Restance, not resistance

Not departing from protocol, but going above and beyond the protocall of duty

In “The Rigorous Study of Art,” Benjamin begins by discussing Heinrich Wolfflin in the first paragraph and then goes on to contrast him to” Alois Riegel, whom he prefers.

Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the “matter itself” is no more than the strata which yield their long-sought secrets only to the most meticulous investigation. That is to say, they yield those images that, severed from all earlier associations, reside as treasures in the sober rooms of our later insights—like torsos in a collector’s gallery. It is undoubtedly useful to plan excavations in the dark loam. And the man who merely makes an inventory of his findings, while failing to establish the exact location of where in today’s ground the ancient treasures have been stored up, cheats himself of his richest prize. In this sense, for authentic memories, it is far less important that the investigator report on them than that he mark, quite precisely, the site where he gained possession of them. Epic and rhapsodic in the strictest sense, genuine memory must therefore yield an image of the person who remembers, in the same way a good archaeological report not only informs us about the strata from which its findings originate, but also gives an account of the strata which first had to be broken through.

“Excavation and Memory,” Selected Writings 2 (2), 576

“Painting, or Signs and Marks” in Selected Writings Vol. 1, 84-85

The sign is printed on something, whereas the mark emerges from it. This makes it clear that the realm of the mark is a medium. Whereas the absolute sign does not for the most part appear on living beings but can be impressed or appear on lifeless buildings, trees, and so on, the mark appears principally on living beings (Christ’s stigmata, blushes, perhaps leprosy and both marks). The contrast between mark and absolute mark does not exist, for the mark is always absolute and resembles nothing else in its manifestation.

Seriality of prisoner tattooed numbers like serial numbers on the currency bills they print; the number is not singular; they are one in a series] and is related to the question of who decides who will live, and live what kind of life: shitty life versus a martyr’s death?

The antithesis of the absolute sign and the absolute mark. . . the sign appears to be more of a spatial relation and to have more reference to persons; the mark . . . us more temporal, and tends to exclude persons.

What is striking is that, because it appears on living beings, the mark is so often linked to guilt (blushing) or innocence (Christ’s stigmata); indeed, even where the mark appears in the form of something lifeless . . . it is often a warning sign of guilt. In that sense, however, it coincides with the sign (as in Balshezzar’s Feast), and awful nature of the apparition is based in large part on uniting these two phenomena, which of which only God is capable.

The tattooed numbers tend to exclude the personal (except for the hooker who identifies him in bed), and so resemble the Mark, the German Mark, the Christian mark.

No surprise that the Pieta scene follows. Yet not a symbol, more an alleogircal ruin.

The flip side of counterfeit is copyright, a different kind of seriality.

The easel painting evolved for display in a collector's private home

Takin It Easely

The Easal Painting literally becomes an easal painting when viewed. It is not hung on a wall the way it usually would be.

There’s something uneaslyabout the frame, the detachment.

“The self-portrait is the one form of easel painting that resists being owned.”

Philip Fisher, Art and the Future’s past

Museum studies: an anthology of contexts

By Bettina Messias Carbonell

Contributor Bettina Messias Carbonell

Published by Blackwell Pub., 2004

Come Closer / Stay Back

Put computer on first page of powerpoint play unforgettable on computer

One get on the train and it leaves on time, arrives on time, everything is on track

In the other you get on the train, but there may be delays, luggage may be lost, items stolen, but the good thing is htat we may we get sidetracked, f even go off track./ There may be a trainwreck. Bu thte upside htat it'll be a bullet train.

Not a difference between electric and magnetic—both cases pollution. But the first is diluted. The second is almost purely pollution.

Tell Nina, have a seat.

Endwith Faites vos jeux,and get up and go over to the computer.

Get up

Iis Italk like this.

And 2 is I present, wearing my beret.

Can you stand for it ? Stehen Sie aus?

Just because I don’t work, doesn’t mean I’m out of whack. I’m always in whack beause I’mnever out of whack. Whackey.

Hans Makart25

Portrait of a Lady with Red Plumed Hat c.1873 Oil on canvas 59 3/8 x 39 1/8 inches (151 x 99.6 cm)

Goering gives Hitler Marhart painting

We go on track, train will run on time

We can get sidetracked, may be delays, but it’ll be a bullet train.

Magnetic, eco friendly. But polluted, neverthelsss.Dilution versus pollustion (poluuted in voth cases

Bo pure solution

10precentsolution

Painting as an Artby Richard Wollheim

Art and its Objectsby Richard Wollheim (Paperback - Sep 30, 1980)

Or as Itell my stdudnets Just because oyou;re out of work doesn't mean yuore out of qhack. I say that after they graudate.

Final solutions are never a good idea

reuniting paintings medieval renaissance diptych ehbit reunting Germany

Reuinted and it doesn't feel so good

I had to over do it, undermachine, over do, redo, go beyond, because of my topic. I mean to begin a tlak about extermination, well, it just can’t be done.

I conclude. Tonight. .

I am going to fastrack my paper because we got off to a late start tonight. It couldn’t be helped.

Reunion---Non-Jewish painters painting s bought by Jews. So there is a strange impossibility of restitution in Derrida’s terms, or of retribution

No redistribution of guilt and debt.

I begin. Thank you Nina, for inviting me and all of you for coming. It’s very nice to have this occasion to present work in progress that will never be progress to publication. Seriously. The thoughts will remain, but remain only as something unfinished that only saw the light of night. Tonight.

I begin. I am here to present—to alert you to some films and related texts I think you may want to see or re/ read rather than give you my full blown readings. We won’t have time. (I will stay to 30 minutes).

To try to explain myself a bit more fully, let me tell you a story about my relation to secularism and Judaism. My Story about secular Jews has now turned out to be about Jewish secularism. And let me tell you one more story. Quickly.

Berlin—“Nehmen Sie Platz” Stranger there. here. Already occupied. I am alien, foreign, strange, out of place. Here I am a strange goy. There’s always a place for me here, or a dis-place. I am happy here to feel out of place. It’s always nice to be with people who like me are pre-occupied, even if I can’t sit down.

In any case, I’m very happy to be here. So is me. And so is myself. We have achieved weness, more or less. We get along pretty well most of the time.

Let me begin, then. Oh,first let me ask foryou, on your behalf, What does it mean for me to say that I appear tonight before you as a strange goy? It means to suspend certain discourses, to say the unexpected and possibly the unaccepted—you may be pleasantly surprised but you may be unpleasantly surprised and want to use media mail to return the package to sender, or you may even want to refuse delivery. You won’t be delivered by refusal to accept, however. Don’t worry. I will bounce it back to you. Those charges will remain, however, and you will keep being contacted by my Bill collector or Burt collector. I insist.

Please do forgive me for going on like this. I know that my talk is now long overdue. I am now in my anecdotage. It’s a real word. I didn’t make that word up. I thought I had made it up, but then I checked, and It’s in the O.ED. Ancedotage means “a garroulous old man.” O.E.D. gives the first see as in1835. So please realize that I am not to blame for this long delay in getting started tonight. Me is. Myself was egging me on. They refuse to take responsibility, however. So I have to offer their apologies to you on their behalf. So you see I already feel strangely left out. But I am always by myself. But really, I had to be careful because I am setting up a lot of fuses, and I don’t want them to blow, and they are highly explosive. But don’t worry. There’s no bomb attached to them. Sparks may fly.

I conclude. Really. I begin. Tonight, I develop some of the interests in the left and right hand in Freud’s Moses here in I relation to ways of reading paintings in reverse related to European art and WW II, one I want to characterize initially as anti-Semitic and the other as Anti-anti-Semitic.

The first kind of reversal involves seeing a painting backwards, as in a mirror image. Essay by Swiss art historian Heinrich Wolflin. First examples Raphael’s drawings. He left Germany went back to Switzerland.

•Reading from left to right as natural, reading right to left as unnatural (perverse): the political as theological and erotic

•The double meaning is not a hidden, secret code in the work of art or historical document (that is just a variation of genetic criticism and mistakenly reduces the polysemous work to a single meaning) but arises in the drama of reading the work of art and criticism of the image.

As an example, let me turn to the essay I had Michael mention earlier,

[next slide] the essay by Heinrich Woelfflin entitled “Ueber das Rechts und das Links im Bilde,” that is “On the Right and Left of Images.”

[next slide]

As you can see here, Wolfflin reproduced in his essay examples of Renaissance paintings and drawings in order to think about what happens when a slide is put in backwards during a lecture. Wolfflin begins by noting that the response is panic expressed as “Turn it around! You’ve got it backwards!” Quite brilliantly, Wolfflin wants to pause and ask what this panic is about. His answer is that viewing a painting is like reading a book—our gaze is directed from left to right, up from the man on the left looking at to the baby Jesus, then over to the Virgin Mary, and then down to Johanna, whose eyes look down. If the painting of the Virgin, and here we may begin to grasp the extent to which direction, theology, and erotics are connected, is viewed backwards, we do not know where to look and the image becomes incomprehensible. His other point is that the work of art only becomes irreversible when it is completed. The possibility of perversion when the work of art has been perfected.

Wolfflin’s text as itself to be read doubly, however, if we are to grasp the political stakes of. Written in 1924 just after left Munich but published in 1940 when Wolfflin was a professor at the University of Basel, the title itself presents us now, even if Wollflin did not intend it, with two puns in its title on the words “right” and “left.” Both sides of an image are also political sides, and how one side, fascist or Communist can turn an image around to distort it or clarify ir. There are similarly charged words and phrases in the essay. The German word Wollflin uses for the slide put in “backwards” is “umkerht,” a word employed frequently by the Nazis. Similarly, when Wolfflin compares viewing a painting to reading a book, he writes “unser shrift,” or “our script,” which is to say without saying, our Christian script, not a Jewish one (Hebrew is written from right to left). Finally, when he concludes that the work is the German word he uses at the very beginning of his sentence is “Das Enschiede,” or “the decision,” a word used by Carl Schmitt and others in writings on the state of emergency and the power of the sovereign. So the language of the essay itself present us now, knowing as we do what was happening between 1924 and 1940 with a question: how do are we to read Wolfflin’s essay between the lines to grasp his decision to read one way rather than another?

2. Anti-anti-Semitic kind of reading, this is reading not just backwards but from the backside. Politics of restitution exhibition—the back of the frame—European art looted by the Nazi from Jews who owned it. Display is symmetrical-or the photos shows us asymmetry. Back and front.

Back to back

So here the exhibition turns on the information about the owner on the backside rather than on the painting itself.

I say that the first, mirror reversal is anti-Semitic because it is Messianic—perfection has been achieved, first in the birth of Jesus and then in the painting. So it’s about looking toward a past I which incarnation is already fulfillment—it’s a revelation—all in the open.

In the second, one side of the painting is hidden,

So to put it somewhat crudely, let’s call the first reversal by inversion (a specular relation) and the second reversal by backside. In the first you can see the front from both sides; The first way is not uncanny, in that it sees one version as inferior of the other, the means by which its perfection may be furthered revealed, in the second you can see only the backside. uncanny, reversal that conceals as it unconceals. Or the front side, at the a time, one side usually being hidden given the way paintings are hung (with their backsides hidden). The other is. I want to think about two kinds of incredulity here as well (Spectral Evidence).

the binary opposition I am setting up between two kinds of reversal—it’s always already self-deconstructing.

Both look back to an unbelievable event, as in can you believe that Jesus . . . is the messiah? O my G! And as in and looks back to an unbelievable event—can you believe that holocaust? Incredulity that precedes it as well as postdates it. Incredulity shared by Jews and non-Jews—we knew, we didn’t know, we heard but we didn’t know, we should have known, but we didn’t.

And in terms of posing not only the question of who is a Jew but also who has defined who is a Jew, for what purposes, and by what criteria. So that reversal by inversion of backside involves a question of recognition and revelation as well as restitution in Judaism—a problem within Judeities and outside them.

And specifically, there’s a shared discourse of the damage and restitution, of perfection and imperfection, of inversion and backside, of closure—like perfection of Raphael——may not be so different. Need to think through the value of art and owners—here a discourse of identity kicks in necessarily—and is hence vulnerable to the critique, however stated it may be, of the Holocaust industry, which I, even if it is an anti-Semitic critique of anti-Semitism, shows the impossibility of restoring the paintings without reinscribing in some ways the anti-Semitic terms of the arts expropriation. So there is no simply chronology taking us fro purchase and provenance through looting and restoration, partly because the original owners are dead, mostly murdered. The ID papers for the camps and he ID papers for the museum tours, and the ID tattoos for the camps. in terms of the incalculable—and here I would follow Derrida’s chapter entitled “Restitutions” in The Truth of Painting on Heidegger and Meyer Shapiro on Van Gogh’s shoe paintings, and Derrida on the shoelace, in which restitution is not linked to identity. He interrogates the idea of restitution in terms of attribution and retribution, a desire to return, in the case of Heidegger’s shoes, the contents of the painting to its painter, to regard to the shoes as a pair and owned by a city dweller or a peasant. Potential problem here is suits like one against the SNCF is the vulnerability to Norman G. Finkelstein’s scathing and intemperate critique of the Hollow-cast in his The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. The problem of incredulity is that it can’t be divided, that it preexists the Holocaust and follows it; and it, follows, like cars in a train, that Holocaust deniability cannot be limited either to quacks like Mr. Death but also precedes and follows the Holocaust within and without Jewish populations. IS there a limit to ex-termination—or is there a terminus? Or are we talking Extermination Terminable and Interminable? Problem of settling, of settling differences, accounts, of occupying, resettling. People will always take sides, but the problem that requires them to take sides is far deeper and impossible to resolve than those who take sides will ever know.