53698704 anti vision rosalind krauss october

7/23/2019 53698704 Anti Vision Rosalind Krauss October

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ROSALIND KRAUSS

One turns the pages of Georges Bataille's book on Manet with a mountingsense of disappointment. Is it really Bataille who is telling us-once again-that Manet's achievement was the destruction of subject matter so that in itsplace, from among its ruins, should arise pure painting-"painting," as hewrites, "for its own sake, a song for the eyes of interwoven forms and colors"?'Having turned subject matter into a mere pretext for this release of visual opu-lence, for this experience of optical autonomy, Bataille can conclude, "I wouldstress the fact that what counts in Manet's canvases is not the subject, but thevibration of light."2So once again there is the visual model, ineluctably tied to the visual arts.Of course, modernism's visual model had significantly transformed those ofearlier times. This is true whether we think of the Middle Ages' preachingmodel, in which vision, seen as the most vivid and precise of the senses was tobe the conduit through which religious matter could most directly and most en-duringly affect the soul; or whether we take an empiricist model, with paintingtranscribing that mosaic of sensation through which reality announces itself toa perceiving subject. Modernism transmutes these models according to itsown, altered sense of the task of visuality. To exclude the domain of knowl-edge, both moral and scientific, to rewrite the visual in the realm of a reflexiverelation to the modality of vision rather than to its contents, to savor in and foritself qualities like immediacy,vibrancy,simultaneity, effulgence nd to experiencethese as qualities without objects -the intransitive verbs of vision, as it were-all of this is to enter what in quite another mood we might describe as the mod-ernist fetishization of sight.1. Georges Bataille, Manet, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and James Emmons, Geneva, Skira,1955, p. 36.2. Ibid., p. 103. This had, essentially, been the position of the French art historical establish-ment since the major Manet exhibition of 1932. In Manet et la tradition(1932), Germain Bazainhad announced, "L'art de Manet est en effet un pur pFroblemede couleur," asserting the artist'sindifference both to invention and to subject matter. Rene Huyghe's Manetpeintre(1932) empha-sized Manet's commitment to a notion of painting as a reflexive process.


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But Bataille - and here's the strange part - had begun his career preciselyby buying out of all this.From the Documentsperiod, that is to say 1929-30, comes a series of textsdedicated to an entirely different reading of vision's relation to art. We think of"Rotting Sun," the essay dedicated to Picasso; we turn to the study of auto-mutilation and the fascination with the sun in "Sacrificial Mutilation and theSevered Ear of Vincent Van Gogh"; orin a r we reflect on the highly critical review ofPrimitiveArt, a book that sought to extend developmental psychology's theoriesof the genesis of representation back to the time of the caves; or again, we findthe brief meditation on the organ of vision in the Documentsdictionary entrycalled "Eye,"and subtitled "Cannibal Delicacy." In all of these Bataille proposesa scandalous relation of art to vision.

Lascaux.Bison, man,and bird.

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Contained in the visual metaphor-the grounding of art in the fundamen-tal properties of vision-is the commitment to productiveness and to mastery,to the acquisitiveness and accomplishment of sight, to its usefulness, its prowess,its determined busy-ness. Miming this productivity was - for the psychology ofthe 1920s-the very project that initiated man into the act of art, where repre-sentation is, simply, a way of appropriating things. To draw an animal on thewall of the cave is to possess it, to have already succeeded in hunting it. Thepsychologist charts a purposive movement on the part of the primitive draughts-man that is propelled by this need to create an equivalent to the purposefulnessof sight. The modern scientist sees that paleolithic, infant artist progressing,over the course of thousands of years, from the babble of an inchoate scrawl tothe search from within that linear meander for something he will "recognize"and, once having seen it there, man or animal, he learns to repeat this sign.Gradually he perfects it. And his mastery of it repeats the mastery that it, aslikeness, will exercise on the world he sees.Bataille never denies this scenario of productiveness, which he titles "ap-propriation." He simply points out that this account has chosen to omitanother, parallel course, charted like the first, on the wall of the cave. It is thissecond course, delirious, destructive, that cannot be thought by science. Fromthe very same period that the walls reap their harvest of animals-delicate-hooved, shaggy-backed, ferociously horned-they declare a fury towards theperson of their own creator. The Aurignacian depictions of man are caricatural,ignoble, debased. They never seem to rise above those initial, early scrawls themotive for which seems, despite the psychologists' scenario, dubiously produc-tive. Rather the force propelling these formless networks of line comes across asdestructive, as a marking which dirties, defaces, disrupts the ground on whichit appears, a marking whose impulse seems purely sadistic. So art has an alter-native beginning at least as far as man's self-image is concerned. It begins withwhat Bataille calls "a refusal to represent" and instead projects self-depiction asautodefacement.3Two mythic cycles project this (self-)defacing structure of representation.The first takes place in darkness, in the chthonic obscurity of the cave, whereno man leans over the luminous reflection of his own image, giving rise to thebeginnings of art in the rapt, self-admiring gesture of Narcissus. Instead, theMinotaur presides in this darkness and substitutes the blindness and terror ofthe labyrinth for the transparency of the mirror. The representation of manwithin this site must be collected under the nonproductive terms "destruction"or "decomposition," as opposed to the productive form that undertakes the jobof appropriation.The second cycle leaves the caves and is performed precisely in relation to3. Georges Bataille, "L'art primitif," Oeuvrescompletes, vol. I, Paris, Gallimard, 1970, pp.247-54.

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the sun, that embodiment of the zenith and of light which for most of mankindfunctions to symbolize elevation of both mind and spirit. The sun functions asthe most abstract of objects, Bataille explains, "since it is impossible to look at itfixedly." But if, he argues, "one obstinately focuses on it, a certain madness isimplied, and the notion changes meaning because it is no longer productionthat appears in light, but refuse or combustion. ... In practice the scrutinizedsun can be identified with a mental ejaculation, foam on the lips, and an epilep-tic crisis.4 It is just such a crisis that tied Van Gogh to the sun, the constantdeity of his painting from the time of Arles and Saint-Remy, the deity to whichhe made the sacrifice of his ear.To stare at the sun is to go mad, to go blind, and thus to perform whatBataille calls automutilation. But this automutilation by which the body is de-filed is the very act of mimesis through which one attempts to identify with anideal-the sun, the gods-by imitating it. Ancient sacrificial ritual-Bataillespeaks of Mithraic cults in "Rotting Sun," or Aztec ones in "Extinct America"- as well as modern pathological behavior, fix precisely on that aspect of thesun or the sun god that embodies waste and destruction: "It is nothing butradiation, gigantesque loss of heat and light, flame, explosion,"Bataille writes,calling the sun "this great cataclysm."5 And it is this ideal which in the eyes ofan idealist culture would only be an anti-ideal, this ideal of a nonrecuperableexpenditure, of a supreme power through loss that forms the basis of imitationwhen identification with "a solar god who tears and rips out his own organs"issues, inevitably, in automutilation.6Within this automutilative act, an identification with the sun that definesitself as a self-blinding, the circle is squared and the darkness of the cave fuseswith the blaze of noon. The two mythic cycles are the same cycle and have thesame story to tell of representation, of art's depiction of man himself. From the1937 essay "Van Gogh as Prometheus" comes another image of this fusion ofdark and light. Bataille imagines Van Gogh trying to look directly into the sunby holding his hand before his face as a screen, or blinder. In such a moment ofboth seeing and not-seeing, "Death appeared in a sort of transparency, like thesun through the blood of a living hand, in the interstices of the bones outlinedin the darkness."7

Representation is born, then, at the limit: where light turns to darkness,where life surrenders an image of death, where sight is extinguished in a revela-tory moment which is the same as blindness. And it is this other, nonappropri-

4. Georges Bataille, Visionsof Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl, Minneapolis, University of Min-nesota Press, 1985, p. 57.5. Bataille, OC, vol. I, p. 498.6. Bataille, Visionsof Excess, p. 66.7. Bataille, OC, vol. I, p. 499.

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art to which Bataille subscribes throughout the rest of the book. For the wholeof Manet is an exercise in the aesthetic paradigm we associate with the Enlight-enment and the name of Lessing: the paradigm that differentiates the artisticgenres by means of the modalities of consciousness of reality proper to each,disassociating an art of time from one of space and thereby grounding each ofthe arts in the perceptual field proper to its own experience: speech linked totemporality and sectioned off by definition from sight, linked to space.Wholly within this framework, Bataille then repeatedly defines Manet'scontribution as a breaking of rhetoric's grip on painting, as a silencing ofspeech in order to discover the preeminence of vision as such.The interest of the Goya episode as an alternative, in fact contradictory,beginning is precisely that it challenges the aesthetic paradigm- vision/lan-guage - through which painting is understood to define itself, by offering athird term /blindness/ which can be seen as undoing or foiling that paradigm.Outside the structural law that organizes the arts in relation to the positive con-tents of sense, blindness-which in its sensory malfunction is precisely therefusal to appropriate - is an irregular third term, not deducible from the othertwo. Following Barthes's description of the operations of Bataille's heterologywe could say, "It is a term that is independent, full, eccentric, irreducible: theterm of a (structurally) lawless seduction."10 Instead, blindness becomes a termthat forms its own pairing with the pole of opticality by constructing anotherparadigm - vision/blindness - on the very body of the perceiver, in all of his orher physical, material existence.In so doing, the work of the heterological becomes obvious, because itforces one to see that it was always on, in, and through the body of theperceiver that the aesthetic paradigm operated; that these operations weremerely sublimated by an idealist subterfuge that wants to describe the work ofart as a function of the disembodied modalities of sense. But Bataille invites thebody to reassert itself into the structural law by which modernism masqueradespainting as the experience for itself of the contentless contents of vision. Theparadigm vision/blindness returns sight to its seat in the affective, erotic groundof the body, the body convulsed in either autoappropriation or automutilation.It is only lately that one has learned, in this country, to attend to thisalternative mythological practice, to this construction of a wholly disorientingand disruptive third term that unravels the neat categories of a too formulaicmodernism. Looking around the edges of Bataille's own circle in the days ofDocumentsone finds a group of practices that are as extraordinary as they aredisregarded within the official histories of modernist art. On the one hand thereis the disruptive practice of the early Giacometti as he began to think the body

10. Roland Barthes, "Les sorties du texte," in, Bataille, ed. Philippe Sollers, Paris, 10/18, 1973,p. 58.

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of sculpture through the Bataillian categories of labyrinth, necropolis, and thevertiginous fall from the vertical axis of the monument to the horizontal axis ofthe base. " On the other hand there is the production of a kind of photographyassociated with both Bataille's magazine Documentsand with Minotaure,the oneto whom he gave its name.As this photography develops what are undoubtedly the surrealist move-ment's most inventive and searing images, it does so less under the sign ofBreton's convulsive beauty than under the sign of Bataille's automutilation.There we find the body inscribed in a mimetic response to external forces; thebody bursting its bounds as it is assaulted from without; the body assumingboth the signs of castration and the forms of the fetish.12The terms that Bataille invented to shake the certainty of various nor-mative paradigms in all their logical symmetry-terms like informe,acephale,basesse, automutilation, and blindness-these terms work to release the affectthat has been available all along in a whole body of work which, for manydecades, has been unassimilable by us.

They are terms that might be expected as well to organize and restructureour understanding of more recent practices, beginning in the 1940s with Du-buffet's early materiological explorations, or jumping forward to watch the ex-tinction of light in late Rothko, or to witness the alignment of the body with theearth in the sculpture of the last two decades and understanding it in terms ofthe labyrinth's complication of forms and of horizontality's endless multiplyingof point of view. It is not clear what an alternative view of the history of recentart -one operated through Bataille's disruption of the prerogatives of a visualsystem-would yield. It is my assumption that in gesturing toward another setof data, in suggesting another group of reasons, another description of the goalsof representation, another ground for the very activity of art, its yields will betremendous.

11. See my treatment of this in "No More Play," collected in my, The Originalityof theAvant-Gardeand OtherModernistMyths, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1985.12. See my "Corpus Delicti," October,no. 33 (Summer 1985), pp. 31-72.

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