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The promise of painting: Spectres of the Baroquein contemporary paintingAtsuhide Itoa

a Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts Londonand Southampton Solent UniversityPublished online: 06 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Atsuhide Ito (2013) The promise of painting: Spectres of the Baroque in contemporary painting,Journal of Visual Art Practice, 12:1, 65-75

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65

JVAP 12 (1) pp. 65–75 Intellect Limited 2013

Journal of Visual Art Practice Volume 12 Number 1

© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jvap.12.1.65_1

Atsuhide itoCentral Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London and Southampton Solent University

the promise of painting:

spectres of the Baroque in

contemporary painting

ABstrAct

The article discusses the strategy of using photographic fragments in contemporary painting. Distinct from Photorealism, photographic fragments are often used alle-gorically in painting to produce disjuncture of narratives and stylistic incoherence and openings. Following Jean-François Cheverier’s distinction between photogra-phers and artists who use photographs (meta-photography), the article argues that Photorealist approach confirms vision’s primacy (aisthesis), while the use of photo-graphic fragments approaches painting poetically (poiesis). Folding and unfolding pictorial compositions in the paintings in the latter category echo Baroque themes. Referring to the works of Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Gilles Deleuze, the article analyses the current painting-scape from the Baroque mindset. By comparing the works of painters who were showcased in ‘The Painting of Modern Life’ exhibi-tion at the Hayward Gallery in 2007, and the Leipzig School of Painters, among others, the article discusses painting, which, like a Baroque garment with a complex set of folds, conceals and reveals a secret message. Here painting becomes a tableau to listen to, instead of an image-surface for visual pleasure. By exploring Jacques Derrida’s notion of spectres, painting as a tableau manifests ghostly presence.

Keywords

aisthesispoiesisspectresBaroqueallegoryfolds

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Painting speaks and dances. The painting that speaks and dances is a painting without painting. What does painting speak of? Painting speaks of a promise. What dance does painting dance? The ghost dance!

Elaborating on this opening statement, the purpose of this article is to investigate the potential of contemporary painting with reference to the Baroque qualities of the spectral and the fold, and in the process to restore the element of poiesis to the visual field. Beginning with a text by Jean-François Cheverier as the point of our departure, I would like to invite you to the jour-ney through the notion of deviance by excavating Baroque traits in contempo-rary paintings. Half way through our excursion, I will have to take a turn, the haunting turn, to let painting dance and speak, to speak of a promise.

The French critic Cheverier (2003) begins his essay, ‘The adventures of the picture form in the history of photography’, by contrasting the photographer and the artists who use photography, and proceeds to discuss their polemical positions since the 1970s. Before such an undertaking, he traces the polem-ics in the nineteenth century between, for example, Émile Zola and Charles Baudelaire. While Baudelaire bemoaned the ‘absence of construction’ in the canvases of the Barbizon School painter Theodore Rousseau, Zola preferred ‘to avoid the pure speculations of the imagination’ (Cheverier 2003: 118).1 While photography’s capacity for the objective observation, so to speak, is in a propinquity to Zola’s position, photography via photomontage and collage in the 1920s shattered ‘the sumptuous “tableau de la nature” that Paul Cezanne still dreamed of’ (Cheverier 2003: 119). Thus, Cheverier says:

it is about using the picture form to reactivate a thinking based on frag-ments, openness, and contradiction, not the utopia of a comprehensive or systematic order.

(2003: 116)

Does he mean, as Walter Benjamin says, ‘in the field of allegorical intuition the image is a fragment, a rune’, or ‘the false appearance of totality is extin-guished’ (2009: 176)? What is wrong with ‘the utopia of a comprehensive or systematic order’?

I would like to suggest the opposition that Cheverier generates in his essay is the discursive struggle between visuality and poetics. More than half a century after Theodor Adorno’s remark ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ (1967: 34), we might ask, how do art and painting in particular return to poetry – poiesis – to speak in a tone of seriousness and warmth and speak in silence and in ellipsis matters of importance in this moment? 2 By which I mean how could I speak and how could painting speak as a histor-ical subject, like a ghost returning to painting after the numerous murders of painting that have been committed? In fact, Yve-Alain Bois (1993) speaks of two and half deaths that painting had to live through: Kazimir Malevich, Marcel Duchamp and its resurrection by Piet Mondrian. He concludes by arriving at an optimistic narrative, so to speak, namely, that a match of paint-ing, that is the modernist painting, is over, but its players return to the game of painting as in the game of chess.

To follow Bois, are photorealism and its divergent forms another set of matches? The exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2007, entitled ‘The Painting of Modern Life’, titled after Baudelaire’s (1995) The Painters of Modern Life, curated by Ralf Rugoff, was a recent survey of the paintings that had intricate liaisons with photography. The exhibition was more a summary

1. Theodore Rousseau, Sous les hêtres le soir/Under the Birches, Evening, 1842-3, 42.2×64.5 cm, http://nga.gov.au/exhibition/turnertomonet/ Detail.cfm?IRN=166686& ViewID=2

2. ‘Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben’ (Adorno 1955: 30).

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than a forecast. The list of exhibitors included Robert Bechtle, Vija Celmins, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Franz Gertsch, Eberhard Havekost, Johannes Kahrs, Gerhard Richter and Wilhelm Sasnal, among others. While Bechtle and Gertsch have approached both photography and painting by deploying the mimetic ability of both, though different from the nineteenth-century realism or the nineteenth-century painting that used photographs, Doig and Dumas, in contrast, move away from the original photographs that they refer to, in order to make their painterly interpretations of these their signatures. That is to say, the inventiveness of the painters is marked by the difference that they have made from the original photographs. They position themselves at the opposite end of the spectrum from Bechtle and Gertsch. Meanwhile, Richter’s paintings, by emphasizing their photographic quality in a painterly manner, instead of working against it, in effect create a paradoxical assertion of paint-ing’s singularity.3 It is as if to twist and turn a piece of fabric, the paintings reassert their paintingness by becoming photographs, that is to say a paint-ing without painting. Photorealism and its divergent forms have deployed a convincing strategy of matching the Duchampian notion of the ready-made with photographs and tapped into the blurred distinction between realism and mediated image, i.e., mechanically reproduced images. In addition, these works share both the photographic sense of realism and the photographic institution of framing, which in their optic nature reveal a legacy of the ocular-centrism of the seventeenth century. If a definition of the ocular refers to the eye as the organ par excellence of perception and acquisition of knowledge, the optic refers to the filtering of vision with the lens. As a consequence, the photographic image can further be called scopic. That is, a form of viewing mediated by a mechanical device that brackets the distance between the object of observation and the observer. Its colonial and military implication is obvious. For exam-ple, recent military technology aims at annihilating the difference between the recognition of an enemy and the obliteration of the enemy (Bishop and Phillips 2010: 29). A device that reacts to the pilot’s and the gunner’s right eye movements bypasses the process of pressing a button and shoots the enemy. In other words, it overcomes the biological limit of human recognition-action sensorium (Bihsop and Phillips 2010: 29). This is perhaps the frontier of ocular science in practice, and reveals how the malevolence of the eye can give a license to the objections to ocular, optic and scopic regime.4

Looking briefly at the history of the suspicion against vision, the first instance of it is expressed in the classical myth of Jupiter and Io. After find-ing out her husband Jupiter is having an affair with Io, the jealous Juno employs Argus, whose another name is Panoptes and who has 100 eyes, to watches over Io, the hostage of love. However, Mercury, the son of Jupiter who plays the flute of Pan, visits Argus and lulls ‘the all-seeing Argus’ to sleep (Ovid 2004: 14–44; Jay 1994: 28). In another instance of the phenomenon, the surrealists tactically privileged ‘madness of vision’ (La Follie de la Vision) in dreams against clarity of vision (Jay 1994: 45–48). Despite this context of suspicion, nonetheless, painting and photography have to live with their visu-ality as their fate.

Painting as an object demands the beholder’s sensual, intellectual and spatial response to it, that is to say it generates an aesthetic experience instead of a poetic one. Poiesis is a good brother of a troubled aisthesis, another name for affect, or perception.5 Bifurcated brothers, aisthesis and poiesis, as brothers do, compete and fight as if to illustrate the difference between totality and fragments, real and imaginary. Poiesis, to follow Martin Heidegger and Philippe

3. Gerhard Richter, Tulpen, 1995, 36×41 cm, http://www.gerhard- richter.com/art/paintings/photo_paintings/detail.php?8113, accessed 6 November 2012.

Gerhard Richter, S mit Kind, 1995, 36×41 cm, http://www.gerhard-richter.com/art/paintings/photo_paintings/detail.php?8128, accessed 6 November 2012.

4. Another cannon of objections is aimed at the visual pleasure, especially indulgent but institutionalized ones such as the male gaze.

5. Daniel Heller-Roazen (2007) explores different connotations of the term Aisthesis in his The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation.

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Lacoue-Labarthe, means bringing forth. In fact, Lacoue-Labarthe uses the German word Hervorbringen (1989: 66), meaning bringing forth, letting come about, or equally Ver-an-lassen, both of which indicate a self-fictioning force, one that acts to produce. Benjamin, along with Christine Buci-Glucksmann, reminds us that the Baroque is another discourse in which poiesis prevailed – namely, through allegory.6 As Benjamin quotes Carl Horst, allegory is ‘always to reveal a “crossing of the borders of a different mode”, an advance of the plastic arts into the territory of the “rhetorical arts”’ (1912: 39–40, 41–42, quoted in Benjamin 2009: 177). Following Horst, Benjamin defines allegory as ‘dialectic at a stand still’ (Buci-Glucksmann 1994: 103). Here I would like to link my discussion to the Baroque, which is an open garden full of allegories and poietic explorations.

The term ‘Baroque’ was applied for the first time by the critic Francesco Milizia (1725–1798) in the eighteenth century.7 Employed perhaps in a similar way to our contemporary term ‘Kitsch’, it was at the time a rather derogatory term to indicate the style that embraces exaggerated décor and excessiveness throughout the seventeenth century. Among a few claims over the etymo-logical origin(s) of the term, the Portuguese word in the sixteenth century ‘barrocco, referred to a deformed pearl’, which suggests ‘deviation from a norm’ (Honour and Fleming 2005: 572).8 According to the nineteenth-century art historian Heinrich Wölfflin who specialized in Baroque, ‘the baroque never offers us perfection and fulfillment, or the static calm of “being”, only the unrest of change and the tension of transience’ (1888: 50, English transla-tion quoted by Holly 1994: 353–54).9 He distinguishes the Baroque, with its emphasis on movements and exuberance, from the Renaissance paintings that exhibit clarity and the balanced compositions. However, Michael Ann Holly demonstrates how much the contrast Wölfflin generated between the High Renaissance and the Baroque is unsustainable, arguing that the categorical difference is an imposed one. In the case of Raphael, for instance, such differ-ences on the bases of categories such as line versus painterly, clarity versus ambiguity, become unconvincing when looking at a painting such as his The Expulsion of Heliodorus (Holly 1994: 359).10

To take up Holly’s argument, the Baroque should not be merely understood as a historical movement or a category in art history. As Mieke Bal explains in her book Quoting Caravaggio, first published in 1999, the Baroque needs to be understood not as a grandiose and superfluous style in the history of western art, but instead as an approach, a way of thinking. To paraphrase Bal’s formu-lation, the Baroque is a situation where a juncture of sometimes contradic-tory, other times converging, thoughts stand still, where an event is about to take place. In a similar manner, Angela Ndalianis describes the Baroque as ‘a transhistorical state that’s extended beyond the historical confines of the seventeenth century – a period traditionally associated with a baroque order of vision’ (2007: xii).11 According to her, Baroque is characterized by ‘its lack of respect for the limits of the frame. Closed forms are replaced by open struc-tures that favour a dynamic and expanding polycentrism’ (Ndalianis 2007: xii). Her perception fits well with Gilles Deleuze’s description of the Baroque in his book entitled The Fold: Leibniz and Baroque (2006). He starts his book by saying ‘the Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative func-tion, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds’ (Deleuze 2006: 3). According to Deleuze, the Baroque is characterized by the fold, which infinitely reveals and conceals. In fact, he defines the Baroque as ‘fold to infinity’ (Deleuze 2006: 140). And he goes on to say:

6. Benjamin, according to Gilles Deleuze, demonstrated that allegory is

a power of figuration entirely different from that of the symbol: the latter combines the eternal and the momentary, nearly at the center of the world, but allegory uncovers nature and history according to the order of time. It produces a history from nature and transforms history into nature in a world that no longer has its centre.

(2006: 143)

7. His Dizionario delle belle arti del disegno.

8. Marco Bussagli and Mattia Reiche offer another explanation of the word Baroque, Syllogism.

9. ‘Der Barock giebt nirgends das Fertige und Befriedigte, nicht die Ruhe des Seins, sondern die Unruhe des Werdens, die Spannung eines veränderlichen Zustandes’ (Wölfflin 1888: 50).

10. Raphael, 1512–12, The Expulstion of Heliiodorus, 746 cm breed, fresco, http://www.artbible.info/art/large/134.html, accessed 6 November 2012.

11. In her forward to a book entitled Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary Art.

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Yet the Baroque is not only projected in its own style of dress. It radiates everywhere, at all times, in the thousand folds of garments that tend to become one with their respective wearers, to exceed their attitudes, to overcome their bodily contradictions, and to make their heads look like those of swimmers bobbing in the waves.

(Deleuze 2006: 139)

The Baroque mode of thinking is characterized by the fold, which suggests points of juncture, where movements of mutations and transformations could occur, while the fold conceals the seams.12 More importantly, the baroque postu-lates thoughts as having forms that may implode and transform themselves. Like a turned and twisted ribbon and a garment with folds, Deleuze brings out a Baroque strategy of thinking that turns the scopic approach into a haptic one and transforms the military gaze into the sensuousness of perception. It is in this way that the Baroque challenges the scopic regime while continuing in the visual realm. While in the optic and scopic vision, the visual field is organized coherently through the photographic lens, the Baroque vision generates multi-ple visual fields simultaneously and folds them in on each other.

Symptomatically fictive and figurative in their approach, the Leipzig School of painters, spearheaded by Neo Rauch, includes painters who deploy collage and assemblage for their compositions. Their surreal and absurd undercurrent runs through the works by painters such as Rosa Loy, Tilo Baumgärtel, David O’Kane, but also by other contemporary painters such as Tim Eitel, Michaël Borremans, Adrian Ghenie, Victor Mann and Peter Martensen. I am aware that Baumgärtel, Eitel and Borremans often set up scenes in their studio and photograph them to be used for their paintings. Not only their fragmentary use of photographs but also their collage-like compositions differ from photo-realism and its diverse trends, represented, for instance, by the work of Luc Tuymans, whose cropping is more prominent than collage. There is certainly a sense of ars inveniendi, ‘the man [and the woman] who could manipulate models with sovereign skill’ (Benjamin 2009: 179).

The fragmentary compositions of the Leipzig School unfold multiple dimensions and indicate their affiliation with the Baroque. Along with other works by the painters of similar intent, Rauch sets himself apart from those who were showcased in ‘The Painting of Modern Life’ exhibition.13 What is at stake here in the works along the Leipzig School, first of all, is an implosion of a photographic image in painting as a guiding structure. Second, the painters such as Rauch deploy a strategic manipulation of the image into fragments, as if to visualize metamorphosis of thoughts, on the basis that thoughts provide structures for forms. Like Jacques Derrida’s notion of differance, The Baroque refuses to recognize the real as truth (aletheia), and slowly and carefully slips away from the real as ‘the indecomposable simplicity of the origin’ (Derrida 1998: 46). In a curiously similar way, while being more formalist, Deleuze also advocates repetition and multiplication to undermine the authority of the origin. As one repeats, the original loses its authority and like wrinkles on a forehead, the truth hides itself in between the folds and becomes un-locata-ble. In fact, he talks about ‘incompossibility’, which he defines as ‘an original relation irreducible to any form of contradiction. It is a difference and not a negation’ (unlike Adorno’s negative dialectics, though Adorno’s model does intimately resemble Derrida’s differance) (Deleuze 2006: 174). Thus, we can observe in both Derrida’s and Deleuze’s thinking how the real as the origin is undermined by the movements of mutations and transformations, like an

12. The reactions to the Photorealists in recent painting is symptomatic of the Baroque, although I would like to be cautious in taking on the term neo-Baroque.

13. Neo Rauch, Die Aufnahme, 2008, oil on canvas, 300×250 cm, http://poulwebb.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/neo-rauch-painter-part-2.html, accessed 6 November 2012.

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irregular and deformed pearl, morphed from the perfect one. This is what I would like to call the ‘aesthetics of deviance’, this mutational movement that turns and twists like a ribbon; like a virus, which parasitically sits on the system to absorb the nutrition but to produce small alternative structures to alter the system, it performs a kind of resistant strategy against the domineering and intolerant coherence of optic vision and its frame. This idea is premised on the implosion of a structure in an image that is no longer able to project effectively the condition of subjectivity that the artists are experiencing. All this perhaps could be embraced by Derrida’s well-known term differance; differance always arrives delayed like a returning ghost, as in Fuyuko Matsui’s painting, which also shows this trait of the fold in the sense of its unfolding.14

If we are to distinguish between the two, we can say that Deleuze’s thoughts are conveyed in forms, while Derrida’s thinking is elusive, devoid of forms, though the fold remains pertinent for Derrida. It is possible to identify a manifestation of the Baroque in Derrida’s thinking on the nature of the fold, notably in his idea of differance, especially the difference between being and appearance, as in the following:

it has to do with the phenomenological fold, Marx seems to suggest, with that difference, both decisive and insubstantial at the same time, that separates being from appearing. The appearing of being, as such, as phenomenality of its phenomenon, is and is not the being that appears; that is the fold of the ‘unheimlich’.

(1994: 181–82)

Unheimlich/the uncanny – as much as it is understood as the unfamiliar feel-ing arising from the familiar, or should I say, one’s inability to return to the same – is also the phenomenon of the inanimate object appearing as animated, as explained in Sigmund Freud’s article ‘The uncanny’ (2003).15 In this quota-tion, Derrida explains the uncanny as the decisive and at the same time insub-stantial severing between being and appearance. What appears real to one’s eyes, including the social reality, turns out to be spectacular and spectral. That is to say, the world appears haunted: moreover, Derrida says, a few pages before the previous quotation, ‘I am’ means ‘I am haunted’ (1994: 166). That is to say, the modern subject ‘I’ is, in fact, haunted by spectres of the others even when she/he is convinced of her or himself as an independent and self-reflective Res Cogitance, the thinking corporeal body, severed from ancestral or inter-generational ties and imaginations, the emancipated individual in the Kantian sense. Here Derrida’s uniquely Hegelian side manifests itself when he explains the difference between the spirit, Geist, and the spectre or the ghost. In Hegel, the spirit manifests itself as an irreducible force, which inhab-its the world, while in Derrida the ghost appears as a differance of the spirit

The spectre is not only the carnal apparition of the spirit, its phenome-nal body, its fallen and guilty body, it is also the impatient and nostalgic waiting for a redemption, namely, once again, for a spirit (auf Erlösung harrt, nämlich ein Geist). The ghost would be the deferred spirit, the promise or the calculation of an expiation.

(1994: 170-171)

An image is spectral: for instance, the representation of a wooden table is a trace of the table, as Socrates argues in Plato’s (1998) Republic, claiming that the bed

14. Fuyuko Matsui, Negatively Inscribed Four-legged Alter, pigments on silk. 2007, 222×172 cm, http://benotdefeated bytherain.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/fuyuko-matsui.html, accessed 6 November 2012.

15. In one of Michaël Borremans’s paintings entitled One from 2003, ‘the animate is in constant tension with the inanimate’ (De Weck Ardalan 2005: 89).

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the painter paints is always a generation away from the original bed that God or the joiner makes. That is to say, the image of the bed or the table is simul-taneously corporeal (a painting as an object) and incorporeal (a painting as a medium represents something other than itself). But here Derrida reminds us, after Karl Marx, that the heavy wooden table can itself be spectral, in the sense that it acquires its spectrality when it becomes a commodity and enters into the community of objects (1994: 184). Different from spectrality as a trace or a residue of something tangible, floating between materiality and immateriality, or even an aura as a magical spell cast on a sacred object, Marx explains, in his chapter on fetish, spectrality in terms of invisible labour which is conveyed in an object and the consequent relationality of the object (1990: 165). The heavy and inanimate table, when it becomes a commodity, begins to act:

when the curtain goes up on the market and the table plays actor and character at the same time, when the commodity-table, says Marx, comes on stage (Auftritt) begins to walk around and to put itself forward as a market value, Coup de théâtre, atresunsuouis non-sensuous thingan-delt er sich in ein sinnlish rphosed into a supernatural thing, a sunsu-ouis non-sensuous thingthe ordinary, sensuous thing is transfigured (verwandelt sich), it becomes someone, it assumes a figure.

(Derrida 1994: 188–89)

Like Marx’s table, painting as the spectral image and an object in one, as it enters into the relations with other objects, becomes an object-tableau. The object-tableau acquires its relationality through its relations with other objects in both historical and contemporaneous contexts. Through this process of becom-ing a relational object, painting as an object and non-object acquires spectral-ity. Haunted by the ghost, painting as tableau becomes spirited. Here painting as tableau like a ghostly table begins to animate itself and dances. This is what Derrida and Marx mean by the Ghost Dance (Derrida 1994: 192). In Karin Mamma Andersson’s painting Ebb and Flow from 2007 – although the vertical line and a short line next to the dark chest of drawers in the background and the frame on the wall suggest the setting is a room – the drawers have flown out, a bed is taking off or landing in the ambiguous outdoor–indoor space. In another painting of hers entitled In the Room of Another from 2002, the chairs and the table, as if exhausted from dancing, rest upside down.16 In the foreground, the painting has flown out of the frame. The figure in pink appears different in her tone from the figures that are inscribed on the wall. Is she a ghost or an angel, I wonder? Let us hear Derrida again on the subject of the spectre:

It emancipates itself on its own initiative: all alone, autonomous and automaton, its fantastic silhouette moves on its own, free and without attachment. It goes into trances, it levitates, it appears relieved of its body, like all ghosts, a little mad and unsettled as well, upset, ‘out of joint’, delirious, capricious, and unpredictable. It appears to put itself spontaneously into motion, but it also puts others into motion, yes, it puts everything around it into motion, as though ‘pour encourager les autres’ (to encourage the others).

(1994: 191–92)

To return to the problem of visuality, we recognize how this constitutes paint-ing. However, if paintings are to be political they have to speak. Here the

16. Karin Mamma Andersson, I en annans rum/In the Room of Another, 2002, oil on panel, 64×81cm, Collection Uppsala County Council, Sweden, http://bombsite.com/issues/100/articles/2905, accessed 6 November 2012.

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term ‘political’ does not mean relations of power, but it needs to be under-stood as a readiness for aporia, an aleatoric moment, in the sense of a readi-ness to be open towards the unknown, thus to participate in a moment of singularity, instead of a prescribed and formulaic ‘utopia of a comprehensive or systematic order’ (Cheverier 2003: 116). To put it another way, ‘political’ means an ability to respond to an unknown situation with a singular voice. I would argue that what constitutes the political subject is a right and an ability to speak, to have a voice.17 To inspire others, that is, for painting to dance and speak. Painting conceived in this sense of the tableau begins to be animated, no longer an inanimate object to be stared at but one that has acquired a voice and speaks back, and even dances.

Roland Barthes (2000) suggests that photography is about death, in the sense that the moments that are captured by the camera lens never return. Speaking about his mother’s photograph as a little girl in the winter garden, Barthes recognizes the photography as a stamp of mortality as she as a little girl never returns. But Painting has this ability to return as a ghost, first of all as the ghost of photography and the ghost of image. But like a table that dances and inspires the other, painting as tableau needs to speak.18 It is in this way that painting, once bifurcated between the brothers aisthesis and poiesis, can become reconstituted again as tableau.

Painting as tableau can be thought of as being ‘like a cloth, “écran” as a projection surface for phantoms’, the body without presence and the presence without body (Hamacher 2008: 169).19 Viewed in this way, such a painting conjures up a ghostly apparition and at this moment of apparition it can prom-ise, in a form of unfolding, the possibility of justice for the other. Haunted by the others before us and the responsibility for the arrivants, painting as tableau promises the future, which remains open to question, like a path that is not yet marked out, in another word, aporetic, by which I mean a path without a path, one that is not yet open (Bloch 2000; Agamben 2007: 33).20 It is in this sense that I regard the promise to be the responsibility of painting. And a spec-tral apparition is the allegorical form of a promise. As art inherits the suffering of the other, art as a form of mourning wells up its tears.21 Tears, unlike the aesthetic totality of scopic vision, refract light and cloud, what the eyes can see in the daylight. In this state of mourning, the artist sees the spectre appearing.

In the art of the Baroque, an apparition does not arrive in the figure of a ghost, but it comes as a messenger, the angel. The angelic apparition is spectro-poietic par excellence (Derrida 1994: 56). Guercino’s (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) painting entitled The Angel appears to Hager and Ishmael from 1652 shows Hager, the house servant of Sarah, and her son Ishmael.22 In the Old Testament story, Sarah who was not able to conceive a child employed Hager to bear a son of Abraham, but then miraculously gave birth herself, to Isaac. No longer needed, Hager and Ishmael were sent away and wandered about almost dying of thirst and hunger. The painting shows the episode where an angel appears above Hager and points out the water running out from a rock. The eyes of Hager and the angel meet as the angel’s left hand covers his heart to show empathy. This I contend is the promise of painting carried by the spectres of the Baroque – in this case the celestial messenger. The figure who demands and waits for justice beyond its death is the spectre. The spectres of the Baroque ventriloquize the painter, and the painting by necessity speaks of a promise, the promise of justice, though aporetic in its character, for the vanquished before us, and the others who are to arrive.

17. Jacques Rancière (2010) discusses the notion of demos by referring to Illiad. See page 32 of his Dissensus.

18. Jon Thompson (1989) presents also the notion of photography as a ghost of the real.

19. Werner Hamacher, commenting on Derrida’s hauntology says that ‘Derrida in Specters of Marx speaks of something like a cloth, “écran” as a projection surface for phantoms’ (1999: 169).

20. A promise is also a threat in a sense that it can be broken. See Hamacher’s and Derrida’s articles in Sprinkler (ed.) Ghostly Demarcations.

21. This paragraph owes a debt to two sources. First, it refers to Benjamin who says, ‘Like Ghostly apparitions, prophetic dreams are an almost obligatory ingredient of the drama, which occasionally begins by relating them as a kind of prologue. They generally foretell the end of the tyrant’ (2009: 134). Second, I was inspired by John Caputo’s reference to Derrida’s tears. ‘Derrida seeks other springs than Ursprung of the work of art, for the drawing springs from tears that well up in our eyes, not from lethe’s subterranean coursing. He seeks “from where these tears stream down and from whose eyes they come to well up”, the source and spring of our tears. He does not seek to know this source or to bring it under the sway of voir and savoir of veritas or aletheia, but to ‘implore’ it, to pray through these tears’ (Caputo 2004: 327). Caputo discusses the relationship between aletheia as

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Conjoined with aisthesis, poiesis questions the primacy of vision as if to suspect truth in the bright light outside of a cave. Poiesis as a process allows apparition in its allegorical form, like the sudden appearance of a secret preserved in the deepest recess in the cave (Derrida 2001). Unlike Heidegger’s understanding of truth, aletheia as unconcealment (a –un, lethe-the secret), the Baroque folds the appearance of the world in the darkness such as we see in Caravaggio’s painting and waits for the moment of its apparition. But it does not uncover truth, rather it whispers.

Following the work of Derrida, I have attempted in this article to divert painting from an ocular path to another, more poetic one. In so doing, I have offered some reflection on the current predicament in politics of which paint-ing is a part and to which painting as tableau can respond.

AcKnowledgement

I would like to thank Jane Lee, Mick Finch, Lee Mackinnon and Emma Tod for their encouragement and inspirations and Niccola Shearman for her care-ful readings and suggestions. I am also grateful to Christopher Smith, editor of the Journal of Visual Art Practice, for his patience. I am thankful to Sandra Sykorova and Chinami Sakai at Tate Modern on the occasion of the Tableau conference in 2011 in which this article was presented. Finally, I would like to express my special gratitude to Barbara Knorpp for her enduring encourage-ment, many years of collaborations and friendship.

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suggested citAtion

Ito, A. (2013), ‘The promise of painting: Spectres of the Baroque in contempo-rary painting’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 12: 1, pp. 65–75, doi: 10.1386/jvap.12.1.65_1

contriButor detAils

Atsuhide Ito studied Fine Art and Social Anthropology and completed his Ph.D. in 2007. He is Associate Lecturer in Foundation Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Southampton Solent University. Following the work of Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin his current research concerns experiences of haunting and ghostly apparitions after traumatic events such as nuclear disasters. In his art practice he works with dust as a medium.

E-mail: atsumaler@googlemail.com

Atsuhide Ito has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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