Erosion and illegibility of images: ‘beyond the immediacy of the present’^*

* Buck-Morss (1989, x).

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the University of Wolverhampton for supporting the project generously as part of the Early Researcher Award Scheme (ERAS). Thanks also to Emma Cocker, Nottingham Trent University, for reading the manuscript and for her very useful feedback and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Christian Mieves is a painter and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Wolverhampton School of Art.

ORCID

Christian Mieves http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2123-4004

Notes

* Buck-Morss (1989, x).

1 Latour (2002, 23).

2 Boris Groys sees iconoclasm not principally directed against the ‘truth in images’ but as a result of power relations and an antagonism between different artistic media. Film in his analysis has been exposed to iconoclastic gesture, ‘been halted midstream and dissected’ (2008, 67).

3 This notion of atemporality, as reflected in the trope of the ruin, can be equally applied to the current situation of artistic practice and the wilful appropriation and decontextualization of images and styles in contemporary painting (see Hoptman 2014).

4 Frampton argues that Postmodernism appears often as ‘casually transparent’ in contrast to the Modernist affinity with illegibility (Frampton 2009, 292). The fascination in our society with transparency reflects the understanding of transparency as being honest and entirely integrated in the flow of communication in a capitalist society (see e.g. Byung-Chul Han 2015).

5 Nostalgia, as closely associated with the trope of the ruin, needs a gap, as Susan Stewart has argued. Any attempts to close the gap will be refuted by the incommensurability of lived and imagined experience. As Stewart argues:

Nostalgia cannot be sustained without loss. The nostalgic to reach his or her goal of closing the gap between resemblance and identity, lived experience would have to take place, an erasure of the gap between sign and signified, an experience which would cancel out the desire that is nostalgia’s reason for existence. (1993, 145)

6 John Ruskin quoted in Prince (2014, 6).

7 The exhibition ‘The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art’ (9 November 2013–9 March 2014 Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, curated by Dieter Roelstraete) investigates the role of the historical, archival research in contemporary artistic practices (see also Roelstraete 2009).

8 Peter Geimer identifies a lack of ‘a palpable legibility’ in contemporary art, with a tendency to ‘change between perceptibility and retreat to the indefinable’ (2012, 22/23). The aspect of ‘impenetrability’ leads to a perception of illegibility of painting and ‘failure’ of the picture to represent to subject, consequently heightens the self-reflexivity of the painting (Geimer 2012, 34).