Art and Its Image
An extract.
The New York Times, In the presence of the ‘Mona Lisa’ at the Louvre in Paris, digital photography, rather than looking at the painting, has become the primary experience, 2014
Credit: Pedro Fiuza/NurPhoto and Associated Press.
I can no longer remember seeing the Mona Lisa. That I did see her when I visited the Louvre at the age of fourteen is certain. Certain, though I have no photograph of the moment, nothing to attest to my having been there before her. I have since seen so many pictures of people crowded around that painting, so many faces reflected in the bulletproof glass behind which it hangs, that I find I cannot distinguish my own memory from these photographs.
I offer this moment from my life as anecdote, fully aware that the subjective is limited, self-interested, that these moments are not exemplary. But aware, too, that meaning is created in that space between individual and artwork. “We are always looking,” the critic John Berger wrote, “at the relation between things and ourselves.” To write of art without audience, without self, is to write of trees falling in forests and no one about to hear them.
Memory is a fallible medium, easily confused, suggestible. Tell me about the sounds of the crowd gathered to see the Mona Lisa – about the camera shutters clicking, the whirring of lenses as they focus on that most famous face, the chorus of beeps from a choir of digital devices, about the sound of voices and footsteps ringing off the walls – tell me and I will remember them, invent them.
The portrait of a woman looks out at the crowd. A camera’s flash glances off the glass. She hangs alone on the wall, impassive, wry. People say she disappoints in life, that she is smaller than they had imagined, darker. No one gets close enough to see the cracks that line her face. The crowd is separated from the work not only by glass but by two barriers: one rope, one wooden. She is brighter in her reproductions, closer, as if all those copies have sapped the colour and immediacy from the original. “We become so used to seeing it on picture postcards, and even advertisements, that we find it difficult to see it with fresh eyes,” the art historian E.H. Gombrich wrote of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece (c. 1503-1517). “But it is worthwhile to forget what we know, or believe we know, about the picture, and to look at it as if we were the first people ever to set eyes on it.”
To see it with fresh eyes or with eyes alone. For the most part, the Mona Lisa is seen through a camera lens, mediated by a screen. “Most tourists feel compelled,” Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography (1977), “to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture. This gives shape to experience […] an appearance of participation.” Where once this artwork consumed its audience, now the audience consumes its image. Each photograph records an encounter between the viewer and the original. I was there, they say, as she is now. I saw her, even if I didn’t see her. Few people spend more than a passing moment studying the Mona Lisa. They have seen her before. She has become less a painting than a symbol of a painting, her image infinitely reproduced.
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Following Berger, art, which once belonged to place – a church, a palace, a grand hall – now belongs to no place but everywhere at once. This displacement first began in the eighteenth century, when art was gathered in temples of culture, in museums and galleries; the object displaced from its setting, stripped of function. And later, with the invention of the camera in the early 1800s, the image of art became displaced from its object. Such images come to us; we need not go to them. “The days of pilgrimage,” Berger wrote, “are over.” Where art carries an air of exclusivity, its images do not. They are democratic in their distribution, available in their multitudes. Taken from museums’ sombre walls to be printed on notebooks and T-shirts and fridge magnets. “Images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free” – Berger again – “they surround us in the same way language surrounds us.”
This is not to say the art object has become obsolete. We will always find special reverence for the real thing. To the authentic work, we lend a talismanic power, as to the artist’s name alone. The object before us may have been seen a hundred times before in photographs and reproductions, yet there remains a distinct pleasure in seeing the original. Here, before us, is the very object the artist touched, and we will never fail to be impressed by that fact. The work has persisted, survived, then as it is now. History is heavy in the object, caught like dust in the varnish. It brings together its time and ours, there and here; the distance between the artist and ourselves becomes momentarily insignificant. As Walter Benjamin wrote in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”
Much has been said of the mechanical reproduction of art images, that it diffuses the aura of the original, that something essential to the work is lost in the translation. But perhaps the copy, far from diluting the power of the original, curiously and paradoxically augments it. The multitude of images that surround art history’s most famous objects has only increased their status as icons. “The work of art,” as Jean Baudrillard said, “is not threatened by its double.” Given its reproductions, the original artwork has both lost and gained, but its image has, above all, been seen. Is not that art’s aspiration?
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I prefer reproductions to originals. I need not remember them nor photograph them. I keep them with me, on a shelf or tacked to a wall. It is easier, I find, more pleasurable, to consider the images of artworks in books, to look at my leisure. In books, one can return to the same pictures again and again as to old friends and find, on every viewing, some previously unnoticed detail. Books allow for a more intimate study, for a private communion without the presence of others. Mechanically reproduced, the work of art meets us halfway, between our lives and its. History’s images find us in our homes, at our schools, on screens, the internet, billboards, populate the familiar scenes of our lives, belong as much to our living rooms and textbooks as they do the institutions that house them. “These works were not after all intended to end up between these morose walls,” the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote. “We are well aware that […] so many joys and sorrows, so much anger, and so many labours were not destined one day reflect in the museum’s mournful light.” Photography offers us, as André Malraux said, a museum-without-walls.
One need only visit a library to see art history, to turn on the television, search the web. Visit a garden shop, and you will see it. All those cement figures come to rest in a place unfamiliar to them all – Venus de Milo, Michelangelo’s David, Winged Victory, cherubs, even Christ – unlike Ozymandias, left to fall apart where he belonged; somewhere in the desert and not in a suburban garden.
When I speak of art history, I speak of the history told by Gombrich and Gardner, by Kenneth Clarke, the story of a hundred schoolbooks and seminal texts. Its narrative is one of triumph and of progress, the forward march from the darkness of the cave to the light of reason. It is a linear story, told along a predestined trajectory, from the Venus of Willendorf to Pollock, and slightly beyond, towards the frayed ends of Modernism in the mid-1900s. This art history has reached me as replica, photograph, translation; those mediums of transmission from Western ‘centre’ to global ‘periphery’. For the place I live does not appear in that story, that history. Like so many other places, it has been overlooked and undermined. That I prefer reproductions is then not surprising, here where the copies have always preceded the original. Where the history of art remains at once familiar and peculiarly inaccessible, a history of images detached from their objects, borrowed and second-hand.
I do not visit art museums to see works with which I am familiar but to find the ones I do not know, the less famous works, those that exist beyond the images compiled in so many art books. There is, too, the contemporary art sold in commercial galleries, which, for the most part, one sees only once and in person. Few of these works will reappear in libraries or museums; most will disappear into private collections and storage facilities. Go and see them if you will not miss them.
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When I visited Venice some years ago, I took with me a film camera borrowed from a friend. On the final day of my trip, shortly after I had framed the final photograph, the film snapped as I rewound it. The images were lost, could never be developed; the torn film exposed in the light of a summer afternoon. Yet they continue to exist in the darkroom of my memory. Of those photographs, I remember three precisely, remember the composition seen through the lens, the colours, the light, even the dirt caught in the viewfinder. The other photographs I recall inexactly but recall nonetheless. The corner of a room painted a brilliant red. The marble head of a cherub in a wooden crate. A single tree in a sunlit hall. A transparent blue cloth held above a table fan.
Photography lends itself to memory, for memory is largely static; life recalled as an anthology of single images rather than a moving picture. Like memory, photography favours single moments among a series of countless others. A photograph is an image of a privileged moment – every image photographed glows bright with the significance the camera lends it. Even before the scene seen through the camera is transferred onto film, the eye (the I) that looks through the viewfinder preempts both the image and the memory. But unlike a memory’s natural images – accidental, unconsidered – photographic images are composed, regarded more intently.
“After nearly three years of blindness, I find that the pictures in the gallery of my mind have dimmed somewhat,” the theologian Jonathan Hull spoke into his tape recorder; however, “memories of photographs are more easily recaptured.” Like memory, photographs are still – unmoving and quiet – a slideshow played to no sound.
Photographic images are seductive. Whether in the news or on a poster, they catch our eyes with an immediacy language seldom touches. We have become so accustomed to photographs, so literate in our reading of them, that they have come to inform not only what we see but how we see it. Sight, then, is not just a biological perception but a social one too, a sense conditioned by the visible world.
“For the first time several months ago,” Sontag said in a 1975 interview, “I spent hours looking at the facade of the cathedral; but only when I bought a book on the cathedral a week later did I really see it […] The photographs enabled me to see in a way that my ‘naked’ eye could not possibly see the ‘real’.” Photography disregards scale, makes parts and wholes equivalent, elevates the fragment. It holds the scene pictured in focus, the eye moving across its surface without needing to adjust for distance and light as it would in life. Photography reflects the world on a single plane, flat as a drawing is, simplified by the depth it lacks.
Even architecture, like Sontag’s cathedral, gives itself to be seen photographically, though architecture is, above all, an embodied experience, one in which the real body moves through real space. Art, with exceptions, does not necessitate a body to the same degree, only regarding eyes and a regarding mind. For the most part, it offers itself to photography with little resistance.
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Art takes as its primary structure translation. Pictorial art represents the visible world, reflects it in paint or clay or gesture. A bowl of fruit described on canvas, a nude rendered in bronze. Even art that makes no reference to the world is a translation of the times, of the attendant art theories, of the historical moment. Perversions, pleasure, politics; the artist’s preoccupations reflect in the work, manifestly, obliquely. Art has always been reproducible; it lends itself to secondary translations. For centuries, aspiring artists copied masters to see how they worked, to understand their logic. Paintings have their engravings, sculptures their plaster copies, all art photography, all language. There is imitation and appropriation, forgery and plagiarism, and the more benign translations of influence and quotation. Why then this emphasis on authenticity, this devotion to the original? Behind every image is another.
