FOIL
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Painting: Poignancy and Ethics
Dr Jim Mooney
A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me
(but also bruises me, is poignant to me). [1]
The ‘staging’ of this exhibition Foil is the third of an ongoing series of manifestations by the core group of artists, derrick Haughton, Kathleen Mullaniff, Eugene Palmer and Edward Chell to which others, Martin Constable and Mark Fairnington, have on this occasion, been included. To what extent or not these artists share common ground in terms of declared interests is perhaps an open question best settled through recourse to the specifics of their individual outputs. What is beyond question, however, is their shared commitment to the defence and extension, re-inscription and reshaping, of the territory of painting.
To speak of ‘Painting’ in the generic sense today is a fraught business given the fractal intricacies which have come to characterise the contemporary operations of painters. Yet, there are nevertheless general remarks which can be made with regard to the function of painting in which a degree of cultural worth still obtains. Painting, in common with other aesthetic productions, simultaneously marks and is marked by loss. The mobilising loss of the originary love object. Moreover, the kind of painting which furnishes us with images, functions, in part, commemoratively, and although not strictly speaking indexical, it nevertheless points and index finger, as it were, to the object which the painted image now comes to substitute and resemble.
Painting is both of this world and posits a world ‘in itself’, that is, a world decisively separated from this world. In this sense it enacts a double occupancy, being both an object in this world and presenting to us a world ‘in itself’ where things are enacted from this world and are accorded an exotic positioning; exotic, in the etymological sense of ‘outside’, dehors, apart from. This notion of a double occupancy brings to mind Maurice Blanchot’s radical likening of the status of the image to that that of the cadaver which, we are instructed, is uncannily both here and nowhere.
In a particular sense, the image assumes a mediating role between the subject (viewer) and the object to which it refers. Viewed in this way, the painted substrate, the surface, facilitates this mediation. However, I hasten my thoughts and hurriedly wish to step sideways from this familiar reading (and move from characterisations of subject/object relations belonging, more properly, to idealist and realist philosophical traditions), to consider this carefully factured surface in terms of a differentially inclined spatial and temporal movement from inwardness to exteriority.
If there is any merit in Lacan’s proposition that ‘… in front of the picture, I am elided as subject of the geometrical plane’, [2] then we might fairly extend this proposition to include the painter of the picture, and assert that the screen (the geometrical plane of the canvas) now be seen as the locus of mediation between subjects, and becomes a tenuous, fragile and luminous site of intersubjective exchange. Let us be reminded that the (sur)face, the above face, is that which is most exposed and let us consider, in this light, Heidegger’s formulation of truth as ‘… uncovering and uncoveredness, shedding light and shed light’. [3] This shedding of light on the uncovered, the exposure of the exposed face, produces a vulnerability which appeals, (the call of the vulnerable), bringing nakedness to the surface. Standing before a painting, when conditions permit, we respond to the naked appeal of this surface and are beckoned, called upon to enter into a relation which is not nearly as forbidding, but is, nevertheless, akin to that which Levinas calls the ‘face-to-face’. This relation carries the promise of the possibility radically reducing the distance which separates the Same from the Other. A proximity born in response to a beckoning distance, establishes itself, and takes up a precariously identified, quivering position.
‘the Other becomes my neighbour precisely through the way the face
summons me, calls for me, begs for me, and in so doing recalls my responsibility, and calls me into question’. [4}
This call to respond solicits a movement which is both an inclination (a leaning toward) and a shift in inclination (taste, disposition). Poignancy moves us and the movement it gives rise to, leans us toward the Other and inclines us toward the condition of ‘implication’ where the Same and the Other become enfolded. It is the sting of poignancy which enables such a shift; we lurch, move outside ourselves, and become enveloped in the rapture of the ecstatic. This can never be expected or guaranteed, it may be sought out or hoped for, but always happens by accident and mostly when we are least prepared. When it does occur, it is experienced as an irrecoverable instant, a moment when our subjectivity is stretched beyond the confines of the familiar. It is perhaps worth underscoring here the trace of the Greek ektasis – stretching, through ektasis – to make to stand, which remains resonant in the ecstatic. Moreover, it has been noted that:
‘Through ecstasy man takes up existence. Ecstasy is then found
to be the very event of existence.’ [5]
Language can inhabit thought in ways which blind us to its treacherous deceit, concealing its other face in our usual patterns and habits of speech. I suspect we have become all too habituated to using the term ‘poignancy’ in the sentimental response to the pathetic scene and tend to overlook the subtle violence of which it also speaks. A felicitous correspondence is struck in relation to the resolutely ambiguous title of this project, ‘Foil’, and the oft forgotten semantic detriments of ‘poignancy’, (pertaining to weapons), as painfully sharp and piercing. If we take foil, in this instance, to refer to the type of sword used in competition which inflicts a sting as opposed to a mortal wound, and the disturbance it provokes, we move even closer to Roland Barthes’ articulation of the punctum. Most daringly, we might propose that we arrive at the insinuating intricacies of an ethics of the punctum. The punctum as ethical event? Might we audaciously nudge this idea along and formulate the proposition that it is a poignancy which introduces the punctum, (by now almost worn-out, tired and degraded, through discussions in relation to the photograph), to painting, where it becomes lodged in the very depths of its surface?
It is due to a mobilising sympathy, aroused by poignancy, that the work becomes folded back, incorporated once again, into our world. Any encounter of this kind produces an ‘initial asymmetrical intersubjectivity’, [6] when recognition of the other’s subjectivity is unevenly tilted, that is, until the moment of poignancy produces its sting, in an instant, and a sympathetic movement is initiated which inclines us in another direction: toward ‘the leaving of an inwardness for an exteriority’. [7] This event, in the order of events, is perhaps small, almost imperceptible, surreptitious even, and would threaten to fade into the obscure, if it were not also talked of as the very founding event of existence.
This inclination, this move from ‘an inwardness to an exteriority’ can be said to typify the operations of the painter as much as it could be said to describe the viewer’s relation, as respondent to the appellant; to the work of the painter. Consequently, might we ask if it be licit to consider that viewer and painter do no more than collude in order to create the conditions under which the work does the work’s work? This double investment, this two-sided operation, speaks of a libidinous economy whereby the planar surface of the work becomes no more and no less the site of intersubjective exchange. This privileged site initiates a flow of grace and we might well deduce that the particular gift of the work is a gift which conveys the grace of poignancy and the poignancy of grace. I have in mind here, the shed, shared, light of grace which flows from the ecstatic.
The work solicits our sympathy, our attention, and should we fall under the sway of its epiphany, and rise to the call to respond, a blossoming occurs, whereby an improbable organ of affectivity unfurls, which by some small miracle, reflects, as in a mirror, the very organ of affectivity which gave rise to the work in the first instance. perhaps to speak of an organ of affectivity misleads or leastways leads us in another direction, and we are persuaded to introduce a certain rigour which would dislodge this fancy and guide us to alight upon the notion of another improbable organ: the organ of libido.
Each painting demands to be apprehended in terms of its own seductive allure and this is entirely appropriate. We are therefore required to attend to the specifics of the painted surface, the particular way in which matter is pleated and most especially, to the interlacing of matter and libido.
Lacan designates the name for this organ which is not an organ in the normal sense inasmuch as it does not require the usual nourishments and, by dint of this fact, is considered immortal. He calls it the lamella. The lamella is characterised by an extreme flatness. It moves around a lot, flying in every direction. It has the capacity to adhere and to insinuate. It can overwhelm. It can smother. It can, of course, adhere to the surface of painting, and then again, it can fly off. It might strike us in the face. It sticks to painting in the way the artists in this project stick to painting. It is the very glue which fixes these artists to painting. It is clear they don’t have much choice in the matter. They are bonded, by something like the bonds of love, to a practice which refuses to relinquish its hold. The painter is held in thrall by an interminable libidinal fixation. We, as viewers, as respondents, are in turn, enthralled by these libidinally charged surfaces which solicit and soak up some of our own libidinal pulsions. Poignancy, then, gives rise to the ethical and the libidinal in a bid to stir, to implicate our capacity to care; to respond to the call of the Other. We become implicated through an overcoming of the indifference which stifles response. This implication in the alterity of the Other, moves us toward a questioning of our own subject positions and instigates a shift in our own capacity for recognition. The dynamic oscillation between proximity and distance, provoked by this encounter, introduces subtle erotic modalities which place us, as subjects, under pressure. This pressure arises from the disturbance carried in the train of this demand to effect a repositioning, enact a shift in inclination, as we ready ourselves to face the work’s face.
This work of facing is more challenging than we might first imagine. The first challenge is to ‘sovereignty’. The notion, of a sovereign subject. And if this challenge is effective, it opens up to a stateless ‘state of being’, to a place where we are suddenly assailable, responsive, vulnerable and questioning. The comfort of an illusory stasis of Being cedes to the more troubling flux of new becomings. When most effective and affective, paintings represent the presences of absences which have the power to marshal all of our other absences and bring them before our very presence. We are in this way, called to account; called to account for our presence in the fullness of this alterity, this presence/absence of the Other.
Dr Jim Mooney
Notes:
1] Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Fontana Paperbacks, 1984. p 27
2] Jaques Lacan, ‘What is a Picture?’,The Four Fundamental concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan. Penguin Books, (London), 1977. p 108
3] Michael Inwood, Heidegger, Oxford University Press, (Oxford and New York), 1997. p 48
4] Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Ethics as First Philosiphy’, The Levinas Reader. (Ed) sean hand, Basil Blackwell, (Oxford), 1989. p 83
5] Emmanual Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans, Alphonso Lingis, Kluwer Academic Publishers, (Dordecht/Boston/London), third printing, 1995. pp 81 -82
6] ibid. p 95
7] ibid. p 81
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