"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 decries the poor reputation of the "image" (hereafter, image) as noted above, while elsewhere, on the grounds of its unobservability, he finds in it even "a kind of essential deception." Even setting aside the fact that this negative attitude was directed in no small part at J.-P. Sartre, author of The Problem of the Imagination, one can say that in the 1960s — a period when the "Age of the Image" was emphasized — the image held people captive while simultaneously confounding ever greater numbers of them, precisely because of the uncertainty of its concept (Note 2). And now, half a century later, the image has been grafted onto the simulacrum and undergone a 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 form.
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 while being intricately combined within poiesis — production and making. From this structural difference observable among the artists, one might note that in the representation of the world through painting, the world itself is differentiated down to a state of incommensurability — yet the situation Merleau-Ponty described in "Eye and Mind," quoting Heraclitus, in which each individual world is opened onto a shared world through vision, can never come to pass here. In the first place, the possibility of that opening onto a shared world was guaranteed precisely by vision, and we who possess physical eyes were defined as privileged "measurers of the world." In this exhibition, however, Ishii's desire to interpret the "space between you and me" as a "black box" has a divided image of the world designed into it a priori — like the picture planes he paints — and a skeptical gaze is directed at vision itself, drawn as it is into the innermost recesses of a box that blocks the light.
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 indeterminacy 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 strip 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 the act of painting, 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 "Are Some Things Unrepresentable?," explores — exactly as the title 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, and he speaks of the impossibility of the essential presence of the object to be represented, or the loss of the object's substitute (Note 3), as well as the collapse of representational adjustment in a site 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 finds "a paratactic chain of small perceptions" (Note 4) as an experience of the concentration camp; and just as Rancière himself notes that such paratactic writing is born of singular experience, is it not precisely to painting — painting in which manifestation and signification 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 thought regarding the chain of small acts and small perceptions as poiesis — production and making — 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 representation of the world 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 irreversibly fragmented 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 by painting in the face of the impotence of art.
Note 1: M. Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," in Eye and Mind, trans. Shizuo Takiura and Gen Kida, Misuzu Shobo, 1966, p. 261.
Note 2: The June 1967 issue of Design Criticism, No. 3, featured a special on the "image." There, Ichiro Hariu sounded an alarm over the rise of image theory and schemed for an attempt at "the organization of the malice of matter" through the object as the counter-term to the image. Yusuke Nakahara, meanwhile, confessed that on hearing the word "image" he "loses his composure and is left completely at a loss." Ichiro Hariu, "The Vogue for Image Theory" / Yusuke Nakahara, "On the Ownership of the Image," Design Criticism, No. 3, Fudosha, 1967.
Note 3: Here, attention should be paid to the "analogous substitute (analogon)" in Sartre's theory of the image. It is held that, through the functioning of the "analogous substitute," we come to possess an imaginative consciousness of a painted portrait directed toward the absent person who is its external object. However, the portraits painted by the artists in this exhibition are disturbed by the coincidence of presence and absence, thereby rendering inoperative the very functioning of the "analogous substitute."
Note 4: Jacques Rancière, "Are Some Things Unrepresentable?," in The Future of the Image, trans. Junshi Hori, Heibonsha, 2010, p. 162.
Note 5: Op. cit., Note 1, pp. 257–258.
"Pandemonium" exhibition catalogue
This English text is a provisional translation for reference, produced with AI and adjusted by the artist. The Japanese text is authoritative.