Routledge Revivals: Painting, Language and Modernity (1985)

Michael Phillipson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138281899
• eBook ISBN: 9781351983464
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

First published in 1985, this book draws together the author's artistic with analytical practices which had been developed over many years of sociological enquiry. It interprets a 'work of art' as a site on which a viewer or critic is invited to share in questioning celebration of the painting itself. The author reassesses modern painting's relation to its own origins and to tradition in light of the emergence of 'postmodern' practice — exploring its engagement of fundamental questions about language and being. Also assessed is the relevance of the metaphors of writings and Reading to an understanding of painting and viewing practices — looking at painters' writings as well as phenomenological and post-structuralist writers.

1
A More or Less Contemporary Pluralogue (Broken)

Scene: A ship at sea

Time: The present - twilight - running out

We are aboard the S.S. MARie CELeste II - a small, rather battered, occasionally leaky passenger ship which seems to be drifting somewhat aimlessly, destination apparently unknown; although it is rumoured amongst some of the passengers that the ship sailed originally from an obscure European port, it is no longer clear from the log whether she is returning from or is on the way to America (somebody appears to have tampered with the crucial entries). It is rumoured amongst the passengers (a rumour probably started by a member of the crew) that some of the lifeboats fall below current safety standards and there is concern that, in the event of a major disaster, not all could be saved. Many are thought to be poor swimmers (comfortable only in shallow waters); nevertheless the captain managed to reassure most people during an earlier conducted tour of the ship by pointing to the running repairs that the crew were continuously and assiduously carrying out.

Although the full passenger list has been mislaid it has become clear during the discussion (which we are still recording) that the expedition (for such it appears to be) comprises a heterogeneous collection of artists and writers (and not a few hangers-on). Many of these have contributed to the discussions, but, equally, many others seem constrained to silence, perhaps overawed by the company, or then again perhaps uninterested in the proceedings. The discussion re-presented here has been recorded (on admittedly inferior equipment - our Arts Council capital grant was withdrawn earlier this year) late one recent winter's afternoon after the cook's usual heavy lunch; the meal was accompanied and followed by the consumption of a large quantity of a rough (though nevertheless amusing) 'house' wine of clearly recent vintage from previously unestablished Italian and German vineyards.

No formal chair-person has emerged during the session, although someone representing him- or herself as an 'interpreter' appears to have acted as an informal link in the discussion. The microphone is passed around amongst the participants and this accounts, in part, for the poor quality of reception at the beginning and end of some of the contributions; another factor affecting reception at these points is often the noisy response of the audience. As a result we have undertaken some editorial work and have reconstructed what we take to be the general tenor of the remarks that have been 'lost' in the recording; all these reconstructions are indicated in the text by being placed between stars, thus* . . .* . All text outside the stars is the text as recorded (or perhaps, we should say, as transcribed by our faithful transcribers who have generated as coherent a script as possible, given the interference and the notorious problems involved in transforming speech into writing).

We must add that the discussion was already under way by the time we had set our recording equipment up and established the best balance possible under difficult circumstances. Our transcript thus picks up a discussion that is already on the way. Unfortunately our sound engineer suddenly ran out of tape and the recording and the transcript break off rather abruptly. The discussion has continued and we were eventually able to acquire a further short length of tape to record a series of later exchanges. The two transcripts frame a collection of remaindered texts whose interosculation with the transcripts is not part of our editorial responsibility.

M.A.D.T.E.C.

(Modern Art Document Transcribers' Editorial Collective)

(tape runs)

PABLO PICASSO: ... I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are and not for what they mean... I make a painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are. . .¹

AN INTERPRETER: ... for what they mean and are - meaning and Being - but can we separate these two, or is the painting of the 'being' of the objects, what they are, already bound to meaning? And is it the objects themselves that are painted or rather your and our relation with them through the languages of painting?

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY: . . . Ultimately the painting relates to nothing at all among experienced things unless it is first of all 'autofigurative'. . .

AN INTERPRETER: . . . you mean it is about itself, is a sign of itself, it re-presents itself?

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY: . . . It is a spectacle of something only by being a 'spectacle of nothing', by breaking the 'skin of things' to show how things became things, how the world became the world . . . The effort of modern painting has been directed not so much towards choosing between line and colour or even between the figuration of things and the creation of signs, as it has been towards multiplying the systems of equivalences . . .

AN INTERPRETER: . . . the languages of re-presentation . . .

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY: . . . towards severing their adherence to the envelope of things . . . Vision alone makes us learn that beings are different. . .

AN INTERPRETER: . . . I'm not sure that we can have vision 'alone', but that's something else. By 'beings' you mean the 'objects' that Pablo has just referred to?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: . . . 'exterior' foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together, are 'simultaneity' . . .²

AN INTERPRETER: . . . are 'synchronic'; so one issue of the painter's relation to the world is that vision seems to create our relation to the world as one where the things, objects, others, events, are separate, independent, while at the same time having this independence only within what you call 'simultaneity', a oneness, a whole, a system perhaps?

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY: . . . Vision encounters, as at a crossroads, all the aspects of Being . . .³

AN INTERPRETER: . . . so we might say, as a beginning, that mute 'Being' speaks through the work of art; the work of art speaks or, better, writes on behalf of the things, of their otherness. And the work of art is the exploring and constant re-forming of the gap between human being and nature that is always, as you have shown, already full. Painting re-opens the gap and re-fills it through its 'systems of equivalences' with something that may potentially transform our relation to nature, to the other, to Being; and at the same time it shows our solidity with nature, our withinness. Perhaps it also proposes that that relation, that solidity, is a possibility of Language. From what you say, Pablo's desire to paint the objects for what 'they are', what we might call the 'thingness' of the object, that they 'are', could only ever be partially satisfied because painting works through a multiplicity of systems of equivalence, or what might also be called codes, signs, re-presentations, simulacra even, and firstly and lastly, metaphors. Metaphor gives us both the thing and not the thing and turns us towards Language; but does metaphor work at this level of the 'Being' of things? Can you give us an example?

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY: . . . *well*. . . it is true and uncontradictory that no grape was ever what it was in the most figurative painting and that no painting, no matter how abstract, can get away from Being, that even Caravaggio's grape is the grape itself.⁴

AN INTERPRETER: . . . The painting gives us the grape itself, the grapeness of grape, only, then, by giving us itself first, by being, as you put it, a 'spectacle of nothing', because it is always finally about itself, auto-figurative; it is about its own making of an equivalence. It offers us the grape itself via the specificity of its own language. The painting is caught between immanence and transcendence, for while it needed this particular bunch of grapes for its motif, all grapes need this particular painting to be what they are for us. To desire, as Pablo desires, to paint the 'being' of objects is then to be committed to the being of painting, for he takes painting as an opening on Being itself.

Pablo Picasso: . . . *Take roosters*... we always have roosters, but like everything else in life we must discover them. Just as Corot discovered the morning . . . Everything must be discovered - this box - a piece of paper . . .⁵

AN INTERPRETER: . . . must be discovered in its thingness as just this thing. Revealing something as just this thing in its concreteness paradoxically may allow it to stand for every such thing. For a work to be a painting it must first of all be about, be all in the service of, painting, for only then may it offer us a glimpse of our relation-to-things. For painting is no longer engaged in the impossible project of giving us things as they 'really are', as if they and reality lived a life absolutely independent of us, but rather shows us the things as always a matter of our relation to them and their relation to each other. Painting is a practice of relating that relates us to things and in so doing lets us see them as inseparably bound to us; this work of relating draws our attention to the ways in which our being is always a being-together, a being-as-relation.

GEORGES BRAQUE: . . . Let us forget things, and consider only the relationship between them.⁶

IVON HITCHENS: ... I am always fascinated by the space left between the verticals of trees . . . These divide up the area into separate movements which can be 'read', 'listened to' or 'looked at'.⁷

STEPHANE MALLARME: ... To paint not the thing, but the effect thaf it produces . . .⁸

AN INTERPRETER: . . . where 'effect' may be read as a metaphor for our relation to the thing . . . Perhaps we could call our glimpse, this glimpse of relation-as-relation, the 'content' of the work of art.

WILLEM DE KOONING: Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter, like a flash. It's tiny, very tiny, content. . .⁹

BOB LAW: ... All around us we have unknown phenomena and mystery, we use art to bridge the gap of knowledge, to put something where there is nothing . . .¹⁰

DAVID JONES: In so far as form is brought into being there is reality.

AN INTERPRETER: So the painting helps to make reality; it is not against or apart from it?

DAVID JONES: 'Something' not 'nothing', moreover a new 'something' has come into existence. And if, as we aver, man's form-making has in itself the nature of a sign, then these formal realities, which the art of strategy creates, must in some sense or other be signa. But of what can they possibly be significant? What do they show forth, re-present, recall or, in any sense reflect?¹¹

AN INTERPRETER: Ah! The painting as sign. This seems to open us onto a vast and open conceptual terrain! But from what has already been said, paintings must first of all be signs of themselves . . .

DAVID JONES: . . . the painter may say to himself: This is not a representation of a mountain, it is "mountain" under the form of paint.' Indeed unless he says this, unconsciously or consciously, he will not be a painter worth a candle.¹²

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY: It is the mountain itself which from out there makes itself seen by the painter; it is the mountain that he interrogates with his gaze. What exactly does he make of it? To unveil the means, visible and not otherwise, by which it makes itself a mountain before our eyes . . . The painter's gaze...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 A More or Less Contemporary Pluralogue (Broken)
• 2 In Advance of the Broken Ar
• 3 Recuperating Modernity
• 4 Modernity Underwrites Itself
• 5 Painting: Writing
• 6 Painting: Reading
• 7 Painting into and out of Meaning
• 8 Painting Signing-on and Signing-off
• 9 Painting: Criticising
• 10 A More Contemporary Pluralogue Re-gained (and Lost)
• References to the Pluralogues
• Bibliography
• Index