by Jon Lackman | 6 April 2009 | Books, Theory
In the March 2009 issue of the Burlington Magazine, Elisa de Halleux reviews Georges Didi-Huberman’s new essay collection L’image ouverte. Motifs de l’incarnation dans les arts visuels:
Didi-Huberman takes representations of the body and the flesh as a means to dwell on the spectator’s intimate relationship with the image, and to describe the nature of that relationship … the image “opens” in the same way that our sensibility, our hearts, our flesh sometimes “expand” in the presence of an image that moves us: “Images open and close like our bodies as we look at them” … Concepts are used, above all, for their ability to make us think above and beyond historical exactitude … Didi-Huberman’s approach to art is not strictly historical, but his thinking is nonetheless fruitful for the discipline of art history … His discussion of the power of Christian art, in a chapter on exegesis and visuality in Christianity, is certainly one of the best in a book which occasionally, it must be said, seems to push abstruseness to its limits. That is not the least of the paradoxes of his work, which, dealing as it does with the theme of incarnation, becomes, through its verbal virtuosity, at times almost disembodied.
