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From Face to face: The notion of the autos in Van Gogh's portraits by Artaud, Bataille, Heidegger, et. al.
"Everything is overexposed in the interface of an interactivity that strips reality of the possibility of places, things, or adversaries meeting face to face."- Paul Virilio
"I should like to paint portraits which will appear as revelations to people in a hundred years' time"- Vincent van Gogh
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The structure and stricture of the portrait for van Gogh, also becomes a structure and stricture for the portrait of van Gogh that haunts the writings of Artaud and Bataille, a portrait that provides the haunt for each writer's vested interest in revelation, in the sacred. The structure and stricture of the portrait, at once, instantaneously opens a space, while this space is immediately delimited, defined, if not deified. For both Bataille and Artaud, van Gogh provides a structure, but this structure only exists within the stricture of their own self, a self that is also subject to and the subject of the structures and strictures housed within portraiture.
For Bataille in "Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent van Gogh," it is not even the whole of the artist that provides the spectral haunt of the sacred, but the sacrificial ear. The ear draws the attentive reader, a reader with attentive ears, ears pricked up, if not pricked at, into the realm of a larger framework, a framework of the sacred that solely exists as one of the shelters for the spiritual within Bataille's larger critique of modernity, a critique of modernity that at one level is an attack against the larger architectural framework through which capitalism debases the world by means of the commodification of the individual's relation to the spiritual and the physical, separating the physical from the spiritual, constructing the very categories that constrict a self. For Bataille, the sense of the sacred is tied to the sacrificial, and the sensorial sonority of the severed ear is sewn onto a larger discourse around the sacred cross culturally. The sacrificial nature of van Gogh's act transgresses, according to Bataille, a clearly marked line within modern European culture, going beyond the rational, the scientific, the normal, pointing to a beyond of modern culture, both beyond Europe, but also beyond, to a more primal and primary state before the modern. Bataille grafts the ear onto the mystical, mapping the mythical solar deity of van Gogh, a solar deity constructed by Bataille in order to graph a graphic lineage of self-mutilation. Yet, this very act of charting the sacrificial leads to the sacrifice of van Gogh's self, the otherness of van Gogh, a constricting reading that latches onto van Gogh's ear in this act of self-sacrificial violence to the portrait. Moreover, this act of sacrifice that bears such importance to Bataille's reading is based on the myth of the artist or, rather, based on a real event that bears within it the mythologizing of the artist. That is to say, Bataille is working from an account of van Gogh's act of self-mutilation that is divorced from the actual event, a textual account of the account that bears within it the myth of van Gogh, but this is the only account that Bataille has at his disposal. The fault lines of Bataille's portrait of van Gogh provide further fissures in that Bataille's intended subject is never van Gogh. From the beginning, Bataille is not talking about van Gogh, but about sacrifice and, through sacrifice, an opening toward the spiritual, an authentic experience of the spiritual, something that resists portraiture and always risks falling into caricature. So we have a writer writing about authentic experience through the mythic account of an act by one of the most mythologized artists of the modern era, writing about something that resists representation, resists portraiture.
An almost chiasmatic mirroring happens as we turn to face Artaud's reading. For Artaud, in "Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society," van Gogh provides a point of departure for Artaud's own critique of the institutionalized instantiation of conformity into the world of modernity and the resultant spiritual paucity that is its chief byproduct. Here, in the face to face, specters of doctors, institutions, biographies, autobiographies, society, and history haunt one another, a self always haunted by the other, and an other always haunted by the self, a veritable breakdown of the relation between self and other. In this haunting portrait of van Gogh, the specter of Artaud's self-portrait manifests itself in an attack against psychiatrists, asylums, and the institution of society. Amongst the ghosts, however, Artaud returns again and again to questions of the spiritual and back to the body, the sole residence of the soul. In the midst of these hauntings, van Gogh disappears, appearing simply as a stand in for Artaud. An artist, Artaud, whose own mental problems are being exploited and mythologized is writing about another artist, van Gogh, whose mythologized mental problems are being exploited, exchanging his personality for a phantom ghost in order to approach the spiritual. Artaud, however, is actually writing about 'van Gogh,' the one who has so overwhelmingly been popularized, writing in response to an exhibition of van Gogh that is exposing and commodifying the myth of the artist for the very society that Artaud feels is culpable for van Gogh's suicide, attempting to replace and displace one myth of van Gogh with his own myth, the myth of Artaud, while destructuring the myth of the spirit through the destruction of the body. It is in this hybridization of myths that the spiritual arises.
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The problem of the face to face is the problem of the face today, the face of the now, of how one envisages the now, a problem that in van Gogh's time was envisioned as a problem of physiognomy. Regardless, within all these visions of the face, the face of the other, the self always haunts the other, whether that self is van Gogh, Bataille, Heidegger, or, indeed, any self, my self included. For van Gogh, the portrait is a question of the other, but a question that also shows the distance of consciousness, a distance that we don't know, a distance we only 'no,' that only can be negated by suspending what we know. The plagues and plays of representation descend upon the spectator, if we remain blindly tied to an ideal of unmediated heteronomy, if we do not recognize the revelation of the face, the face before us. What is before us, still, is the mediated semblance of the other that the portrait bears witness to, that bears witness too, that bears witness to the two, to the relation between self and other.
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The relation between self and other, why is this particularly difficult, both important and potent in van Gogh, to the extent that all of these writers end up writing about themselves, using van Gogh as a projection for their own fantasies and desires? Is there something to the structure of the portrait that van Gogh's work makes problematic, a relation between self and other that happens in a particularly intense fashion with and within van Gogh, where we don't see the people van Gogh paints, but rather a painting by "van Gogh," a painting in which we hope, desire, long to see how van Gogh saw them, even, perhaps, saw himself? Is what we look for in van Gogh's work a mere glimpse of "van Gogh," as opposed to the people he represents, and do we miss something integral to van Gogh's project if we don't see his paintings as an opening, as Heidegger suggests about art, art as a truth, a truth that is a revelation, the very language of revelation that van Gogh talks about, a process of revelation that is intimately linked to all of this rhetoric of the sacred within our secular world that Artaud and Bataille, as well as Heidegger, attest to, a world where we are in the absence of the gods, where it has been the onus of artists since Holderlin to bear witness to the sacred in a world where the divine no longer exists? Is there an opening that happens in art, an opening for a revelation, a process of revelation for van Gogh that is not about self-revelation, but the revelation of an otherness, an otherness that is two-fold, a double revelation that happens in the face to face, in this mutual facing that is the portrait, the very structure and stricture of the portrait, a revelation of the other as other?
This other would involve not only the one who sits, but also a revelation of van Gogh's self to us as other, a facing between an image of the other who is represented and an image of the other who is the representer, a mutual facing that merges in the face to face encounter to which only the painting bears witness to, that only the painting can testify to, a painting that is merely a representation, but no mere representation, a testimony, a bearing witness to an impossible encounter, a mutual facing where self and other open up to each other in an exchange. This is an exchange that takes place in the portrait, a mutual facing that merges into the fact of the face to face encounter to which only the painting bears witness to, the primal document of this encounter, if not the primary means of documentation.
Yet, there is a more originary encounter that takes place in the portrait, one that has persisted since the first artist stared at a blank surface, facing the challenge of filling that void which is not even a void, but a blank, an encounter with an otherness that is made into something recognizable to the artist as a work, a work only produced through the working of materials, materials that are so patently worked in van Gogh's paintings. These are matters and matter struggled with, a struggle to make these materials reveal themselves, to make them matter and not matter, to make revelation possible, and the painting bears witness to this struggle, faced by an artist who signed his name 'Vincent,' whose very existence was a struggle and over which so many writers, philosophers, artists have struggled with since his death. This is a struggle that often times relates to attempts at closing off the process of revelation. This artist van Gogh signs his name as 'Vincent,' a tag of identification that marks and always mars the encounter with the other with the presence of the self, but a self that is present by being so patently absent in the structure of the portrait, and present only through the stricture of the portrait, which is to say nothing of the self-portrait, that which is supposed to capture the other, the uncapturable otherness of the other, the self as other and the revelation of this otherness to a self. Self and other always haunt one another, the one always providing a haunt for the other. Such is the structure and stricture of the face to face.
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