The FuTure
oF The Image
By Jacques Rancière
Verso, £14.99 / $26.95 (hardcover)
French philosopher Jacques Rancière is a
refreshing read for anyone concerned with what
art has to do with politics and society. Having
Image, History’. Rancière draws out how
only recently emerged from the shadows of
modernist art historically worked through the
postmodernism’s great philosopher-celebrities,
instability between image and language caused
Rancière is unimpressed by the esoteric, often
by the unravelling of art’s strict social codification
apocalyptic and politically pessimistic outlook that
in earlier centuries, and maps this ongoing
has dominated ‘French theory’ – and by extension
tension further into the contemporary period,
much of thinking on art – since the 1980s. For
observing the emergence of what he terms the
Rancière the interaction between art and politics
‘sentence-image’ – the unstable fusion of textual
is entirely accessible to reasoned enquiry, and
and visual experience.
The Future of the Image is an engaging collection
This is a tough read, but the following
of recent essays rethinking aesthetic experience
‘Painting in the Text’ should be an essential
and its relation to social reality.
reference for any discussion on contemporary
So Rancière begins, in the title essay, with
painting, a brilliant analysis of the theoretical
the problem left unresolved by Roland Barthes,
confusion around the modernist ‘autonomy’
who first understood images as a form of ‘language’
of ‘pure painting’ championed by critics such
that can be both coded and decoded – a cog in the
as Clement Greenberg. Rancière charts the
spectacle of media culture – but who later sought
long cultural history of how representational
to give value to visual experience that might
art became ‘de-coupled’ from its relationship
resist this assimilation. Rancière explores how
to poetry and genre painting, and exposes the
any rhetoric that celebrates an unmediated ‘pure’
misconstrued logic behind the idea of painting
image – or art object – is always undermined by
as a ‘medium’ understood exclusively in technical
its dependence on a further, codifying discourse.
terms of paint, canvas and stretcher.
Instead, Rancière analyses how these oppositions
Nor is he afraid to take on some of the
misunderstand the relation between ‘seeing and
shibboleths of contemporary postmodern
saying’ – the way visual meaning and linguistic
mystification – the closing essay, ‘Are Some
meaning depend on and cooperate with each
Things Unrepresentable?’, soberly tackles the
other. As he puts it, ‘There is visibility that does
philosophical hyperbole regarding the Holocaust
not amount to an image; there are images which
as an ‘unrepresentable’ event, coolly arguing that
consist wholly in words.’
even the unrepresentable can be given a form,
Rancière’s subtle approach to the interplay
and thus be represented. Rancière’s reassertion
between visual experience and linguistic
of art’s particularity, all the while looking for its
experience allows for a less reductive, more
enmeshment in everything else, is an encouraging
positive acknowledgement of artistic form. This
rejection of absolutes and dead oppositions.
is ‘form’ in the larger sense of the technical and
Though his approach sometimes seems like an
By Miranda July
material artifice that makes an artwork distinct
intellectual performance in its own right – neatly
Scribner, $23 (hardcover); Canongate Books, £9.99 (paperback) from both raw reality and the trammels of
stitching up every contradiction with another
language, but which gives it social existence, a
– and while he stretches his argument over a too-
theme developed in the dense essay ‘Sentence,
wide historical frame, Rancière’s writing strives
to keep art’s potential open in a time when the
political appears to have all but closed down.
J.J. Charlesworth
September_books.indd 5 7/8/07 16:56:44
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