by Jon Lackman | 2 February 2007 | Ancient, Books
Henri Meschonic recently published Le Nom de notre ignorance, la Dame d’Auxerre, a short book on a Greek statue at the Louvre. Dumitra Baron reviews the book in Acta Fabula: “How can an artwork speak to us, what can it transmit to us, what are the relationships between language and art, in what way can the language of poets apply to discussions of art objects? … These are just some of the questions addressed by Henri Meschonnic … The book alternates between mythology, archaeology, history, litterature, art, and translation … between first impressions, solid documentation, and rereadings of the work … Near the end of the book, Henri Meschonnic unveils a veritable interpretive method: ‘to see a painting or a sculpture, we must work through the effects of language on the visible, the intervention of the cultural between the work and the look’ … The pertinence of this reading is underscored by the work itself because ‘La Dame d’Auxerre demonstrates that we don’t see it … that it bears all our looks successively … we don’t see with our eyes only, but through words that say what we think we see.”
