It is, indeed, neither the mystery of the things nor that of the spirit that is represented in art, but the relation between the two. . . . Therefore, it is also permissible for us to say that it is given to man as a peculiar special nature to tear art out of nature in which it is hidden. The artist does this not through trying to penetrate behind the world of the senses, but through perfecting its form to the completed image. In the completion, however, we find the origin.

Martin Buber 1

Philip Van Keuren's Iris 2 prints are quietly powerful and compelling images. Apart from what is represented, the rigor of the composition, the large scale, the richness of tonality, the interaction of the syntax of the grain of the photographic film and the syntax of the giclée 3 printer output with the physical texture of the paper combine to arrest one's gaze. Van Keuren's works, entailing both images of the urban landscape and images of dioramas in natural history museums juxtaposed in exhibition, problematize the natural attitude 4 of the innocent eye 5 by disconcealing the constructedness of one's experience of being-in-the-world. As Nelson Goodman urges:

The myths of the innocent eye and of the absolute given are unholy accomplices. Both derive from and foster the idea of knowing as a processing of raw material received from the senses, . . . But reception and interpretation are not separable operations; they are thoroughly interdependent. The Kantian dictum echos here: the innocent eye is blind and the virgin mind is empty. 6

So also in these works: it is as easy, approximately, to make one photograph as it is another. And it is as easy to photograph this thing, approximately, as that thing. Photographing this, and not that, making this photograph, and not another, is a matter of seeing the thing to be photograph in terms of seeing as. What the thing to be photographed is seen as is first as a photograph-an image having its genesis by a particular material cause, and not as the thing itself. Conflation of a photograph of a thing and the thing photographed is common enough-the photograph thus taken as if the thing photographed-but is not less a category mistake for the commonness of the conflation. The photograph qua re-presentation of the thing photographed is a mediation. That tempts tautology: any representation is a mediation. To thematize representation as entailing a mediation is another matter. All of this proem is an adumbration of the situation in which these works have their being.

The three Concourse works, comprised of representations of a flying goose, a swimming turtle, and a swimming manatee, are compelling illusions of the represented creatures. It is not immediately evident to even the careful viewer that one is looking at representations of mounted diorama specimens, rather than at living creatures in their respective environments. In this regard Concourse is similar to Passenger, but differs from Ship, in which supporting wires can be discerned, and from Heron, where the textured background with affixed exhibition numbers signify that one is looking at specimens rather than living creatures. The uncertainty with which one confronts the animals in the three Concourse w7orks is salient: it is a reinscription of the fundamental animism in one's felt sense of presence in encountering representations, and conduces to the seeing the representation not as a representation-as a mediation-but as the thing represented. The gesture of the respective animals in the three works of Concourse is similar: each is seen in profile, its principal axis parallel to the image plane, directionally oriented in apparent movement toward the left edge of the frame, in an indefinitely deep space in which the objects are given painterly representation with relative clarity. 8 This similarity of form among the Concourse works, no less than their juxtaposition in the installation, unites the three autonomous works into a triptych.

Buttress, Owl, Woman, Tunnel and Fountain, the works representing entities in the world rather than in the natural history museum, share the same syntax of the grain of the photographic film and of the Iris printer output in combination with the physical texture of the paper as the works derived from photographs of dioramas. Consequently, when installed together the two categories of works are first seen for their overt common syntax of their material cause, and only secondarily for their differences in source material, which is subtle and requires close viewing to discern. This elides the difference between appearance in representation of the lifeworld and appearance in representation of the diorama. This may be variously regarded.

Surely that Van Keuren is both a practicing artist and a gallery director is germane, as many of the works derive from museum dioramas-in themselves installations-while others engage objects in their spatial context. Both the diorama-derived works and works derived from photographing entitites in the lifeworld engage contextualization and presentation. Perhaps the diorama is the lifeworld or its simulacrum, the distinction of world from museum being obviated when any object from the lifeworld is placed in the context of a museum, partaking of the 'museum effect" 9 in which all exhibited objects are transformed into artworks. Or perhaps the contrary obtains, with the lifeworld becoming a museum, as Yve-Alain Bois urges:

Our world is one which has the potentiality of becoming, in its entirety, a museum; our Postmodern planet is gradually being gentrified, transformed into its own image, into a spectacle duplicating itself. 10

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real. . . .11

MARTHA (Pleading)
Truth and illusion, George; you don't know the difference.

GEORGE
No; but we must carry on as if we did. 12

If there is a "crisis of the real" 13 in the relation of representation and represented, it subsists no more in fabricated or digitally transformed images, but in images themselves, even when they are simply and directly made, as Van Keuren's are made simply and directly. Even in this case, photographs are less a "pencil of nature" or a token of an indexical sign as they are already constructions. 14 Philosophers as diverse as Plato and Rene Magritte have asserted the perfidy of images. If images are perfidious, it is not because of the relationship between the represented and its representation, but the problematic relation of meaning to representation. In this, and in the allusion to idealism of Plato and Magritte, one finds an analogy to the idealism implicit in the structuralist theory of language. As Terry Eagleton has observed:

Reality [on the structuralist view] is not reflected by language but produced by it: it was a particular way of carving up the world which was deeply dependent on the sign-systems we had at our command, or more precisely which had us at theirs. The suspicion began to arise, then, that structuralism was not only an empiricism because it was yet one more form of philosophical idealism-that its view of reality as esstentially a product of language was simply the latest version of the classical idealist doctrine that the world was constituted by human consciousness. 15

One might refute this by kicking a stone. 16 Or one might again look at Philip Van Keuren's works, which engage us with their quiet power as representations, even as they engage us to consider representation as such.

Philip Van Keuren is Assistant Professor of Art and Curatorial Studies, and Gallery Director of the Pollock Gallery, at Southern Methodist University. His recent exhibitions include Philip Van Keuren: Night Cometh, McKinney Avenue Contemporary, Dallas, 2000; Millennial Biennial National Works on Paper Exhibition, Marsh Art Gallery, University of Richmond Museums, Richmond, Virginia, 2000; v.1, Artists Working in Electronic Media, Houghton House Gallery, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York, 1999; Beyond the Lens, Gerald Peters Gallery, Dallas, 1999; True Stories: Photography + Video, Arlington Museum of Art, Arlington, Texas, 1999; Connemara International Sculpture Invitational, Connemara Conservancy Foundation, Texas, 1999.

1. Martin Buber, The Knowledge of Man: A Philosophy of the Interhuman, trans. Maurice Friedman, Ronald Gregor Smith (New York an Evanston: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 165. return
2. Iris prints are printed on an Iris printer using cyan, magenta, yellow and black dyes, with the paper or other support revolving on a drum beneath an axially traveling printhead. return
3. The term giclée is from French, 'to squirt', related to gicleur, 'nozzle.' Introduced by Jack Duganne in 1991 and initially applied to Iris prints, the term giclée print has expanded to be a generic term for any original print made with any inkjet printing technology. return
4. Briefly, the notion of the 'natural attitude' is that of experience entailing unexamined presuppositions involved in experience: "the world always pregiven as that which exists." Thus Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 145. [Initial publication as Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenchaften und die transzndentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962).] return
5. The notion of the innocent eye was given currency by Ruskin [Modern Painters (London, 1843); in eds. E. T. Cook, Alexander Wedderburn, The Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols. London and New York, 1903-1912)] as referring to what one sees apart from what one knows. For a sceptical critique of the notion, see E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960, 1969), p.14 et passim. For a recent visual explication, see Mark Tansey, The Innocent Eye Test, 1981, oil on canvas, 78 x 120 inches, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the promised gift of Charles Cowles in honor of Wiliam S. Lieberman, 1988. return
6. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), p. 8. Goodman alludes to Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, [1787] trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965 [edition first published by Macmillan, 1925]), B75A51, p. 93: "Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without concepts are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." return
7. David Freedbeerg, in The Power of Images: Studies in the the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 32 is instructive:

   We refuse-or have refused for many decades-to acknowledge the traces of animism in our own perception of and response to images: not necessarily "animism" in the nineteeth century ethnographic sense of the transference of spirits to inaminate objects, but rather in the sense of the degree of life or liveliness believed to inhere in an image.

   Cf. Robert Plant Armstrong, The Powers of Presence: Consciousness, Myth, and Affecting Presence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), and Wellspring: On the Myth and Source of Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). return
8. 'Painterly' and 'relative clarity' are used in Heinrich Wölfflin's sense, in opposition to 'linear' and 'absolute clarity', respectively; see his Principles of Art History: the Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950) [initial publication as Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Munich: Bruckmann A.-G., 1915). return
9. See Svetlana Alpers, "The Museum as a Way of Seeing," eds. Ivan Karp, Steven . Lavine, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), pp. 25-32. Cf. Donald Kuspit, "Authoritarian Aesthetics an the Elusive Alternative," Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries, ed. Mark Van Proyen (New York: Allworth Press, 2000), pp. 52-94; esp. ad fin part I. return
10. Yve-Alain Bois, "Susan Smith's Archaeology," eds. Stephen Bann, William Allen, Interpreting Contemporary Art (New York: HarpercCollins, 1991), pp. 102-123. The notion of world as spectacle derives from Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle [La Société du Spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967; Éditions Champ Libre, 1972; Gallimard, 1992). Translated by Fredy Perlman, John Supak as Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1970; rev. ed. 1977); translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (NY: Zone, 1994). Available online in French and in English linked from http://www.nothingness.org/]. return
11. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 25. return
12. Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (first performed October 13, 1962). return
13. Andy Grundberg, "The Crisis of the Real," Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography, 1974-1989 (New York: Aperture, 1990), pp. 1-17. return
14. See Joel Snyder, "Picturing Vision," Critical Inquiry 6 (Spring 1980), pp. 499-526; reprinted in The Language of Images, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp.219-246. The notion of the photograph as a "pencil of nature" originates with William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Company, 1844). The photograph as index originates in the work of C. S. Pierce; see "Logic as Smiotic: The Theory of Signs," ed. Justus Buchler, Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York: Dover, 1955), pp. 98-119. return
15. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 108. return
16. As Boswell recounts Samuel Johnson's refutation of Bishop Berkeley's idealism. Ed. Charles Grosvenor Osgood, Boswell's Life of Johnson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1917), p. 130. return