"The word image has a bad reputation." (note 1)
"Eye and Mind," the last essay published during the lifetime of M. Merleau-Ponty, appeared in the first issue of Art de France in 1961. There, Merleau-Ponty acknowledged the poor reputation of the image (hereafter image) as noted above, while elsewhere discovering in it, on the grounds of its unobservability, "a kind of essential deception." Even setting aside the fact that this negative attitude was directed at least in part toward J.-P. Sartre, author of The Problem of the Imagination, one can say that in the 1960s — an era when the "Age of the Image" was much emphasized — the image captivated people while simultaneously confounding ever greater numbers of them, precisely because of the instability of its concept (note 2). And now, half a century later, the image has been grafted onto the simulacrum and undergone a fundamental transformation, such that the dysfunction of its referential capacity has become all the more probable — one might even say it has already become a hollow shell.
And yet, the participants in this exhibition, Pandemonium, can be seen performing something of an affirmative gesture with regard to the function of the image in painting — or so one is led to believe. For example, Tomohito Ishii depicts plants multiplied through the division of brushstrokes into the three primary colors, while Yoichi Umetsu re-presents the iconography of Raphaël Collin's Floréal (1886) through his own nude figure and the domestic space surrounding it — in both cases, pre-existing images such as photographs and reproductions are employed and intricately woven into the process of poiēsis-production. From this structural difference observable among the artists, one might note that in the pictorial representation of the world, the world itself is differentiated down to a state of incommensurability — yet the situation described by Merleau-Ponty in "Eye and Mind," where he quotes Heraclitus and argues that each individual world opens onto a shared world through vision, can never come to pass here. In the first place, the possibility of such an opening toward a shared world was guaranteed precisely by vision, and we who possess physical eyes were simultaneously defined as privileged measurers of the world. In this exhibition, however, Ishii's desire to interpret the "darkness between you and me" as a "black box" presupposes a priori a fragmented image of the world — like the very picture planes he paints — and it is vision itself, being led into the interior of a box that blocks the light, that is subjected to a skeptical gaze.
How are we to understand the fact that while the image is employed as a means of representation, there lurks at its root a desire to exclude vision? Or we might rephrase the question thus: when confronted with the impossibility of representation caused by the severance of vision, what can painting represent? In response to this question, the undecidability of the referent of the images employed by the artists in this exhibition may offer one clue. As with the figures seen in the work of Kazuna Taguchi, the indeterminacy and multiplicity of the image strips away the information that persons can ordinarily possess — nationality, gender, age — and, by virtue of that anonymity, the figures perpetually oscillate between presence and absence. It should further be noted that many of the artists in this exhibition internalize the medium of photography within their painterly practice, as though it were proof guaranteeing existence. The layered nature of the acts of photographing and painting, as seen in Taguchi's work, continues to destabilize the terms of presence and absence here as well.
Regarding this flickering between presence and absence, Jacques Rancière, in his essay "Are Some Things Unrepresentable?," explores — as the title itself indicates — the possibility of conceptual figures under conditions of unrepresentability. There, as in the relationship between the sublime and art, the regime and conditions of representation are called into question: the essential impossibility of the presence of the object to be represented, or the loss of the object's substitute (note 3), and the collapse of representational adjustment in a space where "the coincidence of sense and non-sense" and "the coincidence of presence and absence" occur simultaneously. Furthermore, in the writing of Robert Antelme's The Human Race, Rancière identifies "a sequential chain of small perceptions" (note 4) as experiences of the concentration camp — and as Rancière himself notes, attending to the fact that this sequential writing emerges from singular experience, is it not precisely to the image in which ostensible signification and meaning have grown attenuated through the failure of the image that this chain ought to be transferred? If we are permitted to return once more to Merleau-Ponty's reflections on the chain of small acts and small perceptions as poiēsis-production in the brushwork of painting, we find that "the visible world" and "the world of my motor projects" were posited there as covering the whole of one and the same being (note 5). It is for this reason that the image represented in painting comes to contain, within its traces, the persistence of bodily movement transformed into an "instantaneous visual appearance." However, if the world's representation in painting — owing to its incomprehensibility to the other — is threatened and rendered as a non-visual image, then the homogeneous temporal ubiquity of the body that Merleau-Ponty describes would be forced into irreversible fragmentation by small perceptions. At that moment, the object depicted on the painted surface is represented not as the instantaneous visual appearance of movement, but rather as a visual appearance of existence pregnant with multiplicity. The multiple image brought forth by the coincidence of presence and absence dwells in painting itself — non-visually represented — as an ontological questioning of painting in the face of the impotence of art.
Notes Note 1: M. Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," in Eye and Mind, trans. Takiura Shizuo and Kida Gen, Misuzu Shobo, 1966, p. 261. Note 2: The June 1967 issue of Design Criticism, No. 3, featured a special on "image." It sounded an alarm over the rise of image theory and plotted a scheme for the recovery of "the organization of the gaze of matter" through the object as a counter to the image. Nakahara Yusuke also confessed that the word "image" caused him to "lose his composure and become completely at a loss." Hariu Ichiro, "The Fashion of Image Theory" / Nakahara Yusuke, "On the Ownership of the Image," Design Criticism, No. 3, Fudosha, 1967. Note 3: Here, attention should be paid to the analogon in Sartre's theory of the image. It is held that we apprehend a painted portrait through the functioning of the "analogical substitute," thereby forming an imaging consciousness directed toward the absent person who is the external referent. However, the portraits painted by the artists in this exhibition, being constituted by the coincidence of presence and absence, render inoperative the very functioning of the analogon itself. Note 4: Jacques Rancière, "Are Some Things Unrepresentable?," in The Future of the Image, trans. Hori Junshi, Heibonsha, 2010, p. 162. Note 5: Op. cit., note 1, pp. 257–258.