On Not Looking

The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture

Frances Guerin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317587392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

On Not Looking: The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture focuses on the image, and our relationship to it, as a site of "not looking." The collection demonstrates that even though we live in an image-saturated culture, many images do not look at what they claim, viewers often do not look at the images, and in other cases, we are encouraged by the context of exhibition not to look at images. Contributors discuss an array of images—photographs, films, videos, press images, digital images, paintings, sculptures, and drawings—from everyday life, museums and galleries, and institutional contexts such as the press and political arena. The themes discussed include: politics of institutional exhibition and perception of images; censored, repressed, and banned images; transformations to practices of not looking as a result of new media interventions; images in history and memory; not looking at images of bodies and cultures on the margins; responses to images of trauma; and embodied vision.

Part I
Images that Don’t Look

1
Not Looking into the Abyss

The Potentiality to See

Daniel Sack

When you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks back into you.

—Friedrich Nietzsche ¹

We stood on the cusp of that great abyss, expecting a vastness miles deep and wide. We had imagined it many times before, had preconceived its possible contours in the midmorning light from photographs and landscape paintings that had tamed the massive formation into recognizable compositions and complexions. But when we came upon the Grand Canyon on our drive eastward, there was nothing at which to look. Trees giving way to rocky descents plunged into blank fog suspended in the air all around. Nearly a whiteout, the thickest fog, no reimbursements at the visitor’s center. A palpable sense of disappointment also hung in the air, whispered in German and French. Crowds gathered longing for the occasional shreds in the veils of white to show suggestive forms below: the shadowed curl of a tree, hunched backbone of a boulder, surfacing in midair for a glimpse before sinking under again. These hints of appearance eliciting responses far greater than a full view would have entailed, awe that much more acute.

We continued our travels east, wondering if we had seen the Grand Canyon. We certainly had not looked at it, for what was there for the eye to catch hold of, to reel the pupil into focus? But was there something more sublime, more inhuman, in this disappearing act than in the sight itself, the way it beckoned our further approach and promised to disclose its veiled secret? There we were waiting for that great red beast to make its appearance. We knew it must be there—the signs said as much—but what it would be when it arrived was suddenly a matter far beyond the snapshot. For, as Walker Percy describes it in his own reflections on the landmark, the canyon carries with it a whole opaque symbolic logic; it is paved over with the countless photographs, the studium of common appearance, not the punctum of an encounter. ² No, we had not looked at the Canyon. We had seen the abyss, and it had seen the abyss in us.

In his A Theory of /Cloud/, French art historian Hubert Damisch conducts a semiotic analysis of clouds depicted in paintings from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century. He argues that the cloud occupies the limits of perspective as a system of representation, that it marks the unmarked, gives body to the formless and the mutable.

On a conceptual level, a “cloud” is an unstable formation with no definite outline or color and yet that possesses the powers of a material in which any kind of figure may appear and then vanish. It is a substance with neither form nor consistency, onto which Correggio imprints the emblems of his desires, just as Leonardo, before him, imprinted his onto the stains on a wall. ³

In other words, cloud is the ground from which figures differentiate themselves. In the paintings that Damisch reads, clouds part like curtains to reveal the transformed, or act as the surface upon which saints and other celestial beings stand to separate themselves from the terrestrial below or beyond the nimbus. Discrete objects only regain stability upon emergence from these Baroque folds. ⁴ Cloud qua cloud becomes the ground for, and of, sight, so that we may look upon the figure it will unveil. It stands as a visible and delineated surrogate for our potentiality to see, before there is any thing to look at in actuality. Forever promising an appearance it withholds, the cloud displays how not looking is not the same as not seeing, how we can see our capacity for vision by not looking at a particular figure.

And yet, this sense of potentiality seems somewhat exhausted as a result of its representational capture. The painted cloud, too, becomes a thing at which the spectator can look and can possess as one part in relation to the other parts of a canvas’s composition. A further enervation of potentiality derives from the instantaneity of object-based art and such an object’s permanence. In spite of all the suggestive turmoil in a Correggio or a Constable cloud study, what lies behind or within the cloud of these paintings is effectively excluded from the possibility of actualization for all eternity. Compare this with how the earthbound cloud in my visit to the Grand Canyon did not form an object at which to look; it kept churning itself sideways and otherwise in time, holding my attention in anticipation. For a field of potentiality to retain its congenital relationship to an indeterminate future, revelation must remain viscerally immanent, threatening at any moment to realize an actualization. After all, what is potentiality without the pressure of an impending release, however extended that expectation may be? A look at an object is an instantaneous discovery. But we can see or encounter visibility, while not looking at an object. This seeing of one’s potentiality to see requires a durational, lived experience. Like the sense of potentiality itself, the sense of not looking I explore here must be experienced live as a time-based proposition. ⁵

This chapter will consider two performance installations that stage a scene of potentiality in the form of a cloud, but not as a localized figure seen from a distance and not with the attendant problems of delineating an edge to its amorphous form and compass. Instead, in Antony Gormley’s Blind Light (2007) and in Kurt Hentschläger’s ZEE (2008), spectators are situated inside the cloud and subjected to its productive instability. Within such clouds, vision becomes tactile, leveling all sense of distance, proportion, and shape as volume crowds close around the viewer. And where being blindfolded or submerged in pitch darkness would encourage attentiveness to the other senses, here the blindness brings the visible to the fore. While morphologically related, the two performance installations represent divergent models for realizing potentiality as a lived experience: Gormley reduces vision to a field in stasis, withholding the eye’s capacity to discern or create a difference; Hentschläger’s piece realizes an excessive or complete production of this capacity to do or create something different from itself. These two ways of presenting the clouded abyss—as void and as chaos—allow one to see the potentiality of vision without looking at a figure and, in turn, they see the viewer while “not looking” at him or her as a (human) figure. ⁶

Looking at an object allows one to be looked at as subject, an exchange that instantaneously places one in a (spatiotemporal) coordinate relation to an other outside. Think of Lacan’s sardine can floating in the ocean and returning his look as if to say “you are there at the same time that I am here.” ⁷ Disoriented sight not only disperses one scene across a frameless field, but it also spreads the one seen and looked at across a field of potential appearances. The cloud does not look back from here or there; it takes up a position everywhere and nowhere at once. This is to invest the cloud with an active presence, as if it were some kind of alien life form or spirit confronting and, perhaps, conjoining us. For ultimately we must ask: facing the cloud do we really possess such a faculty of sight or, deprived of the directional relationship between a subject looking at an object, does the faculty possess (in the demonic sense) us? Does it disperse one into a cloud of many sensations?

Before addressing the two works in question, let me trace an outline of the relationship between vision and a theory of potentiality. The distinction between seeing and looking that I employ here derives for the most part from common usage. The OED states that to see is merely “to perceive with the eyes.” To look is “to direct one’s sight,” “to apply one’s power of vision.” The former, then, implies an impression of the visible autonomously received by the subject while the latter insists upon an intervention or active participation in the perception of a sensation. In the case of looking, one “applies one’s power” or actualizes the faculty of sight upon a selected focus. It requires that one consciously acknowledge the object of the gaze. However, we can think of seeing without looking as the reception of an event without the attachment to a particular focus; in this position the one who sees possesses the potential to look but does not choose to actualize attention in a look. Gazing off in reverie, the pupils dilate to attend to the broader field of vision, the peripheral sharing the same plane as the focal. At its extremity, one senses the activity of sight, but there is nothing to look at—only an open and horizonless expanse. When the entire field of vision becomes a single holistic object of sight, looking crosses over into a kind of not looking. In these terms, one does not look into an abyss, one sees oneself in what could be called a pure act of seeing, seeing nothing, drifting. One senses the sense of sight.

Aristotle touches upon this notion of “sensing a sense” in his writings on the biological faculties, De Anima (On the Soul). Akin to what we now call proprioception (one’s “perception of the position and movements of the body”), it is that through which the living being becomes aware of its own sensation. ⁸ De Anima offers inconclusive considerations of such self-sensing at work throughout the five senses, but it is the faculty of sight that accounts for the text’s most suggestive articulation. Here Aristotle writes of how the faculty of sight makes itself known through the experience of absolute darkness, an absence of color or light that nonetheless presents itself as a positive presence, the sense seen in its complete lack of content. Opening our eyes in the pitch dark, our capacity for sight is made apparent without confining its vast expanse to a focal point or object. This does not imply a lack of sensation or a blindness—one feels sight’s liveness and preparedness for appearance—only that there is no object at which to look, on which to focus. The potentiality of vision appears in making present the lack of an actual object, in seeing that one could (is able to) not have a look. Such is the connection that the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has taken up as one of the foundations for his own longer rumination on potentiality: “What is essential is that potentiality is not simply non-Being, simple privation, but rather the existence of non-Being, the presence of an absence; this is what we call ‘faculty’ or ‘power’. ‘To have a faculty’ means to have a privation.” ⁹

Potentiality displays a capacity to do or to make—to differentiate—without expressing such a capacity in an action or form. Another way of reading this notion of capacity or “faculty” is as the appearance of a medium prepared for, but withholding, articulation; it is a circumscribed field or ground without figure, or a figure becoming a ground. Aristotle uses the metaphor of the tabula rasa or wax surface before imprint to explain such potentiality. ¹⁰ In this way, we understand that potentiality is not diametrically opposed to actuality: a field or faculty must be actually present in order to express its potentiality. It is not an absolute negation. By dividing vision into seeing as the ground of sight and looking as the figure of sight, I want to propose that seeing while not looking allows one to encounter visible potentiality.

Considered historically, claiming darkness as the potentiality of vision poses problems for contemporary spectators. Jonathan Crary has explained how classical theories of optics from Aristotle through Locke suppose visual perception as the immediate reception of an external stimulus. Following Aristotle, such a faculty lies dormant in the dark, possessing its capacity to sense while awaiting the stimulation...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Images that Don't Look
• Part II The Privilege of the Other Senses
• Part III Not Looking at Bodies and Cultures on the Margins
• Part IV Institutions Overpower Images
• Contributors
• Index