Thanks for the reply, Ira. If I can deal with your post scriptum
first... You may well be familiar with these texts already but Baudelaire`s
Salon de 1859 and Le Peintre de la vie moderne, art criticism of a
great poet, have some difficult but fascinating meditations on the
relationship, or identity, between memory and imagination which might
answer some of your questions. The artist before the model, or the
viewer before the painting, as site of a continual battle between
what the imagination can conceive, what is seen NOW and what
has been seen...Baudelaire has the artist`s memory
of the model as a necessary boundary to the flight of the
imagination...the imagination as the necessary flight beyond what is
known - then in some passages the distinction between the two
faculties seems to be utterly collapsed. A feature of Baudelaire`s
concepts which runs through the Baudelairean corpus like
BLACKPOOL through Blackpool rock.
The "white space of the imagination" might not be as pure as the
driven snow, therefore. If Baudelaire`s concepts seem to be dragging
him kicking and screaming from Romanticism into Modernism, eventually
the Romantic conceit of the imaginative tabula rasa will get ushered into a
quiet room for a chat with Dr. Freud. Imagination as white space
could, among other things, be related to the 19th century drive/drift
towards aesthetic autonomy...locked inside you like Schroedinger`s
cat where the radiation of history can`t penetrate, or maybe it did
and you just didn`t (want to) know... [Derrida`s "Force and Signification" is
partly a review of a book about this way of thinking the
imagination.]
Maybe, from Giotto to Delacroix, they were painting the WORDS of the
text they were reading and not the spaces in between. How do you
paint a white space...see the history of all-white paintings in the
20th century, from Malevich to Ryman, and especially (Cage on)
Rauschenberg, all the same, all different so none of them all just
white.
robin
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