Painting as Model

Fentre jaune cadmium, ou, Les dessous de la peinture by Hubert Damisch

Review by: Yve-Alain Bois and John Shepley
October, Vol. 37 (Summer, 1986), pp. 125-137
Published by: The MIT Press
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Painting as Model
Fene^trejaune cadmium, ou, Les dessous de la peinture by HubertDamisch,
Paris, Editionsdu Seuil, 1984.

YVE-ALAIN

BOIS

translatedby JOHN SHEPLEY

"What does it mean fora painter tothink?"
(p. 59)- thisis the old question
to which Hubert Damisch has returnedin connection with the art of this century,and which he alone in France seems to take seriously. Not only what is
the role of speculative thoughtforthe painter at work?but above all what is the
mode of thoughtof which painting is the stake? Can one thinkin painting as
one can dream in color? and is there such a thing as pictorial thought that
would differfromwhat Klee called "visual thought"?Or again, to use the language currentsome ten years ago, is painting a theoreticalpractice? Can one
designate the place of the theoreticalin painting withoutdoing violence to it,
without,that is, disregardingpainting's specificity,withoutannexing it to an
applied discourse whose meshes are too slack to give a suitable account ofpainting's irregularities?Nowhere in Damisch's book are therebroad examinations
of the idea of "the pictorial."Instead thereis, in each instance, the formulation
of a question raised by the work of art withina historicallydeterminedframework, and the search fora theoreticalmodel to which one mightcompare the
work'soperationsand withwhichone mightengage them. This approach simultaneouslypresupposesa rejectionofestablishedstylisticcategories(and indirectly
an interestin new groupingsor transversecategories), a freshstartof the inquiry in theface ofeach new work, and a permanentawareness of theoperating
rule of painting in relation to discourse. For Damisch's question is also, as we
shall see: what does the painter'spictorialthoughtmean forone who has undertaken to write?
Damisch's book stands alone in France, as it is resolutelyopposed to: (1)
the stamp-collecting
approach of traditionalarthistorians,whose veritableterror
of the theoreticalhas gradually turned their texts into the gibberishof documentalistsand antiquarians - in the sense that Nietzsche gave this word (with
art has remained untouched in France
very few exceptions, twentieth-century
by thisravenous sortof discourse,empirical at best, and withnothingofhistory
about it except the name); (2) the ineptitudeof art criticism,a formofjournalism all themore amnesiac forhaving constantlyto adapt itselfto markettrends;
(3) that typicallyFrench genre, inaugurated on the one hand by Baudelaire

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OCTOBER

and on the otherprobably by Sartre, of the textaboutart by a literarywriteror

philosopher, each doing his littlenumber, a seeminglyobligatoryexercise in
France if one is to reach the pantheon of lettersor of thought.
While Damisch's book exposes the fundamentalincompetenceof the first
two prevailing discourses (demonstratingto the historianstheirrefusalto ask
themselvesabout the type of historicityof theirsubject; teachingthe criticsthe
necessityof discoveringwhat it is that calls into question the certitudeof their
judgments), it is in relation to the thirdand absolutely hegemonic kind of text
thathis lesson seems to me most important.Why? Because Damisch teaches us
above all to rid ourselves of the stiflingconcept of imageupon which the relation
of this kind of text to art is founded- arrogant, ignorant,predatorytextsthat
consider painting a collectionof images to be trackeddown, illustrationsto be
captioned.
One example: Jacques Lacan is reproached forhaving invoked "abstract
models fromthe start"when faced with Francois Rouan's braidings (Lacan's
everlasting Borromean knots) rather than examining "on the evidence" the
detail of the fabric(pp. 280-281). Not that Damisch has anythingagainst abstract models in themselves; he simply says that the work produces them by
itselffor anyone who takes the trouble to notice, and that in this case neither
Rouan's painting nor the theoryof knots gains anythingby the demonstration
in the formof a priori advice fromthe eminent psychoanalyst.' Nor is it that
Damisch becomes the prosecutortryingto pin down all the scornfulremarks
that characterize the discourse of his contemporaries on the subject of art.
There is littleof polemics in Fenitrejaune
cadmium,which consistsof essays written between 1958 and 1984. Or ratherthereis a polmiqued'envoi,as one speaks
which governs, if not the whole book, at least the
of a coupd'envoi,a "kickoff,"
textsof the firstand second parts, entitledrespectively"L'image et le tableau"
and "Theoremes."
The Perceptive
Model
Although they may seem somewhat foreignto anyone reading them today, the pages Damisch devotes to Sartre are decisive, and I would say today
more than ever. These concern Sartre's thesis that there is no such thing as
aesthetic perception, the aesthetic object being something "unreal," apprehended by the "imaging consciousness." This thesis, fromSartre'sL'imaginaire,
1.
Jacques Lacan's texton Rouan, illustratedwith some seventeen figuresof knots, began as
follows:"Francois Rouan paints on bands. If I dared, I would advise him to change thisand paint
on braid." This text, originallypublished in the catalogue of the Rouan exhibition at the Musie
Cantini (Marseilles, 1978), was reprintedin the catalogue of the Rouan exhibitionat the Centre
Georges Pompidou (Paris, 1983), a catalogue forwhich Damisch wrote the preface, reprintedin
cadmium.Damisch's answer is simply that the braids were there all along in Rouan's
Fenetrejaune
painting for those who were able to see them.

Paintingas Model

127

states that, in Damisch's words, "a portrait,a landscape, a formonly allows

itselfto be recognized in painting insofaras we cease to view the painting for
what it is, materiallyspeaking, and insofaras consciousness steps back in relation to realityto produce as an image the object represented"(p. 67). Such a
thesiswould at best hold true fora type of illusionisticpaintingthat, assuming
it had existed at all, would only have existed at a particularmomentin history.
That Sartre'saestheticis an aestheticof mimesis,in the most traditionalsense of
nor fundamentallyusefulto demonstrate,although
the word, is neitherdifficult
it may have had a considerable stake in its time. What is importantabout
Damisch's textis thathe takes thisaestheticto be emblematic in developing his
polemic in an essay on an "abstract"painter, one of the most complex of them,
namely Mondrian. For it is not only that what Sartre calls "the imaging attitude" blinds our literatiand philosophersto theruptureconstitutedby "abstract
painting,"it is also this"imagingattitude"that stilltoday governsstudiesby the
majorityof art historians,forthe most part Americans, who take an interestin
thiskind of painting. If theses abound thatwould make Malevich's BlackSquare
a solar eclipse, Rothko'slate worksstylizedversionsof the Pieta and Deposition,
or Mondrian's BroadwayBoogieWoogiean interpretationof the New York subway map, it is because the kind of relationto art denounced by Damisch is not
only very much with us but, in the currenthostilityto theory,stands a good
chance of becoming absolutely dominant. Damisch's text shows us, however,
thatwe don't have to search for"une femmela-dessous" in order to remain tied
to the systemof interpretationofwhich Sartrewas the eponym. One has only to
be inattentiveto the specificityof the object to be led back to this system;hence
Damisch's interestin the detail of the signifier,the texture of the painting,
everythingthat, according to Sartre, insofaras it is real, "does not become the
object of aesthetic appreciation."'2
The case of Mondrian is symptomatic. How many purely geometric
readings (indifferentto the medium of expression), how many interpretations
resultingfromblindness to the paintings' subtle games have given rise to the
pregnantimage of a grid imposed upon a neutral background? As early as this
formidabletextof 1958, and fromthe point of view of his controversywithSartre, Damisch sees in Mondrian a painter of the perceptiveaporia, preciselythe
opposite of the "geometricabstraction"genre of which he is supposed to be the
herald. For the firsttime, so far as I know, the enterpriseof destruction
carried
out by the Dutch painter is understood as a concerted operation governing
every detail of his painting. In order to comprehend, forexample, the abandonment of all curves, there is no need to get mixed up in the theosophical
"What is real, as one should never tire of stating, are the results of the brushstrokes,the
2.
layer of paint on the canvas, its texture,the varnish that is applied over the colors. But all of this
is precisely what does not become the object of aesthetic appreciation" (Jean-Paul Sartre, L'imaginaire,Paris, Gallimard, 1940, p. 240).

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OCTOBER

nonsense with which the artist'smind was momentarilyencumbered. It is because the line has the functionof destroyingthe plane as such that it will have
to be straight:
The interdictionof any other line but the straightcorresponded to
the experientialfactthat a line curvinginward on a canvas or piece
of paper defines "full"or "empty"spaces, which the imaging consciousness is irresistiblyled to consider for themselvesto the detriment of the line that serves as their pretext. Mondrian's paintings
are made to counter such impulses and to hinder the movement
whereby an unreal object is constitutedfromthe tangible realityof
the painting,the eye being ceaselessly led back to the painting'sconstituentelements, line, color, design (p. 69).
Damisch's thesisis rigorouslyanti-Sartrean:in opposition to the "imaging
consciousness,"whichnecessarilyhas as itspurpose the constitutionofan image,
he sees in Mondrian's canvases, in Pollock's, in Picasso's Portrait
of Vollard,each
with its own modality, "an ever-reversedkaleidoscope that offersto aesthetic
a task both novel and withoutassignable end.., the 'meaning' of the
perception
work consistingpreciselyin this swarmingand ambiguous appeal" (p. 78). Or
again: "If the painter has chosen to prohibitthe imaging consciousness from
giving itselffreerein . . . it is forthe purpose of awakening in the spectatorthe
uneasiness with which the perception of a painting should be accompanied"
(p. 71). Now, this task of the painter is the stake ofhis art; it is what makes his
canvas a specifictheoreticalmodel, thedevelopmentofa thoughtwhose properly
pictorial aspect cannot be circumvented:
One cannot give way to reveriein frontof a Mondrian painting,nor
even to pure contemplation.But it is here thattherecomes intoplay,
beyond the sensorial pleasure granted us by Sartre, some more
secret activityof consciousness, an activityby definitionwithoutassignable end, contraryto the imaging activitywhich exhausts itself
in the constitutionof its object. Each time perceptionthinksit can go
beyond what is given it to see toward what it would constituteas
meaning, it is immediatelyled back to the firstexperience, which
wants it to falterin constitutingthat white as background and this
black as a form(ibid.).
I would call this theoreticalmodel introducedby Damisch perceptive,
but
by antiphrasis,because forthe painters studied it is a question in each case of
"disturbingthe permanent structuresof perception, and firstof all the figure/
ground relationship,beyond which one would be unable to speak of a perceptive field"(p. 110, in connectionwith Dubuffet). With the exception of one or
two texts,especially the one of 1974 on Valerio Adami, all the articlesin Fenitre
jaune cadmiuminsiston this point: "Painting, forthe one who produces it as for

Paintingas Model

129

the one who consumes it, is always a matterof perception"(p. 148). And all the
examples chosen (except forAdami and Saul Steinberg) assign to modernity
the preliminarytask of confusing the figure/groundopposition, without the
assurance of which no perceptioncould establish itselfin imaging synthesis.It
is this "perceptive model" that allows Damisch not only to compare Pollock
and Mondrian but also to establishthe ambiguityof the figure/ground
relationas
the
theme
of
the
American
and
to
ship
very
painter's interlacings
reject as
the
some
divide
that
have
tried
to
enforce
between
particularlyunproductive
Pollock's great abstract period, that of the all-over works of 1947-50, and his
so-called figurativecanvases of 1951 and the years that followed. Likewise,
Dubuffet'sgreat period (the 1950s) is deciphered, by directappeal to MerleauPonty, as an essential moment in this historyof perceptiveambiguity:
By treatingthe figuresas so many vaguely silhouettedbackgrounds
whose texturehe strivesto decipher and - conversely- by carrying
his gaze toward the less differentiatedbackgrounds to catch their
secretfiguresand mechanics, this painter has restoredto the idea of
formits original meaning, ifit is true that formcannot be reduced to
the geometricoutline of objects, that it is bound up with the texture
of things,and thatit draws simultaneouslyon all our senses (p. 117).
The phenomenologicalthemeof the originalunityof the senses oftenreturnsin
Damisch's writing,but it would be vain to see in these studies an application of
Merleau-Ponty's theory.And this is not only because this recurrenttheme is
seriouslyquestioned withregard to Fautrier(p. 134) or because the criticismof
"pure visibility"is reorientedthroughpsychoanalysis(pp. 262-263), but also
because phenomenologicalapprehensionin Damisch opens onto a second model,
copresentwith the first.
The TechnicalModel
In opposition to the "optical" interpretationthat has been given to
Pollock's all-over paintings by leading American formalistcritics(Greenberg,
Fried), an interpretationthatpartakes in a certainway, but much more subtly,
of Sartrean unreality,3Damisch proposes fromthe starta reading that I would
call technical.
It begins (but this also applies to the textson Klee, Dubuffet,or
Mondrian) with an insistenceon the realspace set in play by these canvases (of
course, it is always a question of counteringthe Sartrean imaginaryor unreal-

On the notion of opticsand the "relative indifferenceto the material process of elaboration"
3. the
of
work, typical of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, see Jean Clay, "La peinture en
charpie," dossier Ryman, Macula, nos. 3-4 (1978), pp. 171-172.

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OCTOBER

ity). From this deliberatelydown-to-earth,ground-levelapprehension flowsa

quite special attentionto the process of the work as a place of formation,prior
to its effects.Against the deliberatelyobfuscatingattitudeof the art historians,
always ready to erase ruptures,Damisch establishes a chronology,or rathera
technical logic, of invention: it would be wrong to see in the gesturalityof The
Flame(1937), or in the scribbledmarginsofMale andFemale(1942) and She-Wolf
(1943), the preliminarysigns of Pollock's great art. In the firstcase, "the touch
enlivens the paint that stillremains alien to it," while "Pollock's originalitywill
later consistpreciselyin connectingso closely the gesturedeployed on the canvas with the paint it spreads there that the latterwill seem to be its trace, its
necessary product"(p. 76). In the second case, we are dealing only with a borrowing,fromMax Ernst or Masson, ifyou like: "The inventiontakes place, indeed, at the decisive momentwhen the painter raised thisprocess [dripping]which afterall had been only a means of'padding'- to the dignityof an original
principle for the organization of surfaces"(ibid.). For there is technique and
technique, or ratherthere is the epistemological moment of technique, where
thoughtand inventiontake place, and then there is all the rest, all the procedures that borrow fromtraditionor contest it withoutreaching that threshold
that it is a question of designating- the reason that one can speak of technique
that it mattersand does not matterfor art" (p. 94).
"indifferently,
It is by remainingat the elementarylevel of the gesture,of the trace, that
Damisch discoversthisthresholdin Pollock, firstin connectionwithShimmering
Substance(1946), where "each touch seems destined to destroythe effectborn of
the relation between the preceding touch and the background"(p. 78), then in
the great all-over works of 1947-50: "Lines that plow the canvas throughand
and
through,in a counterpointthatno longer develops in widthbut in thickness,
each of which has no meaning except in relation to the one that precedes iteach projectionof color succeeding anotheras thoughto effaceit"(p. 80). This
reading marks a beginning, firstof all because it is the only one that makes it
possible to understand the manner in which Pollock was workingagainst surrealism (it is impossible in his case to speak of automatism, despite appearances: cf. p. 85), then because it points to the veryplace where Pollock's painting abandons, or ratherdestroys,the order of the image, "whichis reduced to a
surface effect,without any of the thickness that is the particular quality of
painting,"as Damisch says later on regarding Frangois Rouan (p. 296).
Damisch is rapidlyled, in Pollock's work,to make thiscategoryof thickness
in the order of technique (which has since been reexamined by others alerted
confusion(to which it is linked)
by his text)4the equivalent of the figure/ground

4.
See especially Jean Clay, "Pollock, Mondrian, Seurat: la profoundeur plate," in Hans
Namuth, L'atelierdeJacksonPollock,Paris, Macula, 1982.

Paintingas Model

131

in the order of perception. From then on it becomes one of the essential question marks of Damisch's inquiry, functioningalmost as an epistemologicaltest
in his discourse. The reemergence of the hidden undersides in Dubuffet
(p. 114), the exchanges ofpositionbetween outer surfaceand underside in Klee
(p. 213), the interweavingsof Mondrian and later of Rouan- all of these become theoreticalmodels that demonstratethe painting of this centuryjust as
no accidentthat
perspectivedemonstratedthatof theRenaissance. It is therefore
the
the book appears under the sign of Le chef-d'oeuvre
inconnu; essay devoted to
the novel provides the subtitleto the collection: "The Undersides of Painting."
If one is to believe Frenhofer,it looks as thoughpaintingshould produce its fulleffectonly insofaras it proceeds, in its most intimatetexture, froma predeterminedexchange of positions that would be the
equivalent of a kind of weaving in which the threads would go up
and down alternatively,the same strandpassing now above and now
below, without the possibility of being assigned a univocal sign
(p. 16).
Frenhofer'sname is invoked in no less than fivetextsin thiscollectionin addition to the one devoted to the "philosophical study"of Balzac ("whoever writes
proceeds in a way not dissimilar to one who paints, using a quotation that he
had firstsingled out for completelydifferentpurposes, to start out on a new
in every sense of the word" [p. 258]). Far removed from recent
development,
the Frenhoferof Damisch has been, fromhis first
romanticistinterpretations,5
a
emblem
of
the
texts,
conversion, the signal of invention- with Cezanne
c'est
moi") and, one should add, Seurat - of a new thicknessthat
("Frenhofer,
would no longer borrow fromthe old academic recipes:
And if one wants modernityin painting to be signaled by the replacement of the superimpositionof preparations,of underpainting,
glazing, transparencies, and varnish, by another craft based on
flatness, the juxtaposition of touches, and simultaneous contrast,
how can we not see that the problem of the "undersides"will only
have been displaced or transformed,painting having necessarily
kept somethingof its thickness,even ifit were aiming only at surface
effects?(p. 37).
Here, fromthe beginning, a metaphor intervenesto help us see that this
model is irreducibleto the perceptive
technical
model as it was earlier described,
it
is
its
that
of
the
inscribed
on the chessboard, "in its
corollary:
although
figure

I referto the excellent collection Autourdu Chef-d'oeuvre

5.
inconnude Balzac, ed. Thierry Chabanne, Paris, Ecole Nationale Supdrieure des Arts D6coratifs, 1985. For a still differentapParis, Minuit, 1984.
proach, see Georges Didi-Huberman, La peintureincarnde,

132

OCTOBER

fullspaces as in its emptyones, but in the superimpositionand overlapping of

its layers as well" (p. 158), inaccessible
as such topure vision.The work on the
thicknessof the plane is forDamisch a technicalmodel par excellence, because
it implies a knowledge and a speculation (p. 279): we are dealing, as close as
possible to the paint, with one of the most abstract- in its topological
background- inventions of the pictorial thought of this century. "Without
recourse to theoryor to mathematics, a painter may very well come to formulate, by means all his own, a problematic that may later be translatedinto
other terms and into another register (as happened in its time with
perspective)"(p. 288). It is because he acknowledges that paintingcan provide
theoreticalmodels that Damisch will be able to single out in Pollock the moment of thicknessand fromthen on rewritea portion of the historyof modern
art.
The Symbolic
Model
It is the fashion nowadays to ask oneselfabout the ways and means
by which the passage frompaintingto the discourse thattakes it over
is supposed to operate- ifnot about the end of thistransference.It is
even one of the most frequentcommonplaces in our artisticand literary culture, a toposfromwhich veryfewescape who, withoutclaiming to be "art critics"(that is behind us), make it theirprofession,if
not theirwork, to write about painting or about painters. Without
rememberingthat thisquestion, which one would like to see preceding any commentary,has already been decided by culture, which is
at all times responsible for organizing the game, distributingthe
roles, and regulatingthe exchanges between the two registersof the
visible and the readable, between the painted and the written(or the
spoken), the seeing and the hearing, the seen and the heard. If this
question today professesto be such, and a question to which culture,
our culture, would not furnish a ready-made answer, it is still
culture, our culture, that will have wanted it that way, and that always makes us ask it all over again (p. 186).
If the numerous passages thatDamisch devotes in thiscollectionto the relation
between paintingand discourse avoid as much as possible the cliche thathe denounces, it is partlybecause he demonstratesthathis textcan only belong to it.
Like the Foucault of ThisIs Nota Pipe, whose analyses he anticipatesas early as
1960, Damisch likes to draw a historicalmap of the connectionsbetween practices. Here he stressesthe extent to which the mode of relation of painting to
discourse has become in this century, thanks to abstraction and structural
linguistics,a particularlynecessary stumblingblock in the analysis. It is because he considers painting a key to the interpretationof the world, a key
neithermimeticnor analogical, but, as forscience or language, symbolic
(more

Paintingas Model

133

in Cassirer's sense than Lacan's), and because he assigns to paintinga cultural

task equal to and different
fromthe discourse thatdeals withit, thatthe archeoor
logical
epistemological reading takes an unexpected turn in Damisch, as
thoughfindingin certainpictorialadvances theoremsof anthropologicalmutations.
concernthe relationsthatmathematics
cadmium
Many pages in Fenetrejaune
and paintingmaintain at the symboliclevel, whetherit is a question of the role
of mimesis in algebraic invention(p. 51) and notation (p. 196) or the common
ground (projective plane) on which geometry and perspective construction
work(p. 295). Furthermore,it is probably afterhaving successfullyshown how
the invention of pictorial perspective in the Renaissance anticipated by two
centuriesthe work of mathematicianson the notion of infinity6that Damisch
was temptedto pursue the transserialinquiryinto modern times. The long arwhich compares the 1932 painting with the
ticle on Paul Klee's Equals Infinity,
discoveriesof Cantor and Dedekind on thepower of thecontinuum,sufficiently
shows the interestas well as the difficulty
of a thoughtin which,
beyond the accepted division of the work,the inheritedseparation of
the fields of knowledge and significance,the differences
among the
known
as
and
"art,"
"science,"
"mathematics,"
practices
"painting"
cease to be thoughtof in termsof exteriorityin order to be thought
of- whateverone understandsthereby- in termsof relationsofproduction, i.e., of history
(p. 215).
Partlybecause thisis not my field,I preferto leave it and insistinstead on
one of the symbolicmodels developed by Damisch forthe art of this century,a
model that moreover has the particular feature,according to Bataille, of ripping the frockcoat philosophy gives to what exists, the "mathematical frock
coat." One will recognize here the famous definition,given in Documentsin
a term, again according to Bataille, thatservestodeclassify.
1929, of the informe,
Among the referencesthat return at several points in this book (Frenhofer,
Alberti, Ripa, and others), there is one that I consider emblematic of the
reading that I am here seeking to circumscribe: it is those pages devoted by
Valery to Degas in which Valery observed, in Damisch's words,
that the notion of formis changed-if not cast in doubt altogetherby the projectiononto the verticalplane of the canvas of the horizontal plane of the floor,which no longer functionsas a neutral and indifferent
backgroundbut as an essentialfactorin the vision of things,
and can- almost- constitutethe verysubjectofthe painting(p. 111).

6.

See Hubert Damisch, Thkoriedu nuage,Paris, Seuil, 1972, pp. 214-248.

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OCTOBER

by a fewyears
Already in the essay devoted to Dubuffetin
1962--anticipating
flatbedpictureplane in connecLeo Steinberg'sinventionof the concept of the
tion withRauschenberg- then in more recentstudies, the confusionofthe vertical and horizontalproposed by one side of modern paintingwas taken foran
essential mutation,participating,ifyou like, in a critique of optics, whose importance is yetto be measured.7 This model includes Dubuffet'stwindesires"to
forcethe gaze to consider the painted surfaceas a ground viewed fromabove,
and at the same time to erect the ground into a wall calling forman's interven"an area, a space of play, attion by line or imprint"(p. 112); Pollock's grounds,
tacked by the artistfromall sides at once, which he did not hesitateto penetrate
in person and which . . . put up a physical resistance to him" (p. 149); Saul
Steinberg's Tables(p. 231), but I would be temptedto say of these, contraryto
Damisch, that they do not come "directlyinto the inquiry," and are among
"those that proliferatein its wake" (p. 130). Even Mondrian's work, as I have
tried to show elsewhere,8touches on this symbolicmodel, this taxonomic collapse, this overturningof oppositions- especially between representationand
action- on which our whole Western aesthetic is founded. Damisch probably
had an intuitionof this, since forhim the studyof Mondrian's work is "an invitation to createunder its most concrete aspects" (p. 72). The revelation of this
model is one of the mostfruitful
pointsofDamisch's book. From cubism to miniof
from
the
abstraction
the 1920s to that of the '50s and '60s, I would
malism,
almost go as far as to point to all the high points of modern art as verifications
of this discovery,as demonstrationsof its validity.
The Strategic
Model
Shortlybefore his death, "and as though in passing," Barnett Newman
confidedto Damisch "thateverythinghe had been able to do had meaning only
in relationto Pollock's work and againstit"(p. 154). I like to thinkthatDamisch
recalled thisremarkwhen he read Levi-Strauss's Voiedesmasques,and thatfrom
long knowledge of this kind of secret, then fromits sudden emergence as evimodel.9 Like
dence, a fourthmodel emerged in Damisch's text, a strategic
7.
Leo Steinberg,
"Other
Criteria"
inthecollection
ofthesamename,New
(1972),reprinted
"surrealist"
York,OxfordUniversity
Press,1972,pp. 55-91. For a readingof Giacometti's

of Bataille and analyzing in it the vertical/horizontalreversal under

oeuvre, based on the informe
discussion here, see Rosalind Krauss, "No More Play," in The Originality
and
of theAvant-Garde
OtherModernistMyths,Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1985, pp. 43-85.
8.
My essay on Mondrian's New YorkCityI, 1942 (in Cahiersdu MusdeNationaldArtModerne,
no. 15 [1985], pp. 60-85) owes much, entirelyunconsciously, to Damisch's text on the Dutch
painter, as to a good number of texts reprintedin Fenitrejaunecadmium.
9.
"It would be misleading to imagine, therefore,as so many ethnologistsand art historians
stilldo today, that a mask and, more generally,a sculptureor a painting may be interpretedeach
foritself,according to what it representsor to the aesthetic or ritual use forwhich it is destined.
We have seen that, on the contrary,a mask does not exist in isolation; it supposes other real or

Paintingas Model

135

chess pieces, like phonemes in language, a work has significance,as LeviStrauss shows, firstby what it is not and what it opposes, that is, in each case
according to its position, its value, withina field- itselfliving and stratified
which has above all to be circumscribedby definingits rules. Livi-Strauss's
condescending remarksabout art historians,unable, in his opinion, to understand the structuralor rather the strategic nature of signification,are not
strictlydeserved, at least if one considers art historyin its earlier phases and
conceived the
not forwhat it has largelybecome today. As we know, Wb1fflin
baroque paradigm as incomprehensibleunless measured against the classical;
of sixteenth-and
and Riegl demonstratedin a thickvolume how the Kunstwollen
Dutch art was at firstnegativelydefinedin relationto that
seventeenth-century
of Italian art of the same period. Such readings are, in any case, commonplace
in Fenitrejaune
cadmium(see, forexample, the comparisons between Pollock and
and
have the merit of no longer taking seriouslythe autonomy of
Mondrian)
what is called style. Likewise, since strategymeans power stakes, there are
many observationsin thisbook on the historyof the artisticinstitutionin its relation to production, whetherit has to do with the role of criticism,the museum, the market,the public, or even the relationship(fundamentallychanged
since C6zanne, p. 123) that the painter maintains with his or her canvas.
But the interestof the strategicmodel does not reside so much thereas in
what it allows us to think historicallyof the concepts revealed by the other
models as well as the ties that they maintain among themselves. One will
notice, by the way, that this fourthmodel was not born directlyfroma confrontationwith the works themselves: it does not immediatelytake account of
pictorial inventionitself,of the status of the theoreticalin painting, but of the
conditions of its appearance, of what establishes itselfbetween works; it finds
itselfwith respect to the other models in a second, metacriticalposition, and
thisis whyit allows us to ask again the question ofthe pictorialspecificity(of invention) and survivalofpainting,withoutgettingstuckonce more in the essentialism to which American formalistcriticismhad accustomed us. "It is not
enough, in order forthere to be painting, that the painter take up his brushes
"it is still
again," Damisch tellsus: it is stillnecessarythat it be worththe effort,
that
in
succeed
to
us
that
necessary
[thepainter]
demonstrating
paintingis somewe
cannot
do
that
it
is
without,
thing
positively
indispensable to us, and that it
would be madness - worse still, a historical error- to let it lie fallow today"
(p. 293).
potential masks always by its side, masks that mighthave been chosen in its stead and substituted
forit. In discussing a particular problem, I hope to have shown that a mask is not primarilywhat
it representsbut what it transforms,that is to say, what it chooses notto represent.Like a myth,a
mask denies as much as it affirms.It is not made solely of what it says or thinksit is saying, but
what it excludes" (Claude Levi-Strauss, The WayofMasks, trans. Sylvia Modelski, Seattle, Universityof Washington Press, 1982, p. 144).

136

OCTOBER

Let us again take the strategicmetaphor par excellence, that of chess:

Damisch uses it to clarifyhis historicalpoint. Let us suppose thatNewman and
Pollock are opponents. How can we determine in their moves what is of the
order of the match, belonging in particular to its new although replayable developments, and what is of the generic order of the game, with its assigned
rules? One can see what is displaced by thiskind of question, such as the problem of repetitionsthat had so worried W61fflin:
It is certain that throughthe problematic of abstraction,American
painters [of the abstractexpressionistgeneration],just as already in
the 1920s the exponents of suprematism, neoplasticism, purism,
etc., could nourish the illusion that, far frombeing engaged merely
in a single match that would take its place in the group of matches
making up the gameof "painting,"they were returningto the very
foundationsof the game, to its immediate, constituentdonnies.The
American episode would then representless a new development in
the historyof abstractionthan a new departure, a resumption- but
at a deeper level and, theoreticallyas much as practically,withmore
powerfulmeans- of the match begun under the titleof abstraction
thirtyor fortyyears earlier (p. 167).
The strategicreading is strictlyantihistoricist:it does not believe in the exhaustion of things, in the linear genealogy offeredto us by art criticism,always
ready, unconsciouslyor not, to followthe demands of the marketin search of
new products, but neitherdoes it believe in the order of a homogenous time
withoutbreaks, such as art historylikes to imagine. Its question becomes "one
of the statusthat ought to be assigned to the match'painting,'as one seesit being
played at a given momentin particularcircumstances,in itsrelationto thegame
of the same name" (p. 170)- and the question can be asked about any of the
models (perceptive, technical, and symbolic) described above, as well as about
the relations they maintain among themselvesat a given moment in history.
Such questioning has the immediate advantage of raising doubt about
certain truisms. Is the "alleged convention of depth"- rejected by the pictorial
art of this centurybecause, according to Greenberg, it is unnecessary-necessarily of the order of the "match" more than of the game (p. 166)? Also, concerningwhat Damisch observed of the "undersides of painting,"should we not
ratherconsider that a series of displacementswill have modifiedtheirrole (the
position on the chessboard)? And is it not the same for the convention of
"chiaroscuro"(ibid.)? Withouttherebybecoming a theoreticalmachine encoursince on the contrarywe have to take a positionabout it, the
aging indifference,
has
the advantage of decipheringthe pictorialfieldas an anstrategicapproach
field
where
tagonistic
nothingis ever decided, and of leading the analysis back
to a typeof historicitythat it had neglected, that of long duration (to which the
symbolic model par excellence also goes back). Hence Damisch's supremely

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137

ironic attitudetoward the apocalyptic tone adopted today concerningthe impasse in which art findsitself,an impasse to be taken simplyas one ofthe many
interruptedmatches to which historyholds the secret.10

The problem, forwhoever writesabout it, should not be so much to

writeabout paintingas to tryto do somethingwithit, withoutindeed
claiming to understandit betterthan the painterdoes, . . . [to tryto]
see a littlemore clearly, thanks to painting, into the problems with
which [the writer]is concerned, and which are not only, nor even
primarily,problems of painting- if theywere, all he would have to
do would be to devote himselfto this art (p. 288).
Because he considers painting a theoretical operator, a producer of
models, because he agrees with this statementby Dubuffetgiven as a quotation-"painting may be a machine to convey philosophy- butalreadytoelaborate
it"(p. 104), and because he means in his workto receive a lesson frompainting,
Hubert Damisch offersus one of the most thoughtfulreadings of the art of this
century,but one that also remains as close as possible to its object, deliberately
situatingitselfeach time at the very heart of pictorial invention. For what the
perceptive,technical,and symbolicmodels aim primarilyat demonstratingare
the mechanisms of this invention,and what the strategicmodel takes account
of is its mode of historicity.

10. "Hence the

to which art, or whatever goes under
ideological--according
that name, would fiction--basically
its end, a fictionwhose only meaning is to confuse the end
today have reached
of this or that match (or series of matches) with the end of the game itself(as ifa game could have
an end): the rule requiring henceforththat all matches (or series of matches) have an end, even in
the highlysymptomaticmanner of the impasse,while the moves follow each other at an ever increasing pace" (p. 171).