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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Issue 22. Autofiction and/in Image - Autofiction visuelle II |
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Six Stories from the End of Representation. Images in Painting, Photography, Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics, 1980-2000 |
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Author: Jan Baetens James Elkins Paper: ISBN-10: 0804741484; ISBN-13: 9780804741484 |
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James Elkins's last book is an exceptional achievement, of which I don't know any present equivalent. These Six Stories are an attempt to establish a new dialogue between humanists and scientists (the 'alpha' and 'beta' sciences, whose almost unbridgeable divide is well-known since the "two cultures debate" launched by C.P. Snow in 1959), more specifically in the field of the image, both of its production and of its interpretation. Yet, Elkins's book does not simply mix artistic and scientific images, nor does he try to demonstrate that artists are actually scientists and that real science cannot be separated from an artistic impulse, as it is often argued in recent books on the subject (on the contrary, Elkins emphasizes the inevitable and necessary differences between art and science). What the author proposes -and manages to do- is a much more revolutionary gesture. On the one hand, Elkins does not target one specific audience -either an artistic or a scientific one, as happens in almost all publications interested in discussing the two cultures debate. Instead he attempts to write a text which can be read by both audiences without any distinction and thus to defend new insights into art that can be of interest to humanists as well as to scientists and to comment on scientific ways of image-making in a way that proves helpful to both categories of readers. In order to do so, the author, whose background is mainly in art theory and the practice of painting, has taken classes on quantum mechanics and particle physics as preparation. On the other hand, Elkins has also followed a certain number of methodological rules to make sure that his ambitious goal does not become unrealistic or slippery. These rules can be enumerated as follows: first, the selection of a perspective that might have a chance to present common features (in this case, the question of the limits of representation: how does the problem of what lies beyond the visual representation of the world outside is tackled in very different artistic and scientific media and approaches); second, the decision to speak the language of each discipline, and to avoid as much as possible metaphorical language (such a decision implies of course the priority given to description, at the expense of interpretation); third, the refusal to unify the field of image making and reading (hence the radical juxtaposition of the six chapters, which are not part of one grand story). If these are grosso modo the tools which enable Elkins to research the limits of representation, it would be a pity not to stress the strong relationships between the apparently titanic effort of Six Stories and the rest of his work. Given the exceptionally broad scope and nature of Elkins's interests, it is of course not possible to disclose all the links between his previous publications and this new book, which is as much a continuation as a new start, but at least three threads can be underlined. In The Object Looks Back. On the Nature of Seeing (1997), he had already developed an in-depth reflection, via the dialectical folding of sight and blindness, on the limits of representation. A book like The Domain of Images (1999) had started to explore the blurring of the boundaries between pictures, writing, and notation. And Visual Studies. A Skeptical Introduction (2003) had stressed the necessity to foreground creative forms of writing on the image. Six Stories has a strong compositional logic. The six chapters are coupled by pairs, each of them providing two related insights into a specific question: first Elkins discusses the limits of representation in an old and a new artistic medium (painting and photography); then he analyzes similar issues in the case of scientific images confronted with the representation of the extremely large (astronomy) and the tremendously small (microscopy); finally, he raises questions on types of representation that exceed the visible, with questions of the invisible (particle physics) and the unimaginable (quantum mechanics). Even if each chapter constitutes an independent whole and can be read as an autonomous essay, the whole book is exceptionally homogeneous, not just thanks to the particular style of Elkins, who succeeds in expressing the love he feels for his objects, but thanks to three other methodological constraints: a) the overall priority given to the images (the whole book is wrapped around images, which are also beautifully reproduced, and the author always takes the reading of these images as the kernel of every argumentation); b) the attempt to link each group of visual objects with a specific intellectual problem (and one can only express one's gratitude to the clever way in which Elkins manages to extract new problems from new and old images); c) a specific way of reading, which has everything to do with Elkins becoming a guide in the visual labyrinth he is entering with his reader (this is certainly the most personal dimension of the book, and perhaps also its most fascinating one, since Elkins, who avoids easy interpretations, does not refuse to judge: he discusses the distinction between good and bad pictures, between interesting and uninteresting interpretations, between dead ends and real challenges, and so on). One really needs a guide to read this book, which is often extremely technical. Elkins is undoubtedly such a guide, and he does not hide the difficulties of reading images that cannot be understood by the lay reader (but in a sense, we are almost always lay readers). He rightly distinguishes between description and evaluation, focussing several times on the mistakes that are produced by our craving for interpretation, which Elkins often discards as pure nostalgia and false profundity. As I have said, this book is in many regards the provisory conclusion of many of the author's previous writings. At the same time, it would be absurd to deny that this is also a dramatically new start -not just for Elkins himself, but for our 'one-culture' way of looking at images. Even if it is not easy what the next step may be, it will be beyond any doubt that the debate has now shifted ground. |
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Jan Baetens is teaching at the Institute for Cultural Studies of the KU Leuven and is founding editor of Image [&] Narrative. Jan Baetens enseigne à l'Institut d'Etudes Culturelles de la KU Leuven et codirige "Image [&] Narrative". |
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