#image theory

[sentientglue]

monolith

2024. oil and acrylic on canvas, 90 x 115cm

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But we forget that those ages, too constructed their social reality in pictures, whose authority shaped the collective imagination. The crisis of representation is actually crisis of reference, something we are no longer certain pictures are capable of. Pictures fail only when we no longer credit them as representations of the real.

Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 14. 

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(In death) a lost body is exchanged for the virtual body of the image. . . . consider the inherent nature of images as the presence of an absence.

Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images, trans. Thomas Dunlap. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 4-6.

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There have never existed physical images (images object) without the participation of mental images, since an image by definition is one that is seen) is in fact only one when it is seen). Reciprocally, mental images also reply on objective images in the sense that they are the retour or the rémanence of the latter. The question of the image is always related to that of the trace and of the inscription.

Bernard Stiegler, “The Discrete Image,” in J. Derrida and B. Stiegler, eds., Echographies of Television, trans. J. Bajorek (Cambridge 2002). 

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Children are the impression of their parents' imagination at the moment of conception. This is a belief rooted in Aristotelian philosophy, as well as writings of Galen and Pliny. The Italian physician/ art collector and writer advises on what paintings to hang in the bedroom: 

Lascivious things are to be placed in private rooms, and the father of the family is to keep them covered, and only uncover them when he goes there with his wife, or an intimate who is not too fastidious. And similar lascivious pictures are appropriate for the rooms where one has to do with one's spouse; because once seen they serve to arouse one and to make beautiful, healthy, and charming children . . . not because the imagination imprints itself on the fetus, which is of different material to the mother and fathers, but because each parent, through seeing the picture, imprints in the seed a similar constitution which has been seen in the object or figure. . . And so the sight of similar objects and figures, well-made and of the right temper, represented in color, is of much help on these occasions; but they must nevertheless not be seen by children and old maids, nor by strangers and fastidious people. 

-- Giulio Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura. Quoted from pp. 3, David Freedberg, The Power of Images (Univ. Chicago Press, 1989) 

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aesthetics: mirror or prism?

“Two aesthetics exist: the passive aesthetic of mirrors and the active aesthetic of prisms. Guided by the former, art turns into a copy of the environment's objectivity or the individual’s psychic history. Guided by the latter, art is redeemed, makes the world into its instrument, and forges-- beyond spatial and temporal prisons-- a personal vision.” -- Ultra Manifesto (1921)

Ultramismo is a poetic movement that emphasized on revolutionizing the means of expression. Borges, along with Jacobo Sureda, Fortunio Bonanova and Juan Alomar founded the movement in Spain. They wanted a definite break from the contrived lyrical Romanticism of Spanish writers at the turn-of-the-century, such as Ruben Dario or Luis Carlos Lopez. Borges is against the artificiality of French symbolism and forms. He thinks that the grandiose, elaborate literary style is stressing form over function-- often times, these carefully constructed works fail to communicate or reveal the thesis of writer. Influenced by British and German philosophy and literature, Borges strives for frankness in his writing.  Although this early piece of essay is much more polished compared to his later works.