Then there is the story of the two detectives in the Chicago Police Department. One was a naïve realist who believed literally in the copy theory of representation. The other was a sophisticated irrealist who believed in the relativity and arbitrariness of representation. Both detectives, it seems, had to be fired from the force: the realist, because he didn't see any need to arrest a suspect if he already had a mug shot; the irrealist, because once he had a mug shot, he started arresting everyone in sight. 1

The possibility of art lies in this double movement, to converge upon the real if only to pry open and reveal in the act of perception the very procedures by which that real is made obscure in the violent act of transaction and translation. 2

Matthew Bourbon's seven paintings represent representation, sublating conventionalized figuration and the painterly mark qua mark, the layers of paint thematizing the mediated character of representations. Referencing the conventionalized, rather diagrammatic depiction of the figure in illustrated manuals, Bourbon's figures are evoked through linear contour. Pliny the Elder urges "this is the greatest subtlety of painting." 3 Subtlety is a quality not usually associated with line cut reproduction in illustrated manuals, where its use is likely to be determined by the need for low cost of reproduction and a generic figuration. Subtlety nevertheless applies to the appropriation of the illustrations-or more precisely, the style of the illustrations-in these paintings, for the paintings are in relation to the illustrations as a metatext to a urtext. Inherent in the shift of level from urtext to metatext is a criticality not found in the urtext.

Bourbon's layering of monochromatic-nearly achromatic-linear contour over broadly brushed passages entails a distinction, but also a sublation, of linear and painterly in their senses in Wölfflin's dichotomy. 4 This layering also at once asserts and negates the longstanding valorization of line and the concomitant vitiation of color, already presupposed in Pliny's dictum on painting in his Natural History, and echoing in the débat sur le coloris between Roger de Piles and the rubénistes and Charles LeBrun and the poussinistes for control of the French Academy. 5 The debate perdured, of course, long beyond Pliny and the circumstances of the French Academy, continuing with different protagonists. This is not the place to rehearse that history. But that long quarrel is germane to the works in the exhibition, for the positions obtaining in the several fields delineated through that history are also, as it were, layered here by reference, sedimented but not obliterated by subsequent deposits. If that is so, it follows from the inherent structures of oppositions entailed in and through the ramifying arguments of that history of practices and discourses that these oppositional terms are structurally embedded and referenced in representation as such. Among these discourses, the position of color as a term of discourse is wide: color is regarded as an accident versus the regard of form as a substance, with color associated with the bodily ground of perception in distinction from association of form with the mind as locus of intellection (sometimes, but not always, to the vitiation of color 6), color is regarded as an aspect of an emancipatory project 7 in opposition to "the grayness of a desacralized market system." 8

In Business as Usual the two male figures in suits, appropriated from a manual on treatment of choking victims, enact a scene in an implied narrative. One figure, the protagonist, apparently choking, reaches for his throat. The other figure, an internal spectator, reacts with concerned alarm. This much one infers from the gestures of the figures, which are minimally particularized beyond a generic representation. In a manual on the treatment of choking victims, a minimally particularized generic representation of the figures serves to provide sufficient particularity to give a sense of individuality to the figures, and to provide a level of expression and gesture requisite to the narrative, without overdetermining the external or internal repertoires of the figures. The figure to the left, behind the choking figure, reacts to the choking. But from within the pictorial space, this internal spectator cannot see what the viewer of the painting-located in the physical space that the painting qua object also occupies-can see: that the proximal figure to the right manifests the facial expressions, as well as bodily gestures, characteristic of choking. 10 Nor can this internal spectator reflexively see his own depiction, as the viewer can see it. Because of these delimitations of the internal spectator's relation to the scope of the pictorial field, he is does not fulfill the requirements of Wollheim's sense of a "total spectator" and indeed stretches Wollheim's notion of an internal spectator. 11 This is of significance, as it imposes on the viewer the task of supplying the repertoire of interiority that, because of the disposition of the gaze of the internal spectator relative to the protagonist, the internal spectator cannot be supposed to have in reaction to the protagonist's choking.

The space the two figures of Business as Usual occupy is, like the figures themselves, minimally determined. It is an interior. One can assert little more than that. But one crucial thing one must assert is that it is a pictorial space, however indeterminate its depth. That depth is established by the painted glare, above and to the left of the center of the work, no less than by the subtleties of diminution and foreshortening entailed in the delineation of the figures. It is this passage of color serving as a painterly indication of glare that denotes the painted surface qua painted surface, marking the materiality, the physicality of the painting qua painting. Most proximal of the passages of the painted surface, this passage of painted glare establishes that behind which everything else in the painting must be.

Surface and depth are the ur-metaphors of representation, underwriting the phenomenon of two-foldness of seeing-in: the perception of the differentiated surface as such and as figure in relation to ground. 12 Surface and depth are also the ur-metaphors of the self as reflexively engaged in lived experience as consisting in exteriority and interiority.

As objects sharing the viewer's occupation of the physical space of the gallery, Bourbon's installation of the paintings responds to the architecture of the gallery space, and to the implied presence of the viewer. As the passage of painted glare establishes the proximal plane of the painted surface in Business as Usual, the material physicality of the paintings on the wall is given emphasis by their disposition in response to the architectural space of the gallery qua framing institution. 13

In their presence as signifying alterities, both in themselves as re-presentations and in their assertion of alterity within the framing space of the gallery, the works are quasi-subjects. 14

Matthew Bourbon is Assistant Professor of Art in the School of Visual Arts, University of North Texas. Recent exhibitions include: Pink, Tower F&D Gallery, Sacramento; Disclosure, University of Dallas; 9/11: 8 x 10, Dallas Center For Contemporary Art; Reactions, Exit Art, New York, all 2002; Postcards to New York, Macy Gallery, Columbia University; Peripheral Vision, Korean Cultural Center, Los Angeles; ANA 30, Holter Museum of Art, Helena, Montana, all 2001; Snapshot, Aldrich Museum of Art + Contemporary Museum, Baltimore + Beaver College Fine Arts Gallery, Glenside, Pennsylvania; Dim Sum, 450 Broadway Gallery, New York; Re: Duchamp, Sofyali Sokak 26, Istanbul, Turkey + S. Maria Ausiliatrice, Fondamenta San Gioacchin, Venice, all 2000. Bourbon received the Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art, and the Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art History, from the University of California, Davis. He received the Master of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Bourbon writes for New York Arts International.

1. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 345.
2. Charles Merewether "Writing on the Wall," 42. 1990, forthcoming publication in Arte en Colombia. Quoted in Mari Carmen Ramírez, "Moral Imperatives: Politics as Art in Luis Camnitzer," online at http://ca80.lehman.cuny.edu/gallery/web/AG/luis_camnitzer/ramirez_essay.htm; notes and bibliography are online at http://ca80.lehman.cuny.edu/gallery/web/AG/luis_camnitzer/bibliography_notes.htm.
3. Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35.36.67 et seq.
4. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950), 14-15.
li>5 William Vance Dunning, Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 102-103; Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 58-63.
5. See Martin Jay's magisterial Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), passim, and inter alia 151 n. 6.
6. I am using 'emancipatory project' in Thierry deDuve's sense as a sine qua non of the avant-garde move; see deDuve, Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1996), 428f.
7. See Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 237.
8. See Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 101-185, for the notion of the internal spectator.
9. There is a substantial history of codification of expression and gesture for artist's reference, within which the physiognomic studies of Charles LeBrun are particularly notable. See Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 29-57. See also E. H. Gombrich, "On Physiognomic Perception," Meditations on a Hobby Horse: And Other Essays on the Theory of Art, (London: Phaidon, 1963), 45-55; cf. Rudolf Arnheim, "The Gestalt Theory of Expression," Toward a Psychology of Art: Collected Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 51-73.
10. Wollheim, ibid., 102. Wollheim requires that an internal spectator be a total spectator.
11. Wollheim, ibid., 46f.
12. See Yve-Alain Bois, "Susan Smith's Archaeology," eds. Stephen Bann, William Allen, Interpreting Contemporary Art (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 102-123; cf. Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1986).
13. 14 Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey et al. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).