<h3>(일준)</h3> <p></p> <p><strong>1.<em>Gaddafi</em>, Oil on Canvas</strong></p> <p><br></p> <p>Documentation of Muammar Gaddafis death on October 20, 2011, is not only found in well-known amateur videos and press photographs, but also in two oil paintings by the Polish painter Wilhelm Sasnal. Unlike the authors of the press photographs, Sasnal was not present at the event- the times of illustrators and painters being sent to actual scenes of world events (during the Crimean War of 1863, for example) are long gone. Sasnal did not approach the event as an eyewitness of the occurrence on October 20, but as a recipient of the imagery that was circulated worldwide shortly following Gaddaf's death, like the rest of us newspaper readers and Internet users. Sasnal shows two views of the body of the deceased as it had been laid on the floor of a supermarket's refrigeration room. In one of the paintings, Gaddafi 3 (2011, fig. 1), the corpse is viewed from a low vantage point. The legs stretch toward the viewer, the torso is thrashed into an amorphous mass, the face is obscured. In Gaddafi (2011, fig. 2), Sasnal pushes the unrecognizable state further. The mattress and corpse now lie in an empty room, and the body is replaced by an abstract entity of color, making any further deciphering of upper from lower body impossible. Here, the canvas looks like a battlefield onto which the artist clearly applied the paint straight from the tube in broad paths and swirls of poisonous green, red, and blue. The pastose relief of pure paint lifts itself from the canvas on the dark rectangle of the mattress, where Gaddafis dead body would have been visible. </p> <p>Sasnal has often used existing images as examples for his paintings-_for instance, in his work Bathers at Asnières (2010), the Georges Seurat painting of the same name. However, the Gaddaf paintings differ from the work about Seurat on two decisive points. Firstly, their model is not a painting, but a photograph. This connects a transfer from one medium to another, which did not occur casually or "innocently", it calls for a perception and thematization of its own. Secondly, in its iconographic adaptation, it does not deal with a historical motif of European high art, but with a news image that, for a few days in October 201 1, was at the center of international attention. The painterly adaptation of news imagery consciously superimposes an anachronism, both in terms of medium and iconography:. A contemporary, media-transmitted experience appears dressed in the garb of a traditional art genre. To the same degree, because of the fact that attention is directed toward the choice of motif, there will therefore always be an additional accompanying discourse thematizing the topic of painting-and an artist once again dedicating himself or herself to representing a historical event with oil on canvas, or perhaps it should be stressed that the artist still employs oil on canvas for this representation. This is especially valid for Gaddaf, upon which the body of the deceased is transformed into "pure" painting. a thick ball of oil paint in an impasto application. Recently, Sasnal also rhetorically supported the political entitlement of his painting: "Definitely, an artist must be aware of the world and the society which he or she is part of. (...] Painting is not a game, not something you do just for fun; it comes with a responsibility that I take very seriously.” Processes of painterly adaptation have been familiar at least since Gerhard Richter's paintings of photographs.</p> <p></p> <p><strong>1</strong>•Achim Boncharde-Hume and Wilhelm Sainal, "A Conversation alvout Painting* in IN ilbeint ¡anal, ed. Achim Borchardt-Hame (London: Whitechapel Gallery:, 2011), á<br></p> <p>According to Stefan Germer, the goal is "pictures about picture making, about the relationship between painting and photography, about the procedure and social status of the painter" Photographys comeback as painting denies it the right to an immediate access to history, and its subject places the medial transmission within the picture at the same time. If Richter refers to historical experiences, like in his cycle October 18, 1977 (1988), he adheres to the old responsibility of painting to address political themes while modifying it at the same time-because clearly, in the twentieth century, this responsibility could only be asserted by works of the new medium of photography. Germer writes, "The ambivalent character of Richter's works is stirring in that they are history paintings that show the problematic nature of representing the historical."* In her review of the recent Sasnal exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich, Süddeutsche Zeitung critic Carin Lorch also presented Sasnal's work in this context: "One of the greatest achievements of painters like Gerhard Richter or Luc Tuymans is that they still continue to paint, despite the availability of faster, more contemporary media like photography or video, despite the mass of imagery that cuts up each day into a kaleidoscope of images, and despite art history having identified abstraction as the end of painting.” The article, titled "Historienmalerei2.0" (History Painting 2.0), also expresses that we are dealing with a revival of an old genre already declared dead, and that this genre, however, has been deep cleaned by the media-critical reflection of Richter, Tuymans, and Sasnal. The realization "that they still continued to paint despite (it all)" is not meant to hint at a stubborn persistence of repeated forms of representation- on the contrary, it counts as an expression of critical behavior. It is not actually a copying of historical events- rather, it is a reflection of the conditions of the possibility or impossibility for such copying.</p> <p></p> <p><strong>2</strong> Stefan Germer, "Die Wiederkehr des Verdrangten: Zum Umgang mit deutscher Geschichte bel Georg Baselitz, Anzelen Kiefee, Jorg Immendorf und Gerhard Richter,* in Germeriana Kunit, ed Julia Demand (Cologne: Oktagon, 1999), 14. (Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from non -English titles have been translated by Emilie Florenkowsky:) </p> <p><strong>3</strong> Serfan Germer, "Ungebetene Erinnerung* in Gerhard Richte, 18, Olzeber 1977 (Cologne: Verlag der Bochhandlung (altber König, 1989), S1. </p> <p><strong>4</strong> Carin Lorch, *Historienmalere1 20,; Saddleutsche Zeitung, Pebruary 3, 2012.</p> <p><br>The three painters mentioned belong to different generations, which begs the question of whether the potential for painting developed by Richter can last in the long run. Is a painting that transmits a photograph from the Internet into oil on canvas automatically political, reflexive, or media critical? As I am not only concerned with the new "history painting" but also with the rhetorical flanking it has received from critics and art historians, in the following I won't further cover Sasnal's Gaddaf images, about which hardly any thing has been published. Instead, I will concentrate on the reception of Tuymans's paintings,.s</p> <p><br><br></p> <p><strong>2. Tuymans Exegesis</strong></p> <p></p> <p>"In an age when painting was said to be dead, Tuymans experimented with film. [...] Tuymans now works in his studio everyday, perusing books to research his subjects. Nearly all his paintings are based on preexisting material such as drawing, Polaroids, illustrations, and film stills.<br></p> <p><strong>5</strong> However, it is not difficult to guess what sort of commentary Sasnal's Gaddaf paintings would generate. It would likely follow in the vein of the reception of Richter's and Tuymans's work: extolment of the reflexive potential of paintings that take on actual political themes, while at the same time questioning their representability and exposing a naive faith in images (which one usually accuses others of having). The first samples of this have already been made available. From a review of the Munich exhibition with the subheading, " The work of Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal reflects the possibilities of painting in the age of photography, published in the newspaper Der Freitag: "Wilhelm Sasnal erases visibility in his works in order to expose them as representations, as the effects of media. (...] In the painting Gaddafi, which cites a news photograph, Sasnal repaints the dictator's dead body in thickly applied pigment to denote the superimposition of reality through its likenesses. in this way; the medium itself becomes the object.* Katrin Schuster, "Farbklumpengewachs,;" Der Freitag, February 11, 2012, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="http://www.freitag.de/datenbank/freitag/2012/06/ein-klumpen-farbew-chst-in-den-raum." class="auto_link">http://www.freitag.de/datenbank/freitag/2012/06/ein-klumpen-farbew-chst-in-den-raum.</a> Similarly stated in the Haus der Kunst's exhibition brochure: "The artist highlights the problematic excess of a perverted medialization of reality that increasingly manipulates our perception"</p> <p></p> <p>Tuymans nearly always focuses on specific meanings reaching beyond what is shown, often deriving his subject matter from historical facts"* Seven statements are combined into these few lines of commentary by Belgian gallerist Rose Van Doninck- a typical type of remark about Tuymans. The following assertions are primarily touched upon: (1) When Tuymans began working, painting was con sidered dead. Though today, Tuymans enters his studio "everyday to paint, thus finding a means of enabling painting to survive its alleged end. (2) Tuymans is not only a painter. He also carries out a sort of research, uses his studio for an intense study of books, and through this intellectual exploration often relates the themes of his pictures to "historical facts." Tuymans’s paintings have a meaning that goes beyond the visible and that cannot be deciphered through mere observation. We have to search for it somewhere outside of the picture. These stances are found in a similar form in almost all commentaries on Tuymans. On the occasion of his retrospective at Tate Modern in 2004, Emma Dexter wrote, "His painting betrays an awareness of the discourse of the endgame of painting” Here, an attest is made for the reflexive potential of Tuymans’s paintings. They are not simply paintings--they communicate an understanding about the idea that they are paintings, despite the claims made for the end of the medium, or perhaps even because of just this fact. One variation on this reading states that, precisely by painting, Tuymans has transcended the discourse on the end of painting.</p> <p><br></p> <p><strong>6</strong> Rose Van Doninck, "Biography," in Luc Tuymans: I Don't Get It, ed. Gerrit Vermeiren (Ghent: Ludion Press, 2007), 197.</p> <p><strong>7</strong> Emma Dexter,"'The Interconnectedness of All Things: Between History, Still Life and the Uncanny," in Luc Tuymans, ed. Emma Dexter and Julian Heynen (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), 16.</p> <p></p> <p>"Tuymans's works are all, without any question, paintings," remarks Ulrich Loock under the chapter heading "A Historical Challenge to Painting."S He follows with the argument that Tuymans has overcome the modernist notion of progress in painting by consciously employing a seemingly outmoded and unprofessional style: "With the appearance of belatedness and painterly clumsiness in his painting, Tuymans apparently frees his work from any modernist commitment to the category of the new and the problems of the medium itself”? Helen Molesworth drives the nail in even further: it is not only modernism that Tuymans has surmounted but postmodernism as well, in that </p> <p></p> <blockquote><p>Tuymans broke from his postmodern predecessors' engagement with representational painting, a body of work characterized by the powerful neo-Kantian conception that the primary task of modernist painting was “precisely the working through the end of painting." These artists (such as Richter, Polke, Anselm Kiefer, Peter Halley, David Salle, or Ross Bleckner) typically produced paintings with the affective registers of irony, sentimentality, belatedness, or mourning. IO </p></blockquote> <p></p> <p><strong>8</strong> Ulrich Loock, "On Layers of Sign-Relations, in the Light of Mechanically Reproduced Pictures, from Ten Years of Exhibition," in Luc Tuymans (London: Phaidon, 2003), 34.</p> <p><strong>9</strong> Ibid., 36.</p> <p><strong>10</strong> Helen Molesworth, "Luc Tuymans; Painting the Banality of Evil,;" in Luc Tuymans, ed. Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 19.</p> <p></p> <h3>(요한)</h3> <p></p> <p>Tuymans, according to Molesworth, left all these registers behind. "He does not merely paint from photographs or inrelation to them (he does not, for instance, project photographs onto the canvas like either Warhol or Richter); instead his paintings work against the spatial logics of both systems of representation."'</p> <p>Appearing thoroughly tautological, Lock's insight ("Tuyman's works are all, without any question, paintings") would thus not be quite as obvious as it seems following Molesworth, Tuymans's art moves within a sphere where even merely hinting at medial differences has long been obsolete. In this case, the author pleads for a "semantic shif” anyhow: to "replace the word painter (with all its equally mignanimous and defiled connotations) with our century's most expansive nomenclature-_artist." 12</p> <p></p> <p>Ultimately, nothing specific can be said about Tuymans’s reference to photography and film anymore, because all artistic media have entered into a phase of transcendence anyway. In the end, it would be irrelevant whether the paintings process.historical photographs or any other arbitrary resource. What can be gained from such an extermination of medial differences is concededly unclear. It makes a decisive difference if an artist who takes existing photographs or films as models remains within the respective medium- thus becoming, films about film or photographs about photography- or whether he or she changes registers, translating the technically created image into an oil painting, And one cannot understand why Molesworth continuously returns to the painting-specific aspects of Tuymans work, despite her semantic shift from painter to artist, </p> <p></p> <p>Despite their individual differences, all of these authors Imply that the simple fact 'Tuymans paints is not self evident, but that it calls for genealogical justification. In addition to thin, the allusion to the ambiguity and elusiveness of his paintiny. also belongs to the constants of the Tuymans exegetin: “Lue Tuymans paints figuratively and yet his pictures deny a palpable legibility"»; his pictures "change between perceptability and retreat to the undefinable"'*; and "every one of Tuymans's works is basically a balancing act between the promise and the total denial of visual satisfaction."'S</p> <p></p> <p><strong>11 </strong>Ibid, 21</p> <p><strong>12</strong> Ibid, 17</p> <p></p> <p>The paintings are striking in their "emotional impenetrability, [....] they possess and produce a kind of silence, a demonstrable lack of legibility, even a difficulty that outstrips their subject matter per se." This praise of impenetrability is sometimes programmatically declared directly in articles titles. Montserrat Albores Gleason titled her observations of Tuymans "I Still Don't Get It," leading one to believe that even after thorough examination of the paintings, their meaning still cannot be pinpointed. ' It is clear that this position should not be understood as self-doubt on the part of the interpreter, but as praise of the works' hermeneutic inexhaustibility-_-they are loaded with far more meaning than can be expressed with mere words. Here, it should naturally be brought into account that comments of this kind belong to the stereotypes of contemporary-art discourse and, in this respect, represent no particularities of the writings on Tuymans."* Such statements follow a simple dramaturgy: First, they construct a very unlikely gestalt: the backward, pedantic art observer who feels personally threatened by ambiguity, who wants to be able to neatly label all works, demands irrevocable truths from artworks, and certainly does not want any surprises from a museum. </p> <p></p> <p><strong>13</strong> Exhibition text for "Lac Tuymans: When Springtime is Coming* at Haus der Kanst, Munich, March2-May 12, 2008, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="http://www.hausderkunst.de/" class="auto_link">http://www.hausderkunst.de/</a> index.phpiid-6678.t_ttneNTASBet.news*SDa72&amp;La1.</p> <p><strong>14</strong> Eugen Blume, "Zwischen den Bildern,;* in Lac Tigmans: Signal (Berlin: Staatliche Musta zu</p> <p>Berlin, 2001), 18.</p> <p><strong>15</strong> Stephan Berg, "Twilight of the images," in Lac Thymans The Arena, ad. Stephan Perg (Oth)der:</p> <p>Hatje Cantz, 2003), 15-17.</p> <p><strong>16</strong> Molesorth, "Lac Tuyman," 21.</p> <p><strong>17</strong> Montserrat Albores Gleason, <em>I Still Don't Get It,</em> in Lac Tigmans. I Don't Get le, 169-75.</p> <p><strong>18</strong> A few lines taken at random from current art reviews, exhibition catalogs, and muscom wall texts: <em>(As) paintings are superficially enticing, with the charm of their good form. Bat, a closer look shows that their pictures deny a clear analysis</em>, *(Bi) paintings are sho of their unconscious perceptibility while simultaneously using their iconography to question the suspicions of the mainstream* *(Ck) work is extremely difficule to grasp It is difficult to describe, and one is unaware of whether we are now dealing with sculptures, installations, or environments. They are consciously unconventionalDinterestedin the gray zones and the gaps, which evade clear classification”;etc.</p> <p></p> <p>Through the power of its subversive potential, the artwork stands out against the backdrop of such fatuousness. At the end, all contours disappear in the dark drawer of subversion. It is interesting that the praise of impenetrability-_-and of reflexive painting in the case of Tuymans- pertains to an art that is based upon highly political themes at the same time: colonialism, the Holocaust, 9/11. In Tuymans's case (and in Sasnal's as well), it is less about the general question of meaning and the function of painting, despite--or due to -its proclaimed end; it is about the much more concrete question of painting's competence in light of themes of contemporary history. The question is therefore so imposing because the images of today and of the last 150 years), which are meant to represent daily events, are precisely not circulated as oil on canvas. There is no need for justifying artists' transposition of this reservoir of media imagery through an old technique, but it also does not go without saying that this is an artistic approach. In the case of Tuymans, there is obviously a direct connection between the extremely reduced, wan, emptied appearance of his paintings and the discursive force of the historical subjects they engage. The functioning of this idiosyncratic antagonism between an "indefinable" painting and its hermeneutic superstructure is best shown through concrete examples.</p> <p><br></p> <p><strong>3. Sipping at the Real</strong></p> <p><br></p> <p>Take Der Architekt (1997, fig. 3). This pale, dominantly white-blue painting centers on a figure fallen to the ground. A diagonal horizon line indicates the end of a sloping area--a monotone, empty space enclosing the figure. With body slightly rotated the fallen person turns back toward the viewer. Instead of our gaze being met by a human face, a roughly painted white spot gapes back, as if to render the architect's physiognomy forever unrecognizable. It is well known that Tuymans took the motif from an amateur 8 mm film that showed Hitler's architect and minister of armaments, Albert Speer, while on winter holiday, Tuymans isolated one still image from the film sequence, in which Speer, having fallen to the ground, squats in the snow with skis and poles. In 2001, Der Architekt was exhibited at Hamburger Bahnhofin Berlin. The exhibition catalog is noteworthy for its design, conceived by the artist, that mimics the Nazi propaganda magazine Signal, thus dealing with a publication of the Wehrmacht that was translated into the languages of the occupied countries, or the "allies abroad," in order to spread the political mission of national socialism. The format and design of the Berlin catalog were adapted to those of the magazine, and it was titled Numero7 1944. The cover bears the red Signal logo and a blurred image: the negative of a historical, industrial-era villa, zoomed in onto an unspecific detail of its exterior--a typical Tuymans layout of deprivation. The detail came from a color photograph taken by the artist near the house where the Wannsee Conference took place. With this graphic mimicry of the Nazi periodical, both artist and museum decided for a form of assimilation that links these reproductions of Tuymans's paintings with historical documents. Furthermore, the director of the memorial site for the House of the Wannsee Conference, only marginally involved with Tuymans, made a contribution to the catalog that primarily serves as a concise account of the historical background, lending the catalog the feeling of an informational brochure of civic history. In addition, six historical photographs of "German farmers" are reproduced in the catalog, along with old advertisements from the Deutsche Bank and the companies Siemens and Auto Union, a full-page portrait of SS officer Reinhard Heydrich, and a copy of a typewritten protocol of the Wannsee Conference with the file number K210407:</p> <p></p> <blockquote><p>In the course of the practical execution of the final solution, Europe will be combed through from west to east. Germany proper, including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, will have to be handled first due to the housing problem and additional social and political necessities. The evacuated Jews will first be sent, group by group, to so-called transit ghettos, from which they will be transported to the east. SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich went on to say that an important prerequisite for the evacuation as such is the exact definition of the persons involved.'°</p></blockquote> <p></p> <p>In proximity to these documents, Tuymans's oil paintings gain an aura of political volatility. The artist states in the catalog that it was his original plan to show the paintings himself at the location of the Wannsee Conference instead of in a museum; it is not made clear in the catalog as to why this never transpired. Tuymans gives the impression that, in the end, deciding against it was a gesture of modesty and humility. On the other hand, the memorial's director wrote that their premises are logistically not suitable and that an exhibition would thus be out of the question. Without a doubt, the emphatic charge of the paintings would have doubtlessly increased if they were presented at the historical location as intended by Tuymans. At the scene of this event, their exchange with the historical aura would have been more dynamic than that experienced from within the magazine based on the Nazi journal.<br></p> <p><strong>19</strong> Luc Tuymans: Signal, n.p.<br></p> <p></p> <h3>(재민)<br> </h3> <p></p> <p>They would have become effortlessly enmeshed in the spell of world history: But why, at the end of the twentieth century, does an artist pain a film still of the architect and minister of armaments, Albert Speer, on canvas? What is the aesthetic, intellectual, or political value of this image? And to what, exactly, can this image’s provocation or agitation be attributed? Unfortunately, the Tuymans exegesis has the tendency to replicate the indefinability for which the work is praised. As a rule, the notion of where the paintings' reflexive or aesthetic potential should lie cannot be grasped. The Berlin exhibition's curator writes about Der Architekt,<br></p> <blockquote><p>'That the fall of the elegant skier--the steep, frozen slope, the reckless momentum, and, finally, the crouching in the snow with pointed planks could be held as a metaphor for his life could not have been anticipated by anvone at the moment of the incident. It was the historv for which he stands that first enabled this banal event to be translated into a metàphor one no longer decipherable via the moxie of language It was the picture- arrested between the filer image and the painted image as the image of history- that first presented the artist with this possibility of interpretation. Now, one could ask whether the film insage alone, along with is caption doesn't suttice in communicating that we are dealing with the Reich main architect and minister of wartime produc tion- with someone at the mercy of the homophilic attractions of male bending, a power conscious mega/oenaniac. Would the film image not be enough to inform us that we are dealing with the man who found atoneatent follosting the Nurembeng Teals in Spranddau- Albert Speer? Even after another inspection of the film image in the context of this newly gained insight, it still remains disappointingly banal. It will not become art, regardless of how much more we know of its history. Tuymans's painting, which doesn't deny its historical contexts, is very openly committed to tradition: stretched canvas, use of brushes and paint. It vibrates with the resonance of a panel painting 20</p></blockquote> <p></p> <p>Here, the commitment to painting is once again highlighted as a particular quality of Tuymans's work. But what is meant by "very openly committed to tradition"? How should one imagine</p> <p>a painting that actively denies this tradition and suppresses canvas, brush, and paint? Above all, one has still not learned where the aesthetic or intellectual surplus value lies in the painterly adaptation of historical amateur films. Most likely, the following find is indeed worth considering: "The architect fallen in the snow appears to us to be a well-chosen metaphor for a person whose reality is not unlocked by historical documents or testimonials. However, the poetry of the painted image suddenly and strangely allows it to become all-encompassingly understandable."- So, the quality of painting would exist in how the protagonist of the Third Reich "suddenly and strangely becomes poeticized? The following statement is equally dubious: "It is of course absurd to want to explain the source of Tuymans’s image to the viewer. The photographic excerpt's materiality becomes totally nullified in painting. It surpasses its banality, so to speak, and becomes exalted in painting, a medium whose images arise from the hand. They are channeled by both body and mind and not only by intellect."22</p> <p></p> <p><strong>20</strong> Blume, "Zwischen den Bildern," 17.</p> <p><strong>21</strong> Ibid., 18.</p> <p><strong>22</strong> Ibid.<br></p> <p>Why is it "absurd to want to explain the source of Tuymans’s image to the viewer"? This allusion to the source material’s irrelevance is found only a few lines after the author's own description of the source material. Part of the mythologization of this painting is the claim that it transcends its underlying photographs and film, leaving them behind--the claim that the film image is "totally nullified in painting." But it is the opposite case: film and photography must be continuously called up and kept alive as energetic models, as it is only through these that painting can obtain its sensory effects. The model images provide a reservoir of the real, and it is from here that Tuymans attempts to borrow the explosiveness of his own pictures. Moreover, there is a questionable differentiation of high and low art underlying the quoted comments. In order to exalt the painting, the film on which it is based must be debased at the same time. Only when the film image of the fallen Speer has been made to appear as "disappointingly banal" is it possible for the hand of the painter to elevate it to the status of art. But there is nothing justifying this seemingly obvious hierarchy. In fact, it is questionable whether Tuymans's version in oil boasts a higher complexity than that of the historical film.</p> <p>There is another strategy underlying the painting Gaskamer (Gas Chamber, 1986, fig. 4). A watercolor drawing, made by the artist at the former Dachau concentration camp, was the basis for this picture. Constrained in warm, brown tones, the painting roughly indicates the interior of an empty room. As soon as one has noticed the title of the work, the dark markings on the ceiling and the hint of a drain cover on the floor can be decoded as components of a gas chamber. Unlike Der Architekt, Die Zeit (4/4) (1988; the adaptation of an historical portrait photograph of the SS member Reinard Heydrich), or Our New Quarters (1986; after a historical photograph of Theresiensta Gaskamer is not based upon a certain photograph. One coula claim the opposite, as this time the painting draws its mez from the discourse on the inability to represent the Holocaust which, in the mid-1980s, had experienced a renewed topicality largely due to Claude Lanzmann's film, Shoah (1985). In his filmic montage of interviews with extermination-camp survivors, Lanzmann made a conscious decision to abstain from using historical imagery--the witnesses and their spoken accounts were to be the focal points. Any accompanying images, in addition to those of the protagonists, primarily showed the emptiness of the historical settings. Over time, Lanzmann's renouncement of historical image material expanded into a real ban on representation. In an interview, he stated that there is no image of the Holocaust. And if he were to find filmed recordings made inside the gas chambers, he would destroy them straightaway,? Behind this stance, there is an obvious conviction that there are incidences that, by nature, evade representation (and others that do not)-_-a picture that purports to show them would thus be an impossibility. Based on four photographs taken in secrecy by Jewish prisoners in the summer of 1944 at Auschwitz, George Didi-Huberman's response to this concept is that, on the contrary, it is only possible to represent Auschwitz. This obviously did not mean that there is a conceivable form of representation that could adequately reconstruct the reality of the camp.</p> <p></p> <p><strong>23</strong> Claude Lanzmann,"Holocauste, la représentation impossible," Le Monde, March 3, 1994.</p> <p><strong>24</strong> See Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).</p> <p></p> <p>Nevertheless, the attempt to visualize-~-as imprecise, fragmentary, and futile it may necessarily turn out--still represents a legitimate possibility for debate, should one wish to abandon the invocation of the unrepresentable.* In addition to Didi-Huberman, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière also have criticized the discourse on the Holocaust's unrepresentability: Nancy hinted that this dictum remains diffuse in the end: should this mean that one cannot represent the Holocaust? But to what exactly can this inability be attributed? And, must one then separate history into representable and unrepresentable events?' Where would the reasonable borders be drawn? Or does this mean, rather, that one may not represent an event like the Holocaust? In this case, a representation would be possible yet objection-able and, as a consequence, forbidden. In order to justify a moral proscription of this kind, there would need to be a tenet or a principle responsible for enacting such a ban. This binding principle cannot be identified, however,'S Therefore, Rancière also criticized the inflationary use of the term "unrepresentability" and warned to avoid phenomena that have an "aura of the holy horror." Being unrepresentable is not a trait of certain incidences. No event demands to be represented or not to be represented. There should always be a possibility for choice.» It is astonishing that the Tuymans exegesis seems, thus far, to have been passed over by thoughts like these. In the words of the artist, his gas chamber in oil is an attempt "to approach the really terrible thing that cannot be depicted!"" Commentators have repeated this phrase in various versions. According to Molesworth, Tuymans's paintings "attempt to represent historical atrocities that are putatively unrepresentable."<strong>28</strong></p> <p></p> <p>25 See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham</p> <p>University Press, 2005).</p> <p>26 See Jacques Rancière, "Are Some Things Unrepresentable?," in The Future of the Image,</p> <p>trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007).</p> <p>27 Luc Tuymans, "Artist's Writings," in Luc Tuymans, 130.</p> <p>28 Molesworth, "Luc Tuymans," 18.</p> <p>29 Dexter, "Interconnectedness of All Things,"</p> <p>" 24.</p> <p></p> <p>With Dexter we read, "So painting as reproduction fails continually in his work, and this failure, this disguise, allows him to depia the unrepresentable, for example, the Holocaust."» Inanev publication Ulrich Wilmes states, "The representability of the in-fact-unrepresentable is a challenge that perhaps only paint can equal. That is to say, in Tuymans's work the representation of horror is a circumspect exploration of the representability of horror."3© Finally, Loock: "Gas Chamber (...] fails irreversibly in its task of providing any kind of accurate picture of its object, as this object itself is deprived of any possibility of representation. It is the formulation of this failure which (__) is stressed by the production of an aesthetic appearance. The disguise is impenetrable, allowing a painting such as Gas Chamber to preserve the image of the gas chamber.” What exactly is meant by these comments is unclear. How does the unrepresentable allow itself to be represented? Either it is not unrepresentable at all and can thus be represented, albeit with inevitable incompleteness, or it in fact evades any form of visual representation, in which case the painting ultimately does not show a gas chamber. It was obviously intended that Tuymans's Gaskamer represent this failure itself. To his interpreters, it is an image that flaunts its own failure. Here, we are once again encountered with a variety of discourse on the reflexivity of painting. As to how Gaskamer exactly engages in showing something while simultaneously showing that the thing shown is unable to be shown-~-this remains a mystery. Moreover, the painting actually only presents an empty room. When taking the title into consideration, it becomes readable as the representation of a gas chamber. But above and beyond this, aching the works superstructure is not done vin the image or its meaning, Dexter's praise of indifference is also disconcerting:<br></p> <p></p> <p><strong>30</strong> Ulrich Wilmes, "Painting History," in Borchardt-Hume, Wilhelm Saunal$</p> <p><strong>31</strong> Loock, On Layers of Sign Relations, 51.</p> <p></p> <blockquote><p>Herein lies a clue to this methodology. 'Tuymans has flattoned out the hierarehy of the genres of painting that exist within his own practice. He paints a cardboard box with as much care and attention as he paints a gas chamber. This treatment hints a wider political and iconographie significance, but also suggests how Tuymans has developed his own method for representing the uncanny and the repressed.” </p></blockquote> <p></p> <p>Why the equating of a crematorium to a cardboard box, of all things, should entail "a wider political and iconographic significance" remains the author's secret. </p> <p></p> <p>Unlike Neo Rauch, who stages scenes of semantie overkill with his overpopulated pictures, Tuymans draws up the very opposite with pale colors, empty spaces, white space, and removal. Whereas with Rauch it is overabundance, with Tuymans it is meaningful emptiness that sets the hermeneutic machine in motion. A formidable posse has already been summoned in the explanation of Tuymans's paintings: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, W. G. Sebald, Benedict de Spinoza, Sigmund Freud, Immanuel Kant, Jacques Lacan, Theodor W. Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles S. Peirce, and many others, Bery writes, "Thymans derives the material for his painting from a repository of images that refer to reality but no longer stand directly in contact with it." This is quite an exact description of the reservoir from which this painting is nourished. It sips at the real, at the atrocity of the gas chamber and the banality of evil, while at the same time managing to remain in the preserve of autonomous art.</p> <p><br></p> <p><strong>32</strong> Dexter, "Interconnectedness of All 'Things," 16.</p> <p><strong>33 </strong>Berg, "Twilight of the Images," 11,</p> <p><br></p> <h3>(찬영)</h3> <p></p> <p><strong>Questions for Peter Geimer</strong></p> <p>Isabelle Graw</p> <p><br></p> <p>I have two questions, or remarks rather, about your excellent talk. Namely, I agree with you that art criticism has made it too easy by conjuring up the aesthetic topos of an openness of meaning, and the Tuymans exegetes especially abet his work with this manner of mystification. All the same, I wonder whether your argument doesn't ultimately lead to a break with the aesthetic topos of the irreducibility of art. Would this not be hasty in light of artworks that are of interest to us precisely because they do not erupt with evident meaning and cannot be immediately explained away? How do I differentiate this “good' aesthetic topos of an openness of meaning from the questionable obfuscation at work in Tuymans? </p> <p><br></p> <p>My second question revolves around the motif of reflection. In the first instance, I share your skepticism regarding the common formula of a painting itself reflecting the condition of its possibility or its impossibility. It is too seldom demonstrated what such reflection actually looks like and where it takes place in the work. The moment we say that an artwork reflects something, we also simultaneously attribute subjective-like faculties to it. They should have the capacity for thought processes, which would elevate them to a sort of quasi-subject. This tendency to model artworks after subjects has a long tradition in aesthetics, one that reaches from Hegel to Benjamin and on to Adorno. Here, the artwork is conceived in analogy to a living subject. There is a questionable, anthropomorphic projection at work here as well as the wish to elevate artworks to the status of a better person. But to abandon this projection altogether would mean that we no longer grant artworks what most expect from them--agency. Giving up on agency seems problematic as well-why then should we be interested in art-works when they cannot do anything, not even reflect? Against this backdrop, I wonder if you are you pleading for giving up on the motif of reflection altogether or whether you argue for a more precise application of this assumption? And what would it look like if we rooted our claim that artworks are able to reflect in their own materiality?</p> <p><br></p> <p><strong>Response to Isabelle Graw</strong></p> <p>Peter Geimer</p> <p><br></p> <p>You are absolutely right. The problem of such a strong critique of Tuymans and the Tuymans exegesis is related to the difficult differentiation between positive openness and obfuscation. It would be a nonsensical demand to expect a similar form of stringency from an artwork as from a political stance or from the argumentative conclusion of a thesis. So, the point is not to demand a clearly understandable message from the artists or to insist upon a position that does not suit their means of working. Tuymans and his exegesis seem to me to be a good example of the aesthetic topos of an openness of meaning in art having taken on a sort of life of its own on an inflated scale--and this, in fact, after needing to historically assert itself first over the regulated system of genre hierarchies, attribution of functions, etc. Tuymans is therefore a good example, because his paintings' extremely reduced and consciously emptied and paled appearance corresponds to an excessive attribution of meaning in their reception. The stronger the removal of meaning is visually evident, the more emphatic the search for profundity becomes. What I describe as the "Tuymans strategy' is intended as a process that, on one hand, utilizes the blessing of an "autonomous" art, obliged only to itself. But the process also grasps for the greatest possible--and most politically charged-themes at the same time, in order to settle them within the realm of the canvas in the form of rich particles of reality. A political dimension of painting is partially cited while remaining so unbinding and free of risk that one could say everything and nothing about it. Beyond just Tuymans, I wonder much more about many of his commentators, who attest a special explosiveness and reflexivity to this apolitical art. In short, there is no plausible case against ambiquity. But ambiquity is not a characteristic that just approaches artworks. It is not available or given; instead, it must be produced. How wel Dis works, if at all, depends on individual cases. Your second question follows well here because, just like Waits openness of meaning, art's reflexivity also seems to me to be a category whose rise is not self-evident. in fact, I believe that historical and systematic survey of the term ‘reflexivity-or also often "self-reflexivity*~-would be useful and necessar;? find "self-reflexivity: to be a more problematic term. in the phis sophical sense, reflexivity in itself would probably have sufices as the referentiality of a thought is already addressed theren The supplement "self works here merely as an emphasis, as. Niklas Luhmann once observed with the supplement ‘radica'n radical constructivism. It would deal with a rhetorical enhancement, like one would also encounter in an organic grocery store where food would be pitched as "naturally pure:) Works like Viktor I. Stoichita's L'instauration du tableau (1993; the English translation, strangely, is titled The Self- Aware Image) bind the theme of painterly self-referentiality or "meta painting" to concrete, historical situations. In the case of Stoichita this is somehow the development since the fourteenth certury from altarpiece to mobile panel painting. My impression is that beyond such historical specifications, reflexivity/self-reflexivity has meanwhile become a type of discursive wild card, an aesthetic seal of quality, which can be attributed to the works of all eras and genres. According to this, complex and reflexive pictures are those that not only show “something but also thematize the conditions of this showing at the same time. Sub-complex pictures are those that only show "something" and become absorbed in this heteronomous reterentiality. In my opinion, this difference seems to be extremely questionable. Here, old hierarchies of high" and low or"strong" and weak" pictures are repeated-or in terms of the painting of the nineteenth century, modern and salon painting. </p> <p><br></p> <p>But mainly, the underlying criteria appear unclear to me. How does one recognize reflexivity? How can reflexive and nonreflexive pictures be differentiated from one another? What even stirs the will and the need for determining such differences? What distinguishes self-reflexivity from mere self-reference? And foremost, who or what is actually the subject or the actor of this reflexivity? Is it the artist, who materializes his thoughts and actions, so to speak, and stores them in his work? Or is it the work "itself"? Can paintings, sculptures, or installations "think"? Generally, I can follow the idea that not only human subjects but also works or things can act-"actants" in the sense of Bruno Latour. In this case, another alternative notion of "acting" is needed. As with Latour's "symmetrical anthropology,” if something like a broken electric door opener that disables me from entering a building "acts" and, in this respect, is part of society, then it does so without mandating any intention or will toward the object of such action. The things act, but they do not mean anything; they have an effect on us without articulating an autonomous will in doing so. In the discussions on the reflexivity of art, I do not see such a differentiated concept. If W. J. T. Mitchell, for example, speaks about pictures “wanting" something from us or that they have "desires" and so forth,' it seems to me to be just a one-to-one transfer of intentionality and subjectivity from people to artifacts. Either one actually be-lives that paintings--like the aliens in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)-think, act, observe us, and want to make contact with us, or one uses these expressions in another improper or ironic sense, which would then need to be made more precise. It also seems to me that in the current application of the term "reflexivity," many different traditions blend indistinguishably, to a certain extent. A very different variation than Mitchell's talk on the life of paintings is, for example, Clement Greenberg's teleological program of systematically clearing away all external references until the artwork finally arrives at its media-appropriate self. This also houses an idea of the actual "self" of an artwork that ponders itself as well. Yet another variation comes from the diverse reception of Aby Warburg's ideas on the energetic potential of paintings. It seems that all of these traditions and figures of thought culminate here today in an unclear concept of "self-reflexivity." I read recently in a piece on Manet that painting questions itself. Such sentences are often seen, and presented with a great deal of self-evidence. In my view, it would be a worthwhile task to question the genealogy of such statements and to specify the understanding of self-referentiality that informs them.<br></p> <p><strong>1</strong> See W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 28.</p>