Hubert Damisch Research Articles

Damisch avec Architecture

An observer of clouds, miasmas, uncertain perspectives, of the disturbing psychic undercurrents of beauty, and the heterogeneity of vision, Hubert Damisch would seem to be an unlikely theorist of architecture. Something as firm, formed, stable, fixed, and unshifting as architecture would hardly appeal, let alone respond to the interrogation of the informe, the unseen, and the unthought as the subjects habitually attributed to Damisch. And yet from the outset, without much fanfare, and with no treatise or book to advertise the fact, this detective of the elusive has been elaborating, through incisive and regularly published essays, a theory of architecture. Or rather, on the surface at least, he has been interrogating other, historical, theories of architecture, in such a way that, if read systematically, and preferably consecutively in the chronological order of their subject-matter, an emergent theory of architecture might be discerned; one that, while not pretending to operative or instrumental status, nevertheless construes the subject in a radical frame, a frame that if allowed will shift the nature of architectural understanding, or, as Damisch prefers, architectural ‘thinking.’

The museum as prison

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes See Gilles Deleuze, ‘Post‐scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle’, in Pourparlers, Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1990. Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, 1973, republished in 1997, University of California Press. This project was undertaken in the wake of Douglas Crimp's book, which laid the foundations of an archaeology of the museum by using as a model Foucault's analyses of the mental home, the clinic, and the prison. See Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir [Discipline and Punish], Gallimard, Paris, 1975, p. 311. Ibid, p 306. Ibid, p 308. Ibid, p 314. Robert Nickas, ‘Private Collection’, 1991, republished in Live Free or Die, Les Presses du Réel, Dijon, 2000, p 64. Robert Smithson, ‘Cultural Confinement’, originally published in Artforum, October 1972, republished in Nancy Holt, ed, The Writings of Robert Smithson, New York University Press, 1979, pp 132–3. See Hal Foster, ‘The Archive Without Museum’, October, no 77, Summer 1996, pp 97–119, and Douglas Crimp, ‘This is Not a Museum of Art’, in Crimp, op cit, pp 13–16. Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1999, p 11. Hubert Damisch, ‘Le Musée à l'heure de sa disponibilité technique’, in Cahiers du MNAM, special issue, ‘L'Art contemporain et le musée’, 1989, p 25. Ibid, p 28. Ibid, p 28. Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins, op cit, p 287. On this issue of the in‐situ understood as a material and discursive place, see Crimp's chapter ‘Redefining site specificity’ in On the Museum's Ruins, op cit; Frazer Ward, ‘The Haunted Museum: Institutional Critique and Publicity’, October, no 73, Summer 1995, pp 71–89; Miwon Kwon, ‘One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity’, October, no 80, Spring 1997, pp 85–110. Dan Graham, ‘Interview with Ludger Gerdes, 1991’, in Two‐Way Mirror Power, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999, p 70. See, for example, Surveiller et punir, p 313, and Baudrillard's reproach that Foucault failed to discern the disappearance of the panoptic system and its ideal of total transparency in a generalised social dissemination/distribution of the medium comes from a misunderstanding. Jean Baudrillard, ‘La Précession des simulacres’, in Traverses, no 10, 1978, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, pp 27–8. Deleuze, ‘Post‐scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle’, op cit, p 243. Ibid, p 245. See Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Le Nouvel Esprit du Capitalisme, Gallimard, Paris, 1999. Ibid, p 131. Fabrice Bousteau and Jean Poderos, ‘Interview with Catherine Trautman, ministre de la culture’, Beaux‐Arts, no 165, February 1998, pp 95–9. Boltanski and Chiapello, op cit, p 127 ff. See Boltanski and Chiapello, op cit, p 237 ff, as well as Manuel Castells, La Société en Réseaux I – L'ère de l'information, Fayard, 1998, and Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work, 1996. See Bernard Marcadé, ‘L'in situ comme lieu commun’, art press, no 137, June 1989. Benjamin Buchloh, Sculpture Projects in Münster', Artforum, 36:1, September 1997, pp 115–17. Daniel Buren: ‘The museum, as I first saw it in the 1960s and 1970s, was essentially a place of promotion. Its increased numbers caused it to lose its aura. Now the fact of exhibiting in a museum no longer hallows anything whatsoever… To regain its promotional function, the museum will have to reinvent itself differently, because today, where its power to stand out and impose itself is concerned, it is shattered’. See his interview with Catherine Millet, ‘Daniel Buren, esquiver les allégeances’, art press, no 219, December 1996, p 63. Lionel Bovier and Christophe Cherix, ‘De l'Alternatif à l'Indépendant’, Les Espaces Indépendants, JRP Editions, Geneva, p 15. Smithson, ‘Some Void Thoughts on the Museum’, in The Writings of Robert Smithson, op cit, p 58. In developing the same idea, readers may also refer to ‘A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art’ (‘language becomes an infinite museum, whose center is everywhere and whose limits are nowhere’) and ‘The Establishment’ (‘The circles of power become more and more intangible as they move to the edge of nowhere’), republished in the same collection. Michel Foucault, ‘Dialogue sur le pouvoir’, in Dits et Ecrits, vol III, Gallimard, Paris, 1978, pp 464–77. Eric Troncy, Report on the ‘Life/Live’ exhibition, Paris, in art press, no 219, December 1996. Bovier and Cherix, op cit, pp 17–18.

The Architectural Piece in 1700: The Paintings of Alberto Carlieri (1672 - c. 1720), Pupil of Andrea Pozzo

This article presents a catalogue of 144 paintings by Alberto Carlieri (1672 - c.1720), a painter of architectural caprices whose paintings have frequently been misidentified as early works by Giovanni Paolo Panini (1691-1765) . Carlieri emerged from the workshop of Andrea Pozzo in the 1590s, and was apparently active in Rome until about 1720. Carlieri's sources in Pozzo are explored, and the architectural forms and compositions that form the primary subject of his pictures are subjected to a systematic 'transformational analysis' (to borrow a term from Hubert Damisch).

A Conversation with Hubert Damisch

Denis Hollier: How would you define yourself? Historian of art? Anti-historian of art? Theorist of art? Philosopher of art? How would you define your field? Hubert Damisch: It's a field with three poles, and here my early training with Merleau-Ponty played a decisive part: question of unconscious; question of history (which I would put in third place); and something I don't know whether to call form or structure. I guess I'd say, using Wittgenstein's definition: form as possibility of structure. Why art? Because I thought that art would be medium through which I could simultaneously connect these three poles. When I was studying with Merleau-Ponty, I wanted to work on Goya in relation to something I called the perception of This interested Merleau-Ponty very much. It was idea that there was a perception of history that connects to darkness in sense in which you find this in Lucien Febvre, or initially in Michelet: l'histoire noire. It was idea that in midst of a history that was narrative, discursive, something suddenly occurred in work of Goya and especially in Black Paintings of Quinta del Sordo: a kind of silence. It would be, then, a matter not of narrating history but of seeing it. What would a phenomenology of perception of history be? You have to remember that we were just emerging from war. It was extremely important to me, idea that I had perceived history. During war as a child and adolescent this was something I saw. I remember hearing first news about war announced on radio; but I didn't really believe it until I saw facts actually written on posters. In same way, I was profoundly marked by one of first examples of what I experienced as graphic design as such: eagle and swastika on deportation notices. Yve-Alain Bois: But how did you pass from Merleau-Ponty to structuralism and what role did Francastel play there?

Virtually Straight

The Origin of Perspective by Hubert Damisch, translated by John Goodman, Cambridge Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1994, 477 pp., 135 b. & w. illus., £35.95

Painting as Model

is pass4 or in, to antiformalists who see in formalism a kind of ideological sellout, or to symbol chasers and iconographers. He is vehemently against belletristic art writing, taxonomical art history, journalistic art criticism. He sees positivism and humanism as trite disgraces (p. xxx). The introduction, Resisting Blackmail, shows author, sword drawn and flashing, driving back into shadows what no one familiar with scene of humanities today will fail to acknowledge as monsters. And given pressure to theorize, politicize, iconologize when theories are inflated, politics fashionable, iconology hardly robust, it is initially difficult not to applaud author as a champion of intellectual bon sens, even if swordsmanship is accompanied by a certain grands 6coles swagger. Besides, he has written an immortal line, USA politics pervades everything but politics per se (p. xx). is Yve-Alain Bois for? He is for the urge to take painting seriously, or any kind of art for that matter, and to understand it not as illustration of a theory but as a model, a theoretical model in itself (p. xxx). His guide in this pursuit is art historian Hubert Damisch, his graduate adviser at Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. If introduction is a tribute to Damisch's example, concluding chapter, which gives book its title, is a somewhat defensive review of Damisch's book Fen~tre jaune cadmium, published in 1984. In Damisch's book question is raised, What does it mean for a painter to think?; and tone of embattlement and polemic clings to Bois's review: Damisch in France seems to take [this question] seriously; book stands alone in France; it is resolutely to more or less what Bois himself is opposed to in his introduction. Damisch, along with Bois, is concerned with the formulation of a question raised by work of art within a historically determined framework, and search for a theoretical model to which one might compare work's operations and with which one might engage them (p. 245). Damisch is pondering possibility of what o e might term purely pictorial thought, where problems, perhaps historically given to artists, are given purely pictorial solutions. In brief, Bois, and if he is right, Damisch, aspire to a kind of autonomous Kunstwissenschaft, which is to say, an art history that is not an application of theories external to art. At this point sword does service as a kind of razor, shaving off as insufficiently explanatory what does not pertain to pictorial essence of art. For example, Bois claims, order to comprehend... abandonment of all curves, there is no need to get mixed up in theosophical nonsense with which [Piet Mondrian's] mind was momentarily encumbered (pp. 247-48). Those who wrote on Mondrian before Damisch

History in Perspective, Perspective in History: A Commentary on L'Origine de la perspective by Hubert Damisch

History in Perspective, Perspective in History: A Commentary on L'Origine de la perspective by Hubert Damisch