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| EVE'S DROPPING 2 |
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From Eavesdropping/Eve's Dropping
-But this is the problem. Courbet has an experience before the painting. The painting is secondary, a re-presentation of an experience that is lost, that cannot be represented, that is lost in representation, a loss structuring representation. Painting would be a mourning of this loss of authentic experience, this elusive experience that escapes and founds all representational systems, and cannot be found or represented as such within the representation. It is beyond representation.
At the same time, while Courbet is before the painting, spatially and temporally, the painting is also there before Courbet spatially, staring at him with an evacuating, evocative, vacuum of a gaze that voids Courbet of his presence, sucking his presence away, a vampiric parasite that Courbet cannot live with and without which he cannot live. The painting would also be before 'Courbet' temporally, a Courbet who is the product of this painting, a Courbet who is product. 'Courbet' becomes a fictive entity attached to this painting, a ghost haunting the work through the specter of his signature. This 'Courbet' is also an after-effect of Fried's discourse, a product of Fried's looking at paintings, standing before paintings, and also writing about absent paintings. It is this temporality and spatiality of before and after that has to be registered, a temporality and spatiality that are tied up with mourning, ruin, and blindness.
In this sense, the parasitical painting is a para-site, a location that allows for a 'Courbet,' but a Courbet who only exists in a sort of half-life, an absent-presence tracing out this 'before' and 'after' that we are trying to elucidate. This is a 'Courbet' who is always different, always a difference, a 'Courbet' who is produced through a structure of difference.
-Or is Courbet the parasite of the painting, a para-site to which the painting is returned, re-membered, for the painting cannot exist without the parasite? Is Courbet the para-sitical entity here?
-They would haunt one another, not letting the other go in this spectral economy ordered around a para-sitical process of here-ing, an attempt to make Courbet present, here, and an attempt to locate Courbet in the painting or the painting in Courbet, here, one before or after the other. The one would always mark a difference from the other, an other-ing of the other, frustrating a moment of congruence that remains forever impossible, a scene of hunting and haunting, where a meeting never takes place, marking an irreparable rift between painting and painter.
This detachability between painting and painter causes a problem for a discourse on art, a discourse that would be a matter of stabilizing the relation between subject and object, asserting that subjectivity falls on the side of the maker, the painter, who makes an object, a painting. This assertion involves a denial of the para-sitical nature of the painting that comes to act on the painter, to contour the painter's subjectivity, granting the painter's existence, while contaminating this existence, displacing it, placing it in doubt, having this existence live on and live in the painting, and transforming the painter into an object of study. Painting and painter, neither being simply subject and/or object, would be tied up in the production of subjectivities, as well as the production of objects of study, beyond questions of painter and painting, and even beyond the subjectivity and objectivity of the one who writes on art.
-This raises a whole question of restitution around Courbet's paintings. Who(se) are they? Gustave('s) or Michael('s)? Or are they always detached, detachable, a ruin, remains, and is the Friedian project simply one of re-membering, putting back together, a process of restitution, a memorial, part of a larger project of mourning?
-In one sense, painting and painter are separated, and a discourse on art would want to make restitution, give the painting back to the painter. This would be done in an attempt to stabilize the relation between subject and object, order it, give it orders. Stay! Go back to your owner! The painting has gone astray. It is a stray. The art historian finds the painting and calls up the owner, returning it to an owner, to a painter, who is produced by this very discourse of return, a fictive owner who will always be separated from the painting and by the painting. The relation between painter and painting is marked by a tear, an unbridgeable gap that is opened up in the very act of painting, that is opened up by the gap marked by the 'and' of painting and painter. Courbet's Realism would be marked by an impossible attempt to close this wound, a wound marked by the blood of Courbet's signature.
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