Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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Fou d'une image. Puissance et impuissance de nos idoles |
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Author: Barbara Baert Ralph Dekoninck, Fou d'une image. Puissance et impuissance de nos idoles.
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In Fou comme une image Ralph Dekoninck investigates the impact of idols on our lives. This 102-page booklet, published by Éditions Labor, is not what one would (or should) call yet another essay on the dangers and possibilities of the image world on television and the internet; it is not arranged as a platform of assault on that world, nor does it formulate a defence of the visual medium in our modern day. Instead, Fou comme une image is an essay that addresses the love and the pleasure of making images. Powerfully concise in style and razor-sharp in his analyses, Ralph Dekoninck steps into the biotope of the image: an historical communality, but also, in variable amounts, the object of sincere praise as well as stringent condemnation.
The author, however, does not speak of images in Fou comme une image, but of idols - which evidently is a significant difference. If the concept of idol in the Greek 'eidôlon' was ephemeral, referring to shadow and things evanescent, it was narrowed down to the man-created image of the invisible God in the Septuagint. In Semitic monotheism the concept thus became loaded with negative connotations, as idolatry - the worship of representations of God - was a perversity. In the course of his essay, the author reveals the enormous semantic richness, the contradictions throughout the ages, and the flattening out of the concept of the idol in our modern society. He does so by situating and investigating the idol in four zones: Idole et religion, Idole et art, Idole et science, Idole et media.
One of the archetypes of the image debate is to be found in the world of religion. Similar to the way in which the Old Testament had defined and limited every image as an object of idolatry, Christianity welcomed and embraced the image as an object of worship on the basis of the concept of incarnation, analogous to the incarnation of God. But that was not the end of it. If the image was 'jugée en termes de transparence ou d'opacité, mais aussi selon le double critère de la relation de la représentation avec ce qu'elle figure et du rapport que le spectateur entretient avec elle' (p. 23), a particular collection of idols was kept at the hindside of the restored image. These idols were to be situated in the Other: the weak, the child (de la Fontaine), the woman, the naive primitive (Voltaire), and, yes indeed, in the eyes of the protestant: the catholic. As such, the concept of the idol shifts towards a searching and testing of borders, towards a mental concept, towards our general dealing with the world and the way we perceive that world in accordance with day and age.
In Idole et art, Ralph Dekoninck begins his analysis with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's stage adaptation of Ovid's myth of Pygmalion (1762). Pygmalion, the Cypriotic sculptor in Metamorphoses X, brings the statue of his ideal woman to life with the help of the goddess Venus. In Rousseau's adaptation, this life-giving ability shifts towards the artist's burning love itself, or even towards the boundless creative force which equals love. At this point in his analysis, Dekoninck succeeds in very closely linking up examples which demonstrate the shift of the idol in religion towards the sacralisation of the artist and his work of art itself. But this sacralisation of art and the artist-narcisist (a hyperbole much appreciated in Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci's Renaissance: ogni pittore dipinge se) in its turn came under critique of artists themselves as if it was a new idol of its own kind. Marcel Duchamp stands as a prototype representative for this reaction.
Pygmalion's atelier does not differ that much from that of the scientist. Villier de l'Isle-Adam's Ève future (1886) relocates the melancholy for the creative force of the sculptor to the melancholy of the inventor. The 19 th-century phantasm of the scientist-God who brings automatons to life is well-known, and nowadays lives on in cybernetics, in the The Matrix movie, etcetera. But also think of Günther von Hagen's anatomic works of art. Man, the anatomic-biological human being, becomes the subject of art: man 's'artialise' (p. 66). We are witness of the process of reversal of the Pygmalion archetype: the dead statue does not come to life, but the living human being is turned into a statue. All this once more shows that the idol is situated between life and death, ever balancing on the border of presence and absence. What is its mediator? What is the secret of its medialisation?
In Idole et media, Ralph Dekoninck finally takes up the world of show business and the spectacle. In itself, this world is not a new phenomenon: think of the puppet theatre, marionettes, Tussaud's imaginary museum. The author wonders whether the Pygmalion phantasm does not reach its most intimate fulfilment in this fictional world of the spectacle. Translated to our own modern age, he speaks about the world of television. The tele-reality is fictional, a trompe-l'oeil of reality. Does this mean that the image (on television) is always untruthful? In this case, it is probably more useful to approach the image from the perspective of its reception. We receive the image in many different ways, and in this reception the image is situated somewhere in between its producer and its viewer. For that reason, the image, and indeed the idol too, is always relational and social. " L'image est un objet de relation, avant d'être un objet de signification" (Serge Tisseron).
Ralph Dekoninck gives proof of very flexible authorship in this refined little book. When he touches his sources, he does so lightly but not superficially. When he spans his argumentation across different epochs, he does so supply but never arbitrarily. This gemlike essay, this valuable booklet, holds all qualities to become an little idol itself. |
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