Report on Seminar DAS BILD

 

In a review in Art Forum in 1992, W.J.T. Mitchell arrives at the following observation: the cultural discourse has gone through an important transformation unnoticed. Had the meaning of the humanities so far been paradigmatically defined  by linguistics, now the visual suddenly seems to predominate. Mitchell characterizes this paradigm break as a "Pictorial Turn". A confirmation of such a turn could be observed, says Mitchell, in the iconophobia which contemporary linguistic and analytic philosophy seem to display. Perhaps Wittgenstein was the philosopher who most strikingly articulated that fear, stating, "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside of it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat itself to us inexorably." (Philosophical Investigations I, pg. 115) However, not only in analytic circles could a disturbed interaction with the image be observed. Pictures present a point of peculiar friction and discomfort across a broad range of intellectual inquiry. The most outstanding explanation for this seems to be the indistinct status attributed to the image in the current cultural discourse, a status somewhere between what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm and an anomaly. On the one hand, the image appears as a central topic of discussion in the human sciences similar to language, i.e. as a metaphor or as a model for other things. On the other hand, the image continues to be an unsolved problem. Although we often employ the concept of the image while reflecting the current visual culture, many essential questions remain, in fact, unanswered. After all, we still do not exactly know what images are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and on the world, how their history is to be understood, and last but not least, how one could live in a world without them. In short, a broad interdisciplinary approach is needed in order to be able to thoroughly investigate the phenomenon of the image.

     Recently, an impetus to such reflection was given in the form of the colloquium Das Bild (Academy of Arts, Berlin, November 23-26, 2000), organized by the Nottingham Trent University and the German Association of Aesthetics. The symposium focused primarily on charting the different and conflicting meanings the word "Bild" (image, picture) embraces. Four interdisciplinary basic questions formed a starting point:

1) What are the philosophical implications of the concept of the image? How should classic notions such as icon, eidolon, phantasm, and in addition, more modern distinctions such as image, scheme, sign, and notion be evaluated in light of topical developments?

2) What contributions could be anticipated from more exact sciences such as perceptual psychology, neurobiology, and psychoanalysis? After all, these disciplines are involved in the investigation of how immaterial images - traditionally belonging to human "imagination" - are generated and how they function.

3) What role does the pictorial context play? In other words, how do the artistic image, the brains' artless image, and the media picture differ and/or relate to each other?

4) To what extent is there a decisive influence by media imagery - from reproduction techniques to the digital constitution of "pictures" - at stake? How could the distinction between "real" and "virtual" images be judged?

     The latter - and rather problematic distinction - was criticized by Horst Bredekamp during one of the Das Bild discussions. What is, in fact, a virtual image? In Bredekamp's view, this concept lacks any "reason for existence" since the rhetoric of the virtual reveals itself as a new form of Platonism. Thus, the virtual is an ideological formula which willfully conceals the connection between materiality and non-materiality necessarily inherent to the image. With Bredekamp's position, an important part of the discussion shifted towards the concept of the "visible." For example, Robert Kudielka stated that it is characteristic of "the visible that we do not see everything. The visible is just a possibility." Hans Belting situates the visible in Klee's artistic tradition, "The artistic image makes visible; it is not the case that it represents the invisible to such a degree that it increases the importance of that visible. It is one of Western dualisms: the visible as such versus the invisible as such. I do not believe, though, that this antithesis really exists."

     Perhaps to conquer such Eurocentric oppositions, Belting reports on his exchange of thought with the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. One of the questions in that exchange dealt with the question of what an artistic image is. The work of Sugimoto is characterized by the deliberate entanglement of various (Western) visual media. For example, Sugimoto photographed entire movies with an extremely slow shutter speed which makes projection time similar to exposure time. Thus, the technological aspect of a movie, which cannot be observed usually as a whole, has been transformed into an unexpected mise-en-scene. In this process, time and space generally seen as opposi­tes become interwoven. Belting argues that "the visible structure as simple as the seman­tic complexity seems exhaustible. We used to think that photography is about space, whereas film is about time. This is confirmed and disproved by Sugimoto. The moving image disappe­ars in the photographic image. The usual indexi­cality of photography has adopted a new meaning. We realize that we are confronted with a topical form of allegori­cal images." Sugimoto's images demand attention for the mise-en-scene of the light. "The light is not the medium or a technical devise, but the very subject matter, the meaning of Sugimoto's pictures. The technical light abstrac­ted from the movie is turned into pure light. The light Sugimoto needs for his camera adopts an iconic quality transcending the condition of the photo­graphic medium." In Sugimoto's view, the artistic image reveals a new para­dox: the iconic quality of invisi­bility. Such characterization of the artistic image relates to Mit­chell's definition of meta-pictu­res as "a second-order discourse about pictures without recourse to language, without resorting to ekphrasis." The specificity of Sugimoto's metapic­tures is contained in questioning the boundaries of the image from within the image as such.

     James Elkins seems to depart from a similar perspective. He states, "The limit of representation is the criterium of the picture as its degree of visibility." Inte­res­ting images have been made in a number of fields, such as astrop­hy­sics, mathematics, genetics, physics, and cosmology. In Elkins' view, the Hubble space telescope photographs are the most impressive pictures of the 20th century. But what do they repre­sent? Elkins believes that in order to be able to answer that question one still needs the concept of the sublime. He views the sublime as the best model for failed transcendence. Subsequently, Elkins states that the images produced by the various exact sciences could, in fact, be considered as linguistic systems. With that, the classic (semiotic) problem of image versus text resurfaces. Elkins concludes, "In order to understand our image-culture, it is necessary to seriously study each form of visuality and explore what repre­sentation can do." 

     Following Elkins, neuroscientist Detlef Linke nuances the role of "the invisible" in the scientific domain. "There have been traditions where one thought one could conquer the invisible by entering a mental realm where one could reach completeness. As Jung stated: we can complete ourselves by making pictures of the unconscious," says Linke. In neuroscience, it currently goes without saying, though, that there are processes occurring in the brain which absolutely cannot be comprised in images. Linke argues, "These processes are just in between beginning and fulfillment of imagination. It is entirely clear that we can never come to a complete picture of ourselves. Artists know this and show us incomplete pictu­res. We still tend to look for the invisible, but not with Colum­bus' mentality. Nowadays, it is common knowledge that some for­eign coun­tries exist which we can never conquer. Since we know they are there we have to put marks in our pictures so everybody sees that there is a more complex geograp­hy." Such a characterization of the strategy of artistic image production is wholeheartedly endorsed by artist Bridget Riley. "There is a new interest in percep­tion. Not as a shift towards invisible painting, but a move towards paintings which include the way we see," she comments.

     The colloquium Das Bild was not rounded off in the form of traditional conclusions, but by a number of preliminary statements assembled by Hermann Pfütze. This underlines once more the interrogative and dynamic character of the investigation at hand. These statements included questions such as, "Isn't the picto­rial turn much more a de-imagination, since digitalization involves an entire dissolution of the image? Could one claim that the pictorial turn is ultimately hostile? Or is the image ultimately stronger than its meaning and theories? Pfütze's closing remark is, "One could talk for a long time about pictu­res, ima­ges, and pain­tings, wit­hout showing or seeing them, but when you see them, you do not have to talk about them. That is perhaps most strikingly stressed by Roland Barthes in Camera Luci­da, where he says, `The pictures which moved me most, I refuse to show since I do not want to illu­strate my descrip­tion of those ima­ges'."(HS).

 

 

International Association of Aesthetics seminar Das Bild, Academy of Arts, Berlin, 23-26 November 2000. The texts of the participants will be published on the Web. (xxxx)