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

42 Confronting Imagesically from the refusal of a discourse of specificity to examine criticallythe real extent of its field. 36 Taking the words history and art literally,without questioning the nature of their relation, is tantamount toholding that the two following propositions are axiomatic: first, thatart is a thing of the past, comprehensible as object insofar as it entersinto the point of view of history; second, that art is a thing of thevisible, a thing that has its own specific identity, its own discernibleappearance, its own criteria of demarcation, its own closed field. It isby implicitly assuming such imperatives that the history of art schematizesfor itself the limits of its own practice: henceforth, it advanceswithin the gilded cage of its ‘‘specificity’’—which is to say that it turnsin circles.The two ‘‘axioms’’ themselves turn in circles, as if one were thetail chased by the other, which is in fact its own. So the two propositionsare complementary; the reductive operation that they performtogether finds its coherence in the paradoxical tie that durably knotstogether a certain definition of the past and a certain definition of thevisible. The extreme form of this tie might, in the end, be articulatedas follows: Art is over, everything is visible. Everything is finally visiblebecause art is over (art being a thing of the past). Art is finally dead,since everything that it was possible to see has been seen, even notart. . . Am I in the process of advancing yet another paradox, ahypothetical taking-to-the-limit of some propositions about art? Notonly that. For here, with this kind of slogan, I am only giving voiceto a double platitude of our time. A platitude that surreptitiously conditionsthe practice of the history of art—a platitude itself conditionedby a more fundamental schematism wherein the history of art hasitself, in advance, set the limits of its own practice. All of which willperhaps be clearer at the end of the analysis.First platitude: art, a thing of the past, is over. It is dead. In an elementthat supposedly no longer owes anything either to the visible or tothe visual (in short, a chaos), in an atmosphere of crumbling empires,all of us speak, sorrowfully or cynically, from the place or, rather,from the era of a death of art. When did this era begin? Who broughtit about? The history of art—in the objective genitive sense, which is