Balancing act.

There was one aspect of Arthur Danto's review of my book The Sight of Death ["A Serpent's Tale," Artforum, February 2007] that struck me as remarkable; and because I think it connects with some central questions about how we look at and write about visual images, it may be worth responding to. For simplicity's sake, let's stick to Poussin's Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, 1648. Standing in front of this painting day after day, what did I find myself mainly trying to describe? Well, not the episode indicated in the title's last five words. And not the animal. No, the aspects of the picture that I found more compelling, increasingly so as time went on, were structural--and material. The size and shape of the picture, and the place given to the human and animal within that shape; the relation of large and small (particularly the human large and small) within the pictorial field; the balance of light and dark, and intimation of time of day; the precise (often strange) spatial interval between key actors and gestures; the extraordinary balance held, as so often in Poussin, between overall simplification and clarity of structure and weird (wonderful) mere materiality in detail; the unique place created for the viewer in relation to the scene, by manipulations of shading and staging; and so on. More than once in the book I come out and say that these are the ways in which Poussin thinks.

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What interests me in Danto's review is that these matters--the substance of the book--go all but unmentioned. I can think of three possible explanations for this. First, that he finds them uninteresting. It's the snake and corpse that hold his attention. If so, too bad for him--I think he is missing too much of what picturing consists of. Second, that he finds me uninteresting about them. If so, too bad for me--the book has failed hands down. But I think there may be a third explanation, which gets us closer to a real argument about how pictures organize worlds. It may be that Danto concedes that the things I care about in painting do matter, and even that occasionally I have something pointed to say about them, but that he is left feeling let down by the fact that I never draw together my observations on structures and effects, and make a final story of them--tie them to the central (but is it central?) episode, have them be inflections of Death's coming onto the scene. He is waiting for the Wollheim-type moment, in other words, when the long dreaming in front of the picture finally sees what the picture is of--deeply, essentially. The telos of the free association.

I would be the last to question that such moments sometimes happen. And they are certainly what, in the ordinary life we lead as interpreters, we make happen; they are what we and our readers expect. But I do not think that such moments happen necessarily, or that their failing to happen is a sign of the painting in front of us lacking depth or not having made up its mind what it is about. Pictures can present worlds that do not cohere, that do not add up to a totalized understanding, without this being felt as a "disappointment." On the contrary, it may be their deepest proposal--that understanding can take the form of a dispersed, multifocal, truly "contradictory" play of dimensions and possibilities, and be all the more humane in consequence. Some of us think that this is what is most precious about pictures--the aspect of imaging we most want to preserve.

This leads on directly to the question of the politics of the image, and why I believe that celebrating certain possibilities of picturing--certain kinds of density and vividness, certain kinds of refusal to "add up"--may have political upshots. This is not a huge claim, in my view, and I'm basically at a loss as to why Danto finds it so puzzling. How would he respond to the idea that what I've been saying so far amounts to a claim for a kind of ethical balance, or ethical composure, in some pictures I admire, and that I feel pictures in general may be uniquely equipped, by dint of their wordlessness, to strike such a balance? The ethical and the political are continuous, in my view, though obviously not identical. Therefore ethical stances have political force--at some moments urgently, unavoidably. And there is such a thing as an ethics and politics specifically of the image--a set of attitudes to, and demonstrations of, the way giving visual form to experience can (sometimes) edge understanding away from the confines of the sentence. Of course we can disagree about whether a painting by Poussin is strong enough to stand for that possibility. But if it is strong at all, it will be strong in its weakness; that is what The Sight of Death is suggesting. Strong in its refusal to put Death up front, and give it a meaning.

--T.J. Clark

Berkeley, CA