Poststructuralist Approach to Painting

The French philosophers from around 1960-1990, commonly known as the ‘poststructuralists' have had a lasting, if at times, controversial influence. (Deconstruction is linked to poststructuralism, but they are not the same.) One defining characteristic was an interest in art. Many of the key thinkers used art, especially painting, as a lens or as a vehicle to explore or advance their ideas to an unusually consistent degree. You see this in encounters of Gilles Deleuze with Francis Bacon, or Jean-François Lyotard with Barnett Newman. (Lyotard and Derrida also curated influential exhibitions at the Pompidou and the Louvre, respectively.)

It is worth having a brief look at how they engaged with art not only for insights into their thought but also for new perspectives and approaches to how we can examine art philosophically. Their approaches begin with the understanding that art is a form of knowledge.

Overview

When we come to the period from the late 1970s to the end of the twentieth-century, we see a French theory campaign to bypass binary logic, rethink the limits of representation, and question the Western obsession with absolutes.

One way of approaching poststructuralism and deconstruction has been its critique of the Platonic theory of representation. For instance, in the commodity market, the initial impulse is to prefer to have an original over a copy, be it an authentic brand name or a painting.

But as the poststructuralists have pointed out (including Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), Jean-François Lyotard (1924-98), Michel Foucault (1926-1984),  Gilles Deleuze (1925-95), Félix Guattari (1930-92), Julia Kristeva (1941—)), it is only via the copy that we come to value the original. We only know about the origin according to the things that come after it.

If we are to speak about the image in art in these terms, then it is fair to say that our interest in the origin of the image has only come from the many compelling ways it has been rendered within artistic form. It is only by its obscurity that we want to decipher it.

This may sound like rehashing the German early Romantics of the early eighteenth century, which may be valid to some extent. Still, the thinkers who fit loosely under this banner were enormously resourceful and influential in challenging conventional ways of thinking and writing about the nature of artistic imaging, especially in dispelling the bias we have between 'real' object 're-presented' copy, and in seeking the limits of representation and the unrepresentable. I will gloss four examples.

Deleuze and Bacon

Deleuze had already made a name for himself in his philosophy of expression in his studies of Hume, Nietzsche, and Spinoza when he embarked on Francis Bacon, Logic of Sensation (1981). In the form of an appreciation of one artist, it is a treatise on the visual representation of sensation, conceived here as the gamut of human sensory powers.

Deleuze's thesis is in the spirit of the French tradition of phenomenology, mainly to be found in Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61), who stressed that all facets of sensory awareness are brought to bear in our acquisition of knowledge and that our sensory organs are also the organs by which we organize and make sense of the world. The senses are not just a conduit to the brain. Rather the brain and the senses are one.

Indeed, Deleuze devotes considerable space to such ideas, including to Cézanne on whom Merleau-Ponty wrote a seminal essay (Cézanne’s Doubt’) that appeared in 1948. Venturing a step further, Deleuze sees an inner violence in Bacon's painting that takes phenomenology's lived body to its deathly limit.

Study After Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X. 1953. By Francis Bacon. Via Francis-bacon.com

These are big claims that Deleuze makes for Bacon and for which he has more recently been criticized. True as it may be that there is an expressionist nostalgia that drips from the text, Deleuze is eloquent in how figure and form (in this case Bacon's) is a kind of crystal or embodiment of an ineffable force that would otherwise remain unarticulated.

Bacon, argues Deleuze, does not abandon the figural because he finds that expressive force in non-objective abstraction is dissipated rather than concentrated. But the main challenge for Bacon is to transcend the illustrative and narrative element of the figural and expose the sensations that constitute the figure, hence the relations that give form to form.

For Deleuze, Bacon's bodies are in the 'hysterical' becoming-process of returning to the state of brute matter. In Bacon's paintings, we view the human body in an unending encounter with outside vectors of force, which shape it through admission or resistance; in his works, we 'feel' physical pressure, and we 'hear' the screams. These expressions/responses approximate an essence because they return to the inner silence of the body whence they sprang.

One can be forgiven for thinking that Deleuze’s book on Bacon, for all its philosophical apparatus, is as mystical as his work ever got.

Kristeva and Holbein

Kristeva's early work in the 60s and 70s was in the area of semiotics and linguistic theory. By far, her most penetrating foray into the visual arts is in her 1987 essay on Holbein's Dead Christ (1522), a passionate meditation on the representation of death.

The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb. By Hans Holbein. Circa 1521-22. Via Wikipedia

In itself, Holbein’s painting is astonishing in the way it presents Christ as a naked, unadorned corpse, startled dead flesh laid out on a slab. The elongated canvas suggests a glimpse inside a tomb. It is the unceremonial nature of the image, bordering on callous, that preoccupies us, what Kristeva calls a ‘dereliction’ on the part either of the artist or of God Himself, for Christ is left alone and shorn of all aura, all the sacred honour, all mystical hype with which we commonly associate him.

Shorn of all the extra stuff, and shorn in the extreme, the artist presents death in all its horrid, material banality.

For Kristeva, this work is a point of fascination into the attitude of the artist, the melancholia that comes from severance with another: Christ from God, man from Christ; the severance of one person from another in death.

The ultimate severance comes upon the recognition that death is the idea of non-existence that exists only in the mind of the living. Holbein's pared-down picture, his 'minimalism', is an effort not to escape the truth which, anyway, he can only partially comprehend. For Kristeva, the painting asks the most pertinent questions about representation: 'Is it possible to paint when the bonds that tie us to body and meaning are severed? […] Holbein answers in the affirmative.'

The painting is a metaphor of severance, hiatus, or caesura, between what we are and what we eventually will become, dead.

Lyotard and Newman

Lyotard is the most accessible of all the Poststructuralist thinkers on representation to the extent that he deals directly with the unrepresentable in terms of the sublime. He devoted a sizeable part of his later philosophical career to the study of Kant, whose Third Critique, on the sublime and the beautiful, provides the foundation of modern Western aesthetics.

For Kant, human beings are limited by their formal constraint of space and time on their knowledge, but the sublime (literally ‘above the lintel’, hence what is beyond us) registers an encounter with what is external to the limits of our knowledge, if only that we sense that limit and not the beyond. In his essay on Newman (1905-70), Lyotard is preoccupied with this encounter, which he calls the ‘event’.

Vir Heroicus Sublimis. Circa 1950-51. By Barnett Newman. Via Moma.

Newman’s paintings (Newman himself was also obsessed with the sublime) are so simple that ‘The feeling of the instant is instantaneous’. But this is not Minimalism, as Lyotard senses something impersonal in Newman, or rather, pre-personal, the idea of the beginning: ‘This beginning is an antinomy. […] It does not belong to this world because it begets it, it falls from a pre-history or a-history.’

Newman's sublime rests in 'reducing the event-bound time'. Through the matter of canvas, paint, colour, and proportion, we experience with 'wonderful surprise, the wonder that there should be something rather than nothing. Chaos threatens, but the flash of […] the zip, […] divides shadows, breaks down the light into colours like a prism, and arranges them across the surface like a universe'.

Lyotard’s beautiful essay ends with the lines, ‘The work rises up in an instant, but the flash of the instant strikes like a minimal command: Be’.