Shades--Of Painting at the Limit by Sallis John; Sallis John;

Author:Sallis, John; Sallis, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2017-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

Passage across the threshold into pure painting is a movement from one doubling to another, from a painting that would double nature, even if somewhat abstractly, to a painting that would produce its double from a different origin. In the sensible medium of painting, a truth would be presented more fundamental than the truth of nature. This more profound truth would be presented by being doubled in the painting. Painting would become the doubling of this truth anterior to the truth of nature.

And yet, doubling is itself, in turn, a movement across a certain threshold, as, for instance, when a painter casts his glance first at a natural scene that is to be depicted in the painting, then at the painting itself taking shape before his eyes and hands, then again at the scene being doubled by the painting, thus carrying his glance back and forth between the inside and the outside of the painting; as the viewer may also do when, looking at the painting, he calls up in imagination the natural scene depicted in it, projecting that scene beyond its painted image, even if it is a scene he has never seen or even one that could not be seen. Especially in the case of the painter, such passage across the threshold, such circulation between inside and outside, cannot but be enigmatic, riddlesome. Yet it is precisely such doubling of nature that would be suspended and abandoned in the passage to abstract painting. The painter would no longer execute his painting primarily in view of things, either actually before his eyes or called up in memory; it would no longer be a matter of apprehending things so as—by that enigmatic circulation—to render them in and as painting. Pure painting would minimize and finally eliminate passage across this threshold. Thus, recalling that some well-known artist “used to say, ‘When painting, one look at the canvas, half at the palette, and ten at the model,’” Kandinsky responds: “It sounded very good, but I soon found that for me, it has to be the other way around: Ten looks at the canvas, one at the palette, and half at nature” (K 372). But if the painter no longer crosses over between nature and the painting, what, then, is the other doubling, the doubling from a different origin, the doubling in which pure art would be constituted?

Even as Kandinsky turns to this question, taking up the theoretical stance it requires, he does not fail to mark the limits of such a stance, to suspend its results in advance, consigning them to a threshold over which they will have to be carried by art itself: “Even if overall construction can be arrived at purely by theory, nevertheless there remains something extra, which is the true spirit of creation (and thus, to a certain extent, its very essence as well), which can never be created or discovered through theory, but only suddenly inspired by feeling” (K 176). Nonetheless, Kandinsky clearly acknowledges that the true

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