by Jon Lackman | 5 December 2007 | Books, Theory
Jacques Ranciere’s essay collection Le destin des images has been translated into English, as The Future of the Image. In the title essay, he writes:
… Does not the term ‘image’ contain several functions whose problematic alignment precisely constitutes the labour of art? … What is being spoken about, and what precisely are we being told, when it is said that there is no longer any reality, but only images? Or, conversely, that there are no more images but only a reality incessantly representing itself to itself? These two discourses seem to be opposed. Yet we know that they are forever being converted into one another in the name of a rudimentary argument: if there is now nothing but images, there is nothing other than the image. And if there is nothing other than the image, the very notion of the image becomes devoid of content. Several contemporary authors thus contrast the Image, which refers to an Other, and the Visual, which refers to nothing but itself. This simple line of argument already prompts a question. That the Same is the opposite of the Other is readily intelligible. Understanding what this Other is is less straightforward.
In the essay “Painting in the Text,” he writes:
“Too many words”: the diagnosis is repeated whenever the crisis of art, or its subservience to aesthetic discourse, is denounced. Too many words about painting; too many words that comment on its practice and devour it; that clothe and transfigure the “anything goes” it has become or replace it in books, catalogues and official reports — to the point of spreading to the very surfaces where it is exhibited and where, in its stead, we find the pure affirmation of its concept, the self-denunciation of its imposture, or the registration of its end … I would like to turn the game upside down and move from polemical denunciation of the words that encumber painting to a theoretical understanding of the articulation between words and visual forms that defines a regime of art.
