Aesthetics of the imprint

By retracing a synoptic story of the imprint, and by modifying our usual ways of looking at the image in its singularity, Contact by contact wants to challenge the model optical imitation by promoting that, tactile and technical, of work in action. Georges Didi-Huberman intends to modify our usual ways of understanding each work of art in its historicity. The history of art is too dependent on a deductive model which supposes a movement of “ progress “From modernism to postmodernism, and that a” evolution In art is possible: it would tend towards a purification of forms and concepts until it leads to a completely dematerialized art, no longer being interested in form and its constraints. To this model, it is necessary to substitute another, more complex, more able to account for the suggestions of the visual, of the evocative power of art, which takes into account the intrications of various, heterogeneous and conflicting temporalities, of which any image is made, and which make it the richness of reading and feelings.

Anachronism and archeology of forms

Taking up the challenge of talking about the imprint “ in general “(While it is always the indication of a particular relationship, a specific body), Georges Didi-Huberman claims, as in his previous works, theanachronism Warburgian root to rethink the “ current situation – The historian must be anthropologist and complexify his own models of evolution, transmission, he must summon all the history and all the images, whatever their era, past or present, in order to understand the event What does any meeting with a work of art suppose. Anachronism, the dialectical relationship to time whose technique of the imprint is promising, must make it possible to release reflection on the contemporary art of its sterilizing impasse, between postmodernism and antimoderism. Truly return to Walter Benjamin, in his way of thinking aboutwill haveshould make it possible to dialect the art criticism, to end the deploration or the implementation of the “ loss of real values “, And to reconsider, for example, the work of a Marcel Duchamp, so often reduced to a few hasty formulas or pure” anything That he is supposed to have inaugurated in art.

To do this, Didi-Huberman uses both anthropology as to the archaeological approach. He seeks to make the look appear uninformed of the prehistorian, in order to start really looking at what work in art: “ We should accept to place ourselves in front of a sculpture by Donatello, Rodin or Marcel Duchamp, as before a prehistoric hand footprint. Faced with such an imprint, in fact, we know nothing in advance, or we have to criticize everything we already know by an ever more in-depth examination of the material itself. »(P. 20)

The apparently simple imprint process is in fact carrying a technical thought of the “ procedure And the adjustment, of a particular temporality in which the extreme presence and the absence can coexist. The imprint can therefore be used to understand a Image Institution which refuses all teleology (evolutionism and the quest for origins being still too often the basics of art criticism) and which no longer takes the image in its trivial sense (imaging, iconography): the imprint offers the notion of image in general a constitutive model, a paradigm, which has not yet been recognized in all the extent of its historical, philosophical and anthropological meaning.

Liberal arts and their “ kitchen »»

This tool has an exceptional historical prevalence: since prehistory, passing by Pliny or the Holy Face, the imprint process is requested to keep the memory of contact, almost magically. Genealogy, power and survival are found in the same technique that updates the refusals and unsaid of humanist culture. The advent of Liberal artsnow opposing Mechanical artsis based on a detachment, on a distance from the material – the artist is no longer supposed to practice the small kitchen of the imprint: this is what the claim, maniac in Vasari, indicates, of the form included as an idea. Now this doctrine, which always informs our thought of the art of its oppositions and its exclusions, does not account for the practice of a Donatello, for example. The reflection and the investigation into the imprint that Didi-Huberman leads are at this point in this point of relevance, allowing to see the taking shapefar from the philosophy of imitation and the pure visual. Donatello and his formal appetite, his experimental attitude and his heuristic use of the imprint are given to us to see at work.

This reassessment of the role of the rebirth in the Renaissance makes it possible to clarify the anxious and fascinated relationship that the XIX^e century with this technique. The example of David d’Angers, a sculptor recognized today forgotten by the general public, shows the obsessive relationship that is established between “ great art And imprint, between intellectual practice and low workshop works. His relationship with molding is representative of an attitude widely shared by artists and criticisms, which makes them challenge practitioners, those who have parted with matter and, there, with decadence or even rot. This opposition, which extends the theoretical effort of the Renaissance to keep the hand From the image, in order to ennoble the artist’s task and raise him to the rank of purely intellectual work, became a dogma a few centuries later which covers a whole panoply of distrust and unsaid. The theoretical opposition of photography and imprint, even though these two techniques are related by many places, the molding scandal in Rodin (which systematically used molding and imprint processes, producing forms always in process, in active development thanks to this direct relationship to matter-but which suddenly derogated from the sacrosanct principle mental cosa…), Are all moments when the intimate relationship with multiple, reproducible, raise the problem of life, of the mortified and deadly form. The DIY form, the updating of the creation process, are experienced as obscenities. The example of Rodin, Grand Mouleur and impregnalcondensing and resolving in its practice all the contradictions of its century, gives, according to Didi-Huberman, the dialectical image of a thought of sculpture where the form, the idea, no longer fear to be damaged by engaging in “ low materialism »Of an immemorial process.

This process will be used all the more by modern sculpture as it is problematic: by looking at Female vine From Marcel Duchamp, the author demonstrates how this little object with harmless appearance, often forgotten by criticism that always polarizes around the same points, is in fact the very expression in a new way of thinking about images and producing works of art. The gift and caress, precision and tactile thought deepen (finally !) The image of monster Duchamp, the elusive ironist, which is enriched by there humanity new. The concept (recurrent in his work) ofinframance Enlighten, thanks to the imprint, to the work of contact and the minimal difference, of a new day. “” (…) The problem of the serial object is not so much that of the same as that of the gap in the same. (…) But (…) How (Duchamp) will make us concretely access this gap, this interval, to this “ Inframance division »» ? Answer this question would come back, I believe, to start looking at A work by Marcel Duchamp. »(P. 282) Didi-Huberman fully succeeds in removing this renewed look he calls for his wishes.