The issue becomes clear in the current conflict between painting and photography. In the nineteenth century, painting was the dominant art, the carrier of criticality,...
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The shape of the debate has changed now, for photography is sometimes regarded as potentially more critical than painting. It is more at the center of modern life, so that critically used it can have more subversive impact.
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Photography thus dominates and critically brackets art by changing the way it is situated, and photography used as art can change our understanding of the Beautiful and the dream.
Donald Kuspit 1
. . . representation evidently is not, in itself, the aim of representational art. It is only one of the artist's means of expression . . . the belief has become widespread that an exact, complete and objective representation of the visible world cound be made by an artist, but that this "mere imitation" would not be Art, Furthermore, it is believed that such a representation can be attained "scientifically" by the use of photography . . . . But, in fact, such a perfect, objective, representation can be attained neither in painting nor photography.
Maurice Pirenne 2
Using a "given," "a ready-made" from the world outside of himself, provides the artist with something to claim as art, respond to, and change. The artist claims a subject that exists in the world, often by means of a camera, and then coaxes it into existence, working in a respectful relationship with it. 5"Ready-made" is not used here, as in Duchamp's ready-made works such as Fountain and Bottle Rack, to denote the denomination of pre-existing entities as artworks by fiat and by their relocation from lifeworld to artworld. Rather, here "ready-made" refers to the acquisition of the structure of a motif from the lifeworld domain of cultural production, subsequently repositioned in the artwork to the artworld, or more precisely, to the domain of artworks as a site of cultural production, by transformation of the motif in which the syntax of the representation is surplus to the representation. This is a complex way of simply saying that how the work is a representation is as salient to the work as what the work represents. Arthur Danto's formulation is apt and felicitous, and all the more so in serving as a fundamentum divisionis of representations that are artworks and representations that are mere representations:
Any representation that is not an artwork can be matched by one that is one, the difference lying in the fact that the artwork uses the way the nonartwork presents its content to make a point about how that content is presented. 6Danto distills this into a thesis:
The thesis is that works of art, in categorical contrast with mere representations, use the means of representation in a way that is not exhaustively specified when one has exhaustively specified what is being represented. 7It is not only finding the basis of the work in pre-existing structures that Xie shares with Gerhard Richter. Like some of Richter's works, 8 Xie's works represent the ostensible referent of his works as if in out of focus photographs. In the case of Untitled, this is literally and explicitly the case: the images ultimately derive from the frames of a film. In the other works in the exhibition, paintings from the Library series, the images seem to have aspects the syntax of photographs. 9 This is not to say that these are within the traditions of trompe l'oeil paintings, though Xie's paintings reference that tradition. There is no attempt, in these works, to persuade the viewer than one is co-present with the ostensible referent, with the thing itself, unmediated by a medium of re-presentation. Xie's paintings reference photorealist works in their critical stance toward the syntax of photographs examined in paint. Xie's paintings, unlike photorealist paintings, do not use the illusion of sharpness to evoke the sign system of photographs. Rather, one is aware of mediation by the medium precisely because there is an initial, fleeting, uncertainty regarding the identification of the medium. These might be large photographs, produced by coat a photographic emulsion on canvas, or they might be paintings. This initial apparent equivocation of medium places the viewer in the position of risking a category mistake, which a casual glance will not prevent.
The Library paintings reference sections of shelved books, seen typically in elevation, the titles of the spines at the threshold of resolution. The books depicted for the most part are mundane series, the bindings efficient, functional, perfunctory. Library No. 7 has the spines of the eight represented volumes tilt right on the left side of the painting, with the spines becoming vertical toward the right edge. The tilt of the volumes indicated by the strong dark lines between them produces the effect of perceiving the tilted lines as vertical, and consequently of perceiving the painting itself tilting. The volumes fill the picture plane from top to bottom and from left to right, with the left and right volumes cut by the edges; the volumes depicted at the left and right edges of the canvas are cut by the edges. A barely legible title is visible on the spines, identifying the works to be a series of texts by Washington Irving. That the works are a series is also indicated by the volume numbers: volumes twenty four through twenty seven are visible as designated by the numerals within a circle on the middle of the spines, while the volume number at the base of the spines does not correspond, designating volumes twenty two through twenty seven.
Library No. 2 has three shelves of books, spines parallel to the picture plane. The overall value range of the painting is dark, with the upper shelf of books somewhat lighter. The lightest area is a section at the middle of the canvas, where four books have a section struck by a rectangle of light near the top of their spines. This area seems to register motion in the horizontal bands of diminishing value, as if a photograph resulting from sequential incremental exposure with intermittent vertical movement of the lens plane relative to the film plane. This effect is not evident throughout Library No. 2 though it can also be discerned all along the middle shelf, particularly in the lighter areas of the spines; had rising front movement been used with a view camera to produce the image, the entire image would display the effect displayed in the light value middle area. The effect is conspicuously absent in the base of the spines in the upper shelf of books, both in the slight protrusion of the spines of the books over the edge of the shelf and the resulting cast shadows on the shelf edge (traditional trompe l'oeil devices). The luminous rectangle at the middle section of the canvas, lighter that the surrounding passages, arrests the gaze. The metaphor is inescapable: this phenomenon of light is a clearing in surrounding darkness, a moment of lightening, 10 enlightenment, in that repository devoted to enlightenment, the library.
Library No. 5 differs from the other two Library series painting in the exhibition in having a very out of focus image of what seems to be gathered and sewn signatures of books, spines and covers removed, spread horizontally on a table top. These fragments of books, perhaps laid out for rebinding, are the detritus of the dissemination of learning, in a limbo of books awaiting their ultimate destruction or reconstitution. Perhaps they repose in an unfrequented basement of a library.
Or perhaps these worn books repose in Borges' labyrinthine library, appearing to its librarians to be infinite, containing all possible books in all possible languages.11 This vast edifice, distant progeny of the vast library of Alexandria 12 and the fictional cousin in the aedificium in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose13 is thus the repository of infinite, virtual, knowledge: all past, present, and future knowledge, all possible knowledge-all true propositions, but also all false and all meaningless propositions. Far from a scholar's paradise, the library of Babel is a place of melancholy for its librarians. True, all possible knowledge is there, but nothing can be known to be true. Every proposition in the books of the library has its contrary in the books of the library. Somewhere in the labyrinth, the conclusive proposition in this endless intertextuality is to be found, but perhaps can never be found. Michael Foucault has noted that Borges' story is an allegory of the infinity of discourse opened by language.14 As language is a system of representation, so also visual representations. Consider the mirror hanging at the entrance way of Borges' library: "People are in the habit of inferring from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it really were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that the polished surfaces feign and promise infinity...." Though our libraries have not attained the infinity of the library of Borges' story, the totality of knowledge, and even the body of knowledge within a single discipline, has become more than large enough to be known by an individual, or to long continue to be contained in physical printed form.15 Take Borge's library as a metaphor for the universe, and the librarians are ourselves. It is an element of the Zeitgeist, and has its correlatives in the contemporary practice and theory in the visual arts.
While the ostensible content of Xie's Library paintings are the shelves of books, there is another level of reference: painting as mode of representation, painting as a practice, painting as painting. Painting is a mode of representation of possible entities; what is painted need have no being apart from the painting. This is not the case with photography: there is no photograph without some thing photographed. The images in the Library series may have referents among existing actuals, or not. The representation of these possible but not necessarily actual referents is mediated by the syntax of photographs, but this is not to say photographs entered into the genesis of the Library sentence. It is certainly possible to paint in a manner informed by the syntax of photography without utilizing specific photographs. In the case of the other work in this exhibition, Untitled, it is different.
Untitled uses gelatin silver photographic emulsion on sheet steel panels, referencing frames from a film sequence of flags fluttering in the wind. Installed in a vertical row, the several pieces of the work suggest both a long hanging banner, and the frames of a strip of film.16 Xie appropriated the images from a film on German Expressionism; though Xie does not recall the title of the film that is the proximate source,17 perhaps the ursource of the images is Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will.18 In any case, the images in Xie's work are much abstracted translations of film frames of fluttering Nazi flags. The abstraction is carried out by several means: by the transformation from moving to still image (though the moving image of the film is comprised of a sequence of still images), from the interposition of video raster lines resulting from the translation of film to video and photographing the video image from a monitor, from seemingly sharp to blurred, from whole (at least insofar as the film image is in itself a whole, though it is itself a part, an aspect of a larger whole) to part by cropping, by a shift in scale, and by the absence of color. The effect of these several means of abstraction functioning in concert is to position the referent of the images in a liminal zone of near unrecognizability, between recollection and remembrance, between reality and dream, or nightmare. Though present in all of the images of the work, only in a few of the images is the swastika recognizable. In the printing of these images the material presence of medium is evident: the emulsion is not mechanically coated on the metal plates, but applied with a brush. Development of the several images is not uniform within each image; rather than being immersed in a tray of developer, the variation in development suggests that the developer was brushed on the exposed plates. This variation of the material cause of each image within the uniformity of the mechanically stamped metal plates reiterates the variation of the flag element within the otherwise relatively stable composition of each image. This doubling of the distinction of the uniform and the variable may be read as a trope of the tension between the fascist state and the individual. It is also a metaphor for the relation between the means of mechanical production of images and the production of images by means of the hand. Yet through all the transformations and stages of derivation from film to the several pieces of this work, the photographic basis of the image perdures. In categorical contrast to painting as painting, the indexical19 character of photographs roots the images in Untitled in a pregiven ultimately located not in other representations, but in the lifeworld.
Representation need not refer to particular kinds of objects, paintings, or photographs. Representation is a process as much as the objects resulting from that process. Regarding the objects resulting from the process of representation is to comprehend them as loci in a field. It is to engage "the notion of representation as something roughly commensurate with the totality of cultural activity, . . ."20 As such, consideration of representation must include not only art and ideology but the totality of mechanisms of production, exchange, power, and value that mediate, re-present, 21 between self and world, which indeed mediates construction of a world out of earth, 22 as Heidegger suggests of artworks as the exemplary case.
A native of China, Xiaoze Xie received Master of Fine Arts degrees from both the Central Academy of Art and Design at Beijing and the University of North Texas. He is currently Visiting Professor at Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington in the 1996-1997 academic year. Four recent works, including Library No. 7 in this exhibition, can be viewed online at http://www.art.unt.edu/artbase/xie/xie.html.
| 1 | Library No. 7 | oil on canvas | 1994 | 48 x 59.5 inches |
| 2 | Untitled | gelatin silver photographic emulsion on sheet steel | 1995 | six pieces [as installed], each 9 x 12 x 2.25 inches |
| 3 | Library No. 2 | oil on canvas | 1994 | 36 x 48 inches |
| 4 | Library No. 5 | oil on canvas | 1994 | 39.5 x 55 inches |