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

Art as Rebirth 69inconsistencies,’’ 32 wrote Panofsky, when it encounters its own objectsof application, namely works of art. It clarifies, then, but it distortsthe reality of its object. Within it, dogmatism constantly stumblesover pragmatism, and observation over judgment. The kind of economyof salvation reinvented by Vasari to account for the meaning ofthe history of art, this economy also turns out to be an economy ofanxiety: Panofsky says as much. 33 There is indeed a system in Vasari,but it is a cracked system. We who have inherited this flamboyanthistory of art and its finally disengaged status, we have also inheritedthe crack. And that is why we must analyze it.The problem is not, then, to determine whether Vasari had a completedoctrine or not, whether it is original or not. The problem is tolocate in the very flaws and cracks of an unstable doctrine what wemight call the flow of ends: its rhythm is always duplicitous, for theends announce themselves in passing desires as much as in passinganxieties. It is this flow that I would describe as metaphysical in Vasari:metaphysical, the dreamt-for triumph of an age of disegno; metaphysical,too, the anxiety about a death of art that would reduce alldisegni to dust. Vasari’s method, the method of the history of art ingeneral, must not only be judged from the point of view of its results,accurate or inaccurate; it must also be interrogated from the point ofview of its ideals, or its phobias, or its never-realized ends—these endsthat no ‘‘result’’ can define, because they issue from a dialectic ofdesire.There are, then, two characters in Vasari, which some havethought they could separate in order to simplify things: keep the observationand lose the judgment, for example. But this separation betraysVasari’s work, and above all it hides its crack, this crack whenceall of us, all art historians, issue. Let’s try for a moment to pin downthis notion: what’s in question is a mended crack, one that is mendedconstantly because the crack keeps reopening. The teeming contradictionsof the Lives, which make the book resemble an immense palacewhose masonry is out of true, are magically amended in the longprefaces to each of its three parts. Without, synthesis seems to triumph,like an applied decor, but the crack remains within. The buildingwill nonetheless continue to impose its triumphal stature. One