georges didi huberman, confronti... - lensbased.net

194 Confronting Imagesthe individual who made it in the fourteenth century did everythinghe could to efface the trace of his own hands, and of course all traceof human ‘‘art’’? A history of images, it should be clear, cannot be thesame thing as a history of artists—something with which the historyof art still identifies itself much too often. Neither can it rest contentwith iconographic solutions, insofar as the importance and the genius—social,religious, aesthetic—of an image can very well deviatefrom formal invention, so as to propose to the gaze only the efficacyand the mystery of forms undone giving the trace of considerable eventsdreamt by men as signs of their destiny. The history of art too oftendoes only the history of successful and possible objects, susceptible ofa progress, glorifying appearances; we must also think a history ofimpossible objects and unthinkable forms, bearers of a destiny, critiquingappearances.Is this to turn our backs on art images? Is incarnation a requirementincommensurate with the means of which painting and sculptureshow themselves capable, committed as they are, at least in the West,to the so much more ‘‘visible’’ imperative of imitation? I don’t thinkso. If from the start the imposing dogma of the Incarnation turns outto constitute something like a drama of the image, or at least a knottyquestion in the fabric of the figurable, then we can suppose that thehistory of ‘‘possible’’ objects, the history of art in the usual sense, willitself be traversed—and thoroughly—by the energetics of drama anddesire that the Incarnation imperiously unfolds. I imagine a history ofimperious and sovereign exceptions that would develop the countersubjectof the visual in a melody of the visible, a history of symptomaticintensities—‘‘button ties,’’ moments fecund with powerful fantasy—inwhich the expanse of the great mimetic fabric is partially rent. Thiswould be a history of the limits of representation, and perhaps atthe same time of the representation of these limits by artists themselves,known and unknown. This would be a history of symptomsinwhichrepresentationshowswhatitismadeof,attheverymomentthat it agrees to strip itself bare, to suspend itself and exhibitits flaw.These symptoms have yet to be mapped, having been obliterated