Art Criticism - The State University of New York

In this final section of the essay, I would like to mark our in the very
broadest of contours how a historical ontology of images can disclose changing
patterns of pictorial mimesis and thereby reshape a survey of world visual
cultures with the practical intent of illuminating and empowering student reflection
upon their place in the modern spectacle. In a paper focused on
aesthetic education, I cannot even begin to argue adequately for what is peculiar
to the ontology of images nor flesh out the specific mechanisms of pictorial
mimesis. My aim is to sketch what such a project might look like, and how it
might move art history in the direction of what Foucault called a "history of the
present."22
2. Towards an Ontology of Pictures
No prominent Continental thinker of the twentieth-century was more
profoundly engaged with the ontology of the visible than Maurice Merleau­
Ponty. In his last publication ,"Eye and Mind," Merleau-Ponty offered some
terse but remarkable observations about painting:
Thus there appears a 'visible' to the second power, a carnal essence or icon of
the first. It is not a faded copy, a trompe l'oeil, or another thing. The animals
painted on the walls ofLascaux are not there in the same way as are the fissures
and limestone formations. Nor are they elsewhere. Pushed forward here,
held back there, supported by the wall's mass they use so adroitly, they
radiate about the wall without ever breaking their elusive moorings. I would be.
hard pressed to say where the painting is I am looking at. For I do not look at
it as one looks at a thing, fixing it in its place. My gaze wanders within it as in
the halos of Being. Rather than seeing it, I see according to, or with it.23
This passage adumbrates an original theory ofpictoriality. I would like to offer
a brief interpretive gloss that foregrounds certain Heideggerian themes.
For Merleau-Ponty, the pictorial is constituted out of yet remains
embedded within the visible. As a local infolding of the visible upon itself -
generating a virtual space enveloped by lived space - a picture is a doubling of
the visible, a '''visible' to the second power." Because of this doubling, one
does not simply look at a picture, as one would at a tree, but one sees with the
image or according to it. In the very act of beholding, a picture reflexively
guides and informs us how and what to see.
In seeing with a picture, one's "gaze" (regard) dwells as if in "the
halos of Being" (les nimbes de I'Etre), a formulation that directs us to the
thought of Heidegger. Earlier in "Eye and Mind," Merleau-Ponty had referred
to that "actual Being" of our intersubjective insertion in the world that is a
"primordial historicity."24 Although not a pronounced theme of the essay, it
would seem that, for Merelau-Ponty, Being is historical - that the "halos of
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Art Criticism