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

The Detail and the Pan 241to western figurative painting than the Albertian ideal and the prevalenceof narrativity, of historia. 22 Painting is not made for writing—writing stories, histories—by means other than writing. Certainly.What, then, is it made for? It is made, says Alpers, to describe. Painting—Dutchpainting—is made to make manifest ‘‘the world stainingthe surface with color and light, impressing itself upon it’’: somethingof which we might take ‘‘the View of Delft as the consummate example.Delft is hardly grasped, or taken in—it is just there for the looking,’’Alpers goes on to say. 23 So that’s it: painting’s vocation isunderstood to be the view: the perceived world deposits itself* assuch—such as it is perceived—in pigments on a picture.Now this indicates a singularly restrictive conception, both of theview (I mean here the phenomenological relation between the eyeand the gaze) and of the ‘‘deposit’’ (by which I mean the relationship,no less complex, between gush, project, and subject,† between visionand brush, between pigment and support, etc.). We perceive that Alpers’sargument amounts to substituting for the myth of pure semanticreflection the myth of pure perceptual or visual reflection, whereofDutch painting, with the aid of ‘‘technical skill,’’ is a locus, an instrumentalization,and a socialization. Such is indeed the book’s centralmessage: ut pictura ita visio. The ut-ita, unlike the quasi, aiming toreconstruct a new logic of identity: what is painted on Dutch paintingsof the seventeenth century is what was seen in the so-called visualculture of the time (the term is borrowed from Baxandall); 24 it is whatwas seen, seen exactly, through techniques of description and scientificmeasurement of the perceptible world. Such a logic of identitybeing possible, of course, only by reducing all the work of indeterminacy,of opacity, entailed by any change in the order of perceptualmagnitude—as when one moves from the seen world to the measuredworld and from the measured world to the painted world. Theinstrument of this reduction resides in the argument of exactitude: theproverbial ‘‘technical skill’’ of Dutch painters, their ‘‘sincere hand andfaithful eye.’’ 25 And so it is that ‘‘the world,’’ the visible world, comes*de dépose.†jet/projet/sujet: used here as expounded by Didi-Huberman in La Peinture incarnée(1985).