Luciano Ponzio
VISION, DE-WRITING, OTHERNESS
Three thesis about art and life
"L'idée d'une peinture universelle, d'une
totalisation de la peinture, d'une peinture toute réalisée,
est dépourvue de sens.
Durerait-il des millions d'années encore,
le monde, pour les peintres, s'il en reste, sera encore à peindre,
il finira sans avoir été achevé"
(M. Merleau-Ponty, L'
Œil et l'Esprit)
The vision/gaze
Bataille explains that man gazes at, and this action, of gazing at, needs
his petrified presence in a precise point of the world, and his human condition
brings each one of the sensitive truths he recognizes back to the mistake of
fixed soil, to the illusion of an immutable foundation.
"Gaze" reproduces the "intellectualized image of the world" (Cf. Bataille)
and tends to "identify", to "name", to "petrify", to "mortify" the object into
a specific, prescribed prescription and, nevertheless reductive context: "the
mistake of fixed soil".
To gaze at would mean to be able to see nothing but the object integrated
and submerged in the "monotonous code of tools" - a dazzling exactly due to
the obstinacy of casting light. This gazing procures a kind of blindness towards
an exceeding characteristic of signs (namely, according to Peirce, their iconic
value) that makes the value and the sense of signs remaining autonomous and
irreducible to the representation that we have of them, to the interpretation
that we give them, and to the reality that we establish they belong to.
To remove "object from the world of things", to the already given world, means
to relieve the work of art of responsibilities from the obligation of "valuing
the objects", by conceptually defining and grasping them on canvas.
The contents of this life are "the charity offered to the artist" (K. Malevich).
Even though art intensely lives in this world, it does not belong to this
world and it does not allow this historical period to shut the art itself up,
because, otherwise, the present would limit and reduce the strength of the artistic
act into a narrow time.
There is no unitary vision of reality but (Malevich would say that) "the artist
has his/her own, the engineer has his/her one, the scientist another one, the
priest another one and so on".
An "obtuse" vision (R. Barthes), interdisciplinary/indisciplinary among artistic
productions and/or extra-artistic contributes to create translations among different
languages, among relations of signs (semiosis).
"Vision" works with signs that are independent from reality and tends to "form
an optics" (P. Cézanne) that is "other" in respect of the one of the code of
recognizability and that of confirmation of reason.
Artistic vision is oriented towards a deliverance from the seen, the experienced,
the made, the preconstructed, the fake with no ordinary, prescribed limitations.
Pictorial signs are grafted in the regular texture of life with their specific
big or little "outdistance". If necessary, Leiris says, a "quite violent outdistance,
a representation disconnected from the customary perceptions according to which,
in the common existence, man quite stops to see this reality and offers a wrongfooting
representation, out of the habits that turn off the glance".
Pictorial signs (as pictorial breaks) could be compared with the breaks of
the world of jazz (M. Leiris) that distance from the piece (yet dealing with
it) in order to create an effect of differing/deferral that strengthens its
resonance by enervating its musical impact.
De-writing/description
Painting does not want to reproduce, it has no model to represent or story
to tell (G. Deleuze) and it is not "art of collection" (K. Malevich) but it
is a work of translation (and not of transcription), it is a creative language
rich in never-ending possibilities, combinations and interferences between signs
that differ and that are others in respect of the codes of dominion and globalization.
It is a language intended as a creative device able to produce "an infinite
number of possible worlds" (Leibniz).
Painting has got rid of any function of "reportage" (F. Bacon), it has stopped
"to betray the world on the canvas" (G. Bataille); it has emancipated itself
from the slavery imposed by the organized society that subordinated it to the
represented subject" where "the value of a painting consisted of the strength
that it gave to what it was expressing" (Cf. G. Bataille).
So it is necessary to resort to something different from a "photographic"
transcription, namely to develop one's own type of depiction.
When Braque was asked about "portraying a woman" and to represent her "natural
beauty", he declared that he could not do it just as nobody else could (no artist),
simply because the artist handles instruments that are "other" from reality,
and that he could not but create a "new genre of beauty" which appears in terms
of volume, line, mass, weight (Cf. F. Menna).
The vision of art that no longer belongs to the world of representation, and
which is not its representation, causes art not to reflect reality any more
as in a mirror in which you could calmly mirror or please yourself.
Art exceeds life and questions it in a close dialogue.
The pretension of "rendering the visible" reassures and quietens. Pictorial
work, instead, has the capacity of obsessing "the world of objects", of disquieting
life and of breaking the monotony of any wall on which it is hung on - by remaining
suspended and not fixed - exactly because of its powerful structural inclination
to the icon, to the "figural" (G. Deleuze), to likeness, to differ/defer.
Otherness/identity
Painting does not portray bodies, it does not portray landscapes, it does
not portray light.
Painting is (with)drawing of identity, painting is its parody: something "alike"
to life but that does not identify it!
Painting draws by (with)drawing: likeness as drawing one's self portrait by
(sur)rending (to) the other. Artist's divinity lays in his or her belonging
to a supreme extra-location (Cf. Bakhtin) and artist places his or her research
out of contemporaneity.
Artist is the one who differs, the one who does not remain prisoner of the
present, he or she is the one who, within life, not only participates and understands/includes
life itself (practical, social, political, moral, religious), but also the one
who loves it from the outside, in an extra-located and out of context activity
(Cf. Bakhtin).
Artist - in order to deform or to alter "an agreed order" as well as to seize
on canvas some effects of differing/deferral of likeness - does not look at
life in a direct, immediate, frontal way but the artist places him/herself out
of life and, without being indifferent to it, he or she will overcome everything
that, otherwise, would have been able to homologate, to circumscribe him or
her or that would have been able to reduce his or her strength or artistic expressive
creativity, in the same way in which, through the reflex of his shield Perseo's
indirect glance overcame petrification by the Gorgon.
Distancing from every context - according to Bakhtin - also includes the deliverance
of the work of art from the close, immediate, "obvious" bond of the author's
authority.
Picasso also affirms that often a painting expresses more than what the author
wanted to represent. And the author contemplates astonished the unexpected results
that he did not foresee.
The painter is the only one who has the right to look at everything without
being obliged to value them and he or she puts him/herself in front of the objects
as he or she saw them for the first time, as if they were seen by a being of
another species (Cf. M. Merleau-Ponty) in order to paint the otherness of life,
exceeding and renewing the everyday, usual, familiar universe, as well as life
itself. It seems that Monet confided to a young painter his desire of being
born blind so that he would have not have known anything of the objects, but
then recovering sight suddenly so that he could be virgin in front of appearances.
The artistic act, the work of art, lives in a "great time" and looks at the
"same" phenomenon in its multiple tones, accentuations and resonances beyond
homologations and beyond illusory and destroying differences of identity.
The signs of difference are clearly destructive, their utmost expression is
war.
The - utopian - idea is that of a shifting towards a joyful Babel, blending
the differences so that what will exist won't be a unique word, a unique language,
a "New Speech" (using Orwell's expression in 1984) but a never-ending production
of new languages able to differing/deferral.
L.P.
Bologna, 2002
(translated by M. Messina)
