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Extracts from: Peter Nesteruk, A Rhetoric of Time in the Arts: Eternity, Entropy and Utopia in Visual Culture (2011).
From: Chapter Two: Painting: Time and Affect in
Two Dimensions
Contents:
Nicolas Poussin, The Adoration of the
Shepherds (c. 1633-1634), Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii (1784-1785), J. M. W. Turner, Ancient Rome: Agrippina Landing with the
Ashes of Germanicus (1839), Claude Monet Grainstacks series (1888-1889, 1890-91), Picasso, 'Ma Jolie'
(1911-1912), Braque, 'The Portuguese' (1911), 'Atelier V' and ‘VIII’, Edward
Hopper, Room in Brooklyn (1932), Stairway (1925), Automat (1927) and New York
Movie (1939).
…Argument (reprise) :
How should one interpret
art or visual culture? If art is art still (and not simply some image whose
seduction died yesterday) it must first of all communicate with today's viewer
on an aesthetic and emotional level. A purely historical approach can, by its
very nature, say little about an artwork's power to compel today's audiences.
Interpretation must then seek to explain the artwork as the source of today's
intense enchantment. This assumption will include the -anyway inescapable-
presupposition of such an audience's existence in the present. As we have seen
in the first chapter, given this presupposition, depicted space quickly reveals
its potentiality to be read as time. If we feel an artwork it is because we
have matched our present with that of the image before us, and can then read of
its temporal symbolism. However audiences are not unitary. When a division
within such an audience seems either inescapable or aesthetically rewarding,
then I will try to develop the implications offered by such divided or plural
points of view.
The intense enchantment of an
image, once found and explained, can be applied mutatis mutandis to the reconstructed aesthetic experience of
previous generations. Conversely, the art historical understanding of an image,
insofar as it finds legitimacy in the notion of a first or past audience
together with the recreation of its response and its mentalities, must, with respect to this element, if in no other,
begin with the present, with the experiential, phenomenological or intuitive
reading of textual parts. A given reading that can then be adjusted to the
other evidence available (historical aesthetics, the history of the sign, and
criticism and interpretation from the time of production and record of first
consumption). The intuitions of the present need to be addressed if only for
the sake of self-awareness of the observer and critic: if these intuitions are
not made conscious in the present, they will certainly surface to bedevil the
interpretative process in the future - no-one simply steps from out of their
upbringing and culture into another epoch. Either we are conscious of our
ideological and affective baggage or it reshapes all that we see, think, and
feel. Paradoxically the path to the past lies through the acknowledgement paid
to the portal of the present.
As an object of communication,
then, all of a given work's features may be interpreted as significant, as
rhetorical, as persuasive (but not, necessarily, as a totality - that is quite
another question, involving a strategic -but often unacknowledged- choice by
the interpreter). As we have seen, not least among an artwork's rhetorical or
persuasive potentials are its temporal implications, the ability of its space
to become time or to configure temporalities and their symbolic meaning, it is
this figural realisation, which I hope to show in the course of this chapter,
that so often constitutes the text's highly effective, but still largely
unrecognised, means of affective
manipulation. It is precisely this aspect of the artwork, its capability to
function as an affective force in the present (as an artwork 'now') that would
require an explanation foregrounding the temporal.[1]
*
As we shall see, whether in
the case of a Poussin, a David, a Turner, or, in the twentieth century cubist
fragmentation of a Picasso, the disjunctions and super-impositions of a Braque,
the realism of a Hopper, or in the collage of a Rauschenberg, or even in the
postmodern form of the photographic image, the rhetoric of temporality will be
found to have furnished a rhetorical means of persuasion too powerful to be
dispensed with; so from the point of view of the critic, the workings of this
rhetoric furnishes an analytical tool equally found to be too powerful to be
easily dispensed with. But this should not surprise us: for there is no human
experience which is not at ‘the same time’ always already set in a matrix made
from past, present, and future and which does not observe some (usually
sacralised) form of the distinction between temporality and eternity.
…Jacques-Louis David's, ‘The
Oath of the Horatii.’
Jacques-Louis David's, The Oath of the Horatii (1784-1785),
might be said to encapsulate the ideology of the instant.[2] A single event is shown, the swearing of
an oath by three men, with female witnesses in a posture of distress; the
moment captures all, and speaks all.
I might also suggest that what is depicted is always a process, and is
always designed, or is usually taken, to be consumed as such, as dramatic
action, and that the temporally frozen representation is meant to be taken as
seriously as are the picture's two dimensions on the spatial level. Both are
read illusionistically: space and time are read into the canvas figurally as a
matter of course if not convention.
Already we have identified in
the painting two separate and significant groups, separate in sex, in space
(they make up two distinct groups), and in relation to the frame (one group
dominates the centre ground, the other clings to the picture's margin). The two
groups make two contrasting sources of interpretation (as a result of their
sexing, spacing, and position); if we read temporal symbolism back into the
picture, they may well carry differing and potentially significant temporal
implications.
As with the Poussin, but without
the narrative cues, we might begin our search for temporally inflected meaning
by examining the text for degrees of absence. In the absence of solid
indicators we must look for traces of absence itself. Actually it is a relative
absence that we seek: we begin with those parts of the painting which seem to
exhibit a secondariness, or semi-presence, in relation to other clearly fore-grounded
parts or presences. We must therefore begin with the background, or with the
'side-lined' - with that which is pushed to one side, or up against the frame.
These 'relative absences', may be said to function as the visual analogues, or
figural connoters, of memory, or of proleptic or prophetic imagination. They
offer the possibility of being read as occurring in the past or in the future;
in contrast to the present presence of the central, or fore-grounded, action -
but which temporal index to choose? A strictly literal reading always gives the
background the value of the past (the nature of space/time and a finite speed
of light means that distance is always in the past relative to the present -
however, this is taking literalness beyond any useful limit). Rather it is the
path of symbolic reading, as figurative, or second meaning, that we will take.
This path yields the temporal value of either past or future to those areas of
the picture that, by their ground, position, luminosity, (lack of)
distinctness, or anomaly (by size, interior perspective, or
transparency/co-existence) when compared with other areas of the picture, may
be found to suggest a figural or second meaning. Any final pinning-down of the
figural value to past or future must await supporting evidence from other
sources (first the text, then the title, context, co-texts, history, etc.).
However, the reading of grounds
and other formal arrangements as temporal need not be viewed as only a matter
for second meaning as thoughtful interpretation. This chapter is concerned to
show how the essential force, the felt impact, of a picture is as often
explained by its temporal aspects as in its other (spatial, referential, or
thematic) modes of apprehension. This immediacy or emotional impact poses the
question (so often asked of figure in the context of other representational
genres) is not the first (immediate) meaning not also the second (figural)
meaning, indeed what is literal (the first meaning as found in another neutral
context) may only be arrived at later as a result of the memory of convention.
Why limit initial interpretation or response to the assumption that art is a
mere (unified) reflection, or that it always presupposes a uni-temporal
manifold? As we shall see in the
analysis below, these presumptions are challenged by a reading that is not only
temporal, but that also finds the temporal to be near to the affective. Indeed,
one alternative is to take the picture as a patchwork of temporal referents
each with their own temporally discrete first meaning (and taken in as such in
a first reading), with the inter-relation of the temporal values as that which
confers the general possibility of meaning to the artwork, as we find to be the
case in narrative, allegorical, or much medieval art.
However, in The Oath of the Horatii, the oath of the
title itself, symbolised in the picture by the salute to the swords, already
connotes the future. An oath is a promise to do something at a future time. It
also functions in subjunctive mode, signaling desire and uncertainty, and the
promise as a performative, a symbol which is also an act - in this case bearing
upon the future. In this way, the future is already referred to in the title
and the picture's central tableau - which may, without violence, be read as a
dramatic deictic gesture (a moment that gathers up the past and hurls a promise
into the future, a future which at first sight might appear to be lying outside
of the picture). Yet, the future orientation of the oath-taking already
contradicts the 'at a single glance' hypothesis, if only by suggesting that the
viewer look for signs of that future elsewhere in the picture and because
interpretation is always already involved in the process of perception.
If we now combine the central
tableau of the painting with what has been said on the subject of temporality
and figure - if we contrast the centrally presented group against its others -
then all that is not within the central ground becomes opened to temporal
interpretation (or, if we wish to use figural terms, as with the relation of
the title which allows us to read the salute as an oath, to convert spatial
first meaning into temporal second meaning). The absence within the background
arches, three dark spaces that echo the three younger oath-takers, and the
de-centred presence of the group of women can now be read as a temporal
commentary upon the oath and its results. If the positioning of the two groups
in the picture makes it possible to read the figure-ground and centre-margin
relations as gendered, then the death, or sacrifice, of one of the mourning
women in the picture's source story only confirms the degree of the women's
secondariness as suggested by their positioning in the picture. Centre and
non-centre appear to enter into a relation of cause and effect; the ominous
absence behind the men bodes ill for their project (darkness and classical
austerity together constitute a background of severity and foreboding, the
enunciation of a threat, regardless of the consequences). This effect of tragic
foreboding is underscored by the resigned postures of the mourning women at the
picture's margin. The positioning of this group and its collective posture is
felt as containing futural significance, whether read as an anticipation of
events to come, or as a portent and prolepsis (as a temporally back-shifted
image of the mourning to come; an image of, or from, the future).
If
we look more closely at the work’s background, we can see that, not only is the
space within the arches dark, but also that is becomes darker from (our) left
to right; that is, more dark, more occluded, as we move towards the future in
the traditional direction of spatialised narrative (our, left to right, the
object's right to left) indicating a tragic outcome (note also concerning the
futural deixis, that there is no ‘instant’ here, neither in time, in the
rhetoric of temporality depicted nor in their reading - the details take a
little 'time' to process). Furthermore, the spear mounted on the wall under the
arcaded space also points from (our) left to right, the direction of narrative
(the arrow of time, the direction of entropy) and, as we know from the story of
the Horacii, an expenditure of energy will indeed lead to a destruction of
forms, of life.
These
pointers from left to right also point towards a yet darker recess; to an
object semi-concealed in the darkest recess, but half-revealed by an apperture
placed above it on the (our) right-side of that particular arch - allowing just
enough light as to show that something is there. If the increasing darkness
suggests a narrative with a dark, meaning tragic, future, what of the
mysterious object in the corner, with its accompanying window light? Although
indistinct, its general form suggests an altar or a place for keeping
important, that is venerated or sacred objects; objects definitive of the tribe
and its religion, and so symbolising its identity. Because indistinct, its air
of mystery is increased, and so the suggestion of a sacred place is proffered
in an economy of suggestion made more effective by its very lack of clarity -
an atmosphere suitable for the mysterious and the sacred, with their sublime or
transcendentally exterior (rhetoric of eternity) deixis. The window and its
illumination, not only permits the form in the recess to be seen, but by means
of light and sky, offers a hint of rising verticality, to the source of light
(absent in the picture, and so also bearing a figurative exterior deixis). The window
thus reinforces the object’s sacrality by its suggestion of the heavens;
darkness and light, mystery and illumination from above (occlusion and
clarity-giving light) mutually condition the meanings available to this past of
the picture. We have in fact rejoined the title as the addressees and
guarantors of the oath, the sacred centre of the oath-takers’ cultural
tradition, are their gods, whose altar appears to make up such an important
part of the background of this painting.
In
another play of light and shade, the evocative shadow of the painting's
background points up the highlighting of the centre-ground, and so further adds
to the foregrounding, in terms of significance, of the faceces, the swords that cross, their form reinforced again by the
lateral, transverse cross of the picture's outer edges, the corners of its form
and frame. Again the temporal rhetorical effect is to emphasis the present
presence of the bright swords and the oath, with the ominous tone of the
shadowy background foretelling the grim events that lie ahead in the future-
the oath's futural intentionality provides the bridge between present and
future, between intention and outcome, between cause and effect. Indeed the
future-in-the-present of the oath also conjoins the title and the painting, and
so word and image, as well as present and future (as well as past and future
for those that know the details of the story), and centre- and background in
its key role in the meaning making of this painting. 'Le Serment des Horace' converts
center/margin, and fore-/ background relations, that is illusionistic space,
into time, into a temporal relationship which then offers the meaning,
affective and rationalised, to the involved and, perhaps thoughtful, onlooker.
The temporal relations support the theme - which offers temporal depth to 'the
moment'.
Should
original context or first reception be required to help make sense of the
effect of the picture (or to anchor that effect in a prior context), then the
art historical details of the picture's genesis and reception, of the story of
the Horatii and of the public's response to the picture, will be found to
support the symbolic, or temporal, reading given above. The oath taken shows
the moment when three sons, chosen to represent
Perhaps more interesting is the
response to the picture's arrival in the public sphere and the causes of its
sudden popularity. If the arrival was also that of a highly politicised form of
neo-classicism, then the picture's popularity was largely due to its supposed
defiance of tyrants; the oath has become a promise of resistance. With this
contextual explanation of the picture's first reading or reception (a reception
hardly in tune with the source story), the picture's temporal deixis simply
returns to a more general form of ominous future. Its transformation into a
symbol of mass defiance is at once an ethical stance and a moral justification,
and a portent of revolution and general bloodshed.[3] In this way the temporal relation of
origin and end, of cause and effect, as a key part of the picture's initial
aesthetic success, are made plain if the picture is read in this way for its
figural narrativity.
In the Oath of the Horatii, the reading of the temporal element returns
the fate-laden future as the picture's 'proper' theme and as the source of its tense and ominous mood. A closer
examination of the temporal configuration presented underscores the traditional
readings of the picture's reception and suggests why a discrepancy in source
and first reading (as of the picture's continued impact upon the viewer
untutored in the facts of source material or first reception) could occur and
on what basis. It is the temporal, with its manipulation of the painting's
affective force, that provides the general basis for more particular, even
mutually contradictory, readings.
…
Monet,
the ‘Grainstacks’ series.
With Claude Monet's Grainstacks series (1888-1889, 1890-91),
we approach the birth of painterly modernism and the beginning of the twentieth
century.[4] Monet's work is normally understood in
terms of impressions, moments, and instants; all of which are said to be made
up of light and colour - in this way Monet's works may be read as leading the
way to abstraction because of its increasing purity and lack of realism. It may
therefore appear perverse to suggest that, in a series of paintings which is
especially known for its experiments with light, it is temporality that may
have the greater explanatory power. Clearly my reading will not find favour
with the specious (and historically untrue) argument that Monet was a painter
of the seasons through light, and that the documenting of cyclic effects of
light was his true topic.
Yet
most readings of the Grainstacks
series still concentrate on the quality of the light portrayed in Monet's
series and emphasise its variability according to the seasonal cycle. If the
annual cycle can be read as returning to the painterly surface, the 'instant',
or instance, of the 'gathering' together of the 'shining' of the natural cycle
of seasons, then one might equally think of including the social cycle, or
social time, of the production of the grainstacks, or of their constructors,
the labourers (or of the grainstacks' consumption) in the pictures'
interpretative relations, and not elide them as irrelevant to the picture's 'beautiful'
effect.
Indeed the effect becomes less
beautiful, more mixed with melancholy, with desperation, with stubbornness,
even with a luminous tenacious resistance, the more we observe the context of
the grainstacks, the condition of the soil, the weather, and the habitations as
the pictures present them to the viewer. Yet it is the grainstacks themselves
that are, finally, in and of themselves unsettling - even uncanny. Something
persistent and ominous hollows out the pleasure of the light, the colour, the
proportions, and offers a mixed pleasure; our visual pleasure is suffused with
some discomfort. A sign that our affectability, our nascent interpretation, has
recognised that there is more, and that this 'more', this 'something else', as
yet unspoken and apparently concealed, will require a little thought, a little
self-reflection, to explain.
If the grainstacks are found to be
unsettling, if their quality of light is found to be uncanny, then we may ask,
are they not symbolic of something else? Something perhaps showable or, if not,
if abstract, universal, indicating a relation to some Other, or a relation
defined by the negative, then at least amenable to verbal description. What we
have, in this case, is an aesthetic experience that draws upon the workings of
the figural (it contains a reference to a second meaning). And perhaps we are
faced with that special category of the figural which suggests that grandiose,
religious, or universal notions are part of this second meaning. When a part
(of the picture) is a figure (symbol) for a larger whole (the second meaning),
or when the picture itself in its total affectivity can be read to play such a
figurative role, and when this larger entity may be a system of thought, of
belief, or even just unimaginable because too general, too vast, or too
abstract - then we are dealing with the notion of the Sublime. Clearly this
sublime meaning, may be (and on reflection often is) activated by its very lack
of a capturable whole; it may not be captured by a concrete thought or image,
or words connoting such, but only by a paraphrase of abstract words. Similarly,
it may be that what is connoted or symbolised (to use the nineteenth century's
favourite word for this relation) is its lack of unity, its being constituted
by irreconcilable forces which continually threaten to break apart any putative
or fragile unity or wholeness.
I would like to suggest that in
Monet's Grainstacks this second
(symbolic or Sublime) meaning would include the social time of the Grainstacks. This social time would
expand the present depicted moment of the Grainstacks
into a process, or narrative that is made up of, not only a part of time, its
present, but also its past and future. To decode the impact of the Grainstacks series, and explain this
strange feeling of unsettling beauty, we will need to call upon the past and
future to augment the already presented present. In a sense the feeling we
have, the picture's sublime impact, acts a pointer towards these other aspects
of lived temporality.
In the Grainstacks series the deixis of the Sublime is Time. Time appears
first as narrative, as the restoration of past and future. As the familiar and
friendly sense-making operation of narrative, the Grainstacks series are part of a story. However, as we shall see,
Time will soon appear in an altogether more radical guise, as something
altogether more unfriendly, something lacking in sense altogether. Let us begin
with Time in its familiar aspect. The unpresented elements of the time of the Grainstacks series consists of the
production of these same grainstacks as their past, as past which is contrasted
to the present of the picture's shining light, their illumination, and their
setting as finished objects. This present is also contrasted with their future,
their utility, use, intended function, or moment of consumption. The
grainstacks are after all just a means of storage, stored grain, stored labour,
stored time (made from deferred consumption, return, or realisation, and so
invested). They are, indeed, made from stored light. One reason, perhaps, why
they seem so full of hidden meaning, and why they are often depicted as darker
than the surrounding landscape. The sun almost always shines into the
grainstacks from behind (or from an angle); as if pouring its light into a
receptacle. The resulting effect is the, often strangely coloured, pool of
shadow that is a prominent feature in many of the paintings in the series.[5] The light enters and does not emerge.
The pictures may depict the end-product of hay making, of growth, reaping,
gathering, and construction: but they also repeat, re-enact, or refer to, a
crucial moment in this process; the very moment that gives the whole process
its rationale and makes possible its function. The grainstacks store the light.
However, the relative absence of light in the grainstacks' shadow also suggests
another meaning quite apart from that of storage: in and of itself the presence
of shadow suggests the very absence of light, of heat, of energy. The loss of
light in the picture's shadowy areas not only suggests and points, it is also
is in a state of contrast to the stored light of the sun in the grainstacks.
This suggests an explanation for the strange colouring of the grainstacks
themselves - one source of their uncanny presence. Heat is represented
(figurally) as if perceived in the infra-red register. Hence, perhaps, the warm
colour of many of the winter (but not only the winter) grainstacks, which is in
dramatic contrast to their colder-toned surroundings - see, for example: Grainstacks (End of day; autumn.)
1890-1891. The Art Institute of
But what is it that the light, the
labour, and the time (of natural and social cycles) are stored up against? It
is here that we begin to see the working of the relationship to the painting's
sublimity. The feeding of hungry mouths in the cold and lightless winter; the
maintenance of a physiology that requires energy to maintain its biological and
chemical structure, so that it may in turn reproduce itself; these in turn
producing, and reproducing (in cycles) a social structure. In a word, storage
(of the past) to sustain the future structure of organised forms (on a number
of levels) against decay - against entropy. It is entropy that is the hidden
aspect of the uncanny or sublime relation. It is entropy which is the abstract,
the 'too large', or otherwise unrepresentable process in question. If
production, consumption, the social, the species, or the cycles of time are all
involved in the general relation to the sublime, then it is entropy, the
heat-loss of the universe, the decay of all structure, form, and order, that
constitutes the most profound relation to the sublime. Whether as
unrepresentable, as the origin of the pleasurable terror of Romantic
aesthetics, as an unimaginable vastness, or as persistent fear of creeping
process that is at once invisible and ever-present, a deadly seriousness that
is almost unthinkable, it is entropy which is figured in the dull red glow of
the grainstacks (larger than Kant's Law is the force which this Law was
designed to subvent; morality as the answer to social chaos). Paradoxically,
entropy's apparent gift of the (irreversible) arrow or direction of time, the
gift of sense-making narrative itself, turns out to be a gift which can only
lead to dissolution for all and any entities of a temporal character. The
sublimity of Monet's Grainstacks
series, our feeling of disquiet at this strange and unsettling beauty, lies in
our recognition of the implications of this process, of the arrow of time and
its entropic message. The recognition of the content of the sublime is the
recognition of our very survival as a species.[7] In the context of the theme of survival,
the sheer number of winter scenes amongst the Grainstacks series is especially relevant; of the 1890-1891 series,
12 of 25 were set in winter (Tucker, p. 81). In addition there are the chilling
winter scenes Monet painted of
The theme of human survival is
further reinforced by the shape of the built structures in the Grainstacks series (whether grainstack
or dwelling). These shapes may be read as symbolic in at least two ways; as
similitude (metaphor) and as pointer (deixis). In the first, the form of the
grainstacks echo that of a house, also copying its function; shelter for the
structure's contents. Survival, the function of storage as safety of the
grainstack's contents, echoes the function of the 'home' form. However this is
not so much a case of 'form follows function' (grain or haystacks come in an
amazing variety of forms), as of a wish incarnated in form (their meaning is,
in rhetorical terms, subjunctive, and performative). The figural repetition of
a form, a repetition further augmented by the proximity of house and grainstack
on the canvas (they often lie on the same plane or line) suggests that the
grainstacks should not only protect their contents, but also their owners or
consumers, whoever, or whatever, they might be. It is a case of a metaphor (a
house 'looks like' a grainstack) leading to a synecdoche (the movement from
part to an extended field of meaning, the 'whole' meaning); from the
grainstacks to those who rely upon them.
The symbolism of the house
reinforces the general interpretation of the light and colour of the
Grainstacks, an interpretation which is further augmented by the second
symbolic source of the grainstack's strange beauty; their ability to point,
their deixis. The pointed tips of house and grainstack function on a symbolic
level as a deictic, as a sublime and so figural pointer (the line and its
ability to 'point', join colour and form in the making of the paintings'
meaning). If the shining sacralises the storage (it reflects and gilds, but it
also creates the contents), which will maintain human life, as a gift of the
sun (a pagan sacralisation), it is also the pointed roofs of these structures
that 'point' upwards in turn, referring back to the source of their contents
and the illumination of their exterior (how else can one illuminate the
function of storage?). The inter-relation and significance of sun and
grainstack in the widest possible sense is the very subject matter of the Grainstacks series.
The story, then, behind the
affectivity of the Grainstacks
series, is that energy is stored to counteract the entropic effects of pure
linear time, the only pure linear or uni-directional time (or sign of time) we
have. The second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, is the only sure
sign of the 'arrow of time', and is therefore recognised as the only true irreversible
and so uni-directional process (the laws of physics alone are notoriously
reversible, including equations dealing with time).[8] Light is light loss, is expenditure. It
is the sun's entropic self-consumption that constitutes visibility, light as reflection,
making possible retinal vision, making possible the depiction of this self-same
reflection from the surface of the grainstacks, a reflection which is
contrasted to the light which is stored in the heart of the grainstacks.
In the course of this process of
representation and interpretation, a number of forms of temporality may be
found to interact together to make the pictures' effect (their affectivity) and
their meaning (but these forms do not necessarily form a whole, any more than
that the meaning of these forms may be completed). The experiential temporality
of the present, whose effects/affectivity utilise the experiential categories
of past and future, point to two very different kinds of time. Cyclic and
linear time, or social, and natural cycles, are contrasted with the very
process that gives us the difference between past and future in our experience,
and the uni-directional movement of the content of these experiential
categories. Our human experience of time (of temporality) is a gift of entropy.
Yet the giver of time (the direction or arrow of time) is also the eternal and
irresistible foe of all existing form, even of all that exists (all general
economies are entropic).
The series represents - and is
moving, is sublime, to the extent that it
represents - linear time in conflict with cyclic time. This conflict is
presented through the experiential time of the present; with past and future as
figural valencies which lead the viewer into the origin and ends of the cyclic
processes and their relentless enemy. The struggle is at once human (the social
cycle, history as 'we' time, + narrative + clock time) and universal (the
natural, or calendar, solar cycle, and the eroding power of linear entropy, or
the march of time).
As a symbol, the grainstacks and
their anti-entropic function carry with them a particular and a general
allegorical connotation. The particular evokes tales of human survival in the
face of the elements and (in the world's temperate zones) the cyclic return of
winter (the winter scenes remind us of this vividly, the grainstacks almost
seem to burn with energy in the cold winter light). On a more general level
there is also a epic, heroic level of meaning: it is the very survival of the
social and of the species itself that is coded into the general figural frame
of the paintings and which turns the simple beauty of colour and light into a
complex of feelings with cosmological overtones. Stored time acts as a breaker
against the relentless tides of the arrow of time adding emotional and
intellectual depth to an evocation of light.
…
Edward
Hopper’s Spaces.
If the urban landscapes of
Edward Hopper haunt us with their modernity, they also belong to a tradition.
The depiction of the everyday spaces of the modern can be found in the
analytical cubism of Picasso and Braque. The avant-garde combination of the ordinary, the popular and the
everyday, with a modernisist technique of representation, can be dated back to
Cezanne, and beyond him to Impressionism, to Manet and to Corot's influence on
the artists associated with
A
key American painter before the advent of Abstract Expressionism (against which
he is often defined as a 'New Realist' specialising in the depiction of
America) Edward Hopper produced paintings which present the viewer with
evocative surfaces, planes and textures as much as they offer an evocative
content.[9] It is these surfaces, as much as their
referential subject matter, their equivocation between these, that contribute
to the overall affective impact of Hopper's art; an impact which works upon the
inner experience of the viewer to promote the disturbing sensation of a
narrative hiatus, a gap in the flow of normality, a moment inserted in-between
the pageant of everyday life, and the unsettling sensation that, just perhaps,
the world in really this way (and not the other). This effect is, I will argue,
one born of the picture's general temporal relations.[10] Yet if the surfaces, textures, planes and
grounds do play an important role in the impact and interpretation of Hopper's
art, their contents will, nevertheless, effect their reception: the paintings
are often set in the context of urban life, or its clash with nature, or in the
conjunction of individuals with an 'in between' situation (a work break,
leisure time, a 'before' or an 'after' moment).[11] Before proceeding to a detailed reading
of New York Movie, I would like to
examine several works that will serve to introduce Hopper's themes along with
the role of temporality in the rhetoric of their realisation.
A major source of aesthetic
significance in Room in Brooklyn
(1932), can be found in the painting's foreground/background distinction.[12] The combination of the roofs of the
background with their screen-like surfaces and the fore-grounded staring or
daydreaming person - where the back of the head, connoting absence of self, a
sense of personal abstraction or being otherwise lost in thought - suggests a
movement away from the present as a wandering through time.[13] The background becomes the place of
remembered pasts and possible futures; each roof, not only another place, but
another time, a time outside of present life or place. We see the past or
future of the character figure's fantasy in the windows. Or rather we don't;
for nothing is projected there. Yet the planes and repetitions work upon the
viewer in such a way as to suggest the contrary. Something it seems is
configured there, something evoked, but never quite visible, never quite given
voice. More than a silent movie, it is an invisible film that runs in the
shadow world of Hopper's screens. This uncertain brooding absence, Hopper's
sublime, points, like all sublime effects, to a place (or time) exterior to
that of the site of depiction. This deixis, suggesting a double world that
exists alongside that of the visible, is the product of another key Hopper
technique. The form, the texture, the sections, the near abstract disposition
of space in many of his paintings, their sub-division into units and screens,
themselves suggest an ambiguity with respect to significance, a 'something
else', so augmenting the symbolic absences and semi-presences which carry the
potential for temporal readings.
This un-homeliness or anxiety, caused by a space which appears to point
to something other than itself and so figurally inseparable from temporal
otherness, is therefore an effect of the combination of the painting's grounds,
its referential forms, and its almost abstract colour and geometry. Further,
the colour and repetition of the (new) horizon which is the top of the opposite
building may suggest that the character is dreaming her future in the urban
world. However, this aspect of the background may also be read as referring to
the past as the source of a repetition to be dreaded in the future (or possibly
even of the remembrance of a pleasant event long gone). It is this combination,
ambiguity, or alternation of temporal modes which operates in turn the
varieties of unease or uncertainty the viewer perceives in Hopper's most
evocative work.[14]
Stairway
(1925), is among the eeriest of Hopper's paintings and exploits another key
Hopper motif: the symbolic possibilities inherent in entrances and exits.[15] The inanimate is represented as that
which waits. In this painting the present presence of place, the dominant
space-time represented, takes the form of a junction. We are presented with an
in-between place and time; a pure hiatus accentuated by the plainness,
repetition, or indistinctness of the 'other' space, the place beyond the
door. This latter space may be read
temporally as past or future to the stairway's present. If this in-between
space is read as the past, then, unnervingly, there is no memory; no space for
the 'before' is found in representation. Yet if this space is read as the space
of the future - and this temporal valency would fit in with the implied
progression in time from before the top of the stairs (the present) to the door
leading outside (the future) - then what is configured is the unknown. However
we may also be witness to the known as repetition; a past is repeated in the
future, but one which the implied viewer wishes to forget. If we combine both
temporal valencies, then the choice of options for the future is between a
bland repetition (the past continued) and the option of choosing for another
(as yet unknown) form of life. This is the familiar tension between the stale
and known as unsatisfying but safe, and the unknown as potentially dangerous (a
symbolic gesture giving the inside the value of safety, the outside, that of
danger). Indeed the colour, luminosity, proportions, viewpoint, and especially
the vanishing points (which converge on the dark, indistinct outside) combine
to suggest a trajectory from the past (the before of the stairs, the place of
the viewer), through the anxious present, which fills the space of the picture,
and the future (the place outside of the door).[16] This is the urban dilemma. An inner fear,
uncertainty, or anxiety, a temporal relation refracted through the future, is
projected onto a physical environment (which may indeed deserve such fear). The
depiction of this environment is then divided into analogues for interiority
and exteriority (inside and outside, present and future/past). If we have been
able to read time from space, or subjectivity and identity from the canvas and
its illusionism, by way of a figural relation, it is because the temporal (and
so the subjective, affective, and identitarian) can only be inscribed into two
(or three) dimensions in this manner. The painting enacts the ineluctable
relation of the viewing consciousness to time in visual content. As an object
of perception, it can do nothing else. (Even narrative prose or drama can only
do this if the time -that is the story- is stopped at a point read as the
present; leaving the past as a memory and the future open to projection.
Certain novels by Faulkner and plays by Beckett appear to operate within this
hiatus - classical rhetoric has a term for such an interruption of narrative: hypotyposis. With Beckett the entire
drama often takes place in the space/time of this interval, this in-between).
A starker combination of space
and person occurs in Automat (1927).[17] Much of what has been said of Room in Brooklyn and Stairway would apply to Automat. Indeed the latter can usefully
be read as a combination of the rhetorical techniques employed in the former
paintings. From Room in Brooklyn we
have the presence of a consciousness (or a character-figure as an implied focus
for such a projection, or identification) and from Stairway, we are offered the dark background space (where the
implied consciousness is that of the viewer on the verge of stepping onto the
eponymous staircase). Automat
combines screen and figure, in the process giving the figure a face (she
already has a gender).
The background of Automat features a huge back-window, a
retreating sequence of lights (just possibly shining through the glass, more
probably reflected in it), and a vanishing point to nowhere.[18] Before this window an apparently
disconsolate figure sits.[19] The moment is pregnant with anxiety. The
background's figural temporality provides the viewer with the options: is it
the future that is empty? Or is it the past? The tragic tone of the picture
suggests that it is both. Temporality continues but narrative ceases. There is
nothing to tell. The anxiety of the future, as symbolised by the window and its
content, of what is yet to come, may imply an unknown path: or it may suggest a
path only too familiar, a future rooted firmly in the past, the insistence of
an unwanted continuity - a reflection of what has gone before, a return of the
same. Repetition has given form to a narrative non-sequitur.
If the position of the viewer in Stairway is that of the implied user of
the stairs, then Room in Brooklyn
links viewer to represented character, or character figure, through their shared viewpoint over the city's
horizon. In this way the affective response of the external viewer may be
imputed to a position internal to the painting. The affective viewpoint is both
internal and external, and so overlapping. In Automat, it is the posture of the character figure (again a woman)
that permits the viewer to read his or her affective response as an analogue of
the character's dilemma. The self-consciousness of this mise-en-abime structure in the viewer means that self-consciousness
may also be implied as part of the meaning of the picture, posing the
questions: to what extent is the picture's affect a comment upon the
character's predicament, and to what extent is it readable as a representation,
or enactment, of her awareness of this predicament (the predicament as affect
is enacted in the implied viewer)? This reading of the representation of inner
regard as putative self-consciousness, of the temporal rhetoric of a painting
as the means to construct an identity and voice its problems, also applies to
another painting by Edward Hopper.
The painting's referential or
literal present is the cinema with its usherette and its customers. The implied
viewpoint is from the place of the back wall (external), or from the back seats
(internal), onto the usherette's corner - this ambiguity of viewpoint allows
the unification of the viewpoints (internal and external) and of the picture
itself as two spaces viewed from a privileged position. The (dual) space of the
painting is unified by the viewer and by its presence within a frame – and,
within the painting, by the presence of a vestigial foreground. The possibility
of an internally implied position for the viewer encourages the latter to play
the role of participant consciousness or character-viewer to the usherette's
character figure, and so to impute consciousness to her also. It must be noted
that in this case the character-viewer appears to find the usherette more
interesting than the screen, and so, by analogy, to speculate upon her thoughts
- exactly like the critic (which acts as a reminder of the potential for the
position of the critic to become that of a voyeur).[22] Yet already this apparently unified field
of space, or sense of place, is divided by the rhythms of time. The usherette's
work time and the leisure time of the customers divide space into left and
right, leading, in turn, to two backgrounds, and to two sets of vanishing
points - all of which may be read as carrying temporal implications. Indeed the
viewpoint may be itself divided temporally. If internal it is of the period, or
the time of the painting: if external it is based in the eternal present of the
implied viewer (pinned to a specific now-moment by the actual viewer). This
division, by form (the two halves), by relation to consumption and production
and their respective cycles, and by gender, provides our first temporal cue.
The usherette gives us our second temporal cue. Her posture suggests that she
is thinking - perhaps daydreaming, or worrying? If she muses in the painting's present,
whatever she is musing upon is absent, is non-presented, and quite probably
relates to matters located in the past or the future rather that in the
immediate present.[23] This absence of thought representation
with its concomitant implication of a temporal elsewhere also provides a bridge
to the two backgrounds as interpretable in terms of the past or the future, as
symbolic keys to the usherette's implied interior vision. Indeed, in contrast
to the others in the cinema who are watching the screen, the usherette's regard
is turned inward, further permitting, even inciting, the viewer to seek
symbolic indicators as to the contents of her implied consciousness, her
thoughts as a character-figure, elsewhere in the picture.
One of these indicators may be
in the picture within a picture (the end of a mise-en-abime that begins with the picture frame, passes through
the left half, and ends at the picture's top left hand corner). The contents of
the screen (black & white) are unclear (possibly representing a snowy
mountain scene) and belong to the opposite side, of the painting - that of the
usherette. Perhaps it is her entry into this space, the space of escapism, that
the usherette dreams of transforming herself from worker to consumer, and from
servant to master. The empty chairs of the left half may, in this sense, be for
her. The vanishing points of the floor and ceiling around her, on the right
hand side of the painting, also point towards this screen. At work, does she think
on leisure; specifically the leisure pursuit obtaining in the 'other' half of
the painting?[24]
Following
this line further we might ask if it is the content of the film on show that
she thinks upon (and to which the vanishing points of her half of the painting
lead)? If the screen's content features one of the popular genres of adventure
or romance, then we are offered the usherette as wishing to participate in the
escapism it offers, yet excluded by her job (by time, her labour time has been
sold) as well as by space from the spectacle around the corner. Indeed, if the
screen is showing a film (or scene) concerned with desire, then the usherette
may be thought of as musing upon her own desire. The non-representation or
hidden character of these thoughts may suggest their difference from the
sanctioned fantasy on show, or their distance from the cliched question of an
older generation of psychoanalysts (Freud, Lacan): what does a woman want?
The two halves of the picture
appear differentiated by sex, by a sexual division of labour, and by their
associated gender roles. There is a woman consumer; but she is a -barely
visible- background figure when compared to the visual priority of the male
customer. Indeed, the ornamental column, or ornamented side of the painting's
central horizontal partition, structurally a 'false' pillar or decoration, has
the phallic character of such structures (just like the phallus in
psychoanalytic theory, which is just a sign and not the thing itself). This
combination of gender, role, and symbolism suggests that the public space of
entertainment and leisure is (primarily) masculine, for the use of men, and
that the public sphere (in the 1930s) was to be thought of as a, primarily,
male preserve - a preserve however, to be serviced by women (the right hand
side of the central dividing feature may be the functional pillar, or may be a
partition with the functional weight-bearing structure hidden behind).[25] If the division of the picture's space,
which is the division of production and consumption, is also the division of
sex or gender roles, and if this division can be read on a temporal level, then
the resulting temporalities will be divided by sex, will be indicators of
sexual identity - as well as of identities based upon labour and consumption.[26]
If the central column can be
read as a phallic, or masculine-referring, form, then other forms are also
amenable to being read as gendered (sauce for the goose is indeed sauce for the
gander). The opening in the right half, adjacent to the usherette, is en-framed
in folds, whilst the little lamps above the usherette may configure other
aspects of the female primary sexual organ; not least as compared to the
overhead lamps in the other half which in their form suggest mammary glands
(giving light rather than milk) as do the snowy mountains on the screen behind
them. These latter perhaps function as indexes of masculine fantasy (but also
of lesbian fantasy, as sexuality, choice of sexual object, enters the story
through the minimal presence of a woman on the 'male' side of the picture). The
barrier indicates that the two sexual imaginaries here implied are not joined
(Lacan: 'there is no sexual relation') and that any real relations happens
off-image, off-screen, off-painting; elsewhere. What we have, here in this most
'realist' of artists, is another use of deixis in art to point to the real, the
important, the prior, as being outside representation.[27] This is the place where readings based
upon the work of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan joins forces with that of the
philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Both prefer the Word to the Image: for Lacan the
Symbolic is preferred as a more direct route to the authenticising unconscious;
for Levinas the iconoclast, the authentic lies in the Word of God, the Image is
a false relation, a golden calf inciting idolatry.
If
we read the areas not immediately present as the presented non-present (past
and future), then the full temporal dimensionality available to consciousness
again reasserts itself. An option of escape or critique which is an alternative
to the situation presented within the picture itself, an alternative option
implied immanently by the picture's symbolic or second meanings, will require a
temporal dimension to ground its possibility as an alternative future. Such an
alternative must involve more than just stasis; it needs a rejected past and an
index into the future to motivate the search or critique (the present here
functions as the continuation of the past, otherwise the event depicted would
already be sufficiently temporally transitional). Even the depiction of stasis,
as can be seen from Hopper's other pictures, implies the existence of a past as
the threat of the ever-same persisting into the future, or of the anxiety of
the unknown to come (again, the future). If the tragedy of stasis, as
represented in Hopper's paintings, is to be transformed into a critique of the
situation they represent, it must be by means of temporality, that is, by the
very means that awaken our affective interaction with the painting. The same
textual rhetoric that underlies the sensing of a problem in the painting, the
nagging 'something else' indicated by grounds, vanishing points, and surfaces,
as well as by the posture of character figures, is capable of extending the
sense of 'something else' from description and diagnosis to a potential for
change, which in turn signals the position from which a critical and ethical
judgment may be made. The movement of interpretation would then become: from
the future as (the repetition of) a problem, to the future as the site of the
possible (solution).
In New York Movie the past and future become present in the picture
through the portions of the text which appear secondary, are more distant,
which may even be absent yet referred-to from the world of the image-text. In
general textual features such as the background, marginality, indistinctness,
the deixis of a vanishing point, indeed whatever the viewer feels has less
presence than the foreground, whether figure or feature, all may support
temporal co-relates. In this painting the cinema screen (left) and the exit
(right) figure as a double background (suggesting a double symbolic economy),
that we might wish to read as connotative of past or future (or of both). If
the contrasting sides of the painting can be read as the simultaneously
depicted pasts or futures of a repetitive cycle of labour time and leisure
time, then the life of the usherette is shown as a cycle of production and
consumption, with the left half of the picture simultaneously giving us an
example (or synecdoche) of her non-work activity, and suggesting that
consumption may not always offer the rewards expected. A third possibility
suggests her connection to the picture as fantasy participant of the movie, site
of her imagined desire and imaginary identifications (in parallel perhaps with
our identification with the picture and its character).
Moreover the background of each side may
symbolise one of two futures for the usherette, one side, as indicted above, as
a consumer, in her post-work role (the immanent, or 'internal' option). The
other future is contained in the exit on the (our) right, to exit would be to
enter the future, it would be a future action. Such an action might suggest a
more general exit from the cinema (and the imaginary world it represents) and
be read as leading to participation in some other form of consumption or
leisure activity - or it may indicate a complete exit from a particular
division of labour and its life-styles (the utopian or transcendent 'external'
route). On the other hand, the cinema screen may be read as showing a film or
feature already made and so indicating the past (even if consisting of a
news-reel), here the usherette's life in the world of consumption: in contrast
to the exit door on the picture's left which would remain symbolic of an, as
yet unspecified, future possibility. A possibility which may constitute an
unseen and therefore unknown alternative which may equally be, as we have seen
in Automat, as in other similar
paintings by Hopper, the source of some trepidation (this time it is the
unfamiliar that is the source or anxiety). What will the future hold, is there
a (different) future at all, and if so is it achievable? Freedom too has its
terrors. On this reading the
division of the text is a division into good and bad options, or better, into
stale and unknown options. Such a reading is in full consonance with the
overall mood of the picture. Temporality again shows its versatility in
explicating our intuitive feel of a picture, of meaning as included, rather
than occluded, by attention to affect.
The dispersion of luminosity
within the picture and its relation to the 'eye-leading' of the vanishing
points, appear to support such a reading.
Indeed, the cinema lights 'float' and obscure the screen and its
contents (this suggests that, as far as the implied viewer is concerned, we
might finally decide on an external viewpoint, as it is too high to be a person
sitting in the back row). The lights even appear more 'real' than the screen
(black & white); the cinema lighting is more attractive or intense than
than the lighting of the screen and its indistinct images. The doubled
red/orange lighting leads to the double vanishing points of both 'halves' of
the picture, one containing a dead-end colourless screen, one a flight of
stairs, glowing red, presumably leading to a door which is also a way out. We
are presented with a binary space divided between illusion and exit, where fake
visions are opposed to a call to escape - perhaps even to make one's
recreational activity active, rather than passive - of finding an alternative
to spending one's leisure time lost in illusion.[28]
The trajectory of the vanishing
points does appear to reinforce this set of interpretative options. The ends of the doubled vanishing points
of the picture's symbolic halves lie, in part, within the double framing of a
part of each background. The left background is framed referentially by a screen
frame and its surround: the door on the right side is framed by curtains,
lintel, and a wall. The vanishing points involve an implied movement of the
eyes from (our) right to left, from lower to higher - although the vanishing
point of the cinema lights occurs nearer the base of the screen, a visual cue
(augmented by their intensity and colour) to the redundancy of the screen and
its contents. Of the double termini
of the vanishing points, one is visible (left side), the screen, coloured in
black and white; and the other is invisible (right side), and emits a warm
coloured light, the symbolic end of the rising stairwell, beyond the frame of
the door and the frame of the picture. Where does the latter lead to? In life
it leads to home (on which the usherette's thoughts may rest), to family,
children, or leisure activity; or, if we read the usherette's thoughtful
appearance as meditative self-consciousness, it may, figuratively, lead to
another life, the prospect of another job, as noted to another mode of
consumption or leisure activity, or even an alternative to labour (even, in
full utopian mode, an alternative to the division of labour and leisure).
Visual and symbolic lines of flight combine to pose some difficult questions
about production, consumption, and their varied forms or possibilities. Furthermore,
if the formal, symbolic and economic (production/ consumption) division of
space echoes the sexual division of labour and the division of sexed gender
roles, then this division further suggests that the questions posed and
possibility of alternatives are to be read with an eye to their implications
for the role of women (the primary 'producers' in sexual reproduction and in
leisure commodity production were, at the time of the picture's creation, and
are still, at time of writing, women).
The division of the painting
into two halves by gender has one other important implication. If the radical
division in space of Analytical Cubism left us with a manifold divided into
many folds of time and space, this division is nevertheless quantitative; the temporalities
revealed were hardly differentiated amongst themselves, the emphasis was upon
their fragmentation and co-existence, not upon their potential for qualitative
difference. With New York Movie the
two spaces and their temporal co-efficients offer the viewer two contrasting
kinds of life, two qualitatively distinct identities, the two different kinds
of time that we have discussed are also divided by gender. Woman's time, and
what that might be, can now be added to the questions posed by the right hand
side of the painting, in its contrast (but not necessarily in contradiction) to
its contrary. If a gendered critique or escape are proffered by the time and
space of the formal properties of this half of the picture, then these
questions may also be implied to the thoughts of the usherette (in contrast to
the other half whose escapism is rooted in the illusion on the screen). Her
time may constitute her thoughts; her thoughts, her time. This issue is left
open.[29]
If the painting's contrasting
temporalities offer us identities which are sexed as well as based upon labour
and consumption, then this division also reminds us that notions of escape may
differ according to identity and can not be simply located in any one answer to
the painting's problematics and then imposed as part of a unified reading. Yet
temporality can only indicate the general possibility of a problem and its
future (in a criticism which may also be a possibility of escape). The viewers
'take' on the usherette may be coloured by their gender, but also by whether
the relation to her is one of recognition (to be, to be like her, to belong to
the same classification) or desire (to have, or possess her) - or an admixture
of both which may combine recognition of kindred in labour or service and
desire (or indeed a further kindred) in terms of sexuality. The particular is therefore not only
left up to the period or history of the viewer, but also to his or her politics of identity (or politics of desire).[30]
Any explication of the theme of escape,
of the questioning of the relations depicted in New York Movie, must take into account the double movement, the
double flow, of the viewer's vision to the (our) upper left of each half of the
picture - as observed in its dual vanishing points and backgrounds. In
practice, the end of this movement is elsewhere. We assume, that the door at
the top of the stairs leads 'out'; yet the screen too is centred out of the
frame. Does the picture refer to both of its 'escapes' as elsewhere, as taking
place only (or first) in the world of representation or imagination (the film
and the usherette's interior regard)? Or perhaps both invisible ends refer to
'escape' as only residing in the, otherwise unattainable, realm of art; the
picture self-referentially grounds its themes to its own form of being as a
work of art. Art becomes a present (collective) means to deal with the past and
to pre-empt the future. In this respect art, as collective imagination, takes
the place of the sacred as the provider of coherent answers to the general
questions of existence or 'last things'. Yet, the combined vanishing points of
the left side appear 'over-determined' and cluttered compared to the elegance
and simplicity of vanishing points of the right side. Perhaps on aesthetic
(that is, artistic, formal, self-referential) grounds, the stairwell - and we
remember the previous Hopper Stairway
- still holds the position of positive pole with its inviting but (necessarily)
absent exterior exit. Hopper is never a propagandist. The logic of New York Movie has been to read the end
of a spatial vanishing point as temporal: as a question asked of continuity in
time, as a question asked of the future. Temporality transfers into criticism
the present or presented content of the painting; an explication of the
picture's affective force (its sense of stasis) also provides the means of a
criticism of this stasis (and so may indicate a future).
Yet
there remains something we have ignored. Something central to the picture, but
almost invisible. For the implied viewer within the picture (as a member of the
cinema audience) as for the viewer without (as a gallery visitor), what lies
center screen is the dividing pillar, divider of space, of the picture and of
the male and female (sex and gender) and the social-economic
(producers/service-providers and consumers) associations of these two halves.
'We', that is, are looking at the absence at the centre of the picture; and so
apparently is the usherette. She, within the world of the picture, insofar as looking at anything, has her head turned
toward this black-grey monolith, for all the world a blank screen or vertical
band of impenetrable darkness. All thoughts turn to this 'gap' in the
picture. What work of significance
does it perform and how does it affect the reading given so far?
First this blank piece of
canvass, this emptiness, this absence in the centre and top of the picture, may
be read as connoting the 'feminine' when opposed to presence as such,
traditionally read as 'masculine', and particularly when compared to the
presence found in the picture in the contiguous phallic pillar . It may also be
said to occur on the 'feminine' side of the picture (simultaneously dividing it
from the 'masculine' half and taking its part, being a part of it). Furthermore
if we go beyond a simple visual-based economy of reading (the image as
privileged bearer of presence) then we find that the absence portrayed here
becomes the sign of another kind of presence, invisible in this realm (in this
image and in the visual world itself); it becomes the sign of another realm of
significance, another place of reference and so a matter of considerable
rhetorical importance. Such a reading parallels exactly the findings of a
temporal reading of this space, where we find in the absence portrayed, a
deixis, an indicator, or a portal to the extra-temporal. So far our temporal
readings have focused on the relations of presence and semi-presence that
offered the possibility of present and optional future/past temporal alignments.
Now, with the interpretation of this enigmatic band of absence, we have moved
beyond temporality to the outside of time, to eternity as the opposing semantic
and metaphysical pole to the duration of temporality.[31] If we follow this route we find ourselves
faced with the rhetorical exteriority on which our interior stability appears
so often to depend (eternal truths, general propositions, truths beyond the
wear and tear of the passing of time, all requiring extra-temporal status to
'support' their claims). A piece of representation is sacrificed, reality (or
realism) is dispensed with; albeit in a realistic way - the figure is born of
the realism of the shadow.[32] Sacrificed to allow in that which is
beyond representation, beyond the space and time that shelters its bearers,
beyond its limitations and theirs, to allow in a link to eternity. This is
therefore a sacrifice which (like all sacrifices) guarantees order in the
world; here the ordering of the two halves of the picture and the meanings
associated with them.[33]
Within the world of the picture
then, the vertical 'band' divides. This band of absence, a representative space
sacrificed to a higher rhetoric, functions as the guarantor of the meanings
held apart in binary tension. This band is like the sacrifice at the centre of
a ritual which opens up eternity to witness and guarantee the identities the
art work depicts.[34] Yet in what way does it do this? The
picture's double economy holds one more twist in store for the reader of New York Movie.
The
history of art too has left its trail in the picture. The source of light from
the picture's top right-hand corner, echoes the presence of God in the same
place in countless Annunciations as in other religious visual genres; but as
this position represents God's eye view onto us, it is not of course to be
'found' on the unlucky and tabooed left (this was only ever our subjective left) but (‘His’) right
(that is, the point of view of the object or image, the objective right, the
picture's Right). This depiction of divine causal influence underlines here the
dominance of the left-to-right directionality in art (as in other forms of
representation, as of the reading of representation, in the West at least, in
the countries and cultures influences by the cultures of Christianity) as the
default direction of time in art, the direction of narrative. This
directionality, this visual template, has since become a part of the history of
art, its favourite diagonal. In this way the doubling of Western Art history's
favourite diagonal in the two halves of New
York Movie, takes the Annunciation at its ultimate point of reference. The
issue of the Left/Right forces in the picture suggests the directionality of an
Annunciation, even an Annunciation doubled; but finally a failed Annunciation -
the light does not traverse the entire space of the canvass to the waiting
woman; instead we have two gendered halves, each with a light source operating
from the (our) top left. As with the historical Annunciation genre, there is
also a double directionality to be found in the origin of the light; in each
there can be found a local or temporal light source (in the prior art
historical genres, the sun, here the interior lighting) and an a-temporal,
absent or light of qualitatively different origin to that of the above, a
symbolic or metaphysical source (the arrow of the Annunciation, the cinema
screen and the light from the exit). In post-Annunciation art and photography
the direction of light itself often comes to play this role. There appears to
be no simple return of sacrality or full meaning to justify the world, rather
the sense is that this return is denied, blocked, or provisional. Its return,
in short (as in other aspects of Hopper's art) is problematic. If the light from the far left top of
the picture (traditionally the 'male' god position and side), the light from
the cinema screen, does not get through, then we are instead offered an
alternative; on the left side of the right side (her side). However the source
of the light from the top left of the right side of the picture (her side)
actually leads out from right to left; an implied motion contra to that of the
normal or default movement of narrative from left to right, that is, in contrary motion to that of the default
directionality of narrative in Western Art. Are we being offered a symbolic
escape, inverting the norms (the default symbolics, meanings and behaviours of
art as of society) as exploited by the picture itself? Where might they lead?
If the folds of the exit on the
woman's side can be read to suggest feminine imagery (folds as opposed to
phallus), then the exit is yet further tagged as 'feminine', as not-male. This
configuration would then also suggest that it points to a realm of 'not labour'
(an exit from the 'labour' side); yet not to consumption, at least not as
'masculine' consumption (as found or demonstrated on the picture's left). Could
it be that New York Movie offers the
reader a 'neither/nor', the logical figure for waiting? Awaiting the
Annunciation of something else, as yet unspecified; open, but not yet unfolded?
Or is a different kind of labour implied? The labour of motherhood, the economy
of working only in the home?
The reading of the absence as
connoting the a-temporal and so the eternal guarantor of these self-same sexual
and other divisions in their current hierarchical form is questioned by the
co-presence of the failed Annunciation. The light from left to right does not
get through the divide, so unifying and sanctifying the received hierarchy of
differences; but is doubled. There is to be no single external guarantor
(rather if there is it guarantees the division, as we have seen). The division
of pictorial space is not reunified; the picture remains divided. From a
sub-division within One, we have Two. Each to their Annunciation, to their
sacred, to their own time. (To meditate upon the meaning of New York Movie is to meditate upon the
divisions that make up ourselves).
However the absence on the woman's side configures
not only the traditional masculine
cliché of an absent organ - a figure for (social) castration, but also a figure
of the outside, of eternity; now found on the female side. Is the trace of
sacrality to be found in the picture to be read as feminine (as other to, or
not-traditionally, masculine)? It would appear so. This inversion taken with
the division of the painting's reference to its Annunciation(s) would suggest
an-other, a female, response to the traditional meaning of the Annunciation.
The gift of making the world's values has become part of the work (the side of
the producer in the picture) of the female, a feminine remit, an act of
positive creation (an act of labour). This is the (symbolic) power to make
difference, to divide and to justify such differences and divisions (the legitimating
absence, the rhetoric of eternity). This power has in this instance passed to
the female side, to a woman, also the side of production, of labour. The
usherette's posture may also be recognised as that of ‘the thinker’, a
philosopher. She may no longer be waiting for God.
Copyright, Peter Nesteruk, 2011.
[1] Much recent discussion in aesthetics on
the question of time seems to have had difficulty getting beyond the work of
Gotthold Lessing, a eighteenth century critic. Lessing's concept of 'temporal
and non-temporal arts', expounded in Laocoön
(1766), essentially marks differences of kind, of genre, or species difference,
existing at the level of the mode of engagement of the art object with the
perceiving consciousness (literature, painting, sculpture, music), See Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing, Laocöon: an Essay on the
Limits of Painting and Poetry, Trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore,
USA: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984). See esp. p.78; p. 104.. Of this perception, the
initial moment is regarded as crucial; has all been seen or is there more (must
one turn the page or await the next scene). The arts are distinguished by their
relation to duration, or process, on the one hand, and simultaneity, on the
other; all rests upon whether the constituent parts may be said to coexist or
are perceived as consecutive. The only question allowed is: are the parts
apprehended over time or in an instant? Even if objections are raised that
suggest that the time of interpretation, or 'reading', of a work, takes all the
arts into the realm of duration (and that the notion of the instant, as a unit
of presence, can no longer be allowed as valid), traditional aesthetics would
still insist that the initial mode of apprehension would hold, and become the
the basis for the imputation of fundamental differences in kind. See, for
example, Jean-François Lyotard, 'Newman: The Instant', in The Inhuman, (Cambridge: Polity, 1991) pp. 78-88, which
essentially focuses upon the time of interpretation, or, more precisely the
moment of impact and conceptual resistance of the Abstract Expressionist work
(particularly Barnett Newman), and its relation to the inexpressible or sublime
relation.
[2] Jacques David, The
Oath of the Horatii.
Oil on canvas, 265 x
[3] See also Anita Brookner, Jacques-Louis David, (London: Chatto
& Windus, 1980), p. 69; 75-76; 79; 81; 97, for an excellent summary of the
picture's sources and reception.
[4] See Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet in the '90s: The Series Paintings
(London: Yale UP , 1989) for the meaning at time of consumption, and
production, as linked to the period after the 1870 war of France with Prussia
and the role of landscape as patriotism (for the lost war, for lost land,
Alsace-Lorraine, and as unifying ideological response to the class and
industrial problems of the time). Such a reading is not exclusive of my
interpretation, but rather may be read as taking strength from the latter's
connotations. A reading based upon the consumption at the time of production,
or upon the dominant reading emerging at that time (a historically bound
reading) is not, however, necessarily valid for all time. This is the
difference between history and aesthetics, between a pure historical object
(the original reading) and the current consumption of the art work (the notion
of aesthetics may be glossed as the tension between the works current
affectivity, success, and reading, and its universal pretentions - implied by
its continuing success).
[5] See, for example, Grainstacks (Sunset.) 1889. The
[6] This suggestive colouring also leads the
realism of the grainstacks to be questioned by Tucker - aiding interpretations that see stacks
as repositories of light, and not just convenient reflectors or objects for
effects demonstrating the essence of light (Tucker, p. 88). See further, Grainstacks (Morning Effect.) 1888-1889.
Private Collection; Grainstacks
(Thaw; sunset.), 1890-1891. The Art Institute of Chicago; Grainstack (Sunset;
winter.), 1890-1891. Private Collection,
[7] Survival is indeed linked to storage,
whether as forage, as hay, or fodder for animals - or as grain. Indeed the name
'Grainstacks' itself strikes home more directly, we think of the step from
grain to bread, to food chain and to human survival.
[8] Regarding reversibilty and
non-reversibility (the maths of physics and thermodynamics). It requires the
additions of a quantum theory butteressed with chaos math, to give a
statistical average -in
the jargon of chaos theory, a 'strange attractor'- whose results tend toward
the direction taken by the arrow of time, thus bringing physics into line with
thermodynamcs (until now physical laws were thought to be, as some still are,
reversible, awaiting the contraction of the universe).
[9] Most writing on Hopper may be divided
into two broad camps: that which addresses the issue of author and art as
'American' and that which focuses on the biographical. The best examplars of
each trend are; Wieland Schmidt, Edward
Hopper: Portraits of America (NY: Prestal, 1995) and Vivian Green Fryd, Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward
Hopper & Geogina O'Keefe (
[10] In this sense Hopper represents a
continuation of the Romantic tradition of subjectivity as interiority via
landscapes that are only nominally exterior or mimetic. See also Rolf Günter
Renner, Edward Hopper: Transformation of
the Real, Trans. Michael Hulse. (Köln: Benedikt Taschen, 1993), who quotes
Hopper: 'Why I select certain subjects rather that others, I do not rightly
know, unless it is that I believe them to be the best mediums for a synthesis of my
inner experience,' (p. 10). The role of silence as a hiatus of comprehension in
Hopper's work has been noted by Joseph Anthony Ward, American Silences: The Realism of James Agee, Walter Evans, and Edward
Hopper, (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State UP, 1985) and Brian O' Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth,
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1988), who also notes the role of imagination and
personal memory as filters of experience and the formal, and so aesthetic,
options of separating effect (or affect) from content or representation (p. 19;
22). Indeed, an analysis of late works, such as Rooms by the Sea (1951), would find that the treatment of those
elements of abstraction in the picture might just as easily be interpreted
through the notion of citation, of parts
of the picture as juxtaposing different referents; the interpretation would now
proceed through a discussion of the aesthetics of contrastive assembly or
collage, in a similar way that the demands of abstraction and citation must be
balanced in the interpretation of a Rauschenberg.
[11] Marc Augé, A Sense for the Other: The Timeliness and Relevance of Anthropology,
trans. by Amy Jacobs. (Stanford, California; Stanford UP, 1998).
[12] Edward Hopper, A Room in
[13] See also Ivo Kranzfelder, Edward Hopper: Vision of Reality (
[14] Edward Hopper, Stairway c. 1925. Oil on Wood, 16 x 11, 7/8 inches.
[15] Of Stairway,
Kranzfelder, Edward Hopper: Vision of
Reality (2002) notes that the painting suggests a 'transition... from the
real world into a transcendental one' (p. 35). Hopper also painted at least two
other stairways with a similar symbolic impact: Stairway at 49 rue de
[16] Further examples of such an analysis
would include:Compartment C, Car 293
(1938), Approaching a City (1946), Four Lane Road (1956), Hotel
Window (1956), Western Motel (1957).
[17] Edward Hopper, Automat . Oil on canvas, 71.4 x
[18] For a reading where the void in the
background is a representation of the unconscious and especially of the death
drive, see Margaret Iverson, 'In
the blind field: Hopper and the Uncanny', Art
History, V. 21, No. 3, 1998 (pp. 409-429) p. 418. The author only then
focuses upon which temporal implications (figures) may be read into this space.
[19] For the ubiquity of the lone
figure/character in Hopper and its default reading; see Matthew Beigell, Artist & Identity in 20th Century
America (Cambridge: CUP, 2001). Hopper's figure is read as the typical
product of modern city life, 'lacking spirtual resources, sexually frustrated
and unable to develop, let alone nurture, healthy human relationships' (p. 51).
[20] Edward Hopper,
[21] Ita G. Berkow, in Edward Hopper: A Modern Master (NY: Todtri, 1996) notes that the
illumination of the usherette gives her 'prominence' (p. 36) that is visually
and so semantically, in terms of her contribution to the significance making
process (I shall comment later on the metaphor of physical presence for
significance, its implications and its alternatives).
[22] Kranzfelder, Edward Hopper: Vision of Reality (2002) notes that, 'Hopper has
made the viewer's gaze part of his work (p. 37).
[23] A possible discrepancy in her clothing
also appears to indicate a temporal pointer. The discrepancy between the
register of the usherette's uniform and her footware has beeen noted by many
contributors, among them Michaelis, in Lyon (1995), and Claude Esteban, Soleil dans une pièce vide (Paris,
Flammarion, 1991), who notes that
they appear to be either 'des chaussures de princesse ou de prostituée' (p.
97). The anomoulous nature of the footware does, of course, constitute a trope,
which, when temporalised, may be
read as pointing away from the present, just as a any trope points away from
the literal context. The resulting suggestion of a past or future dexis offers
the alternatives; she has come from or is going to somewhere where the
footwhere would be apposite and not anomoulous. Esteban's suggestion covers the
opposites available; either up-market or a drop to the lower depths.
[24] However, as with the implication of the
voyeurism of the viewing role, the viewer, as outside of the world of the
picture, is also a leisure-time based consumer (when not a critic); therefore
already complicit with the values represented in the (our) left half of the
picture - in this sense the painting reminds us that we are all traversed by
conflicting interests as producers and consumers.
[25] Indeed, the figure of the usherette
echoes the false pillar, both are to the right of their half of the picture;
yet the implied contrast of the woman (next to the frame) to the central (in
terms of the picture's mise-en-scene)
position of the pillar, suggests her role as real social support to the
pillar's artificial function. And what of the other entrances, doors, or
mysterious portals: are they toilets?Are they markers of sexual difference? Or
do they connote classical, sacred entrances (in a sexual economy of entrances
and pillars)? Or does the
combination of these connotations further ironise the roles and functions
represented in this half of the picture?
[26] Kranzfelder, Edward Hopper: Vision of Reality (2002) notes that: 'It is as if he
were implying that the difference between recreation and labour is nonexistent,
a fiction' (p. 161). This painting at least suggests the opposite.
[27] The rhetorical formula, or
deconstruction, of this position is evident: the important or prior, that which
is outside representation, relies on the actual primacy of the image, to debunk
the importance of the image...
[28] If the cinema is read as the bearer of
the sacred in the modern or mass-cultural period, where art functions as a
conduit for aspirations once catered for by religion (together with the
meta-narratives of state or nation) and thus acts as a kind of secular sacred
in a rationalised and commodified modernity, then the issue may be one of a
fake 'mass' sacred versus individual forms of sacred activity (one which would
therefore be both 'alienated' and 'authentic').
[29] The picture is composed of the tension
between a double symbolic economy which is simultaneously temporal, spatial,
divided by sex and gender, and by the differing moments in the general economic process
of production and consumption, in another version of the sexual division of
labour where one attends whilst the other consumes - the service relation
repeats the domestic relation. This relation of isomorphic binaries reminds the
present-day reader that sexual equality in the jobs market was (and is) still
some time away (although better paid jobs, and so consumption, are now more
open to women, low paid short term work is still the lot of many).
[30] This question of qualitative
temporalities and identity can be taken further in the implications of
Synthetic Cubism for poly-chromatic space-time units and more especially in the
collage, combine, or construction, whether made of found objects, and images,
or of especially constructed ones, as, for example, is pre-eminently the case
in the work of Robert Rauschenberg.
[31] Taggart also finds a religio-mystical
component to Hopper's painting. However he proceeds from the presence, and not
the absence, of light. See John Taggart, Remaining
in Light: Ant Meditations on a Painting by Edward Hopper (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1993).
[32] Compare this blank dark space with its
opposite in Sun in an Empty Room,
1963, in Kranzfelder, Edward
Hopper:Vision of Reality (2002); which has in fact no sun, just its
reflected light sitting, like a door, on a wall, then repeated in another room,
on another wall, in an enigmatic allegory of interiority and sacrality (p.
191).
[33] As a performance of the problem of future
identity, as an identity ritual, does the picture offer a change of identity
for woman (or fror the producer, the provider of a service)? Or are both
subjectivities (both economic roles) put into question: the 'masculine' also as
the 'other half' of the binary equation; and both as the sacrifice of the
other, each in their half (depending on the viewer to chose which half of the
binaries lined up in the picture he or she may choose)? With 'only' the symbolic
absence, the bar, between them.
[34] For a insightful comment on art as ritual
(here as art's content, not as part of the fact of its existence) see Taggart, Remaining in Light: p. 12.