversy between Lacan and Derrida can appear in the present context as an argument about the relation between allegory and that truth it bears (and through which it loses itself). An interest in this argument is, I take it, reflected in Fineman's effort to "maintain the validity of the distinction between literature and its criticism" over and against the "infinite, indefinite, unbountded extension of what nowadays is called textuality." It wotild seem that both in the case of I.acan atind Derrida and that ot literature and its criticism what is needed is a way of clinging to the controversy or distinction itself. Like Fineman, I want to register a certain dissatisfaction with a (presumably de Manian) criticism that "projects its own critical tinhappiness onto literature, whose selfdeconstruction would then be understood as criticism." But I am loath to set against such a denial of psychoanalysis an equally simple revalorization of the truth of psychoanalysis. What I would like is a more oblique approach that would let one see how both denial and reaffirmation fall similarly short of the necessary recognition of criticism. But all of this belongs, obviously, to another essay. It is perhaps enough to remark here that my Derrida suspects Fineman's Lacan as I presume his Lacan suspects my Derrida; if we can do this well we will be doing the necessary. (I have been quoting Fineman's "Allegorical Desire," pp. 64-65.)

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precisely through this admission of time. More radically: it gains its presence and claim upon us through its appropriation of the time in which we think to come to it, and through its mastery of this "unavoidable condition of intelligibility." What needs stressing here is that this claim takes its sense from a problematic that implicitly recognizes the continuing need for painting to (impossibly) recover itself from theatricality and that further assumes that the continuing deep task of painting is to master the conditions of its own intelligibility, "the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld." Painting has-still-to make itself count as painting, as art: as counting. This brings us to what I take to be the deepest and most difficult point in Fried's work. However convinced we may be that the making of art is natural to man, we have no access to it, no way to speak of it, except insofar as it is profoundly conventional and thus caught between invisibility and fragility. Art makes itself count only by exposing itself and so also its fragility, its gratuitousness and arbitrariness; such strength as it has it has only so long as it remains invisible, so long as it passes for natural. Fried's phrase, "the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld," conceals and reveals at once the essential contradiction that makes of art a historical activity. The same contradiction makes of art history simultaneously a means and a block to that activity. (This, I hope, is a way of saying something about what Smithson glimpsed in geology and the fact of the prehistoric.) We know or we think we know, more or less, what it means to speak of, for example, a "convention" that certain paintings are not to be beheld. A religious sanction perhaps. But we ought to feel very confused by the notion that it is also a "convention" that paintings are made to be beheld. In the case of the religious prohibition we know what it means to defy the convention-we just go ahead and do what (so to speak) comes naturally, we look at the painting instead of averting our eyes. But what could it mean to subvert this other convention? In a sense, this convention is failed or broken exactly the same way it is met: by "casting one's eyes on" (I'm groping for a neutral phrase) the canvas. What intervenes between success and failure here is just the recognition of the conventionality of this act (the recognition that we could have looked and still not seen). (This is why Fried glosses theatricality in "Art and Objecthood" in terms of "seeing works as nothing more than objects" and why he goes on to write that "literalist sensibility is, therefore a response to the same developments that have largely compelled modernist painting to undo its objecthood-more precisely, the same developments seen differently, that is, in theatrical terms, by a sensibility already theatrical, already (to say the worst) corrupted or perverted by theatre."41The eye the critic needs here is more than formal.)

41.

Fried, "Art and Objecthood," p. 136.

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In acknowledging the conventionality of beholding, we rescue our vision from its own automatisms-automatisms, variously, of more or less natural habit and more or less sophisticated and art historical taste-automatisms released by a thirst for the guarantees of the literal or by a surrender to the simplicity of radical flux. "Automatism" is then the name of a risk,42 a deep motive to self-criticism and to indirection, menacing both (so that what I take to be self-criticism may be mere narcissism; what I take to be indirect discourse may be self-indulgence or nonsense). "Self-criticism" may appear as the demand for the reduction of the literary and rhetorical. Indirection may appear as a call for rhetoricity and a recovery of ornament. Each is justified, to the extent that it is, by the history it makes and in which it would inscribe itself. Each such call appears as an emblematic summary of an unsummarizable history (a text), inscribing itself as such within the inner plurality, dissemination, of art history. "Breakthrough paintings" are now-and have therefore always been-everywhere and nowherepainted and repainted in works that complexly hinge their pasts. "Art history" is, now more than ever (but always now more than ever) the Great Automatism through which modern art lives its death and dies its life. Heads I win, tails you lose: art history quarantees at once everything and nothing. Cavell's caution is, finally, terrifying: A familiar answer is that time will tell. But my question is: What will time tell? That certain departures in art-like pursuits have become established (among certain audiences, in textbooks, on walls, in college courses); that someone is treating them with the respect due, we feel, to art; that one no longer has the right to question their status?43 We can only stand, unsponsored, ever more directly before time's radical (non)certification of our art and criticism, bearing and baring what we can, clinging to the difficult uncertainty of a present divided from itself-an uncertainty that demands our judgment, our acts of inclusion and exclusion, if its experience is to count for us:

With this I at once address and elide the central matter of the photograph. I find myself still 42. struggling with the notions advanced by Crimp in "The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism" (October, no. 15 [Winter 1980], 91-101), as well as his still more recent essays, "The End of Painting" (October, no. 16 [Spring 1981], 69-86) and "The Museum's Old/The Library's New Subject," Parachute, no. 22 [Spring 1981], 32-37). My inclination here will, I assume, be obvious: it is to say that photography is a central place for the posing of questions of automatism and that photographic work will inevitably be touched by that questioning, so that we will find ourselves forced to such assertions as that the photograph has "acquired an aura, only now its is a function not of presence, but of absence, severed from an origin, from an originator, from autheticity," and that "in our time, the aura has become only a presence, which is to say a ghost" ("Photographic Activity," p. 100). But I will also say that this does not free us from problems of aura and presence-rather it frees us into them and their complexity. The loss (or gain) of aura will not be simple. 43. Cavell, Must We Mean, p. 188.

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But in waiting for time to tell that, we miss what the present tells-that the dangers of fraudulence, and of trust, are essential to the experience of art.

The recognition that the art of painting was inescapably addressed to an audience that must be gathered . . -Fried, Absorption and Theatricality For not just any mode of composition will tell us something we cannot fail to know and yet remain enlightening; not just any way of arguing will try to prevent us from taking what is said as a thesis or a result. Theses and results are things that can be believed and accepted; but Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein do not want to be believed and accepted, and therewith, of course, dismissed. And not just any way of addressing an audience will leave them as they are, leave them alone, but transformed. These are effects we have come to expect of art.... -Cavell, "Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy"

CONDITIONS OF PUBLICITY

This is then where we stand, in difficult times. If there is a simple moral in our situation, it is perhaps just this: the existence of the beholder, which is to say the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld, has emerged as problematic for painting as never before. And: what we are newly recognizing is that the art of painting is inescapably addressed to an audience that must be gathered. And: we are attempting to acknowledge that this is now as fully and explicitly a problem for criticism as it is for painting. We have been concerned throughout this essay with the way-and time-in which that audience is gathered-with the conditions under which a work has a public. This concern demands a new or renewed attention to and awareness of the depth of complicity between painting and criticism. In this situation, criticism stands, or could, or should stand, in an altered relation to the art it serves. At any time, it is subordinate to that art, and expendable once the experience of an art or period or departure is established. But in the modern situation it seems inevitable, even, one

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might say, internal, to the experience of art.... Often one does not know whether interest is elicited and sustained primarily by the object or by what can be said about the object. My suggestion is not that this is bad, but that it is definitive of a modernist situation.44 Art is not simply and accidentally given over to criticism. This is part of what follows on our recognition of the primordial conventionality of art. We might also say that criticism is not (not simply) observation. Allegory forces these recognitions; allegorical works do not exist except in a universe of continuing allegoresis, commentary, and interpretation. Allegory demands criticism, confusing the line between itself and its criticism-in such confusion criticism must take account of itself as well as of its simpler "object." (The risk here is of the theatricalization of criticism, its regressive sublation into the ether of what might then be called "metatheory" or "metacriticism" [as if these were names for a purer criticism or theory].) The present essay would not constitute a work of metacriticism or an exercise in the metatheoretical. It is occasioned by an experience of criticism and would speak of and to that; it would speak also (obscurely, indirectly) of the condition of art. But it can guarantee nothing out of itself. Allegory, as a trope of revelation and concealment, is a mode at once public and private, and if allegorical works appear to embody the deep and obscure promptings of the self, they do so successfully only to the extent that these promptings are communicable, are already what we might call "public." Such works pose as a condition of their inner sense their outer publicity; they are works that demand a beholder, and they do so in order to show the beholder his or her own difficult presence to (absence from) the work. The allegories of sense and gesture, convention, that have been seen in the work of Longo, Anderson, Goldstein, Sherman, and others are visible as such only to the extent that they are recognized as deeply responsive to the issues raised in "Art and Objecthood"and questions of anthropomorphism, the privacy and publicity-hiddenness the other. the of self, openness-of "Art and Objecthood" tends strongly to align surface with publicity and depth with privacy. The hollow literalist form appears as a person who presents himself to us in and from his sense of radical privacy-presents himself as withdrawn, distant, distancing, even mocking. In this view, Pollock counts as a discoverer of surface and it is this discovery he hands down to his strongest heirsto Louis, Noland, Olitski. The weak are left with the rest-an expressionist ideology, an insistence on the self. As the surface becomes ever more compellingly and powerfully charged, the self, having become its own deep and private object (having become object to itself-ironized, distanced) becomes ever more naked,

44.

Ibid., p. 207.

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ever more exposed to its public. The passage from Smith and Judd to Acconci isas I have tried to show elsewhere45-simply a matter of consequences literally drawn. In dialectics the world unfolds through the failures of the moment. It was only out of the drive toward radical privacy in art and out of an insistence on forcing the relation between art and its beholder into mere externality-(the reduction of that relation to one of mere objectivity and knowledge), that the failures of such a vision of privacy (and of publicity) could become once again visible. (And here the essential contrast is between an art that insists on criticism as a reflection and acknowledgment of the way in which public and private always have interpenetrated one another and so are seamed in one another, and an art that would construct itself as an epistemological problem, daring its beholder to know it.) Success, whatever its other virtues, rarely has a future. The trick some painting seems now to be attempting is to succeed precisely through its failure. As Owens writes: When the postmodernist work speaks of itself, it is no longer to proclaim its autonomy, its self-sufficiency, its transcendence; rather, it is to narrate its own contingency, insufficiency, lack of transcendence. It tells of a desire that must be perpetually deferred; as such, its deconstructive thrust is aimed not only against the contemporary myths that furnish its subject matter, but also against the symbolic, totalizing impulse which characterizes modern art.46 If Pollock, for example, counts for this painting, he counts now in the tension between his surface and its presumptive depth, the way these terms interlock in and as the condition of his work's gathering an audience, the way in which his work means to mean and does not (quite). This Pollock is one who painted in time, whose canvas marks the time of that painting, its dissemblings and forgettings (of drawing, for example), its revelation and concealment of its own depths-a flatbed, a table, a tableau that would explicitly bear the marks of the time it freezes and gathers into itself. If Louis is a recovery and repetition of Pollock, so also is Rauschenberg-the two possibilities are entwined in one another, are each other's condition of possibility. But it is through Rauschenberg that the story of painting's confusion with and dependence on the theater is narrated, and it is Rauschenberg's work that seems increasingly capable of the past decades. standing as emblem-hinge-for

45. In a review entitled "How Should Acconci Count for Us? Notes on a Retrospect," October, no. 18 (Fall 1981), 79-89. The essay is an attempt at working out practically what it means to talk about a work in terms of the way in which it meets or fails to meet its conditions of publicity, the fact that it addresses an audience which must be gathered. 46. Owens, "Allegorical Impulse," part 2, p. 80.

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(On page 43 of the catalogue for the 1976 Rauschenberg retrospective there is a photograph of a rehearsal for a dance called Spring Training. Rauschenberg stands in the foreground, carrying Steve Paxton. To the right, in the background, Trisha Brown, dressed perhaps as a bride, walks with what appears to be a radio. To the left and in the background, Alex Hay turns away from the camera, looking for all the world like a figure out of Longo. How many ways do the limits between the modern and the postmodern, painting and theater and dance and photography, presence and representation, hinge in this picture?) In the spring of 1980 Joel Fineman published an article on psychoanalysis and allegory in October. His piece was accompanied by an essay on the allegorical impulse by Craig Owens. The next issue included a second essay by Owens on allegory and postmodernism, and an essay on Rauschenberg and museums, photography and postmodernism by Douglas Crimp. Further in the background is Crimp's essay, "Pictures," from October 8-which first picked out the group of artists and issues around which the ensuing discussions have turned. Now there is this baggy monster, as well as whatever may have intervened between then and now.47 All of this may amount to-in the minds of the various writers concerned or in the minds of their readers or in fact-the articulation of a particular theoretical and critical prise de position (like, perhaps, "Art and Objecthood"). Inevitably it will be at least that. But that may also be merely the least of what this spate of articles is or should be. To the extent that this series of writings amounts to the taking of a position, the presentation of a thesis, it presents a position that is fundamentally not different from (only later than) the position Fried has been building all these years-and it is powerful, if it is, precisely because this is what it is. If there is something newer than this in these writings, it is in themselves, their rhythms, and their embeddedness in one another: the world in which they are present to one another and to their readers. If the present notes seem designed to force a certain acknowledgment of Fried-of what is not (so) new in the postmodern-this design can only be accomplished by forcing the novelty as well, by insisting on the opacity and heterogeneity of criticism, the complexity of its allegiances and the absoluteness of its entanglement with the terms and practices it is tempted to theorize more simply and know. In this sense, I hope to recall criticism from its attained positions to the time of its practice and the risks concomitant with it. Cavell, continuing his discussion of the ways in which criticism has become

47. Or even between now and now: as these notes were undergoing revision, October 15 appeared with the new essays by Crimp and Fineman indicated in previous footnotes; and, as the notes were edited for a final time, October 16 appeared with Crimp's "The End of Painting," and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh's "Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting"; furthermore, Parachute 22 with Crimp's "The Museum's Old/The Library's New Subject." A new essay by Michael Fried has also appeared: "Representing Representation: On the Central Group in Courbet's 'Studio,' " Art in America, vol. 69, no. 7 (September 1981), pp. 127-133, 168-173. Courbet's painting is, of course, subtitled "Allegorie reelle.... "

Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory

central-perhaps internal-to difficulties of this situation:

91

the experience of art, turns to the dangers and

Perhaps it would be nicer if composers could not think, and felt no need to open their mouths except to sing-if, so to say, art did not present problems. But it does, and they do, and the consequent danger is that the words, because inescapable, will usurp motivation altogether, no longer tested by the results they enable ... this suggests that a central importance of criticism has become to protect its art against criticism. Not just from bad criticism, but from the critical impulse altogether, which no longer knows its place, perhaps because it no longer has a place.48 The dangers here are dangers to which this essay may have already succumbed. We began, it may be recalled, by dismissing certain fears that have now returned in a much deeper form and, so to speak, for real. I may be forgetting Fried even in my claim to recall him-I may be forgetting the notion of art he (and I) claim to serve. There is no way the news can be gotten out without risking, undecidably, a crime or glory of one's own. A part of the news that would be gotten out is of "postmodernism," and the crime risked in getting this out is that of forgetting modernism as something that has counted and continues to count for us (the name, for example, of the way in which we can now gather about a work of art). Such forgetting may also be the glory. "Postmodernism" means, if it means anything, something about the way in which modernism must inevitably come to see in itself its own allegory (and so also something like its own failure, its nonidentity with itself-but these then would be the terms of its power and success). Where postmodernism would mean something more radically separate from modernism (where it would forget modernism) it will end by forgetting itself as well-and it will do so by falling into the trap of modernism's favored mode of (self-)forgetting, the (non)dialectic of the mere and the pure. Postmodernism would proof itself against this risk by appealing to a deconstructive impulse working beyond the (merely) self-critical tendency of modernism-but the risk shows itself in the bare statement: the practice of deconstruction cannot rigorously hold itself apart from something called self-criticism except by hypostasizing its self in just the way it would avoid; it can articulate itself only insofar as it acknowledges explicitly its emergence from and dependence upon what might otherwise appear as mere self-criticism. If postmodernism names modernism insofar as it is inevitably its own allegory,

48.

Cavell, Must We Mean, pp. 207-208.

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deconstruction likewise names self-criticism insofar as it cannot exempt itself from itself. These are names with time in them, emerging at the crossing of art and criticism as at the crossing of art with itself, recalling each to each, recalling each to the other and its embeddedness in that other (so disseminating each from itself as well, working between what is purely what it is and what is merely so), doing and undoing the complexity of presence, folding and unfolding works of art and criticism into one another, sounding out the rhythms in which they find themselves and their audiences for such time as they do-for such time as they master, hold, or submit themselves to.

Ryman's Tact

YVE-ALAIN

BOIS

translated by THOMAS REPENSEK The more closely you look at a word the more distantly it looks back. -Karl Kraus The question-despite its rhetorical flavor-must be asked at the very outset: why is it so hard to write about Robert Ryman's work? Aren't his paintings themselves-preeminently anti-illusionist, flatly literal-all the explanation the viewer or critic needs to penetrate their ineffable silence? Don't they reveal what they're made of, proudly, with a kind of routine generosity, thereby cutting short any attempt at associative readings? Simply, don't they seem to suggest their own commentary, to define their own discursive terrain? And if we ask Ryman what we should see in his paintings on corrugated paper, whether, for example, something could be further clarified, he says: "What the painting is, is exactly what [you] see: the paint on the corrugated and the color of the corrugated and the way it's done and the way it feels. That's what's there."' Why is it so difficult then, for me and others, to approach his work and express our excitement about it? Isn't it tempting, but tediously elementary at the same time, to compile a list of "what's there" in a work of Ryman's, a recipe ("the way it's made"), a checklist? Yet isn't this what he as the artist invites us to do? In Naomi Spector's lengthy essay on Ryman, she undertakes a systematic chronological description of Ryman's work from the point of view of process. Painstakingly, she establishes each painting as a procedural document, reconstructing Ryman's formulative process in the smallest detail.2 But how do I explain my hesitation to begin? Why this inertia instead of smartly stepping up to take my own turn as detective (the evidence: the paintbrush, the paint, the support) and insisting on my version of the facts? 1. 2.

Phyllis Tuchman, "Interview with Robert Ryman," Artforum, vol. iX, no. 9 (May 1971), 53. Naomi Spector, Robert Ryman, Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, 1974.

Robert Ryman. Empire. 1973. Oil on linen. 96 x 96 inches.

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It's not as if the historical development of the process itself isn't of primary importance, or that Ryman's inventiveness doesn't express itself in the making; it should be clear that in this sense he drives himself to experiment, and the story of these experiments never fails to interest me. Yet there is a certain innocence in the systematic decoding of the how-it's-done. Like the hunt for sources that used to take place in literary studies, or the search for the motif in art history (find the improbable valley that was the source of inspiration for this engraving by Seghers or this drawing by Claude Lorrain), the narrative of process establishes a primary meaning, an ultimate, originating referent that cuts off the interpretive chain. That is, an aesthetic of causality is reintroduced, a positivist monologue that we

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thought modern art was supposed to have gotten rid of: A (paintbrush) + B (paint) + C (support) + D (these combined) give E (painting). There is nothing left over in this equation. Given E, ABCD can be deciphered, absolutely. By making the artist a kind of engineer who solves a problem of many parameters in his work (Ryman, the experimenter, does in fact often speak in these terms), the discussion of process in art is refitted to this heuristic mold. The object of this critical discourse then would seem to be: given the solution (the painter's "eureka"), find the problem. Thus, pretending to believe that visual thinking functions only as anamnesis-recovering a section of Lost Time-the narrative account of process allegorizes painting without admitting it, or without realizing it is doing so, conceiving of the painting as a rebus. According to the allegorized narrative of process, what we should see in Empire (1973) is not so much a canvas on which the subtle, white, all-over smoothness delineates three contiguous zones of fleecy horizontal bands, the intensity and rendering of each zone being scarcely distinguishable from one another, but a "reflection" of the "process of its creation";3 viz., among other things, that three paintbrushes were used to make this painting, which is an index of the artist's heroic exertions. It isn't that I disapprove somehow of this sort of allegorization, or that I experience no pleasure-aesthetic pleasure, that is-in finding out that the painting's three bands correspond to the durability of the three paintbrushes. But does this mean that Ryman's is a world without qualities? That the white of Empire is not, to our senses, brilliant, hovering, vibrating, and materially dense, before it is seen as a product? before, that is, we could possibly worry about how it was produced? Any attempt at commentary, especially when it addresses the visual "asceticism" of Ryman's paintings, even more when it examines them at very close range, becomes distanced from its object, or, rather, sees its object become distant. This is one of the meanings of the Kraus epigraph. The innocence of the processaccount stems from its believing itself capable of exhausting its object, of being able finally to state the truth about the truth, when it is in fact its object that exhausts it. The claim that the process-account is essential is more interesting to me than the narrative itself, because it is precisely this claim that Ryman questions. Thus the innocence of the process-account is its failure to think about its own claims to primacy. We know that Ryman sometimes makes prototypes of his paintings, that he discards many of them in the course of his work, that he is selective ("to obtain these thirteen panels Ryman worked on more than fifty," Barbara Reise wrote about the Standard series).4 Does this mean that his choice is a function of the legibility of process in the completed work? Nothing could be less certain. Who

3. Ibid., p. 24. 4. Barbara Reise, "Robert Ryman: Unfinished II (Procedures)," Studio International, vol. 187, no. 964 (March 1974), 122.

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would know, for example, looking at series III, IV, V, and VII, whose titles correspond to the number of panels they contain, that the more or less identical panels were actually painted in groups of three?5 And how could it be known, since except for the major exception of the first series (III), none of them is a multiple of three, nor is the total number of panels (nineteen), whether intended or not, divisible by three. Is this element of process then insignificant because it is concealed? No, because it generates (and thus "explains") the slight breaks in continuity, in the last three series, between the horizontal bands whose gestural rhythms should continue from panel to panel. But couldn't this slight discontinuity have been obtained by painting these panels one by one? No, because the semiautomatic breadth of gesture corresponds to the entire width of the original surface existing as a sort of frieze (the three panels that were initially juxtaposed 5.

Cf. Naomi Spector, Robert Ryman, p. 19.

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extended over thirteen feet). Painting the panels separately would, of course, cause excessive discontinuity, or, rather, discontinuity pure and simple, which would signify nothing and be an empty sign, since it would not be in opposition to the continuity it interrupts. Therefore, since this element of process is not insignificant, why isn't it expressed? Because process doesn't interest Ryman as such. He attempts instead to construct a structure of oppositions: a paradigm. This is what the visual "asceticism" in his paintings is always ready to provide. The structural paradigmcontinuous/discontinuous-declined by the full series is clearly legible: the procedural record has nothing more to teach us; it may even lead to a concept of arithmetic accountability which is of as little value at this juncture as-to repeat my metaphor-the "correct" motif of a Seghers engraving. Another example is the Stretched Drawing, which demonstrates the tension characteristic of all painting mounted on stretchers (the drawing was traced first

Robert Ryman. III. 1969. Enamelac on corrugated paper. 3 units, each 60 x 60 inches. Left: Installation, 1969, Fishbach Gallery, New York.

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Robert Ryman. Stretched Drawing. 1963. Charcoal, pencil on cotton canvas. 15 x 15 inches.

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against a stretched canvas, was then unmounted, then restretched). Barbara Reise states that "[i]t is a 'drawing', not a 'painting', for dried paint-even on cotton canvas-cracks into non-adhesion during an accentuated stretching and restretching process. If Ryman were only 'into process', he might have used paint and accepted its disappearance.... "6 If he were a competent practitioner of process art, as there was reason to believe, he no doubt would have chosen this solution, accompanying the result of his experiment with a caption detailing the course of events. The presence or absence of the work would simply be a record of the process, an index,7 with no further exercise of the code, without recourse to a paradigm. But in fact we know that if he had undertaken such an experiment, Ryman would no doubt have considered the result a failure and would have destroyed it. This drawing, then, instantiates tension-an institution ordinarily naturalized (taken for granted) in painting-declaring it a historical code rather than a natural fact. Yet it does so indirectly. If Ryman were to content himself with a frontal attack on the institution of tension, he would, like many painters currently working in France, be satisfied by simply exhibiting his unstretched canvases in large sheets unrolled to the floor. Choosing instead to set tension in contrast with its opposite, Ryman reveals the following aporia: which comes first, the stretching or the unstretching? The aporia itself leads to a historical investigation. That is undoubtedly the other sense of Kraus's aphorism: the closer you look at a word, the more echoes begin to reverberate from the sedimented strata of its historical, etymological dimension, the deeper the geological cut that opens up. Isn't it possible, for example, following Ryman, to read modern art according to this new on the basis of that point among oppositional axis-stretched/unstretched-and, others, to establish links between, say, Bonnard and Pollock (both of whom painted their canvases before stretching them)? Finally, Ryman invests his paradigm with actual configurative power. We are tempted to say that the drawing was sketched on unstretched canvas; but can we in fact say that? The misshapen square that we see is not a sketch. It is not first and foremost the product of a freehand drawing. Nor even simply the act of stretching, unstretching, and restretching the canvas. But of the intervals between them. Now, the narrative of process is strictly additive, for it can never recapitulate more than one successive set of acts; it cannot reveal how the work stages their proliferation. Making the work the objective complement of a series of transitive actions (squeezing the paint, stretching the canvas, etc.), the process-account refuses to believe in the enigma of the work's potential intransitivity.8 6. Reise, p. 123. 7. See Rosalind Krauss's text on the index (and photography as a model for recent abstract art), "Notes on the Index, '70s Art in America," Parts 1 and 2, October, no. 3 (Spring 1977), 68-81; no. 4 (Fall 1977), 58-67. 8. There are many other examples of the interval. Jean Clay points out two: "It is like a work where Ryman will claim alternately to deconstruct something completed and complete something

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Returning, then, to the initial question: why do I find it so difficult to write about Ryman? Isn't it enough to describe and analyze not the process itself but the process of the process (not tension, but the stretchedness of the unstretched stretch)? This is exactly where the difficulty lies. We know that all of modern culture is characterized by a loss of innocence regarding what we call the means of expression, and that the entire modernist enterprise can be read along the axis of this reflexivity. That this is taken for granted today is the result of its articulation in what we call the theory of modernism. That it suddenly solidified, excluding from the pictorial pantheon all but a very exclusive group of artists, should not diminish the breadth of the qualitative leap it effected in critical discourse over the past forty years. If it seems to be accepted as a given today that the old masters, whatever they may have said, were much more concerned with painting than they were with history, literature, theology, or psychology, this perception is as much due to the efficaciousness of this theory as it is to the emergence of abstract painting, for which for many years the discourse of reflexivity alone was able to provide a theoretical base. Today's rush to deny the reflexive nature of the modern sensibility, to challenge the acquired knowledge of modernist critical practice, and at the same time, under the pretext of correcting the abuses of this criticism, simultaneously to represent all of modern art as a gigantic historical error and a terrorist mystification-all of this has only symptomatic importance. There will always be those who equate Bouguereau and Ingres, who prefer late de Chirico to early, who say that all the trouble started with Manet. That they are speaking very vociferously today and want us to think they are getting their revenge is only cant perpetrated in the name of history in order better to erase it. The same applies to practice: the anti-modernist (mistaken for postmodernist) reaction reflected in the dominant trend in current exhibitions (the schoolboy pranks of the Italian "transavant-garde," the Sturm-und-Drang-ing of so-called German neoromanticismeven though it was precisely German romanticism that sowed the seeds of modern reflexivity) is only an epiphenomenon. It is nevertheless true that the historical revisionism I have referred to, like the return to the figurative order we are now witnessing, are both symptoms of the crisis of modernist discourse today. So, too, is current modernist practice, which, in its own referral back to discourse, simply accommodates itself to that discourse. "I approach printmaking in the same way that I approach painting, from

uncompleted [cf. Reise, pp. 122ff], the completion of the uncompleted taking on meaning only in that it raises the question of the completedness of all painting. Or the exhibition of a nakedly frameless painting: Ryman attaches a canvas to a wall, frames it with a broad brush stroke, pulls it off, and fixes it in another location. Covered with hairline cracks and chipped, the painted frame adheres to the wvall, while the jagged outline and curled edges of the work evidence the act of unframing. Even if a frame were supplied, it would never be more than an unframed-reframed painting" (Jean Clay, "La Peinture en charpie," in "Dossier Ryman," Macula, no. 3 4 [November 1978], 173).

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the point of view of working with the basic possibilities of the medium," says Ryman, modernist in spite of himself.9 Is there anyone who doesn't see that this way of speaking is no longer enough? that it is vacuous because it applies in various ways to everything of importance that modern art has ever produced? Eighteenth-century connoisseurs, responding to Titian's sprezzatura and the debate over the best distance from which to see his paintings, began to "look at the painter's handiwork closely, admire his touch and the magic of his brush," to prefer the sketch to the completed painting because it reveals the making of the work, insinuates the spectator into the studio, makes available the secret of the gods.'0 The artist's skills were evaluated by measuring the distance between effect (the resemblance of a portrait, for example) and the means used to achieve that effect (a tangle of gestures). The sudden interest in brushstroke came from an opposition, a discrepancy: a paradigm. And undoubtedly it was this sensualist probing by the connoisseur that finally led to the theory of modernism. But strangely enough, as Jean Clay has remarked, neither Clement Greenberg nor his followers bothered very much with the material process of constructing a work of art." If they were never really interested in the pictorial process, it was because they saw no difference between the painter's formal intention and its realization, its visualization. So Clay continues, "It's as if, when speaking of Ryman, 'modernist' categories were grafted onto the pictorial components that Greenberg himself had avoided. 'Essence' would no longer reside in the ever greater coincidence between a delimited two-dimensional support and its painted surface, but in the specific qualities of texture, brushstroke, affixing elements, stretcher bars, etc., everything constitutive of painting itself, in its very nature."'2 And we have seen that Ryman himself speaks in these terms. Greenberg's interpretation of art since Manet defines the modernist program as being engaged in the elimination of nonessential conventions. What hasn't been eliminated, he sees as truly motivated; hence its logical place in the pictorial order. So far so good. But Ryman, starting from the same premises (there is something like a pictorial absolute),'3 shows that scarcely has a pictorial element been examined-given a motivation by virtue of its formative process-than that 9. Cf. Prints: Bockner, Lewitt, Mangold, Marden, Martin, Renouf, Rockburne, Ryman, Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1974, p. 49. 10. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, New York, Pantheon, 1960, p. 199. 11. Clay, p. 171. 12. Ibid., p. 183. 13. In the brief text he wrote for the catalogue of the Fundamental Painting exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1975, Ryman himself speaks about an "absolute" in painting. Still more naive at the very beginning of his career, Ryman painted what appeared to be a programmatic work. The painting, dated 1958, is untitled, but written, white on black, in the middle of a long horizontal rectangle that stripes its surface are the words "The Paradoxical Absolute" (reproduced on p. 29 of the Ryman exhibition catalogue, InK, Zurich, 1980). Naive precisely because it makes a statement without constructing a paradigm, this painting implies belief in the immediacy of a paradox simply by virtue of its linguistic formulation.

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which was withdrawn as being arbitrary and unmotivated returns to threaten elsewhere. A given configuration of the surface is determined bh the shape of the frame and the choice of paintbrush. Except, how is the paintbrush chosen? where does the frame itself come from? and outside the frame, for example, what is the source of the light that illuminates it? The paintbrush depends on the size of the canvas, of course, but what determines the size of the frame? No requirement seems any longer to take precedence over any other, and when the painting-whew!interrupts this infinite regress (Roland Barthes's favorite game of hand-over-hand), what is there except this residue of arbitrariness that modernism (the reductiveness of modernism) would have liked to eliminate?'4 Valery remarked, "The forms: I think that I think that I think... I dream that I dream etc.... are limited to only two real states of remove."15 1 would say that Ryman has attempted to paint that he paints that he paints; that he has always wanted, by means of an excess of reflexivity, to outflank the tautological reflexiveness in which modernism has been locked. Further, his success is due not to having attained that literally unthinkable reflexivity, but to the fact that every failure of his audacious attempt removes him further from his object, driving him to produce objects that are increasingly enigmatic and indeterminable. In a sense each of his paintings revives Poe's statement about the mise en abyme: "Now, when one dreams, and in the dream, suspects that one is dreaming, the suspicion never fails to confirm itself, and the sleeper is almost immediately roused. Thus Novalis is not mistaken in saying that we are close to awakening when we dream we are dreaming."'6 That is, in this instance, by trying to solve the enigma, by trying to think painting, we always arrive, literally, at the same object or the same absence of object. This is what Ryman demonstrates again and again: there is a threshold of reflexivity beyond which the record is erased.

I have placed this text under the sign of Karl Kraus. If I may be permitted one last literary reference, I will return to him. Walter Benjamin writes of Kraus, "He, 'merely one of the epigones that live in the old house of language', has become the sealer of its tomb .... No post was ever more loyally held, and none ever was more hopelessly lost."17 In relation to modernism, Ryman is in the same position that 14. Thierry de Duve, assuming the relative irreproducibility of Ryman's paintings, clarifies some theoretical connections between them and photography and speaks about what there is of the auratic in them that is resistant to it. ("Ryman irreproductible," Parachute, no. 20 [Fall 1980], 18-27). Paul Valery, Cahiers, ed. La Pliade, vol. 11, Gallimard, Paris, 1974, p. 207. 15. 16. Edgar Allan Poe, "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains," in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, New York, Random House, 1938, p. 683. Walter Benjamin, "Monument to a Dead Soldier," "One-Way Street," in One-Way Street and 17. Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, London, New Left Books, 1979, p. 79.

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Kraus occupies in relation to the German language: standing guard at its tomb, like any sentry, he holds an untenable position. He is perhaps the last modern painter, in the sense that his work is the last to be able graciously to maintain its direction by means of modernist discourse, to be able to fortify it if necessary, but above all radically to undermine it and exhaust it through excess. This detour by way of Kraus, with whom objectively speaking Ryman has in common, is not based solely on their parallel positions, but also on little very the similarity of their arsenals. We are aware of the extraordinary polemical force of Kraus's writing, the untiring, devastating rage that sustained him in his solitary editorship of Die Fackel. Benjamin shows that "in a world in which the most shameful act was still the faux pas"-the Vienna of 1900-Kraus was effective polemically because "he distinguishes between degrees of the monstrous."'8 In this sense he set for himself a criterion-tact-"'whose destructive and critical aspect" he brought into play. "It is a theological criterion," Benjamin continues, "for tact is not-as narrow minds imagine it-the gift of alloting to each, on consideration of all relationships, what is socially befitting. On the contrary, tact is the capacity to treat social relationships, though not departing from them, as natural, even as paradisiac relationships, and so not only to approach the king as if he had been born with the crown on his brow, but the lackey like an Adam in livery."'9 What does Kraus make of this notion of tact? He does not use it to rise to the sacred, to its theological kernel, but to "dismantle the situation, to discover the true question the situation poses, and to present this in place of any other to his opponents,"20 knowing full well there is absolutely no hope of escaping history, which he conceives of as an apocalypse. If Kraus treats social relations without "departing from them as natural relationships," it is in order better to capture that very nature in its own trap, better to read, under the "naturali" the presence of history. And what of Ryman? Doesn't he demonstrate extraordinary tact concerning all the institutions of the act of painting, as well as a destructive tact that drives each of them back to its problematic condition? His criterion remains, certainly, theological (his essentialist manner of naming Painting, Engraving), but like Kraus, doesn't he refuse to set limits in his quest of law? In the same way that Kraus, the guardian at the tomb of language, knew that "mankind is losing the fight against the creaturely world,' 21Ryman also realizes that when the norms of painting are put to the test, what is arbitrary will have the last word. This is perhaps the source of the charm of his paintings, as it is of the difficulty one has in writing about them.

18. 19. 20. 21.

Walter Benjamin, Reflections, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, p. 244. Ibid. Ibid., p. 243. Ibid., p. 245.

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"His reflection has contributed greatly to pushing back the frontiers of the pictorial field," Stephen Rosenthal writes of Ryman.22 I would say that, with respect to modernism, Ryman (perhaps without realizing it) works with a lethal delicacy; that simply reflexive discourse cannot be carried on with regard to his works; that in forcing reflexivity to reflect on itself he has moreover-quite simply-indicated the limits of our critical discourse more than he has pushed back those of his art, unless in the sense of a distancing of his object that is ever more irrevocable.

22. Stephen Rosenthal, "Notes sur le proces pictural," in "Dossier Ryman," Macula, no. 3/4 (November 1978), 158.

The New French Culture: An Interview with Guy Hocquenghem

DOUGLAS CRIMP

Crimp: The new Socialist government's policies are very badly reported in the United States. We know something of the general features of Mitterrand's economic and foreign policies, but very little about cultural and social policy. Perhaps we could begin with a discussion of the new government's cultural policy. Hocquenghem: Mitterrand was, in fact, elected partly on the basis of his position with regard to culture. Under Giscard, a technocracy ruled, and culture was conceived in the usual bourgeois sense, as beaux-arts, an elitist activity that is at the same time marginal. The Socialists, in contrast, insisted upon a notion of culture as it has traditionally been understood by the European left, as something which is essential to every human being, something which will provide all workers with a global view of the world-a notion of culture which is rather vague, but at least has the merit of being generous in spirit. It also has strong nationalist roots, an inheritance of Gaullism. The Gaullist cultural policy, begun under Malraux and simply continued during Pompidou's presidency, was a policy of national culture, consisting of prestige operations-big monuments, big exhibitions-the cultural equivalents of the Concorde. In repudiating Giscard's "decadent" era, the Socialists are claiming fidelity to that Gaullist nationalist tradition, but with one difference. That culture had been centered in Paris, where the state spent about one hundred dollars per citizen on culture each year, as opposed to about fifty cents per citizen in the provinces. The Socialists won the elections of 1981 largely because they had already come to power in many large provincial cities in 1977, in Marseille, Lille, and Grenoble, for example. And they had already established a network of cultural activities in those cities, something which had never previously existed in France. The French state devotes about fivetenths of one percent of its overall budget to culture, while cities like Marseille and Grenoble are now devoting ten or fifteen percent of their budgets to culture. Crimp: What kinds of activities does that money pay for?

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Hocquengherm: A wide range of activities, the most important being the various provincial festivals, such as those of Avignon, Nancy, Hyeres, La Rochelle. Lille has established a new philharmonic orchestra, which was directly planned by the mayor, Pierre Mauroy, who is now prime minister. The Socialists also built a network of movie theaters by buying up abandoned ones. About twenty percent of the movie theaters in France are now owned by leftist associations and municipalities. Crimp: What kinds of films are distributed in those theaters? Hocquenghem: Independent films. Anything from Godard and Duras to the recent German films, films that were impossible to see in the provincial cities before. Crimp: And you say that Mitterrand was able to use this already established cultural network as an image of Socialist culture for his campaign? Hocquenghem: Not in Paris, where Chirac won the first round of elections in any case. But certainly in the provinces, and that's where the Socialists won the elections. Parisians paid little attention to what the Socialists had been doing in the provinces, which accounts for their surprise at the Socialist victory. You must remember that Mitterrand considers himself a writer first, a politician second, so he places an enormous emphasis on culture. And it's true, he is genuinely interested in literature. Giscard was interested in Maupassant only because you can't be president of France without professing an interest in literature; but Mitterrand really considers himself a professional writer. To give you an idea how far this goes, the day he was elected, Le Monde's front page carried a story by their literary critic with a large headline saying "Mitterrand, un ecrivain ne." Crimp: What kind of writer is Mitterrand? Hocquenghem: Angelo Rinaldi, the literary critic of L'Express, has dubbed his style a "lyrisme d'orpheon," which I think is very accurate. Imagine a lyrical notary and you get the picture more or less. He's written a number of political memoirs with titles like The Wheat and the Chaff. It's traditional humanist writing, not offensive really, but neither is it good writing, as was De Gaulle's, for example. But what is important is that Mitterrand is a man of letters and his minister of culture, Jack Lang, is a man of the theater, and it is those two arts-what we might call traditional prewar culture-that their cultural policy is centered on. The very first law to have been passed after the law of amnesty was one concerning the pricing of books. Mitterrand campaigned on the principle that culture must not be subject to the conditions of the marketplace, must not be competitive. So the government has established a system of book pricing whereby no bookseller

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can undersell another. The price must be printed on the book and it must be sold at that price everywhere in France. This removes some of the power over publishing from the large chain bookstores. That law was passed immediately as proof to the electorate that the Socialists meant what they had promised about culture. I must confess a certain skepticism about this book policy. Their respect for books is so extreme; books are treated as sanctified objects. They forget that many books are after all only commercial objects. Crimp: Does this anti-commercialism extend to other aspects of cultural production? Hocquenghem: The Socialists have a similar distaste for the commercialization of cinema, and it appears that the next years' Cannes Festivals will reflect it. Instead of being a marketplace for commercial movies to find international distributors, Cannes will be largely a festival of independent, national, and Third World cinema. Some notion of the thrust of this policy can be determined from the Socialists' boycott of this year's Deauville Festival of American movies. It's not really a festival at all, but a commercial fair paid for by the International Association of Motion Pictures. It's run by the wife of Deauville's mayor, Michel d'Ornano, who was one of Giscard's ministers of culture. Since it's not really a cultural event, but rather a purely commercial one, no minister of culture has ever officially attended, except of course for d'Ornano himself. But this year Lang made an issue of not attending by making a statement opposing the invasion of France by American movies. This statement instituted a wave of nationalism, including the formation of a Committee for National Identity, which is organizing support of Lang on purely nationalist grounds. There is also a policy which concerns popular music played on the radio. The government wants to stop what they perceive as a glut of mindless American disco music, which they think is providing our children with nothing but English-language memories. They want to return to the traditional values of the French realist singers. The problem is that there is very little good new popular music in France. Crimp: Is the government actually limiting the amount of American disco music that can be broadcast on the radio? Hocquenghem: They are certainly limiting the number of American series on television, which is owned by the state. But for private businesses, such as most radio stations, they are not using any authoritarian means to govern. It's a matter of policy statements, organizing, and support. In this case, they simply issued a statement and the radio stations immediately began to play more French music. And radio announcers now very proudly announce, "You know, this morning we played five French songs!"

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Crimp: That would seem to indicate that there is a general enthusiasm and support for Mitterrand's policies. Hocquenghem: Not necessarily. It's the response of people who are trying to hold on to their jobs. This is the first change of government in France in twenty years, and it's an enormous change. Initially, the government said they would leave everyone in their jobs, but in fact they've begun replacing everyone. They're not necessarily firing people; it's more subtle than that. They're just waiting for people to resign. People have been progressively forced out of positions. Of course, the left had already controlled many positions of power in the area of culture and those positions are secure. But people associated with the right, particularly those with positions in the state-run media, are out of a job. Crimp: Tell me something about the new cultural minister. Hocquenghem: Jack Lang had been director of the Chaillot National Theater until he was fired by Michel Guy, who was then Giscard's minister of culture. Lang was also director of the Festival of Nancy. He and Guy have opposite views of culture. Guy's is an elitist view, based on the exercise of good taste. Lang's view is that the government does not need to make decisions of an aesthetic nature, but that it must build structures to allow people to do what they need to do. Lang is, as I said, a man of the theater. He has been a promoter of Robert Wilson, for example (as was Michel Guy). Theater is the central art form, the point of reference, for Lang and the Socialist government. The involvement of the European left with theater has to do with its truly public nature. The Socialists don't care for art forms that involve a simple one-to-one relationship of spectator to work. They prefer a social praxis in relation to a cultural event. Their interest in theater is rather catholic-everything from Brecht to Wilson. Patrice Chereau has just been appointed to a position in Nanterre, where he will stage productions; and Jerome Savary of the Magic Circus has been made director of an interregional theater in the Southwest, in Montpellier, linking Latin theaters of Spain, Italy, and southern France. The Socialists are also supporting the new French theater-people such as Daniel Mesguich, a follower of Chereau essentially, but more theoretical, more artificial, more purely aesthetic. Crimp: They are committed, then, to really vanguard work? Hocquenghem: Insofar as there is a vanguard in France, yes. They do not want to be accused of supporting only socially engaged art. They seem very diffident about that. Furthermore, they know the artistic community would never stand for it. Mesguich presented an interpretation-if you could even call it that-of King Lear at Avignon this year. It was utterly bizarre, containing all kinds of theoretical jokes on the text, a completely vanguardist spectacle, incomprehensible to almost

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everyone. And the government had it transmitted in its entirety-nearly hours-on television.

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Crimp: In the recent past, France has played host to the American avant-garde in large numbers. Such gatherings of international avant-garde culture as the Festival d'Automne in Paris have been virtually American festivals ... Hocquenghem: Half American, half Tibetan ... Crimp: Will that change considerably now? Hocquenghem: Oh yes! Well, to be just, I must say that the Nancy Festival, which, as I said, Jack Lang directed, was very involved with American artists, so I don't want to sound so definitive about that. As for the Festival d'Automne, it doesn't depend heavily on state money, so it might not change. Michel Guy is its director, and he has personal connections with Chirac, who, as mayor of Paris, is largely in charge of the festival's funding. But this kind of cosmopolitan culture is becoming unpopular. The general idea is that the million dollars spent on a big international event could better be divided among ten French cities to use for their own cultural purposes. Furthermore, Lang's opposition to the monopoly of American movies may extend to the other arts. Crimp: Do you have the sense that such a policy is an attempt to rejuvenate a flagging French culture by supporting French artists rather than foreigners? Hocquenghem: It's not as specifically nationalist as that. The claim is that Socialist France will be a haven for all artists, and, in fact, French citizenship was given to several foreign writers just after Lang's appointment. On the other hand, a profoundly nationalist sentiment has recently begun to emerge in the wake of the campaign against American movies. The Socialists would, in fact, like to support French culture, but there is very little new cultural production in France and they know they cannot simply invent it. The government is now giving much thought to artistic education. A law which is about to be voted upon will return art education to the normal school routine. Art in the schools had progressively narrowed until it consisted of only an hour a week of music appreciation or something comparable. The Socialists want a real art program for the schools, and it does seem that this goal is related to a long-term plan to rejuvenate French cultural production. Crimp: You mentioned a moment ago that the government is limiting the number of American television programs on French TV. Are there other noticeable changes in television?

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Hocquenghem: What they are doing with television is very clear. First, of course, they are taking complete political control of it. Second, they are attempting to force television to play a specific cultural role. By contract, TV networks will be required to broadcast a set number of hours of cultural programs, which means, generally, transmitting theater plays, ballet, opera, and so forth. That is, of course, an extremely conservative way of thinking about TV. Crimp: Yes, it is. It's perfectly compatible with the direction of much American television, not only the public broadcasting network, which has been providing cultural programming of that sort for years, but even with the major private networks, which have begun broadcasting ballet and opera. Barishnikov and Pavarotti have proven to be as big a hit with the American public as athletes and movie stars. Hocquenghem: This is a continuous problem of the left in France. They've always held the position that culture should be democratized, that everyone should have equal access to culture. But what culture? Whose culture? Does the democratic ideal make any sense when applied to culture? Crimp: It sounds much like the official position toward culture of the Carter administration. Carter's was basically a populist notion of culture involving an even distribution of funding (of course, government funding of culture in the United States is pitifully small in any case-about seventy cents per citizen under Carter and certainly far less under Reagan). So money was to be divided more equally under Carter between, for example, an alternative exhibition space devoted to showing vanguard art in New York City, on the one hand, and a craft center in a provincial city, on the other; or between the New York City Ballet, which is one of the two or three greatest ballet companies in the world, and a provincial ballet company, which is of very limited interest. Hocquenghem: That is the contradiction: when you speak of community art, you are almost inevitably speaking of low-level art, at least in terms of innovation, of the exploration of new forms. But the Socialists claim to be conscious of that contradiction. During the past several years there has been a shift in their position. They had been particularly fond of animation culturelle, which means that they were most interested in the social, participatory aspect of culture. But as the election approached they began to realize that this could be artistically catastrophic. For example, about 600 theater troupes are given state and local subsidy in France. About 590 of them are purely local troupes of no general interest. Once the Socialists realized this, they decided to support vanguard work, but since they know so little about it, it remains just a principle.

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Crimp: But certainly the provincial festivals are extremely vital, and, regarding the network of provincial movie houses showing independent films-that's a definitely progressive step. Hocquenghem: Yes, it's true. We have only two big distribution networks in France: Gaumont, which shows their own productions, and UGC, which shows Hollywood movies. Since small theaters had mostly closed, independent film, which had been a very important tradition in France since the Nouvelle Vague, had no distribution outside Paris. Gaumont was distributing some of the big names of the Nouvelle Vague, but there was no renewal. Crimp: But, like many other aspects of French culture, that great wave of filmmaking in the sixties seems to have fallen off drastically in the past decade. Hocquenghem: Yes, of course. What they're doing about distribution is fine, but they have no policy regarding production, which is much more difficult to legislate. They can wage a war against the supremacy of Hollywood in the market, but that does nothing to alter the condition of current French cinema. I'm afraid much of their cultural policy is like that. They're building structures, but they're empty structures. I support their intentions, but the real problem is that there is no longer a modern French culture-perhaps I should say there is no French postmodern culture. Crimp: That is especially true for the visual arts. Does the Socialist government have any policy at all for the visual arts? What, for example, will their policy be regarding museums? Hocquenghem: Lang has decided to increase the budget of Beaubourg, which, for obvious reasons, no one any longer calls the Centre Pompidou. But, nevertheless, it's easy to see that the Socialists have a problem with modern art in general. They don't understand it and they don't like it. They consider it to be directly tied to the capitalist market, which is true to some extent. Another problem for them is that modern art is, more than any other art form, cosmopolitan. The Socialists don't like art without roots, and we know perfectly well that modern art has no roots. Modern art is full of cases of artists born, say, in Russia, emigrating to Paris, and finally settling in New York. The Socialists still think of art primarily as the individual's means of engaging with his community, although they would no longer put it in those terms. In fact, they issued a statement during their cultural congress saying exactly the opposite, that artists have no roots and that communication with a public is not a good criterion for judging art. They went so far as to say that artists have the perfect right to want not to communicate with a public. But their social surroundings will not allow for the implementation of such a policy. The mayor of a city of half a million inhabitants cannot allocate money to

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support some exiled conceptual artist. Instead the money will be given to someone who runs a workshop teaching children self-expression through dance. The Socialists are very wary of nontraditional art forms, especially the technological media. They associate television, in particular, with Giscard's transfer of culture to the private advertising interests. Any art in which there is no real possibility for a critical point of view on the part of the spectator is suspect for them. TV moves too fast, is too technological, too physical; it requires only passivity of the spectator. And modern art shares something of that quality; not that it functions like advertising, but certainly you could say that an important aspect of modern art is an effect which is very direct, very physical. One form of visual art in which the Socialists are very involved is photography. The official portrait of Mitterrand was made by Gisele Freund, who is his personal friend. Many officials of the new government attended the festival of photography in Arles this year. Crimp: It's curious, because photography is certainly not a traditional art form. In fact, it is the prototypical media form. On the other hand, photography has been well theorized by the left, including Freund herself, following Walter Benjamin, and it has a strong tradition of what in America is called concerned photography, photography whose purpose is to expose the conditions of poverty, war, and so forth. Hocquenghem: Yes, they love the documentary tradition, everything from Brassai to modern journalistic photography. The central figure is Cartier-Bresson. And, on the other hand, they would see pictorial photography as a typical capitalist misunderstanding of the social role of photography. Crimp: But their interest in photography does coincide with a general resurgence of interest in the medium, and that resurgence is inseparable from the creation of a new market commodity, one which is based on divorcing all photographsCartier-Bresson's included-from their social purpose. Hocquenghem: Certainly the interest in photography had already begun to expand in France, but, you know, whenever there is a social change of such magnitude, everything is connected to it. Crimp: I understand that about a year ago there was a very strong reaction in France against the advanced critical and theoretical research that had constituted the most developed aspect of French culture of the past two decades. A number of courses were cancelled-those of Julia Kristeva, Christian Metz, and Hubert Damisch, for example-which meant that doctoral students could no longer work with these people and were forced to return to the entrenched conservative

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disciplines. Was there a concerted policy against theoretical work that threatened the academic status quo? Hocquenghem: Yes. A number of specialized courses were cut a year ago. The last months of the Giscard regime were very hard on leftist intellectuals. But the Socialists have simply restored everything that had been cut. All those cultural figures who have traditionally been associated with the left are in a very good position now. Crimp: It's ironic, because many traditional leftist intellectuals had begun to accommodate themselves to the right, just as they are now in America. Hocquenghem: The demoralization of the left went very far, so far that the success of the Nouveaux Philosophes became possible. People now speak of the cynicism of the late Giscardian period, of the superficiality of its culture, its distance from real social life. Crimp: Let's shift our discussion and talk about some aspects of Mitterrand's social policy. You said this morning concerning an article in the New York Times about Mitterrand's amnesty, that the single group of amnestied people conspicuously not mentioned were those who had been convicted under those provisions of the law that discriminate against homosexuals. I also did not know until you told me that there is a new ministry in the government to deal with the problems of homosexuals, aliens, and the handicapped. That's a very strange grouping. Hocquenghem: There are many strange new ministries. We have, for example, a Ministry of Free Time, which is separate from the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Sport. The idea is that people's lives are so organized that we must find time that can be used freely. But how do you suppose such a thing can be organized by the state? Actually, that's precisely the idea-to have a minister within the system of ministries to say what is off limits, what must remain free of government organization. And, yes, there is a Ministry of National Solidarity, in charge mainly of the problems of aliens, gays, and the handicapped. Crimp: Whose idea was that? Hocquenghem: Oh, Mitterrand's, of course. All of these new humanistic ministries reflect Mitterrand's political view that the state must serve human needs. Many of his ministries have such an ideological cast. The Ministry of National Solidarity is just now preparing its program. The government has met several times, even at the level of the prime minister's cabinet, with the CURA [Urgency Committee against Anti-homosexual Repression], which is equivalent to your National Gay Task Force. We had not had a national gay militant organization

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for a long time-since the demise of the GLH [Homosexual Liberation Group] and the FHAR [Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action]-so the CURA was formed about a year ago. It is a Socialist organization and there is even a Communist member. Crimp: Which means that it is in fact not like the National Gay Task Force, which is anything but a leftist organization. Hocquenghem: Certainly the CURA is more leftist, but it functions similarly, as a lobbying group for gay issues. Since the legislative elections, members of the CURA have met several times with representatives of various ministries. It's the first time that gay people have ever been officially received by members of the government. You are accustomed to this in the States-the Carter administration received a delegation during the gay march on Washington two years ago-but for us it's really a revolution. Crimp: For us, too. It had never happened until a few years ago, and right now we are experiencing a counterrevolution in this regard. The House of Representatives has, in fact, just voted overwhelmingly to maintain the sodomy laws of Washington. But how did this change come about in France? Hocquenghem: Let's go back a bit. Traditionally the left has not been pro-gay. It has been either neutral or, in the case of the Communists, really opposed. But a year ago, at the same time that the Communist party was being progressively reduced to a marginal political status, the Socialists became really serious about gay problems. There are two articles of French law that directly concern homosexuality. One, which is a law of Petain, makes sex with a minor of the same sex a more serious offense than sex with a minor of the opposite sex; and the other, enacted under De Gaulle, discriminates in the same way regarding sex in public places. It is generally agreed that these discriminatory laws should be done away with, and finally Giscard promised to do so. But the majority in Parliament was even more reactionary than his government, so the statute regarding minors was left intact. For the first time, though, the left unanimously voted for the reform. And at that moment a Socialist assemblyman announced on television that his party stood firmly opposed to discrimination against homosexuals. From that point on, the gay intellectuals very clearly and firmly supported Mitterrand. There were only a few exceptions, including me. The majority manifesto addressed Mitterrand, while a minority one insisted that both candidates answer our questions about gay rights. Both Foucault and I signed that one. Crimp: Why were you so "neutral"? Hocquenghem: First, because we thought that there wasn't the slightest chance

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that Mitterrand would win and that, therefore, it would be more efficient to petition Giscard's government for our rights than to support a party that had no chance of coming to power. Secondly, because we were very suspicious of the promises of the left. Traditionally, when the left came to power in France, they immediately betrayed their campaign promises in the most shameful way-after being elected to end the Algerian War, for example, they immediately doubled the number of troups in Algeria. The tradition of the left was a tradition of betrayal. But we were completely wrong about Mitterrand. On this point, he is doing exactly what he promised to do, very systematically, very calmly. In any case, as I said, the gay community very visibly supported Mitterrand, and the Socialists themselves are convinced that gay votes contributed to their victory. It's impossible to know really, but it affirms the Socialists' view of community power, of people taking direct responsibility for their lives. And so immediately after the election they began implementing policy to prevent discrimination against homosexuals. The first measure was taken by Gaston Deferre, the minister of the interior, who ordered the police to stop harassing homosexuals and transvestites. The decree merely repeated what is already law, but for the first time the word homosexual was used specifically, and that's always a very important step. The police are furious about this hands-off policy. There are rather comic conflicts between Chirac and the government on this matter, because the question of jurisdiction in Paris is confused. First Chirac will insist that the police enforce the closing time for gay bars, then the government will insist that the police leave the gay bars alone. In one such case, when the police attempted to close a bar, people from the CURA called to report harassment, and the police responded on the assumption that the CURA was an official organ of the new government. Everyone is so confused by the magnitude of the change! Crimp: What about the amnesty? Hocquenghem: The amnesty law is a good barometer of the Socialists' politics, and indeed this was a very political amnesty. For example, it forbade amnesty for economic transgressions. It was thus an anti-capitalist law, which I don't entirely approve of-amnesty is supposed to be above those considerations. Usually the law involves such minor violations as traffictickets and sentences of under fifteen days. But this law amnestied all sentences under six months and reduced others according to a complicated scheme. The day of liberation was incredible because there were literally hundreds of released prisoners in front of every prison. In the entire history of the amnesty law from the beginning of the Republic, it has never included condemnations for violations which are considered shameful, condemnations on morals charges. But this time a paragraph was added which was just the reverse, a paragraph granting amnesty to anyone condemned under the two provisions of the law discriminating against homosexuals.

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Crimp: What does the program of the Ministry of National Solidarity consist of as far as homosexuals are concerned? Hocquenghem: Inititally they will be dealing with discrimination in the work place and in housing. For example, there is a law which says that to hold public office you must be of good morality. That is a very vague expression, often used against homosexuals. Similarly, the standard French lease for housing contains a clause stating that you must dwell bourgeoisement, in the bourgeois fashion, which means simply that you must live decently. That too has been used against homosexuals. The problem is not that the laws themselves are discriminatory, but that they are used for discriminatory purposes. The government has decided not to change the text of the laws, but to issue directives to the various enforcement bureaus stating that they cannot be applied to homosexuals. Crimp: What about the other groups affected by this ministry? What is the legal status of foreign workers in France? Are they similar to our resident aliens? Hocquenghem: France is not an immigrating country officially, so the policy has been that aliens, mostly North Africans who came to work for a period of time, would eventually return to their countries of origin. Of course, they don't return to their own countries and so enormous problems arise. Crimp: So what you have is a kind of Gastarbeiter policy. We also have such a policy now. Reagan has created a Gastarbeiter status for the Mexican laborers, thus legalizing the exploitation of a cheap labor force. Hocquenghem: That is amazing, because yours is, after all, a country of immigration. When Mitterrand came to power he faced the problem of the presence in France of perhaps two million illegal aliens. Giscard had tried to force foreigners to return to their homelands using all sorts of means, including paying them. Mitterrand's government took the position that anyone who was in France had the right to remain. The right to remain is a rather vague right, but at least it means that the police can no longer have you deported just because you have no papers. This is already a radical change, because hundreds of people were being deported every month, and since the new government came to power there hasn't been a single deportation. At the same time, however, the Socialists are preventing anyone else from entering. Crimp: This policy change came from the Ministry of National Solidarity? Hocquenghem: The decision itself was that of the Ministry of the Interior, but the Ministry of National Solidarity will be charged with providing papers, with determining the precise legal status of these people. And it will deal with their

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particular problems, with building educational programs in Arabic, for example. Initially they intended to give these people the vote in the next township elections. It would have been the first time noncitizens had been given the vote, but the government reversed itself when polls showed that an overwhelming majority of French people opposed it. Crimp: The government's position toward foreign workers would seem to be the polar opposite of that of the Communists, whose hostility toward Arab workers erupted so violently last year. Hocquenghem: Yes, that's true, but the Communists have nothing to say on the subject now. In fact, they say nothing about anything. It is as if the Communists were dead. Crimp: Are there Arabs in the government? Hocquenghem: No. That's a very good question. You know, on certain points we are very reactionary. We are so accustomed to the idea that the government is white. It's always been white. But you are perfectly right-among forty ministers it's a scandal that there is not a single nonwhite. The left has a tradition of nationalism, which we are beginning to see very strongly now and which creates a strange mixture of progressive and not-so-progressive policy. But at least they have been very correct thus far regarding foreign workers. I think the Socialists became much wiser with their experience administering the provincial cities. It's an important step that nearly everyone overlooked-the newspapers, for instance. The Parisian press joked about the flowers in the streets of La Rochelle, but now the mayor of La Rochelle is the minister for environmental problems.

Letters To the Editor; Rosalind Krauss's article in the spring issue of October ("In the Name of Picasso") attacks a construction called the "autobiographical Picasso," that she uses to represent my ideas and those of others. She treats this rhetorical strawman as a single all-pervasive concept, despite the fact that she gathers under its rubric observations by a variety of art historians whose views and methodologies are, in fact, diverse and even contradictory. I am described as a "convert" to the "autobiographical Picasso," having had supposedly to "overcome the resistance of decades of [my] training." I have purportedly given up the interpretation of "formal and iconographic symbols" as functions of "larger units of history" (an assertion to which my recent publications give the lie) in favor of their interpretation within "the restricted profile of merely a private life." Miss Krauss uses as the linchpin of her argument a comparison I proposed in a Baltimore Museum lecture between Picasso's Seated Bather (1930) and Bather with Beach Ball (1932). But she misrepresents my interpretation. I don't recognize my supposed words: With these two works, [Rubin said], we find ourselves looking at two different universes-and by this he [Rubin] meant different formal as well as symbolic worlds. This passage is rather curious. I am supposed to have said something, but Miss Krauss does not put the citation in quotation marks-no doubt because I never used those words. Miss Krauss was at the lecture, but I doubt that she took it down in shorthand, and as "universe" is not a word I am apt to use-especially in this context-I am sure that the absence of quotation marks was a hedge against the fact that we are looking at a paraphrase. This distorted paraphrase is then extrapolated by Miss Krauss with a flat-out assertion as to what I meant-"by this he meant . . . "-that is quite incorrect. For whatever it is worth, I think the two pictures in question show not two different "universes" but two different morphological approaches within the same general stylistic area. I do not doubt that these contrasting morphologiesangular, bony, and hard in the Bather inspired by Picasso's wife, Olga, and curvilinear, soft, and pneumatic in that inspired by his mistress, Marie-Thereseare directly related to Picasso's responses to the very different bodies of the two women. By the same token, these morphologies exist in Picasso's work in other contexts, and their coordinates are by no means limited to biographical factors. Here we get, it seems to me, to the main problem of Krauss's critique. She seems to presume that an assertion that biographical factors have had an influence-sometimes very central-on changes in Picasso's subject matter, morphology, and even style necessarily implies that all other familiar art-historical approaches are renounced. Because in one lecture I happened to focus on this

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aspect hardly makes me a convert to "the autobiographical Picasso," nor does it mean that I have given up interpretation of his art "in transpersonal terms." A great deal of autobiographical interpretation of Picasso's art has appeared recently, in part as a result of new information. I believe, with Miss Krauss, that this literature should be subjected to the severest possible critique. But the starting point of this critique should not be a misrepresentation of the literature itself. That my interpretation of Picasso's art has somewhat altered over the last ten years in the direction of giving somewhat greater weight to biographical material is certainly true. I see these new views not as contradictions but as enlargements of the more traditional art-historical approaches I had previously used. Moreover, the change took place under the direct pressure of Picasso's own view of his work. Having had the good fortune to be able to talk with Picasso about many things on a number of occasions during the last years of his life, I became forcibly aware of certain relationships between Picasso's life, and his thinking, and his work for which my former methods did not suffice. William Rubin

Rosalind Krauss replies: I am delighted that Mr. Rubin and I are in agreement on at least one aspect of the argument I put forward in "In the Name of Picasso," viz., that the autobiographical interpretation of Picasso's art needs some rather severe critical examination. Just as I am sorry if my perception of his Baltimore lecture-which led to its inclusion as one instance of the growing tendency to advance such interpretations-should have been so wide of the mark that it would deserve his charge of "misrepresentation of the literature." In this instance, having no text from which to quote, I was of course paraphrasing what he said. And being anxious to verify my sense of Mr. Rubin's discussion of the works in question, I checked with two other auditors of his lecture to see if their experience of what he said agreed with mine. Of course we may all have been in error, but then we would have misperceived the goal of his remarks, a mistake that direct quotation of any given sentence would not perhaps have altered. Which brings me to the point where we obviously disagree. Mr. Rubin sees the autobiographical interpretations "not as contradictions but as enlargements" of other approaches. As distinct from this intellectual pluralism, the goal of my analysis was to place two interpretive systems in sharp contrast-one a denotational system that ties and limits meaning to a real world referent (label to object); the other a connotational system that works from a different picture of signification altogether. These positions with regard to meaning are flatly incompatible, as are the experiences of art that are functions of each. Mr. Rubin's confidence that

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one enlarges the other raises questions about what he thinks would constitute "the severest possible critique." Would it be finding out whether the man in La Vie is really Casagemas, or if Casagemas was really impotent? Or would it entail asking what it really means to Casagemize La Vie, Picasso's art, cubism, style, meaning... ?

To the editor: I would like to correct one small point in Abigail Solomon-Godeau's excellent Salzmann piece in October 18. At the end of her summary of the steps by which the photography of the past has been indiscriminately funneled into today's art market, she argues that the seeds of this leveling tendency have been sown over the last fifty years. She says: "When Edward Steichen mounted at MOMA an exhibition of aerial views and bombardments made during World War I by the military, he was effectively stating that the art of the photograph is not contingent on intentionality." The example offers a dramatic instance of photographic souvenirs of destruction suddenly transformed into objects of aesthetic delectation (and inevitably calls to mind Daumier's crack about Nadar). As it happens, though, such an exhibition was never mounted by Steichen at MOMA, or anywhere else. Moreover, a look at his exhibition program at that museum from 1947-62 shows him a most unlikely candidate to hold the view that "the art of the photograph is not contingent on intentionality." I believe it's possible that Solomon-Godeau has in mind an episode that took place in 1974, when a New York gallery included in a Steichen exhibition several anonymous WWI aerial views culled from a Steichen scrapbook. The prints were offered for sale, the unstated premise being that they somehow "stood" for a crucial moment in Steichen's artistic biography. It was the elevation of these aerial photos to the art-historical realm that prompted Allan Sekula to examine the whole question in Artforum of December 1975. The incident took place a year after Steichen's death, in a climate which owed more, I think, to attitudes fostered by Steichen's successor at MOMA. In The Photographer's Eye, Mr. Szarkowski popularized the notion that anonymous, vernacular photographs were central to the development of an authentic photographic style. His early MOMA exhibitions of press photographs and automatic photographs of bank robberies contributed more to the habit of appropriating photographs from widely divergent sources to a fine-art discourse than anything Steichen ever attempted. In itself the point isn't important, and hardly detracts from the force of Solomon-Godeau's argument.

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I bring it up only because I think it worth noting that MOMA's attitude to photography over the last fifty years has been by no means unequivocal. Almost from the beginning a debate grew up around the question of photography's status at the museum. Should it be treated as a (minor) fine-art medium alongside prints and drawings and judged according to standards of connoisseurship and scholarship? Or should it be used as a great popular lure to bring vast crowds through the turnstiles? Newhall's famous exhibition of 1937 did not resolve the question, nor did the establishment of a full-fledged department in 1940, when Ansel Adams was brought in as vice-chairman. The tables were effectively turned in 1947 when Steichen was appointed director of the department, after his two enormously successful wartime propaganda exhibitions. Nelson Rockefeller, then president of MOMA's board, encouraged Steichen to continue in the direction of the exhibition-as-social-essay; Rockefeller asked for exhibits "where photography is not the theme but the medium through which great achievements and great moments are graphically presented." Newhall retreated to Rochester, and only with Szarkowski's arrival in 1962 did MOMA's photography-as-fine-art faction clearly gain the upper hand. If you recall, Szarkowski created something of a stir in museum circles by insisting that photographs be shown matted, framed, and behind glass, at a time when the framing process cost more than most of the photographs were worth. Over the last five decades, MOMA has certainly done much to define the role of photography within the American museum. But the principle figures in MOMA's photography circles-Lincoln Kirstein, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, David McAlpin, Willard Morgan, Steichen, Peter Bunnell, and Szarkowski-have seldom been of one mind as to just what that role should be. At some times MOMA's policies have encouraged the current situation as Solomon-Godeau described it in her essay; at other times, not. It's an interesting subject which deserves more attention than it has so far received. Christopher Phillips

ENCLITIC enclitic 6 (Fall 1979) Louis Marin To Destroy Painting * Judith Crews Plain Superficiality * Bruce Bassoff Private Revolution: Sontag's The Benefactor * Kimball Lockhart The Figure of the Ground * KajaSilverman Hamlet and the Common Theme of Fathers * Bernhard Lindemann Experimental Film as Meta-Film: Frampton's Zorns Lemma enclitic 7 (Spring 1980) Sanford Ames Cars N' Garbage * Verena Andermatt Big Mach (On The Truck) ? Evlyn Gould As Such, Merce Cunningham * Claudia Crawford-Tysdal Ecco Homo: I M fil MX * Michel Deguy Appendix to the End of the World * Michael Halley Pas A Sa Place * Francia Friendlich Painting After Word Enclitic 8 (Fall 1980) Alice A. Jardine Theories of the Feminine: Kristeva * Sarah Kofman Ex: The Woman's Enigma ? Diana Hume George The Myth of Mythlessness and the New Mythology of Love: Feminist Theory on Rape and Pornography * Helene Cixous Arrive le chapitre-qui vient * Jane Gallop Sade, Mothers, and Other Women ? Frances Bartkowski Feminism and Deconstruction: "a union forever deferred"e Cathy Schwichtenberg NearThe BigChakra: Vulvar Conspiracy andProtean Film Text * JoAnn Liebman "My Hidden Enemy": Mothering and Narrative in Wuthering Heights forthcoming in 82 Special Film Issue with articles by David Bordwell on Materialism and Textual Analysis * Marie-Claire Ropars on writing in Breathless * Larry Crawford on subsegments in Psycho * Peter Wollen on North by Northwest * John O'Kane on the ideology of deep focus in Boudu Sauve des Eaux * Tom Conley on Paisan * Mary Yost on Paris Qui Dort * Dudley Andrew on montage in Meet John Doe enclitic is available at the following bookstores: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN; Cody's, Berkeley CA; A Periodical Retreat, Ann Arbor MI; Book Branch East, NYC; Saint Mark's Bookshop, NYC; Books 8c Company, NYC; Motion Picture Bookshop, London; La Hune, Paris

published twice a year in Fall and Spring Institutions, $12/Outside USA and Canada: $14 Individuals, $6/Outside USA and Canada: $7

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QUARTERLY Film Quarterly articles turn up frequently in anthologies; they're argued over by film enthusiasts; they're often used in teaching. The reason? Film Quarterly is written (and read) by people who take film seriously-as a key art of our century, just as deserving of scholarly scrutiny as literature.The journal never speculates about Oscars, never wastes space on flashily illustrated personality pieces. Since 1958, its objective has remained the publication of readable but substantial and lasting film writing: retrospective articles on major directors-American and foreign, commercial and underground; carefully prepared interviews with cameramen, writers, producers, editors, directors; authoritative reviews of features and short films; articles on "lost films," politics and cinema, editing techniques, and many other topics. Film Quarterlyis the only general film magazine devoting consistent attention to experimental and documentary work; it also scrutinizes new developments in film theory. And once a year it provides a massive survey of all new English-language film books-a convenient guide for those perplexed by the recent flood of film titles. Film Quarterly is on newsstands and in public librariesthroughout the country. It's also found in universities, colleges, and high schools-wherever films and film-making are taught. Sample copies are available gratis. Subscriptions are $10.00 for one year.

Periodicals Department University of California Press Berkeley 94720

APPARATUS

is a collection of Autonomous Works by writers, filmmakers and theorists on the subject the apparatus of cinema. Included are: Roland Barthes, Dziga Vertov, Jean-Louis Baudry, Maya Deren, Gregory Woods, Daniele Huillet, JeanMarie Straub, Thierry Kuntzel, Bertrand Augst, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marc Vernet and Christian Metz. 5-1/2 x 8-1/2, 448 pages. Sewn paperback 11.95, hardcover 23.95.

EATINGTHROUGH LIVING

by Jenny Holzer and Peter Nadin. A collaborative work of short aphoristic statements, drawings and text offering commonsensical and exotic representations of the personal and the social. It is the complete collection of material that Holzer and Nadin have publicly presented as signs, posters and paintings. 5 x 8, 176 pages. Sewn paperback 5.95, hardcover 12.95

FASSBI N DER

A Monograph on the filmmaker Werner Rainer Fassbinder with essays by Peter Iden, Ruth McCormick, Yaak Karsunke, Wolfram Schutte, Wilfried Wiegand and Wilhelm Roth, an interview with Fassbinder and an extensive filmography with synopses and production information on all films. 5-1/2 x 8-1/2, 93 photos, 256 pages. Sewn paperback 7.95, hardcover 15.95.

OF WALKING IN ICE is Werner

Herzog's journal of his walk from

Munich to Paris in the winter of 1974. "...Herzog had received word that Lotte Eisner was seriously ill in Paris and on the verge of dying. Determined not 'to permit her death,' he decided to walk from Munich to Paris, believing that she would stay alive if he came on foot.... Herzog appears as a kind of Beckettian anti-hero who, walking through mud, hail, and snowstorm ('the Lower Orders'), 'stumbles forward in the darkness' ('the Great Calamity'); he becomes human loneliness in a universe filled with 'Nothing...the Yawning Black Void,' with the 'Grotesque...crowding everywhere on this earth."' 5 x 8, 96 pages. Paperback 4.95 hardcover 9.95.

DEBRIEFING

by Susan Sontag. A sound recording of the author reading her story from I, etcetera. "This city is neither a jungle nor the moon nor the Grand Hotel. In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is a fairly legible printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data bank for asthmatic voice prints..." Stereo record, 7.98.

DICTEE

by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is a cumulation of narratives in nine parts. A non-linear recording; tracings of names, events and biographies of nine female persons. The personages and their accounts are derived from non-fictional and mythological sources. Established as a constant throughout the book is the self-reference to the act of writing, the act of making speech; inherent in its function that which simultaneously subverts, silences the very act. 5 x 8, 96 pages. Sewn paperback 4.95, hardcover 9.95.

FIGURE-EIGHT

by Reese Williams. A fable about the generating and receiving of images; set at street level in a hypertrophied dollar culture, it unfolds as a series of seeming disparate scenes. Short texts, images and quotations are resonated into four sections, Sight Wounded, Rites d'Entree, Ocean, and Breaking Apart. "...the life one has images of, but never oees." 5 x 8, 128 pages. Sewn paperback 5.95, hardcover 12.95. MAIL ORDER: Prices include postage and shipping. Send your payment in the form of check or money order. Allow 2-3 weeks for delivery. NY residents add 8-1/4% sales tax. Orders from outside the USA should add $1.50 for the first book and $.50 for others to cover postage.

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by RosalindE. Krauss the best treatmentof its subjectyet written.As a textbook,it ought "Krauss'sbookis undoubtedly of to raisethe levelof discoursein arthistoryclasses, forit is the meaning,notthe chronology, plodding sculpturesince Rodinthatis the book'scentralconcern.Kraussavoidsthe conventional surveyanddividesthe bookintoa sequenceof 'case studies'thatpermitsustainedattentionto to standbehindthatporspecificworksand artists.Inso doing,she attemptsto tracea 'tradition' in America tionof Americansculptureof the past 15 yearswhichshe espouses critically."-Art in blackandwhiteand is, foran artbook,of a convenientand "Thisbookis wellillustrated andanalyticalandorganizedaroundspecific formalistic manageablesize. Thetext is rigorously such as the treatmentof narrative considerations time,the handlingof space, and the sculptural well in the game strategiesof surrealistsculpture.Itis an approachthatpays off particularly author'sdiscussionsof Rodinand DavidSmith."-SaturdayReview 308pp. illus. $8.95

PHILIPJOHNSON:PROCESSES The Glass House, 1949 and the AT&T CorporateHeadquarters by CraigOwens,GiorgioCiucci,and KennethFrampton ALDOROSSIIN AMERICA: 1976-1979 by PeterEisenmanandAldoRossi CENTERBEAM editedby OttoPieneand Elizabeth JOHNHEJDUK: Goldring Introduction 7 Houses by LawrenceAlloway by PeterEisenman These illustrations, essays, and biographical documentthe history SCOLARI: profilesof the contributors a kineticperforming of Centerbeam, groupwork Beyond Memoryand Hope by artistsat MIT'sCenterforAdvancedVisual editedby KennethFrampton Studiesexhibitedat documenta6 in Kassel, NEWWAVE D.C. AUSTRIAN Germanyand in Washington 131pp. illuswithcolor $15.00 paper editedbv KennethFrampton

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OCTOBER/Back Issues OCTOBER 1 Foucault on Magritte, Lebensztejn on Stella, and texts by Richard Foreman, Hollis Frampton, Richard Howard, others OCTOBER 2 Eisenstein's notes for a film of Capital, Krauss on Johns, and texts by Yvonne Rainer, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Carl Andre, others OCTOBER 3 RicardoutrnRobbe-Grillet, film theory by Jean Epstein, and texts by Peter Handke, Robert Morris, Annette Michelson, others OCTOBER 4 Michael Snow's notes for Rameau's Nephew, Richard Sennett on narcissism, Craig Owens on Robert Wilson, and texts by Dolf Sternberger, Robert Whitman, others OCTOBER 5 Photography: A Special Issue Nadar's memoirs, Hollis Frampton on Weston, Jean Clair on Duchamp, and texts by Hubert Damisch, Rosalind Krauss, Thierry de Duve, others OCTOBER 6 Beckett's... but the clouds... Kristeva, Pleynet, and Sollers on the USA, and texts by Michael Brown, Tom Bishop, Octavio Armand, others

OCTOBER 7 Soviet Revolutionary Culture: A Special Issue Alfred Barr's Russian Diary, 192728, documents by Lunacharsky, Dziga Vertov, Pasternak, and texts by Margit Rowell, Paul Schmidt, Annette Michelson, others OCTOBER 8 Barthes's inaugural lecture, Laurie Anderson's Americans on the Move, Douglas Crimp on Pictures, and texts by Leo Bersani, Berenice Reynaud, others OCTOBER 9 Derrida on aesthetics, Louis Marin on Stendahl, Enzensbergeron German civil liberties, and texts by Yvonne Rainer, Craig Owens, and Rosalind Krauss OCTOBER 10 HubertDamisch on Duchamp, Lyotardon Daniel Buren, interviews with Trisha Brown and Richard Serra, texts on Dan Graham, and Robert Smithson OCTOBER 11 Essays in honor of Jay Leyda Alan Trachtenbergon Walker Evans, Annette Michelson on Ren6 Clair, Yve-Alain Bois on El Lissitzky, and texts by Noel Burch, P. Adams Sitney, Mikhail Kaufman, others OCTOBER 12 Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson on Beuys, Joel Fineman and Craig Owens on allegory, and texts by James Benning, Robert Morris, others

OCTOBER 13 Macciocchi, Bersani, and Dutoit on Pasolini, Douglas Crimp and Craig Owens on postmodernism, Michael Nyman on new music, and texts by Leo Steinberg, James Kavanagh, others OCTOBER 14 Maya Deren's 1947 notebook, Eisenstein's letters from Mexico, interview with Pierre Boulez, Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Annette Michelson on the centennial Ring at Bayreuth OCTOBER 15 Film reviews by Borges, film script by Joseph Cornell, HubertDamisch on Delacroix's Journal, Crimp and Krauss on photography, and texts by Serge Guilbaut, Joel Fineman, others OCTOBER 16 Art WorldFollies, 1981: A Special Issue Benjamin Buchloh on regressive painting, Rosalind Krauss on Picasso studies, Clara Weyergraf on populism and feminism, and texts by Ben Lifson, John Beardsley, others OCTOBER 17 The New Talkies: A Special Issue Jameson on Syberberg, Copjec on Duras, Frampton, Wollen, Rosler on filmmaking, and texts by Philip Rosen and Mary Ann Doane

Back issues are $8.00 each. Order directly from The MIT Press, Journals Department, 28 Carleton St., Cambridge, Mass. 02142 USA

Trustees of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies Armand Bartos, Chairman Charles Gwathmey, President Douglas H. Banker Richard F. Barter A. Bruce Brackenridge Colin G. Campbell Walter Chatham Peter D. Eisenman Ulrich Franzen Frank 0. Gehry Gerald D. Hines Eli Jacobs Philip Johnson Edward J. Logue Gerald M. McCue Robert M. Meltzer Paul Rudolph Carl E. Schorske Frederieke S. Taylor Marietta Tree Massimo Vignelli John F. White Peter Wolf

OCTOBER 20 & 21 Jean Baudrillard

The Beauboug Effect

Bernhard Leitner

Albert Speer: The Architect

Frank Gehry and Richard Serra

Collaboration on a Connecting Bridge between the Chrysler Building and the World Trade Center

Eugenio Donato

The Priority of Theory

Hollis Frampton

Atget at MOMA

Noel Carroll

Hollywood in the Seventies (and Beyond)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

In a Year of Thirteen Moons

J. Hoberman

Super-8 Cinema

Scott MacDonald

Interview with Vivienne Dick