Modernist artists were interested, radically, on the question of what an image is. Contemporary art criticism is concerned with what art is. I want to pursue some meandering thoughts on what an image does. It is at once a broader question that the one modernism sought to answer and a narrower one than the one contemporary critics want to pose. It is at once more philosophically interesting than the reactionary questions modernism entertained because it involves both the image-maker and his intended or unintended audience and is also more philosophically indeterminate because it does not propose one single set of things that an image does.
An image is. But an image does X. An image is a subject but as subject also serves another as object. An image can represent itself and pretend that it does not represent anything else but itself. An image can inhabit personal biography and social history. An image fades away in time like so many fallen leaves. An image can speak to the narrative that some artist wishes to draw for you, her audience. And an image is what you think of when you read what I have written.
Perhaps most importantly for my work, an image is what I use–as substance, not style–to draw together the strings that bind a narrative that I wish to discuss and examine. I use images substantively to tell stories, sometimes through works in a series, sometimes as some far flung illustration of some thought on politics or some philosophical nag. What I do when I use those images to illustrate X, is that I bring to bear all those connections unavailable to me in words and in sentences. I bring to bear the burden of color and of composition, things that remain entirely out of bounds for me whenever I assume the role of writer and writerly narrator. I condense the whole substance of what I imagine the image to mean and allude to the history–the objective narrative or conventionally imagined tale–of all that has transpired, contingently, contagiously, before this writing, before this drawing, before this doing.
And I wish to speak of the unhinged character of our modern lives, the sense we have that because we know what lies behind the veil, we find ourselves impotent. Knowledge of causality is for us, a sign that free-will has become a philosophical object. There are no frames that allow a privileged true vision; there are only conventional approaches to what we must insist to be true if we are to fix ideas at all. Things are, of course. But that’s hardly any consolation.
Francis Bacon painted stages and screens and cages that hold us all. His Popes screech like owls at dusk. His lover was speeding away on his immobile bicycle. Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic documentation of movement was a signal achievement that demonstrated that the things we know are a hairsbreadth away from nonsense. There is more fancy and mythology in Muybridge’s serial photographs than there is substance in all of Damien Hirst’s oeuvre. And I want to appropriate these images, as mentioned works, for a particular use.
I want my images to speak to that dislocation that audiences read into Bacon, that erasure and white noise of all we know of our political and natural knowledge. After all I can really know is that I was born , that I have hands and that I have a mother who once lived. The rest I insist to be true without any stable foundations for that to be the case.
I do all this with a more philosophical turn that is couched in the distinction between the use and the mention of expression or an image. To use an expression, according to this distinction, is to propose something substantive about the expression. To mention an expression is to say something about the expression as a signifier: that is, we make a statement about the expression itself. The sentence, “The Mona Lisa, a work by the great Master Leonardo is a very important piece in the cannon of Western art”, uses the expression Mona Lisa. The sentence “The Mona Lisa is the name of a famous work by Leonardo” only mentions the expression Mona Lisa. Similarly, writes Arthur Danto, to use the picture “The Mona Lisa” is to say something substantive about the Mona Lisa as a work; it is to speak to its history, to describe something true about it. To mention The Mona Lisa is a painting is to say something about what the picture looks like in that painting. That is to say, to mention it in a painting is to say something about the original Mona Lisa painting in an another, different painting. It is therefore work at a level of criticism, something entirely ‘meta’.
I use a picture only in ways that refer to the production of the image, in ways that are available to me today; I do not use it to refer to a particular static reading of a work. My use of an image then alludes to its history and its content but only by sheer relation to the digital production through which I come across it: photography. The history is all there in my reworked image, as it is in that the prior image, the substance of its use and meaning, too. But the use of the image exists behind a veil of allusions and interpretation; it cannot be read outright from what you see. Therefore, the use of the prior image is not as an immediately obvious, apparent image or even a style of image, but as a specter that arises within modes of communication and production. I mention an image in my work in so far as it could be an apparent image that bears no relation to me whatsoever. The image could be a painting of Hero and Leander by William Etty; it could be an image that is a photograph of a dying soldier in a battlefield during the Spanish Civil War. I want to make an image about that original image but without necessarily working in the same mode as the original, prior image. In so doing I mention that original, prior image.
That is say, finally, that any reworking of any image whatsoever, is to me, now a mention of the original image. To the extent that most of my images refer to original photographs, this is true. (Of course there are original drawings that I have undertaken and I would think those drawings are pictures that I use to illicit different conditional meanings. And in so far as they are original works, wrought in my “original style” they are images and styles of images that I do, in fact, use according to the philosophical defintion) Hence, any prior image that I use only mentions that work, though in its use it refers to modes of artistic production, digital production. My work, therefore, tries to tease out that tension between uses and mentions of an image by both using and mentioning images.
But all you see on your screen is a photograph. This is part of my work. And when you think about my work, you yourself only mention the work that you see when you do refer to my work. Nevertheless, there remains, for me, another part of my work that allows me to reclaim–to some extent– the use of an image. That is the point where I print and rework the images that you see on your screen in some particular way that remains unknown, even, to me until the moment where I begin to rework that image. That some of these images will be printed and re-worked, repainted, is for you a fact that has no consequent meaning. You remain ignorant of the possibilities of the image that may yet be realized. Though, even now, I remain ignorant in that same way as well, my ignorance moves toward a particular resolution prior to yours. Is this not how all work is created?
This is meta-level art work, I suppose. But how could any work be otherwise?
