draft
work in progress
continued from
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1DZudavz-yNLbaZUHRUW_kq2_2fv7iiKg
Giotto usually exploits atmospheric perspective (fig.) But here a nuclear blast of light instantly evaporates the misty Tuscan atmosphere and singes the skin of the saint. The same light, reflected off the face of the mountain brings distant objects into clear view. If we reimpose an atmosphere as in Giotto's other other images, we read the church at a distance that rationalizes its size in relation to the body of the saint. (fig.) This reading overcomes the anomaly of the apparent appearance of the church so near to the saint's secluded hermitage. It’s like the world Alice finds down the rabbit hole, the hermitage a dollhouse the saint must squeeze into.
What we see is all we get -- the minimal difference that creates and divides without fixating and over-defining lovers and all named and not yet named things in truth -- in words, in visible form, in felt bodies, that minimal difference and all the things it makes and unmakes, makes and unmakes, constantly alive, here made visible, but only when you kiss the beast, worse than a beast, by all accounts a corpse. Worse than a corpse, just a pile of dead ideas all linked together in such a way as to come to life, like Frankenstein. Knowledge is a scandal, a travesty, possibly a Faustian bargain, but I don't think so. Rather, it's the hair of the dog that bit us. Every time you lynch Frankenstein, history repeats itself until you arrive at the Last Man. Heed your sibyls. The oppressed have only language for hope; the oppressors have too much language, and only want to escape from it, but not by giving it to the oppressed. Language set free to assist the oppressed is Frankenstein! But poverty is the true and only enemy of the human species.
At the hooked top of the craggy mountain grazing the upper frame, the rock loosely mirrors the form of a rather absurdly large bird facing it. This bird at the summit, surely a bird to whom Francis preached, turns to the attentive mountain peak. All praise to you, Sister Mountain, says the bird. Because of her black triangular hole from which the saint emerges today reborn, I take the mountain to be a woman. Though it looks like the ground directly in front of her just suffered an earthquake or a landslide, the unperturbed mountain bows graciously. All praise to you, Brother Bird. On the lit facet of the rock we see two small trees one at the edge, its green crown blending into the slate blue cloud of light in which Christ hovers. and a few small ferns, otherwise the rock is barren. The apparent giornata, or distinct zones of the sparse landscape, as each giornata represents a day of fresco painting before the wall sets, could also stand for a day of Creation —- the separation of light and dark, the creation of vegetal life, of animal life, where Francis and Christ could be the moon and the sun, the observers man and woman. Creation in time warping back into all present space.
The aggressor, reading, stands depleted, now fully encased in the visible sphere of the inner sanctum of the image. It cannot win, but neither has it lost. By this time, narration has no more wind left to blow the image into the luxurious plenitude that it produces later in the pictures of the Stigmatization by Giovanni Bellini and Titian. Like the once wealthy Francis, who discarded all his clothes in the public square, reading in quest of the figure in the field of Giotto’s painting, has already been to the Renaissance and returned. Now at the last minute, the aging, wandering, rolling stone finally collapses in exhaustion into the mothering arms of Giotto’s wan, dusty figure that hardly covers its old, geometric bones, having waited patiently, for centuries, in utter stillness and near muteness, to receive it.
For Giotto, as for Bonaventura, the Stigmatization reads as embedded in, and determined by, history and existing language. The Stigmatization is not the first figure, and we are not the first readers. So we must read not by disinterring but by burrowing through a medium thick with pre-existing objects and by brushing off the surface of the figure as far as we are able. But reading does not need to detach, but only to unrivet itself from objects, to create the possibility that readers can begin to appropriate and control reading and to create their own objects. At the instant that the language used by the New Testament Jesus reads as a coherent signifying system -- just as it unrivets the figure from the object, it brings into being a new object - the whole, single sphere of continually forming and de-forming objects and figures. The appearance of this new object brings into being its read boundary, separating it from what it is not. On this boundary, read in the sensed index, where the new object commingles with and crosses over into its alterity, a new figure appears, not the spirit-infested, naturalistically dying body of the self-sacrificing figure of Christ inside the interior of Francis, but the exteriorized, magical, figure of the New Testament Jesus, who signs to the reader that she has arrived at the closing off and enclosing of naturalistic space. The instant the magical figure of Jesus nestles against and bleeds into what it is not - the naturalistic figure of perspectival space -- it is natural that perspectivalists should begin to construct vehicles to convey the observer out to this outer limit, where the strange, alien figure can be spied on directly. There the miracle-performing, nature-violating Jesus visibly encircles naturalistic space by performing as one who has purified himself of the memory of objects and can freely reinvent new objects. The first traveler is Francis, but Francis, polluted by the sin of memory, imitates Christ at first not by reading him directly. Unlike those who, according to the story, touched Jesus, saw him, and entered directly, without remembering or even reading, into the visible figure that contained the non-object of his living body, Francis must work himself up to an imitation of the fervor of spirit of Christ. The fervor of love, according to the story, carries Francis across perspectival, naturalistic space to its outer boundary. But then it drops the saint off the edge, failing to resolve the distant image of the event as it fades out of view at the remote place where Francis himself spoke of an unutterable mystery. This mystery purified the impure saint and allowed him to enter into the bodily figure of Christ and to read the self-productive language of Christ directly. After the vehicle of the emptied body of Francis returns home, Bonaventura takes it apart, refines, and re-launches it. The body, newly equipped with the refined story, carries the perspectival reader all the way out to the boundary of the boundary - just before the imitation of spirit enters into the imitation of matter.
But we still cannot see or read the Stigmatization or the miracles of Jesus directly or perspectivally. With Bonaventura, the wounds remain for us objects, cut off from the phenomenon of their appearance. But then Giotto tries his hand at refining the vehicle of the body of Francis, refined by Bonaventura. With Giotto the body of the saint, rigged up in its story and welded into hyper-perspectival space, telescopes reading out past the gravitational field. The objectified body spiraling out through constellations inside of galaxies arrives at the non-place where not only the object of the body, but the whole figural/objective sphere dissolves. The rigged up body of the saint conquers, violates and penetrates the purified boundary where the object without memory comes into being in the body. A tool-maker pulls a usable tool out of the hat of problem-solving. The technician, Giotto, just as he turns the last bolt in the instrument of perspectival reading, pulls the living, breathing, magical/natural rabbit of the clear, transparent, redeemed sign, without any hidden tricks, out of the hat of picture-making.
It may take several centuries to produce, several decades to decode and translate into the current language, and at least an hour just to begin to read a translation of the reading instructions cryptically written into Giotto's Stigmatization. But once there is a set of instructions that works, the observer can fly Giotto's smooth, new, quiet, time machine as reading machine at will. After quickly re-scanning the instructions, the reader leaves herself as reader and steps into the seat of the observer. As observer, reading at the speed of recognition, she responds affectively to the immediate presence of the picture. Her mind heads directly into the folds of pictured surface, which Giotto has broken in subjection to one another; and the folds break again subjected to her act of reading and entering into the three-dimensional space "beyond" the surface. But when she returns, her body, like that of the hypothetical astronaut who does not age during his orbit at the speed of light, fails to register the journey even though her memory equipment records it. The voyage ironically, scandalously leaves relatively untouched and unmoved the immediately responding observer who confronts, close up, the bare and tragic scene. In retrospect the trip appears to have been an unreal, disconnected experience, like dreaming or looking through a small, thick window, on which the view beyond might as well have been some skillfully painted fantasy. On the other hand, her voyage into the painting scandalously violates and deeply, permanently moves the one the recognizer has been and who she returns to being, the one who holds her ground and remains at her post as she watches from outside, monitors, clocks, verifies, and experiences directly the impossible contradiction between her time as the traveler and her time as the watcher,
The view through the frame, it turns out, is a painted fantasy, but at the same time it is continuous with and transparent to the "real," world that appears around and behind it and that curls back to enclose the observer from behind. The same, black, everyday world, blind to the direct, internal/external light of inspired vision, seeps into depicted space from behind the outline of mountain, the mouth of the cave, and the empty church. From within this outside space the observer as reader, monitor, and clocker sees the picture and the seeing of the picture from below. She watches and records the effects on herself of a rectangular surface, from which the virtue of economy that rules the moves of Giotto, Francis, Christ, and God, has expunged the irrelevant. What is left is the thinnest possible film of meaning on the surface of the emptied plane -- a non-existent, but visible outline or figure, which impossibly reads although what it reads against is included in it. The images of what have been and what will be at the swirling figure of the mobius strip impress themselves into it, since it is the edge, the present itself, impaled between past and future. Whatever both Francis and the surface represent from without -- it appears to build up from within.
Giotto openly confesses the sinning thinness of his vision, and God forgives it. In return God reiterates his demand for stricter adherence to his now clarified commandments. In order to love and worship God alone, according to the first commandment, humans must relinquish their hegemony not only over one another, not all over the wild beasts, but over the apparently non-living matter of the apparently indifferent, visible dots on the perceptual screen. In order to fulfill the second commandment prohibiting making and worshipping images, humans must reject all degraded, incomplete facsimiles, including the reversed "divine impress" of the Stigmatization (Giotto's wrong turn -- which, in turn, reflects the pope's sly move of appropriating Francis -- at the Louvre.)
The commandment specifically prohibits images, not idols, except ones made of silver and gold. According to the commandments, Giotto's little, muddy, painted god at Santa Croce is okay; it is not a facsimile of the event, but an identical progeny, still umbilically attached to the identical One -- the appearing, evanescent, continuous, divine phenomenon of that which, as Nicolas of Cusa put it, is not other than itself. After Moses in anger at the idolators, shattered the tablets of the commandments, Saint Francis, shattered, but still intact, brings down from the mountain the tablet of his body. On it, in Giotto's picture, God has inscribed the new law of perspective, by which God reveals the secret of his perpetual presence in the self and the world. By allowing, through Francis, idols, or art, the ever-forgiving God gathers the last stray sheep, not only the illiterate, but the over-literate. And the degree of humanness that God allows, he also sanctifies.
... He who is thus a spiritual lover knows well what that voice means which says, you Lord God are my whole love and my desire. You are all mine and I all yours. Dissolve my heart into your love so that I may know how sweet it is to serve you and how joyful it is to praise you and to be as though I were all melded into your love. Oh I am urged on by love and go far above myself because of the great fervor I feel through your unspeakable goodness. I shall sing to you the song of love; I shall follow you, my beloved, wherever you go, and my soul will never be weary of praising you with the joyful songs of spiritual love that I will sing to you. I will love you more than myself, and I will not love myself except for you, and I will love all others in you and for you as the law of love which you give commands...
The last, perspectival formal invention connected with the increasingly precise description of devout imitation is a book called The Imitation of Christ by Thomas Kempis, writing in the early fifteenth-century. With The Imitation of Christ the tool of prayer consumes its own metaphor and its own body, opening transparently onto and dissolving into an open field of language that refuses metaphor. The words and the phrases and their rhythmical structure enact what the words already mean and are. To be attentively in the words is to be in the place where they have already come to pass. The Imitation of Christ is the language of the moral transparent to the language of pure sound, by which Francis might have preached to the birds.
Just as perspectival reading exits from the visible sphere into the immaterial, resonant language of imitative prayer, the architect, Brunelleschi, moves Giotto's observer from the private chapel in the Franciscan Church of Santa Croce to the threshold of the portal of the Cathedral of San Reparata, which opens onto the public square facing the Baptistery. Then Brunelleschi publicly invites the observer to compare a panel he has painted of the Baptistery, which faces the church on the other side of the square, with the actual appearance. Brunelleschi inverts the function of the perspectival image. Instead of enabling conscious perspectival reading, he has the viewer read the picture through a mirror which obfuscates the viewer’s position and role in reading. Brunelleschi also refuses to divulge the tricks he used to produce the apparently astonishingly convincing likeness between the image on the panel and the distant appearance. A few decades later, in 1435, the humanist Alberti, publishes the first known verbal description of mathematical perspective, what he called prospettiva, a view through. In his treatise, which makes no mention of Christianity and refers to places of worship as temples, he disingages the conscious mode of perspectival reading an image in construction from the act of reception. He assumes the reading of the picture will proceed by the old mode of figural reading by unconscious projection. His method of imagining the picture to be a window on which a view beyond is traced indeed assists the image in its tendency to appear as an already present object. Still, like Bonaventura, Alberti constructs the image as the intersection of a plan and elevation view of an appearance from a vanishing point at the top of the view. And like Bonaventura, Alberti includes in his geometric construction a scaled figure. Alberti also admonishes the painter to include a figure who points to the picture from outside the scene, a reminder of the artificial nature of the image and of the act of observing it from outside.
In this Alberti's image, meant to deceive the eye of the beholder, still betrays a remnant of its origins in conscious perspectival reading. Finally, like Giotto and Brunelleschi, Alberti re-installs the spectacle inside a public/private space -- now the illustrated, diagrammatic text meant to be studied and used by the reflective, literate specialist. Alberti, then, returns the perspectival sign to the signifying system, the illustrated text, that, in the Dominican prayer manual, prefigured it.
The Renaissance perspectival figure, reverting to being read in drifting between poles of unconsciousness and awareness, attention and musing, then figures itself in the world. It divides the world into educated, literate readers who read as producers and unconscious readers, the controllers and the controlled. To become an educated reader, to know how to re-produce the figure in reading is to enter into power; that is, either to maintain and display power, or to assume power, or to relinquish power. This was the case with the church as it came into power, then with Francis, who consciously withdrew from his class and also "saved" the power of the church, then with the upwardly mobile Giotto, then with the Renaissance artists, who followed Giotto in newly assuming economic and social status.
For Giotto, each figure signifies everything contained in the oneness of God and self. But as Brian Rotman put it, the figures by which the Middle Ages learned to read the world correspond to the emerging paper cash of pure exchange; they signify nothing. But if the figure exists at all, it signifies nothing only in the very instant that sense passes into reading, carrying power, that is, paradoxically, signification. We may learn clear rules and techniques and teach them to machines, and then allow machines to produce surfaces that signify nothing. But figures do not exist until reading opens the configured surface to the powerful retreating and advancing, inhaling and exhaling force that comes from "behind." This force pumps the figure into roundness (the realm of recognition) then to the spherical (the three-dimensional realm of physical action), then to the narrated (when physical actions add up to meaningful stories), then to ideality as, either, on the one hand, ideology (the manipulation of power) or, on the other, self-reflection and play (the retreat from power and the freeing of the figure to float back and forth through its "posts.")
The church clearly understands that reading admits the observer into the power of the figure and that learning how to read reading means reading the self as a power. Because of this understanding throughout its history the church oversees and monitors not so much in the changing forms the image takes, but instead the act of reading. Only insofar as the structure or form of the image impinges noticeably on the mode of reading, does the church step in and intervene. Instructed by the church the believer approaches the act of reading the figure self-consciously. But the church also officially restricts the believer from reading too "hard," from reading himself too directly as the force that comes into being from behind the image. But in Giotto's inescapably cogent visual argument, the mortal, human Francis communes and mixes directly with the blood of Christ by facing up to and entering into the figure as an embodiment of his own mind. For Giotto, Francis teaches that in prayer there can be no limit placed on access to the power of the visible figure. Instead to pray is to rush into the productive heart of power -- reading itself -- and take responsibility. He who approaches a picture in any other way abuses it as a philistine and an image-maker.
Francis and Giotto dare to be seen embarrassed in the very act of tearing their own grasping hands away from the real, dirty, world that they love too much. The genius saint and the genius artist both proudly, insanely traverse and re-traverse the terrain of their unquenchable desire until the form of the desire, like the pattern a fly scrawls in the air, finally appears visible. Agile as the fly in abrupt reversals, the medieval language of theology and devout poetry keeps up with the desire, feeds it, and holds it on course through its gradual consummation in the preciously useful, lasting form of the tool of perspectival reading or prayer. The performance it describes determines the form of the tool. The performance is an impossible-to-master mode of reading into a view by evening its focus and removing its frame -- so that nothing visible appears outside of the space in which it is read, no shadow cuts off at the body rising above it, no body presents itself apart from the mortal body of the lover, where alone a body can be and appear outside of itself, no lover appears outside of the necessary scene of the love story, no love story pretends away its fate or its muse, and no fate or muse forgets its own name or eclipses the praying one who was desperate enough to use its name to conjure it up. To wield the tool, would be to bring forth and then transform before the eye all walled-in, labyrinthine arguments, all partially descriptive sciences, all incompletely rationalized theories, all temporary or final solutions, all soft impressions, all bland excuses for stories, and all imperfectly comforting or terrifying beliefs. As these pseudo-crutches and pseudo-spectacles drop out of the hands and off of the eyes that they paralyze and blind, the drilling of the tool of prayer imitates Christ. Being itself scandalously crowds into and take command of all of visible space, calling forward and crumbling before it all that in failing to show the looked-for moving into view, describes the reverse of what is.
continued at
confluenza7.blogspot.com
work in progress
continued from
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1DZudavz-yNLbaZUHRUW_kq2_2fv7iiKg
Giotto usually exploits atmospheric perspective (fig.) But here a nuclear blast of light instantly evaporates the misty Tuscan atmosphere and singes the skin of the saint. The same light, reflected off the face of the mountain brings distant objects into clear view. If we reimpose an atmosphere as in Giotto's other other images, we read the church at a distance that rationalizes its size in relation to the body of the saint. (fig.) This reading overcomes the anomaly of the apparent appearance of the church so near to the saint's secluded hermitage. It’s like the world Alice finds down the rabbit hole, the hermitage a dollhouse the saint must squeeze into.
What we see is all we get -- the minimal difference that creates and divides without fixating and over-defining lovers and all named and not yet named things in truth -- in words, in visible form, in felt bodies, that minimal difference and all the things it makes and unmakes, makes and unmakes, constantly alive, here made visible, but only when you kiss the beast, worse than a beast, by all accounts a corpse. Worse than a corpse, just a pile of dead ideas all linked together in such a way as to come to life, like Frankenstein. Knowledge is a scandal, a travesty, possibly a Faustian bargain, but I don't think so. Rather, it's the hair of the dog that bit us. Every time you lynch Frankenstein, history repeats itself until you arrive at the Last Man. Heed your sibyls. The oppressed have only language for hope; the oppressors have too much language, and only want to escape from it, but not by giving it to the oppressed. Language set free to assist the oppressed is Frankenstein! But poverty is the true and only enemy of the human species.
At the hooked top of the craggy mountain grazing the upper frame, the rock loosely mirrors the form of a rather absurdly large bird facing it. This bird at the summit, surely a bird to whom Francis preached, turns to the attentive mountain peak. All praise to you, Sister Mountain, says the bird. Because of her black triangular hole from which the saint emerges today reborn, I take the mountain to be a woman. Though it looks like the ground directly in front of her just suffered an earthquake or a landslide, the unperturbed mountain bows graciously. All praise to you, Brother Bird. On the lit facet of the rock we see two small trees one at the edge, its green crown blending into the slate blue cloud of light in which Christ hovers. and a few small ferns, otherwise the rock is barren. The apparent giornata, or distinct zones of the sparse landscape, as each giornata represents a day of fresco painting before the wall sets, could also stand for a day of Creation —- the separation of light and dark, the creation of vegetal life, of animal life, where Francis and Christ could be the moon and the sun, the observers man and woman. Creation in time warping back into all present space.
Giotto openly confesses the sinning thinness of his vision, and God forgives it. In return God reiterates his demand for stricter adherence to his now clarified commandments. In order to love and worship God alone, according to the first commandment, humans must relinquish their hegemony not only over one another, not all over the wild beasts, but over the apparently non-living matter of the apparently indifferent, visible dots on the perceptual screen. In order to fulfill the second commandment prohibiting making and worshipping images, humans must reject all degraded, incomplete facsimiles, including the reversed "divine impress" of the Stigmatization (Giotto's wrong turn -- which, in turn, reflects the pope's sly move of appropriating Francis -- at the Louvre.)
... He who is thus a spiritual lover knows well what that voice means which says, you Lord God are my whole love and my desire. You are all mine and I all yours. Dissolve my heart into your love so that I may know how sweet it is to serve you and how joyful it is to praise you and to be as though I were all melded into your love. Oh I am urged on by love and go far above myself because of the great fervor I feel through your unspeakable goodness. I shall sing to you the song of love; I shall follow you, my beloved, wherever you go, and my soul will never be weary of praising you with the joyful songs of spiritual love that I will sing to you. I will love you more than myself, and I will not love myself except for you, and I will love all others in you and for you as the law of love which you give commands...
Just as perspectival reading exits from the visible sphere into the immaterial, resonant language of imitative prayer, the architect, Brunelleschi, moves Giotto's observer from the private chapel in the Franciscan Church of Santa Croce to the threshold of the portal of the Cathedral of San Reparata, which opens onto the public square facing the Baptistery. Then Brunelleschi publicly invites the observer to compare a panel he has painted of the Baptistery, which faces the church on the other side of the square, with the actual appearance. Brunelleschi inverts the function of the perspectival image. Instead of enabling conscious perspectival reading, he has the viewer read the picture through a mirror which obfuscates the viewer’s position and role in reading. Brunelleschi also refuses to divulge the tricks he used to produce the apparently astonishingly convincing likeness between the image on the panel and the distant appearance. A few decades later, in 1435, the humanist Alberti, publishes the first known verbal description of mathematical perspective, what he called prospettiva, a view through. In his treatise, which makes no mention of Christianity and refers to places of worship as temples, he disingages the conscious mode of perspectival reading an image in construction from the act of reception. He assumes the reading of the picture will proceed by the old mode of figural reading by unconscious projection. His method of imagining the picture to be a window on which a view beyond is traced indeed assists the image in its tendency to appear as an already present object. Still, like Bonaventura, Alberti constructs the image as the intersection of a plan and elevation view of an appearance from a vanishing point at the top of the view. And like Bonaventura, Alberti includes in his geometric construction a scaled figure. Alberti also admonishes the painter to include a figure who points to the picture from outside the scene, a reminder of the artificial nature of the image and of the act of observing it from outside.
In this Alberti's image, meant to deceive the eye of the beholder, still betrays a remnant of its origins in conscious perspectival reading. Finally, like Giotto and Brunelleschi, Alberti re-installs the spectacle inside a public/private space -- now the illustrated, diagrammatic text meant to be studied and used by the reflective, literate specialist. Alberti, then, returns the perspectival sign to the signifying system, the illustrated text, that, in the Dominican prayer manual, prefigured it.
The Renaissance perspectival figure, reverting to being read in drifting between poles of unconsciousness and awareness, attention and musing, then figures itself in the world. It divides the world into educated, literate readers who read as producers and unconscious readers, the controllers and the controlled. To become an educated reader, to know how to re-produce the figure in reading is to enter into power; that is, either to maintain and display power, or to assume power, or to relinquish power. This was the case with the church as it came into power, then with Francis, who consciously withdrew from his class and also "saved" the power of the church, then with the upwardly mobile Giotto, then with the Renaissance artists, who followed Giotto in newly assuming economic and social status.
The church clearly understands that reading admits the observer into the power of the figure and that learning how to read reading means reading the self as a power. Because of this understanding throughout its history the church oversees and monitors not so much in the changing forms the image takes, but instead the act of reading. Only insofar as the structure or form of the image impinges noticeably on the mode of reading, does the church step in and intervene. Instructed by the church the believer approaches the act of reading the figure self-consciously. But the church also officially restricts the believer from reading too "hard," from reading himself too directly as the force that comes into being from behind the image. But in Giotto's inescapably cogent visual argument, the mortal, human Francis communes and mixes directly with the blood of Christ by facing up to and entering into the figure as an embodiment of his own mind. For Giotto, Francis teaches that in prayer there can be no limit placed on access to the power of the visible figure. Instead to pray is to rush into the productive heart of power -- reading itself -- and take responsibility. He who approaches a picture in any other way abuses it as a philistine and an image-maker.
continued at
confluenza7.blogspot.com
