Art Criticism - The State University of New York

Being" have an affinity with Heideggerian Seinsgeschichte. 25 But whereas
Heidegger praised poetry and philosophy as the highest ways of attuning to
such ontological sendings, Merleau-Ponty looked to nonlinguistic media:
Now art, especially painting, draws upon this fabric of brute meaning
[sens brut] which [scientific] operationalism would prefer to
ignore. Art and only art does so in full innocence. From the writer
and the philosopher, in contrast, we want opinions and advice. We
will not allow them to hold the world suspended. We want them to
take a stand; they cannot waive the responsibilities of humans who
speak ... Only the painter is entitled to look at everything without
being obliged to appraise what he sees ... What is this fundamental
of painting, perhaps of all culture?26
In contrast to the later Heidegger's stress on language, Merleau-Ponty sees
the pictorial image as opening up privileged access to a concentrated gathering
and local intensification of Being. Images shines forth in halo-like radiance,
instructing us in the visible (and invisible) contours of a primordial historicity,
and as such open and focus the ontological makeup of a historical
worldP
Pictures "draw upon the fabric of brute meaning [sens brut]" by folding
this very fabric, constituting a visible to the second power. But what more
precisely can be said about the visible? It must be stressed that for Merleau­
Ponty vision is not in the first instance an act of a disembodied subject, a mind
or consciousness that transcends the world, but is always already "practical,"
always already inextricably intertwined with one's motility and implacement in
the world. Said otherwise, a picture is an "unmediated" gathering and reflection
of Being because both picture and beholder are chiasmatic facets of the
world's Flesh, entailing that an image always has an irreducibly embodied
"meaning" (sens).28 By these lights, contemporary art history appears not
only "logocentric" but overly intellectualist in its presupposing the ontological
primacy of the spectatorial stance (expressed in methodological metaphors
like that of the "period eye") and its correlative neglect of the primordial insertion
of images into specific environments of existential comportment.
3. Pictorial Mimesis
According to the view I am propounding, one is always already in the
world, and it is within the world that one encounters a picture; this picture itself
opens up another "world" - an image-world - that is enveloped by and located
within the world of beholding. And since a beholder always already assumes
a fundamentally "practical" relationship to and motile engagement with this
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