What is depth, what is light, ti to on?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1

 
There is a light which has the power of radiating from the pictorial object like the living heat it diffuses. Thus light is not so much a unity which results from harmony as the unity which renders harmony possible. It is the sensuous a priori of the work by which the work can become a theater of movement.

Mikel Dufrenne 2

 
The aesthetic object has depth because it is beyond measurement. If we want to grasp it truly, we must transform ourselves. The depth of the aesthetic object is measured by the depth of the existence to which it invites us. Its depth is correlative with ours.

Mikel Dufrenne 3

 
It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which-if you will allow me to use a word, as I often do, in a fragmented form-that I am photo-graphed.

Jacques Lacan 4

Teresa Rafidi's color photographs are elegant and lyrical representations of the figure blurred in movement. Painterly abstractions retaining reference to the figure from which they are derived, surfaces dissolving into light, Rafidi's works implicate questions of the representation of the gendered subject. There is an ecstasy in Rafidi's representations of the subject, a delighted exhaltation, and a negation of the static and an unbodying. 5Presented in this exhibition as output in several digitized print media, Rafidi's works re-mark the trope of surface and depth as constitutive of the subject, reinscribed at the level of the material and formal causes of the signifier, making concrete the gaze.

The tropes entailed within the work, and predicated within viewer response to the work- surface and depth, light and subject and presence-are problematic terms. To say these tropes are problematic is to say they cannot now be employed uncritically, but neither can they be summarily dismissed by appealing to this or that version of current doxa. Such an appeal consists in an argumentum ad verecundum, an appeal to authority, and as such is to be dismissed tout court. Yet insofar as some versions of the current doxa entail an argumentum ad rem and thereby render the terms of these tropes problematic, while prereflective lived experience nevertheless suggests them, use of these tropes obtains under erasure. 6 To utilize these tropes under erasure is to recognize them as tropes. Recognition of these tropes-surface, depth, subjective interiority, light, presence-as tropes evoked within viewer response to the works is to recognize them as deeply embedded in the cultural framework conditioning viewer response, and deeply imbricated with respect to each other. Engaging the embeddedness and imbrication of these tropes within the works is to enact a disconcealing of the structure at once manifest and concealed within the work. This structure is correlative with the horizon of possibilities in which the work comes to be as it is, correlative with the horizon of possibilities within viewer response: the works open a domain in which a fusion of horizons is possible. 7 I shall briefly address these terms elicited by the works, sequentially, though their mutual implication suggests an equiprimordiality underlying their imbrication. This will hardly be exhaustive, but merely sufficient to suggest the depth and complexity of the issues Rafidi's works elicit. Indeed an exhaustive account is in any case not possible even in principle, if it is the case that, by definition, artworks are distinguishable from mere representations by the use of the means of representation in a way that is not exhaustively specified when one has exhaustively specified what is being represented. 8

To characterize Rafidi's photographs as painterly is not to say that the images resemble, in some aspect what one might expect a painting to look like. Rather, to term these works 'painterly' is to evoke Heinrich Wölfflin's distinction of painterly from linear, the former entailing a deprecation of line as guide to the viewing eye, with a reduction of the role of outline in the isolation of objects and a concomitant emphasis on "the apprehension of the world as a shifting semblance." 9 From this follows a emphasis on depth rather than a sequence of planes. Open form is favored over closed form, with an emphasis of the unity of the whole rather than the multiplicity of the several parts of the work, culminating in the relative rather than the absolute clarity of the image. Wölfflin applies the notion of relative clarity to Baroque painting: "Composition, light, and color no longer merely serve to define form, but have their own life." 10

Rafidi's works are photographs within the "directorial mode," in distinction them from the modernist practice of "the photographic." "Directorial mode" is A. D. Coleman's term: the "directorial mode" refers to photographs in which the objects entails the creation of the thing photographed by the photographer for the purpose of creating the photograph.11 The directorial mode is to be contrasted with "the photographic," Andy Grundberg's term for the modernist construction of photography in an essentialist, reductivist, purist version eschewing the intervention, much less the invention, on the part of the photographer with respect to the thing photographed, which in this position is to be regarded as pregiven and to be simply recorded as information, or altered through means regarded as intrinsic to photography (framing, focus, and the like).12 The directorial mode entails an opening of the facture of the work to intervention by the photographer, presupposing the facture of the work as a thematized duration in which intervention may obtain. In Rafidi's body of work, this thematization is inscribed in the works as the blurring of the figure as a trace of movement in time.

The representation of the figure as a blur is a function of the mapping of the moving figure to the unmoving emulsion13 in the duration of the exposure. Thematized, the duration of exposure is a dilation of the instantaneous 'now', the 'now' of being as presence of the subject in the act of facture of the work, the 'now' of the facture of the work.14 In Rafidi's works such as Jumping Once, String I, String II, in which the incorporation in the image of a cord or string functions as a marker of stillness, the movement of the figure represented by the blur enacts a relation of dynamic versus static. As a repoussoir functions with respect to the virtual space of an image, so the relatively still cord or string functions with respect to the virtual time of an image: an alterity by which a difference can be perceived. The cord or string, rendered in relative sharpness, unblurred by movement, is a marker of stillness, that which is a holding fast.15 The string in String I and String II enters the image from beyond the top edge, and terminates within the image in an empty, open, loop or noose at its lower end. In Jumping Once, the blurred figure holds the string that trails off to the lower right of the image, as if a leash holding an invisible, absent dog. But however seemingly instantaneous, the interval of exposure is always an interval, a duration however brief. As an interval, a duration, the period of exposure is comprised of a multiplicity of 'nows,' their trace as a blurred figure a making visible of the structure of duration of subjectivity. That is, consciousness is intentional, always already a consciousness of, filled with the perception of the differentiation of beings, yet is nonetheless experienced as a unity perduring through time, whatever alterations it undergoes. This is to regard the exterior as expression of the interior, to render the interiority subjectivity an object, doubling the exteriority of the subject as object available to the gaze of an other. The subject is for the photographer an object of the photographer's gaze and also a surrogate for the photographer's subjectivity, a subject in the impossible position of being outside the exteriority of the subject.16 Thus Merleau-Ponty:

Between my consciousness and my body as I experience it, between this phenomenal body of mine and that of the other as I see it from the outside, there are internal relations which causes the other to appear as the completion of the system.17

that perfectly modest sense of self that precedes the pretensions of philosophy. Between the self as absolute Spirit and the self as nothing at all there is, it turns out, very little difference-as Kierkegaard in particular told us some time ago.18

Surface and depth stand as an oppositional pair of terms, metonymy of the subject regarded as comprised of exteriority and interiority. This is to regard surface as applicable to the subject, though surface may also be regarded as applicable to the aesthetic object. As such, surface joins light, luminosity, to form an oppositional pair of terms. The opposition of surface and luminosity is notably applicable in considering photographs, as inherent in the material cause of the process19 the palpability of surface diminishes as luminosity appears as such: representation of light sources as such entails a concomitant absence of surface. This relation is reversible: absence of apparent palpable surface in the image is regarded as if an area of luminosity.
Luminosity, considered as a trope, is richly metaphorical. The complex medieval analysis is instructive: splendor is the light of luminous bodies, color is the light of terrestrial bodies. 20 Light is considered as lumen, and as lux: "the participation of lux in a transparent body is called lumen." 21 The distinction of lux and lumen is complicated by the range of medieval thought, but in general, lux is perceptible by the eyes of the body, lumen is intelligible, i.e., available to the 'eye of the mind.' 22 This distinction of the physical and the intelligible engages the distinction of subject-side and object-side in the regard of the aesthetic object. In considering the re-presentation of the subject as aesthetic object, Mikel Dufrenne's analysis is useful in considering a framework in which viewer response is inflected in the encounter with the aesthetic object. 23 This may be briefly summarized:
 

subject		object
	presence		the sensuous
perception	representation	aesthetic object	the represented object
	reflection		the expressed world.

Inflecting viewer response to the aesthetic object as embodying the represented object, the syntax of material cause manifests the re-presentation of the absent subject as a representation. This particularity of here-ness of the object for its viewer is in counterpoint to the mode of consciousness peculiar to photographs; thus Roland Barthes:

The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have now is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then. It is thus at the level of this denoted message or message without code that the real unreality of the photograph can be fully understood: its unreality is that of the here-now, for the photograph is never experienced as illusion, is in no way a presence. . .its reality [is] that of the having-been-there. . . . 24

The aesthetic object is luminous through its very opacity-not by receiving an alien light by which a world is outlined, but by making its own light spring from itself in the act of expression. Thus we shall call the aesthetic object a "quasi-subject." 26

Clockwise, from the gallery entrance; dimensions in inches.
 

Teresa Rafidi is an alumna of Brookhaven College, completing the Bachelor of Fine Arts at Southern Methodist University in 1995. Recent exhibitions include Blur the Line, The University of  Texas at Dallas, 1998; Dallas Area Art, Lowell Collins Gallery, Houston, 1998; Critic's Choice, Dallas Visual Arts Center, 1997; New Views: Eight Emerging Texas Artists, Gerald Peters Gallery, Dallas, 1997. She lives and works in Dallas.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

1. 1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 178. Cf. Aristotle, Meta., 1028 b:  "And indeed the question that was raised of old and is raised now and always, and is always the subject of puzzlement 'What is being?'...." Return
   
2. 2 Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey, et alia (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 291. Return
   
3. 3 Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey, et alia (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 398. Return
   
4. 4 Jacques Lacan, "What Is a Picture?" The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1981), p. 106. Return
   
5. 5 'Ecstasy' from Middle English extasie, from Old French, from Late Latin extasis, ecstasis, from Greek ekstasis: ex-, out + histanai to place, thus to displace, to drive out of one's senses; cf. stasis (istamai), standing, the posture of standing. Return
   
6. 6 'Under erasure,' translating sous rature, is lately associated with Jacques Derrida's usage for the use of a term which is not usable in an unproblematic sense but which nevertheless must be used; e.g., Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). The term has its urtext in Martin Heidegger, The Question of Being, trans. Jean T. Wilde, William Kluback (New Haven: College and University Press, 1958), pp. 80-81f. Return
   
7. 7 For the notion of fusion of horizons in hermeneutics, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer, Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroads, 1989 [2nd ed.]). Return
   
8. 8 See Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 147-148. Return
   
9. 9 Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: the Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, n.d. [1st German ed. 1915] ). Return
   
10. 10 Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: the Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, n.d.), p. 16. Return
    
11. 11See A. D. Coleman, "The Directorial Mode: Notes Toward a Definition," Light Readings: A Photography Critic's Writings 1968-1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. be 246-257; initial publication Artforum, September 1977. Return
    
12. 12 Andy Grundberg, "The Crisis of the Real," Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography, 1974-1989 (New York: Aperture, 1990), pp. 1-17. Return
    
13. 13 If the photographic emulsion moves synchronously with the moving object photographed, as by panning with a moving figure, the object photographed is rendered without blur, while the background is then rendered as blurred. Return
    
14. 14 In both commonplace usage and in a technical usage, the photograph is typically regarded as being of instantaneous facture; this is reflected in the term "snapshot," having its origin in Sir John Herschel's application of a hunting term to quickly made photographs as the "possibility of making a photograph, as it were by a snap-shot-of securing a picture in a tenth of a second of time." Sir John Herschel, Photographic News 11, May 13, 1860, quoted in Sarah Greenough, "The Curious Contagion of the Camera," in Sarah Greenough, Joel Snyder, David Travis, Colin Westerbeck , On the Art of Fixing A Shadow: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Photography (Boston: Bullfinch Press/Little, Brown and Company, 1989 for the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), p.153 n. 15; see also Jonathan Green, ed., The Snapshot, [Aperture 19:1] (1974), frontispiece. It is also entailed in the notion of the "decisive moment," deriving from the rendering of the title of Henri Cartier-Bresson's Images a la Sauvette (Paris: Editions Verve, 1952) as The Decisive Moment, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952) from a quotation from Cardinal de Retz used as an epigraph in the Foreword: "Il n'y a rein en ce monde qui n'ait un moment décisif." Return
    
15. 15 This is a curious locution in English: one 'fastens' a thing to 'hold it fast' so that it will not move. Return
    
16. 16 Cf. Donald Kuspit, "The Hospital of the Body: Maria Lassnig's Body Ego Portraits," Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 205f. Return
    
17. 17 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1962, 1989), p. 352. Return
    
18. 18 Robert C. Solomon, Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 202. Solomon provides a magisterial rehearsal of the history of the notion of the transcendental subject. Return
    
19. 19 Thus the shoulder portion of the D-log E curve characteristic of the response of a photographic emulsion to exposure and development describes the density of the resulting negative as being, in the case of light sources, too dense to allow printing so as to provide textural information, with a consequent loss of the sense of palpable surface. The urtext is the classic paper by Ferdinand Hurter and Vero Driffield, "Photochemical Investigations and a New Method of Determining the Sensitiveness of Photographic Plates," (1890). See C. B. Neblette, "Photographic Sensitometry," Fundamentals of Photography (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970), pp. 78-95; Hollis Todd, Richard Zakia, "Sensitometry," in ed. John M. Sturge, Neblette's Handbook of Photography and Reprography: Materials, Processes and Systems, (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1977 [7th ed.]), pp. 165-196; C. N. Nelson, "The Reproduction of Tone," in Sturge, op. cit., pp. 234-246. Return
    
20. 20 Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 50. Return
    
21. 21 Aquinas, Comm. De Anima, II, 14, 421; quoted in translation in Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 50. See also Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Hugh Bredin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), s.v., 'light.' Return
    
22. 22 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 29f. Return
    
23. 23 Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey, et alia (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 333f. Return
    
24. 24 Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image," Image Music Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 44. Return
    
25. 25 The lack of syntax is imputed to photographs by William M. Ivins, Jr. in Prints and Visual Communications (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1953); relative to the chierographic printmaking process to which Ivins contrasts photography, it may be granted that photography has a more subtle, less manifest syntax, but this relative subtlety of syntax is far from grounds for denial of syntax to photographs. Return
    
26. 26 Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey, et alia (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 146. Return
    
27. 27 Plato, The Republic, VII, 514a - 532e. Return
    
28. 28 Heraclitus, Fr. 45, Diogenes Laertius ix, 7. I have rendered logon as 'discourse'; it might alternatively be rendered as 'account' or 'reason' or 'reckoning.' Return

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