david bate: indexiphilia

‘Indexiphilia’ is a neologism for the love of making marks. In semiotics (an interest that goes beyond the medieval semioticians back to the Greeks) the ‘index’ is a type of sign where the signifier is said to be ‘contiguous’ with its signified. The image is caused by its referent. For example, a knock on a door (signifier) shows the link with a person who is there on the other side of the door as the cause of the knocking (signified). Such a banal example of the indexical sign will serve us well when we come to ask the question of why there is a love of making marks. I take the notion of ‘making a mark’ in its most general sense to mean all kinds of mark-making within and outside of art (i.e. graffiti, doodles and lithographs, drawing, etc). Indeed it is curious that as a ‘figure of speech’ in English, to ‘make one’s mark on the world’ is an aphorism for success. Of course, what sort of mark is being made is of great significance for everyone in terms of what we call our ‘culture’.
I
The history of printing is often told as a victory of technique over technology, a victory of the artist over materials. In a teleological view of art history, one technology (and artist) supercedes another and the problem of ‘how to use it’ is renewed by that very technological fact. In other words, the question, one that is rarely asked explicitly of ‘How does art as an institution and a set of discourses constantly renew and reinvent itself?’ is answered as the artist’s heroic battle with technology and their psychological will involved in moulding it to suit the goal. The function of this type of battle for the rest of society is practically useless in itself, except for the aesthetic value of the images that are sometimes thrown up as a consequence of that ‘struggle’. The nature of this struggle, in Anglo-American (I do not want to pretend to speak for all) art theory of the twentieth century has been most predominantly rendered as a battle of form over content, that is to say, as a way of avoiding ‘content’ entering the picture or part of its discussion in any way. One of the remarkable distinctions that I came across in my own education was the one made between early ‘Russian formalism’ and American modernism or ‘Western formalism’. We know that, to characterize it rather simplistically, that in the former, (before its demise) content was considered as part of the form, whereas in the latter, content was regarded as in opposition to form. In the modernism espoused by Clement Greenberg, content was to be ‘avoided like the plague’. It was only in the avant-garde movements of the 1950s and 1960s, of Pop art and Conceptualism, that such modernist aesthetics came under challenge and went into its phase that was subsequently - and is now - called ‘postmodernism’. Yet despite those mutations, the interventions of new technologies like photography and video, the language of formalism, (for want of a better description,) still pervades the discourse on art around us. Even in the thinking of so called ‘postmodernism’, which at its most basic more or less, points out that popular forms are decanted into new art, (an observation already made by Viktor Shklovsky long before: ‘New forms in art are created by the canonization of peripheral forms’) we find that critical works and issues are still reduced to a language of formalism. (E.g. in the 1980s & 1990s various anti-feminist responses to Cindy Sherman, Mary Kelly and even Tracy Emin for example.) Such criticism sees the art work as a fetishized surface in which the canvas or paper has no social relation, has no existence ‘outside of itself’. ‘Western’ Formalism is not really interested in any reference to the real.
The task for any kind of art theory today then, is to find a language for pictures outside of that formalism. It will be a discourse that need to deal with what is at stake in the making of marks as an image and consider what kind of investment is involved by the artist or the spectator in the production of an image? Considering this sort of question will, in the process, enable us to come back to what is involved in the discourse of formalism itself and to see partly why the ‘purity’ of formalism remains quite popular.
II
In printing, the capacity for technical reproduction of an image enables the repetition of a type. The structure of the mark is repeated as more or less the same. The cheap book and the mass reproduction of images became a possibility long ago, but we can go back, long before this invention of printing to see how the making of marks, the technology of messages is in the very foundation of culture. From the stick with blood on it scraped across the cave wall, from the hand print to the chisel, it is the indexical mark which bears the presence of humans. Egyptian hieroglyphs are, mythically, the form of inscription designed for the chisel and superceded by the writing that can be flowed from the invention of the pen on papyrus, yet whatever the form we have the organisation of systems of messages through the indexical mark as an index of presence. I think this aspect of pictures is greatly underestimated in the study of visual images. Erwin Panofsky notes that the early interest in cinema was not narrative, a ‘story’, but the fact that things moved - and it did not matter what they were. Galloping horses, trains, sports events, etc all held their audiences enthralled and it was only with their repetition that narrative forms, borrowed from the theatre, could come to ‘justify’ and sustain the look at the screen that gave and still gives so much pleasure. We cannot really say that the WWW today is any different from that at base.
What we find in these myriad forms is the wish, a desperate and passionate wish for proximity, a desire to be able to ‘get closer’ to a thing through its image. We can see this perhaps more clearly in Christian art and the Bible. Christ is the link between divinity and humanity, between God and Man [sic]. His real flesh is sacrificed and sanctified as sign in this relation. It is the punishment of his flesh
that embodies the relation between God and son. While the prohibition against graven images in the Bible is a rejection of the proximity of the flesh, what returns in the shroud is the fascination with the image as sign of a proximity to the body. We find the desire to make an image of Christ connected with the wish for proximity. The handkerchief of Veronica, which supposedly wiped the sweat of Christ from his face, bears the imprinted image of his features. We might even extend this sort of logic of indexical proximity to the relics of the Saints, which, far from being simply a medieval superstition and, with a slightly wild jump across history and frame of reference can also be equally compared to the non-secular modern teenager, who wears a T-shirt with a print of Madonna’s face or some other pop star on it. What I am trying to suggest here, and Christianity theorizes it quite carefully, is the extent to which the evil of images is to do with proximity of the object pictured. How else can we account for that modern phenomena of people kissing photographs of their leader if it is not to be, in some way to try to actually kiss them? The looking and touching of pictures in this respect is less to do with ‘seeing’ as a visual experience than it is to do with incarnation, to ‘embody’, ‘to make flesh’. The image is the embodiment, the personification of the being in the field of the visual. One might even go so far as to say that printing, painting, photography, film, video and so on are all technological fantasies at some level of a proximity to the flesh. No amount of philosophical rubbishing of ‘presence’ will, in the end, dissolve such fantasies which remain within the fabric of everyday modern common ‘belief’’ and practice.
It is perhaps worth also noting here that it was Plato who wanted to abolish images and who did not trust them; he actually did believe in the force of their powers. Pictures are ‘cosmetic’ for Plato and as with the fate of cosmetics was regarded as superficial. The art of cosmetics is the art of make-up, of illusion, of surface appearance. Behind the paint and perfume lies the real body without its colour, without make-up, there is only its flesh in a vulgar nakedness. (This is something that pre-occupied the artist Francis Bacon.) For Plato, painting, the most cosmetic of the arts (because of its use of colour) is three removes from nature, it imitates what is already but a copy (an actual body) of an essence (a body in its ideal). In this way Plato holds at bay and separates the representation from the referent, the picture from the object. Separated, the image is nothing, it is ‘lacking’ and a poor substitute for ‘reality’. Plato despite his reasoning betrays the wish, a bit like those today who say that, an image is ‘only an image’. What Plato’s negation of the image denies and refuses to consider is the relation of pleasure, of the seduction of images which are so much a trademark of the experience of pictures. This is why the comparison with cosmetics is correct, in that the very artifice of cosmetics is also part of the process of seduction towards an object. If in Christian thinking it is the body of Christ that lingers beyond the picture, the image as an imprint of the body, we can nevertheless distinguish at least three different ways in which the wish for proximity is played out in non-secular thought on images: firstly as the direct experience, as in the handkerchief of Veronica; secondly in the copying of the object, the mimetic fidelity of reproduction; and thirdly, the image as a means of the
incarnation of the object for internal thoughts - as in the touching and kissing of images. Common to all of these is the desire to get closer to the thing, where the sense experience is not so much visual as it is tactile, as though it is the eye which ‘touches’ the image like a finger.
III
It was Sigmund Freud who pointed out that looking is next to touching. In the schema of adult foreplay it is looking which conventionally leads to the touching of a sexual object, the person or thing that is the object of desire. We know that in children this structure is tamed, disciplined, or at least, is socially organised. How often is heard the interdiction by parents addressed to their young children in shops and museums, of `don’t touch´. Looking then is concerned with getting closer to the thing
looked at. In Freud’s theory of sexuality, which embraces much more that merely contact of genitals, is the fact that pleasure is sexuality. Pleasure in looking is itself a component of sexuality, he says. The concept of beauty cannot be divorced from such pleasure. But this is not to exclude those Christian images of Christ undergoing cruxification. It is quite clear from the testimony of Saints, and in particular the medieval relationship to cruxification that this torture embodies some kind of eroticism. ‘Getting to know’ someone, getting to know their flesh entails the same sort of eroticism, even if it is less brutal in modern life. I think that we have to recognize that even in formalism, even in the most purest forms of imagery, where ‘content’ appears to be legitimately absent, there is an eroticism at work. An eroticism which embodies, paradoxically, sexuality but not sex. This is the definition of sublimation. The sublated pleasure of ‘pure’ colour, for example in a Malevitch or a Rothko cannot be ignored...
If all this appears to be against history, against the historical differences that usually demarcate different epochs, it is because I want to try to chart another history. This other history is of the connections between different forms, practices and their historical uses...
If we can begin to conceive of the connections between different practices in the history of visual culture via their pleasures as well as their more obvious social functions and roles, then we can perhaps begin to understand the imagination in indexiphilia .