Hubert Damisch Research Articles

Cloud as an Alternative Architecture

This paper argues for the absenting presence of an embodied theoretical architecture of materialist harmonious dialectic in Hubert Damisch’s engagement with Chinese art and architecture around the cloud. This connects with recent media studies discourse where environment both conditions and is being with an alternative architecture that is different from a centralized elevated arche. At the same time, the essay positively explores the decolonizing structural potential for displacing Eurocentrism and idealism in the making of theory and art and architecture history by opening up to global collaborative knowledge formation and reconnecting theory with practice.

Станция «Дистанция». Диспозитив производства знания в ранних российских художественных исследованиях

The article examines the specifics of Russian artistic research. First, with the help of historical analysis of the phenomenon in the international context, the essential characteristics of artistic research are deduced. They consist in the intertwining of ontology, epistemology and methodology of a work or a process, which is enacted through a problem beyond the issues of art. Art in this situation acts as an “epistemic thing” (Henk Borgdorff), a “theoretical object” (Hubert Damisch), or an enactive environment. This boundary, or the interdependent intertwining of the subject, method, and purpose of the work, manifests itself in different ways in the various apparatuses of knowledge production in art, varying from context to context, despite the globalization of the art scene of the twenty-first century. The Russian art of the late noughties and early tens was just approaching the use of the research paradigm. Its application is conditioned by a range of reasons, including the need to construct a work of art as a complex reflection on a socially acute topic, such as issues of national identity and historical amnesia. The art segment under consideration tried to avoid merging with the common media imagery, moving away from both the dominant rhetoric and its ironic interpretations by artist predecessors and fellow contemporaries, while bypassing straightforward activist strategies. The kind of knowledge such art dealt with was often non-knowledge, the ungraspable, the erased, and the camouflaged. This knowledge found its elusive manifestation in traces of absence, scattered authorship, failures, and other forms of distancing, yet sometimes revealing through such embodiments its own communicative limitations.

The Madness of the Gaze: for Hubert Damisch, in every light

Abstract In his seminar “The Eye and the Gaze,” Jacques Lacan is forced to regard the problem of the unconscious through the grid of the Cartesian cogito. In the certainty of “I think, therefore I am,” which expresses the complete transparency of the self to its own apprehension, leaves no space for the ineffability of the unconscious. Lacan sees this proto-enlightenment certainty running through all perceptual mechanisms, as in Paul Valèry's poem “La Jeune Parque,” which declares, “I saw myself seeing myself.” Lacan turns to anamorphosis as a perceptual exception, in which there are two viewing points turned on the same object, neither coinciding with the other, such that classical perspective's fundamental unity of the perceiving subject is alienated from itself—a Spaltung, or split, that enables the unconscious presence of the uncanny and its castrative impression of death.

Speculative scholarship: Between text and image

This experimental text considers the application of painting as a philosophical practice through an inquiry of what it actually means to have knowledge of an artwork. That is, what does it mean to think materially, in Hubert Damisch’s words, ‘what does it mean for a painter to think?’. Within this context emerges a dialogue between the cognitive, the analytic and the poetic, seeking to embody and offer a picture of the experience of the visible. This grows from an interest in the philosophy of perception, specifically engaging current approaches in embodied cognition and blending theory, considering vision and visual perception as an ontologic process. The text presented below seeks to explore the possibilities of carrying over this philosophical terrain to questions of received language, ideas of originality and problems of authorship. This is a painter’s task – an approach to ‘text as image’ – and is not only about devising and exploring a specific format to speak about how painting works but also about staging a compositional technique and textual act of re-production between experimental writing and the material practice of painting. Presenting unorthodox academic writing seeks to situate ideas not only within scholarship but also in how that scholarship might be transmitted effectively.

Nexus, veil: Robert Ryman and the equivocal spaces of abstraction

It is now understood that the two great defining points in the history of western painting – the emergence of illusory space in the Quattrocento and its disavowal in the mid-twentieth century – represent significant shifts in a perpetual tide in which pictorial space is re-invented. Outside of modernist teleology, the ‘abstract’ in painting is a malleable term, denoting a tendency, or a move away from, rather than a polemic against depiction. How productively, then, can notions of pictorial space be mapped between ‘abstraction’ and ‘figuration’? In this article, I focus on the work of the American painter Robert Ryman (1930–2019). Ryman defined his work as ‘realist’ and deployed a materialism that foregrounded the processes of painting. His paintings are both disarmingly simple and spatially complex, and, despite his disavowal of illusion, this complexity is, paradoxically, concerned with the production of pictorial space. I bring together two texts, Hubert Damisch’s A Theory of /Cloud/ and Hanneke Grootenboer’s The Rhetoric of Perspective, to address the complex and contradictory spaces in Ryman’s paintings and to suggest that they enter into a negotiation with a perspective that is something very different to a rebuttal. To look at Ryman again in this way is to offer a rethinking of the paradoxical spaces of abstract painting, its past and its present.

Early modern clouds II: Revisiting the poetics of meteorology

“Early Modern Clouds II” briefly introduces the four essays contained in this volume and refers readers to the more sustained, introductory essay of the first special issue of “Early Modern Clouds” in Romance Quarterly 68: 2, 2021. Here, the focus shifts from Hubert Damisch’s classic study of clouds in Théorie du nuage: Pour une histoire de la peinture (Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting; 1972; 2002) to the question of the cloud’s numerous mediating functions—including philosophy, poetics, art history—with an eye to later centuries, as explored by John Durham Peters in The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2016).

Buccal Exscriptions: Ann Hamilton’s face to face Photographs*

In his ‘Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image’, Hubert Damisch states that ‘photography is nothing other than a process of recording, a technique of inscribing, in an emulsion of...

Le Grand Musée. Altri sguardi sul Louvre

Beyond the much discussed but certainly meaningful experience of the opening in 2017 of the Abu Dhabi satellite museum, a controversial example of a global museum, the Louvre has not lost in the passage between the two centuries the ability to present itself as an updated museological research space. Proof of this is the series of exhibitions Parti pris (1990-1998) where, thanks to the direction of the “dissident” art historian Régis Michel, intellectuals of various backgrounds – Jacques Derrida, Peter Greenaway, Jean Starobinski, Hubert Damisch, Julia Kristeva – have reinterpreted the collections of the museum through exhibitions of an overtly subjective and undisciplined nature. So, the Parti pris project was, in Michel’s words, a “zone of freedom and break” in the heart of the institution, questioning not the prestige but rather its too rigid and monumental identity. This proposal was partly taken up by Jean-Marc Terrasse, director of the auditorium and cultural events of the Louvre from 2005 to 2014, with his “special invitations” for protagonists of international culture, to build alternative and eccentric narratives through history, works and spaces of the Louvre. This essay, which analyzes in particular the contribution of the nobel for literature J.M.G. Le Clézio, curator of the project Les musées sont des mondes (2011), highlights the critical value and the urgency of these exhibition proposals thanks to which the museum becomes the driving force of a reflection which, overcoming conventional disciplinary distinctions, is able to urge the public to new views and different aesthetic and ethical perspectives.

The Writing of History and Return of Language: Art History as An Explanation Object-On Hubert Damsich’s “A Theory of /Cloud/”

Giving a methodological and ontological explanation to the art history is the core thought of “a theory of /cloud/” of Hubert Damisch. It shows that there is no uniform explanation for art history. And the explanation of art history can only be placed in the framework of history. Language is the main reason for this, because it is historical, and through it the art history can be narrated and explained. As an explanatory activity, art history needs to plan a historical horizon which is different from the present, and integrate with the current horizon to explain historical events. Therefore, all art history is bound to be a historical explanation. This is the logic of why art history needs to be constantly renovated. On the other hand, because art history is inseparable from language, it must rely on linguistic methods in the specific analysis process. Taking this as his starting point, Damisch takes semiotics as the dominant method of explaining the art history. In his eyes, semiotics, as a method of combining meaning reading and characterization analysis, can effectively reconcile the contradiction between formal analysis and iconology. Not only that, the symbol as a kind of representation of representation can also make the painting back to the field of representation. Because representation is the basic purpose of painting. As a symbol, cloud precisely emphasizes that painting should pay attention to representation. And the sensibility and materiality of cloud in painting indicates that the painterly should become the mainstream of the representation. This kind of painterly is exactly what “A Theory of /Cloud/” aims to reveal. According to this, the painterly of painting should become the main focus of the writing of art history.

Models of attention

In this article the question posed by Yve-Alain Bois via Hubert Damisch in Painting as Model, ‘what is the mode of thought of which painting is the stake?’ (1990) is shifted to what is the mode of attention? Informed by current cognitive and neuropsychological research, paintings combative art history is assessed through the lens of attention. The unravelling of modernist painting is proposed as a conflict between models of attention, and divergent attentional expectations. Modernist values of immediacy, presentness, wholeness are considered conditions of an ideal attentional experience, one that attempts to hold back a partial, fragmented and distracted counter experience of modernity. Painting as Model argued for painting’s specificity, pulling away from a formalism that reduces painting to the visual, and theoretical structures that bypass the made object. This article proposes an attentional-specificity for painting; the limits of attentional capacity, distinctions between focused, distributed and divided attention correlating with the cognitive complexity held by the structural, spatial and material conditions of painting.

The intertwining – Damisch, Bois, and October’s rethinking of painting

While most of Hubert Damisch’s major books have been made available in English since the publication of Yve-Alain Bois’ review essay ‘Painting as model’, it nonetheless remains a shame that Fenêtre Jaune Cadmium (Damisch 1984) – the subject of Bois’ review – has not been translated. Although best known as a specialist in Renaissance art, the essays of Fenêtre show how Damisch’s distinct art-theoretical project emerges from his early writings on modernist and post-war painting, phenomenology and structuralism. This paper argues that Damisch’s writings and Bois’ essay serves as a crux for the October journal. October was at the forefront of the critique against painting during the early 1980s, but the publication of ‘Painting as model’ suggests a sea change in the journal. I shall examine how Damisch’s entwining of phenomenology and structuralism, as a model for October that helped it revise its understanding of painting and for rethinking the relationship between art history and art criticism.

Sign/or/Sigm: Freud and the Name of Signorelli

In December 1972, French art-historian/philosopher Hubert Damisch, who was a senior fellow of the Society of the Humanities at Cornell, gave a public lecture on the Freud-Signorelli case, which is published here for the first time. Damisch discusses the theoretical montage proposed by Freud and attempts to evaluate the impact of the language games analyzed by the psychoanalyst for the study of visual objects. Moreover, the case allowed Damisch to reflect on how a work of art involves the spectator-analyst and how this relationship affects interpretation. This essay was Damisch's first to address the Freud-Signorelli case, and it can be considered as the nucleus of his article “Le maître, c'est lui (He is the master),” published in Savoir et Clinique in 2010, and more generally of a book that was to remain in manuscript, La machine d'Orvieto.

Letters, 1972–1973

Between January 1972 and December 1973 French art-historian/philosopher Hubert Damisch and American art-historian Meyer Schapiro exchanged forty-four letters. During this short period, the two scholars discussed many issues concerning the state of art history and its relationship to semiotics and psychoanalysis. A recurring topic was Freud's famous lapse of memory concerning the name of the Renaissance artist Luca Signorelli—what to make of the lapsus in art-historical terms and how to make use of it in analyzing Signorelli's cycle of frescoes at the Cathedral of Orvieto in Italy. Damisch was then beginning to work on a book devoted to the subject while Schapiro was writing a small essay on the topic.

The other “Sch,” or When Damisch Met Schapiro

French art-historian/philosopher Hubert Damisch and American art-historian Meyer Schapiro maintained an intellectual friendship of rare intensity for nearly forty years. Their many letters bear witness to this: From art history to psychoanalysis, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and literature, they exchanged ideas in almost every field of the humanities and social sciences. The special issue which this text introduces focuses on the years 1972 and 1973, a period during which Damisch spent much time in the United States and met, in addition to Schapiro, Michel Foucault, Max Black, M. H. Abrams, and Norman Malcolm. “The Other ‘sch,’ or When Damisch Met Schapiro” seeks to put into perspective the forty-four letters gathered here as well as the several essays devoted to the Freud-Signorelli case.

Staking the Subject: The Self's Own Gamble with Art

Devoted to the Freud-Signorelli case, this study by French art-historian/philosopher Hubert Damisch offers an in-depth analysis of “the implication of the subject in the various dimensions of perception, remembering, analysis, and interpretation.” To better reflect the complex relationships between art, psychoanalysis, and interpretation, Damisch's commentaries take the form of a diary. By discussing his comings and goings between the 1960s and 1990s and by making an effort to remember his own life and practice, Damisch builds a dispositif where Freud's analyses of the mechanisms of oblivion, Signorelli's painting of “the damned,” Dante's Inferno, and Primo Levi's testimony on the Shoah reverberate with each other. This study, which is one of the chapters of the unfinished book La machine d'Orvieto, was first published in French in Y voir mieux, y regarder de plus près (Rue d'Ulm, 2010).

Homenagem a Hubert Damisch

Texto escrito por Yve-Alain Bois para ser lido na cerimônia fúnebre de Hubert Damisch. O teórico francês morreu em 14 de dezembro de 2017, e a cerimônia fúnebre ocorreu no dia 20 desse mesmo mês, no crematório do Cemitério Père-Lachaise, em Paris.

Peter Christensen. Review of "Noah's Ark: Essays on Architecture" by Hubert Damisch and Anthony Vidler.

Peter Christensen. Review of "Noah's Ark: Essays on Architecture" by Hubert Damisch and Anthony Vidler.

Drawing as memory and survival; painting and its relationship with history

In an interview with Sheila Cabo Geraldo, visual artist Carlos Zílio recalls aspects of a trajectory that turned him into a reference in the field of art in Brazil since the second half of the 1960s. The conversation emphasizes, above all, the artist’s political engagement, his imprisonment and the possible ways of resistance in that period; it also reviews the interaction with his generational peers (Gerchman, Vergara, Dias) with Iberê Camargo and French art historian Hubert Damisch. Finally, it discusses his perception about painting itself and his notion of an encounter with a “ground zero” of painting in the 1970s, projecting its chances of permanence in contemporary times.

Yve-Alain Bois

Yve-Alain Bois, 2010 © d.r., with courtesy of Yve-Alain Bois Disgusted by the way art history was being taught in French universities, Yve-Alain Bois enrolled in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), where Roland Barthes supervised first his degree and then his dissertation. On Barthes’ advice, he also attended Hubert Damisch’s seminar. Deeply involved in that intellectual ferment, he met Jacques Derrida, read Claude Levi-Strauss and Walter Benjamin, was introduced to lin...

‘Perspectives bâtardes’: Stereoscopy, Cézanne, and the Metapictorial Logic of Spatial Construction

Stereoscopy initiated a dimensional shift that freed representation from the laws of geometric optics and longstanding conventions of linear perspective, creating aesthetic possibilities that were first explored by now obscure stereo-photographers. The late nineteenth-century ‘rupture in the pictorial order’ that Hubert Damisch attributes to Paul Cézanne has a genealogy that includes stereoscopy, the debates about binocular space perception that it occasioned, as well as innovative photographic work for the stereoscope. Through reading Hippolyte Taine, Cézanne was aware of the Berkelean idea that binocular space is not seen, but rather assembled from visual and tactile sensation sampled across time. The problem that this understanding posed for representation led many to insist that binocular space could only be invoked through synthetic apparatuses like the stereoscope; others argued for new conventions of planar representation, or ‘binocular painting’. The visual evidence from Cézanne’s work suggests that he paid attention to prescriptions for binocular painting and also to the new pictorial language developed by stereo photographers. Stereo photographers in the 1850s and 1860s, by abandoning perspectival conventions and proposing a constructivist conception of space, helped to transform Western visual culture in hitherto unappreciated ways.