Paper at the First Meeting in the Research Network “What Images Do”, Copenhagen 13.XII.2012.
My errand here will be a series of interrelated dichotomies, like
• visibility and invisibility
• aisthesis and concept
• image and index
• continuity and discreetness
all which I believe, with some profit, could be invested in Deleuze and Guattaris introduction of the dichotomy between the
• smooth and striated spaces
in the last chapter of Mille Plateaux.
To do so, I will use the concept of ”fake” or ”falsity” as a theoretical hinge, as this is the concept with which Plato understood the strange entanglement of Being and non-Being in images.
The most eloquent—verbally at least—faker in art history, Eric Hebborn, at one point in his autobiography, challenges the reader to spot the difference between an authentic Corot and his refacturing of one.
”Once having recovered from my disappointment at having to sell a perfectly good ‘Corot’ as a doubtful Pisarro I set to work to make a copy on modern paper of the Corot drawing in the Fogg Museum, Harvard University. The purpose of the copy was to familiarise myself with the master’s portrait style suficiently well to make an original drawing in it. It might perhaps amuse you to test your own abilities as a connoisseur, and decide for yourself which of the two photographs (Figs 48 or 49) represents a detail from the original.”
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From Hebborn: Confessions, p. 224–25.
”Even if you happen to be Joe Bloggs in person, you will still have a fifty-fifty chance of being right. Look carefully, take your time, and seek the hesitant line of the copyist as opposed to the strong sure line of Corot. The answer is given at the bottom of the page.” (p. 226ff.)This problem of discernability of identicals has been the standing philosophical issue in the question of art forgery at least since Michelangelo’s time and has kept its actuality at least until Arthur C. Danto identified the problem under a new guise in Andy Warhol’s Brillo-boxes.
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The Brillo Boxes in Stable Gallery 1964, wood and silkscreen.
The proponents of the position that fake is a crime against art (as for instance Nelson Goodman, Alfred Lessing or Thomas Hoving) maintains that there must be an aesthetical difference, however minute or discreet (in both its colloquial as mathematical sense that is), which, eventually will be aesthetical obvious. The fakers, on the other hand, insists that aesthetic perception is continuous and non-individual and thus not indexically attributed to any person, place or time.In the heart of the problem, I believe, is the question of causality. From the Goodman point of view, an art work, or an image in general, is always the effect of a historically indexed spacetime. It is thus a carrier of documentary evidence of all sorts. For the forger, on the other hand, operating without any such historical indexicality, the image presents a vehicle for historical refactures of all sorts.
To make his point, Hebborn paraphrases—in my opinion very precise—the usual strong arguments of hindsight:
”Now, having read the solution, look at the two drawings again and you will suddenly notice how poor my version is, how faulty the construction, how harsh the modelling, and all sorts of ghastly errors which escaped you notice before. But what if I should now tell you that the answer at the bottom of the page is wrong? Perhaps you had better look up the Fogg drawing after all. Should you happen to have a copy of Paul J. Sachs’ Modern Prints and Drawings (Alfred A. Knopf), not date (circa 1959), you will find it reproduced in full on plate 18 with the following caption”:
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From Hebborn: Confessions, p. 226.
”I have included the above quotation because it is a good example of the drivel that experts tend to talk when they are obliged to go beyond factual description. For myself, I am prepared to believe Mr Sachs when he says that the drawing is in pencil, measures 10¾” × 9⅞”, and is in the Fogg. Nor do I see any reason to doubt him when he says it is by Corot (although I must admit that my estimate of his knowledge of drawing would rise dramatically were I to discover he had really made it himself).” (p. 227)And shortly thereafter he concludes: ”If anybody wishes to know anything about drawing, let them draw.”
That is, there are no conceptual, attributive or predicative properties with which we could understand a drawing (or an image). All communication is intimatelly linked with the refacturing or replication of the observed object. That is, there is no transcendental, or else pivotal, instance from where right or wrong, true or false, authentic or inauthentic could be differentiated beyond the replication itself.
In a slightly different vein, but I believe intrinsically linked with the above problem, at least with regard to the question of causality and time is Benjamins theological philosophy of history, where the metaphysical function of redemption is linked with a certain mnemotechnic ability to administer closures and openings within the shape of time. Benjamin writes: ”What research has established can be modified by remembrance. Remembrance can make the incomplete (happiness) complete, and the complete (pain) incomplete. This is theology—but the experience of remembrance forbids us to conceive of history in a fundamentally atheological manner, even as we are not allowed to write history directly in theological concepts.” (Agamben, Bartleby, p. 267)
Remembrance is thus this capacity of restoring the possibilities to the past, making what happened incomplete by de-creation and completing what never was by re-creation. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, winding history back to its original state of contingency were ”it-will-happen-or-it-will-not-happen” is necessarily true, this deterministic non-local state of wave dynamics.
I.
To explain his argument for a physiological basis of our aesthetic perceptions, Edmund Burke, in the fourth section—”Cause of Pain and Fear”—from his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Notions of the Sublime and the Beautiful, presents us with a remarkable allegory of how images affect the imagination of the observing subject.Burke refers to a physiognomist who was ”very expert in mimicking.” When this physiognomist had in mind to ”penetrate into the inclinations of those he had to deal with, he composed his face, his gesture, and his whole body, as nearly as he could into the exact similitude of the person he intented to examine; and then carefully observed what turn of mind he seemed to acquire by this change. So that, says my author, he was able to enter into the dispositions and thoughts of people as effectually as if he had been changed into the very men.” Burke himself adds that he often had observed that on mimicking the looks and gestures he often involuntarily found his mind turned to the passion he had eneavoured to imitate. (Ph. Enq., pp. 249–51).
Now, as Edmund Burke had got his optics—from our point of view—totally wrong, he was thus forced to establish such a physiological link between the perceived object and the perceiving subject and in so doing, he came to introduce a notion of reversed causation: in forging the effects of an unknown cause, you can produce the cause from the effect. When Campanella made himself into an image (simulacrum) of the investigated subject, Burke implies, the idea, or identity, of that image was produced.
Such a concept of reversed causation is of course alien to any of our established notions of the reception of images. We do not become what is depicted, or the modes of depiction, like a Zelig, because it would essentially drag us down into the chaotic abyss of sympathetic magic.
Nevertheless, similar concept continue to linger in the background in art historical and art theoretical discussions. The revival of Aby Warburgs pathos formulae could be said to be one example, Marcel Duchamps emphasis on the ”unintentionally expressed” on the part of the spectator in the creation of the work of art could be said to be another. One could even say that the very entanglement of Being and non-Being in the concept of the image (eikon), as expressed in Plato’s Sophist, articulates a certain suspension of the concepts of causality, truth and falsity.
II.
Most explicitly, however, is this reversed causation expressed by forgers. Almost every forger has defended his criminal activity with an excuse that a never realised Past has materialised itself in the Present, for in the future to be realised as a past already made.The modern English forger, Tom Keating, uses a languague which plunges directly into the realm of sympathetic magic. A propos a pastel drawing, a self-portrait by Degas, he not only insists that the drawing really was made by Degas with himself as a medium, but furthermore notes that when he later measured the paper, he noted that the dimensions didn’t measure up in inches, but in centimetres. Keating habitually called the spirits of these artists taking possession of his mind and hand for “the gaffer”.
Keating is most known for his production of watercolours by Samuel Palmer from his Shoreham period. He choosed Palmer—who he calls ”the guv’nor”—quite intentionally for to replenish the stock as a kind of vendetta against Palmer’s heirs, who destroyed the main part of his production after his death. During this period Keating worked in the daytime at his own paintings. In the evening he moved to his sketching room, preparing the papers, the quill pens, the sepia bottles, to wait for ’it’ to happen:
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‘Samuel Palmer’ [ɔ: Tom Keating]: The Good Shepherd with Corn Stooks beside a Sheepfold, c. 1970–1971. Pen and sepia with orange-yellowish wash, and heightened with white on cremecoloured paper, 16 × 24 cm.
”I’d just sit there whistling softly to myself to help me think, then I’d start to doodle and look at the moon. Dink, donk, dink, tick, tick, tick,—it would start to happen. God’s honour, I have never drawn a sheep from life, but Palmer’s sheep would begin to appear on the paper tick, tick, tick, and there they would be in the guv’nor’s ‘valley of vision’ watched over by the good shepherd in the shadow of Shoreham church. With Sam’s permission I sometimes signed them with his own name, but they were his work and not mine. It was his hand that guided the pen. He turned out dozens and dozens and dozens of them. And then would come Gainsborough, Wilson, Turner, Girtin, Constable, all the boys. But none of the old masters, by which I mean the Dutchmen, Frenchmen and Italians. They were all very English, all Romantic landscape painters and men of the same feeling.” (p. 183)Eric Hebborn, refering to Keating’s ”magical” experiences, admits that ”there is a snag”, because when these ”gaffers” descend they usually leave their genius behind and then it would be best for all parties if the rare blank paper from the correct time stayed blank. This, however, did not hinder Hebborn to express a similar experience of reversed causality. In a beautiful passage in his autobiography, Hebbord describes how he did to reproduce an assumed lost orginal drawing by Jan Breughel the Elder, known to us through an engraving. Hebborn writes:
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‘Jan Brueghel’: Temple of Venus and Diana at Baia, c. 1960s. Pen and brown ink, brown and blue wash over black chalk; frame lines with brown ink on paper, 26,2 × 19,4 cm., New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Acc. No. 65.209.
”To make the first marks of a new Old Master, knowing that one tiny slip could cost you a small fortune in wasted materials, is a nerve−wracking experience and it was not until I had sipped a tot of brandy and drawn a few lines in Breughel’s manner on a scrap of note paper that the stage fright vanished and the connection between the conscious and the subconscious was unblocked. Oblivious of my actual surroundings, I found myself sitting on a stone in front of the ruins of the so−called temples of Venus and Diana at Baia on a bright clear morning over 300 years ago. Time was halted. Hours must have passed but it was as if I had breathed the drawing into existence in a moment.”The most famous forger of the twentieth century, Han van Meegeren, pleaded for a similar type of non-intentionality, when he before judge Boll in the Amsterdam court, defended himself, saying that he ”found the process so beautiful”. He went into a state in which he no longer was his ”own master”: ”I became without will, powerless. I was forced to continue”. And even if judge Boll remarked that ”the financial side hade some influence”, van Meegerens answer that he didn’t do it for the money and selling them for a low price would have been an a priori indication that they were fakes, is not altogether implausible.
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Han van Meegeren during the trial 1945.
The case of Han van Meegeren highlights another aspect of art forgery, namely the physical inversion of the production of the images. The forger must first produce the image, then produce the history in which this image was made. This can be done with the help of producing a proveniens of the image as John Myatt and John Drewe did by manipulating with exhibition catalogues in the British Library, or, more creatively, constructing a fictitious art collection, documenting this art collecting by staging a grandchild as her grandmother with the original dress in front of photocopies of fake paintings and taking photographs printed on an old photographic stock of the whole scene as did Wolfgang and Helene Beltracchi do in a recent case in Germany.But this history or provenance can also by produced by material means alone. Han van Meegeren perfected a method of baking new paintings by using bakelite in the paint medium, which, after a certain amount of time at a certain degree in an oven produced a prefect hardened surface. The crackelures were similarily produced by saving some of the original ground of the canvas used, which, through rolling the canvas produced some very convincing cracqueluers on the surface, which then could be rubbed with some old dust. And so on.
As the technical methods of detecting fakes have improved since the van Meegeren case, so have the forgers’ method of producing there fakes in a kind of arms race. As some recent cases of de- and re-attributions of Rembrandt have shown, connoisseurship have definitively lost its relevance in this type of art historical investigations (as I would guess the case in all types of criminal investigations). Any forensic investigation nowadays a priori excludes any, however famous, expert’s opinion.
Our trust in the scientific investigation of images do have an unintended by-effect though. When we look at the infrared, ultraviolet and x-ray photographs, the spectral analysis of the pigments, and fluoroscopical images, the image itself becomes invisible, definitively for the time being, but not unlikely for good as well.
Now, whatever weight we prefer to put upon the testimonies by the forgers themselves of their practices, the question here is not the veracity or plausibility of these explanations, but more a registration of these experiences, which, by the way, is not uncommon amongst artists working legitimatelly under their own names.
For the moment I just want to note, that in these reports, they all insists that there are no identites, no intentionality, no fixed position in time and space, and a certain omnipresence of the hand. One could maybe speak of a certain smeared-out aisthesis in which the painters or draughtsmans hand descends and dissolves.
III.
When byzantine icons began to appear in the West from the early thirteenth century, they were—optimistically, as we would say today—attributed to S. Lucas. We could accept this as a simple error of attribution, and even an understandable one, considering the primitive state of connoisseurship at the time. But when these pictures continued to be copied, and the copies themselves were regarded as the authentic image of Our Lady with Her Child, it is clear that something else than the correct attribution is at stake.It is of course because the question of authenticity in the history of images before art is not a question of who made the physical image when and where, but rather a question of whether the image, the representation, is true or not. The image is identical with any of its manifestations. The image, as an immaterial entity, has no fixed position in time and space, and the fact that most of these byzantine icons were in fact recent products, and in one case (the Cambrai Madonna), even painted in a byzantine manner in Siena only hundred years before it was hailed as an original painting by S. Lucas in 1440, would probably not disturb any contemporary iconophilist. But even when they knew the painting was a copy, as is the case when Alexander Sforza as late as in 1470 commissioned Leozzo da Forli to copy a byzantine Madonna and Child, it bore the inscription: “This is painted by S. Lucas in life. The painting is the authentic portrait. Alexander Sforza gave the commission, Melozzo had it painted. Lucas would had said it was his own work” (Belting, p. 382), As we know from the legend of the Mandylion, the image of Christ could be copied, the copy could again be copied, and so forth, and the last copy would still retain virtually the same magical powers as the original print of the face of Our Saviour.
It is thus the signified in the image, which is smeared out in time and space and thus descended and dissolved within the physical matter of the painting. The curious thing is, that these signifiers, the panels, the pigments, the paint medium, and the brushstrokes, seem to have been invisible for a contemporary viewer. No one seem to have noticed, during the continuous copying of this very image, that the style shifts not insignificantly from one copy to the next. This is probably because revaluations of taste and changes of style is only made visible with the help of an observing apparatus we could call a developed historical sense; a kind of meta-observation which, with the help of comparisions from a certain transcendental viewpoint, establishes a discreetely mapped chronotopography with its developments in a causal chain, instead of the traditional continuity in time and contiguity in space. This observing apparatus installs history instead of remembrance.
One could say that the radicality and uncomfortable position of Aby Warburgs iconology lies in a certain mediaevality, and thus a-historicism, in his concept of mnemosyne.
IV.
The long history of Chinese painting and calligraphy entertained a third position, alien to our mediaeval authenticity of the represented image—the authenticity of tradition—as well as our modern idea of historical–or chronotopological–authenticity. It is similar to the medieval concept in that the Chinese—or East Asian—notion of conservation takes the form of a remembrance through a continuous replication and copying, not through conservation and discreet isolation of an authentic original in a museum, library or archive. But it differs from the medieval tradition, in that copied and replicated is not the image or the signified, but rather the style or the taste of the hand.This is often obvious in the colophons of the paintings, like ”I did this painting. Yüeh-ch’uang does not find fault with its easy quality, but says it has the flavor of Tung Yian and Chii Jan (tenth century artists). Yüeh-ch’uang has big eyes! Most people believe what he says, but I myself just can’t understand it. 1474.” (Lee, 50, p. 149) See också Richard Edwards: Shen Chou and the Scholarly Tradition.
Thus a copy did not really had to be a copy of the image, but rather a stylistical elaboration, or what we would conceptualise as the outwards or superficial features of a picture. It is of course not so that the image was invisible for the Chinese viewer, but on the other hand it would not surprise me, if it could be demonstrated that the style of the brush, for a Chinese viewer, blocked the image to such a degree, that it became virtually invisible, a non-observable. The millenial monotony of the Chinese iconography at least suggests something in that direction.
V.
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[Giovanni Bastianini]: Portrait Bust of a Man. ”Girolamo Benivieni”. n.d. [1864]. Terracotta. Paris, Musée du Louvre.
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[Giovanni Bastianini]: Portrait Bust of a Man. ”Girolamo Benivieni”. Detail.
In the West, immediatelly after the time when Courbet staged his Realist Pavillon at the World Exhibition in 1855 and Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe was rejected at the Salon in 1863, events which paved the way for the breakthrough of modernism in Western art, another—less known—scandal broke out in Paris, when it became more and more clear, that the celebrated Renaissance bust bought by the Louvre in 1867 turned out to be a modern product by the Florentine sculptor Giovanni Bastianini. In the aftermath of the passionate debates between Italian and French art historians, it turned up that Bastianini had produced a large number of portrait busts in a late Gothic and early Renaissance style. Since then Bastianini is used as a case among others in the annals of art forgery, but it can be argued that more than being a case among others, the Bastianini case marks a paradigmatic shift in our qualifications of images.Warning: getimagesize(/home/www/barnabooth.portheim.org/museum/sculpture/xix/moskowitz2004_19.jpg): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/www/portheim.org/pub/textbild.php on line 63
Giovanni Bastianini, «Giovanna degli Albizzi», wood, stucco, cloth, polychromy and gilding, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art (Andrew W. Mellon Collection. Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).
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[Giovanni Bastianini]: Chanteuse Florentine, c.1860s. Terracotta pigmented. Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André.
During the 1850s and 1860s, Bastianini produced these portrait busts under his own name. They are indeed made in an antique style and artificially aged. But this was wanted by the buyers and a common practice by a number of Italian sculptors during since the Renaissance up to the nineteenth century. More than a forger, one could argue that Bastianini and his tradition practised a kind of stylistic remembrance, or a physical immanent linking, of contemporary and historical persons. It was rather the meeting of the Italian tradition of sculpture as a traditional handicraft with the emerging new paradigm of art which caused the confusion on the Parisian art market where authenticity for the one became forgery for the other. For Bastianini the image was a true portrait made in a customary, that is, impersonal, style. For the emerging art world in Paris, operating with the new ”art historical hanging” at the Louvre, and a chronotopological plotting of the history of art it was a modern fake in adopting a style not congruent with its chronotopological origin. With Courbet, Manet, and the emergance of modernist art, the significance of art images made its final shift from a question of iconic veracity to a question of stylistic identity.Neither is there any coincidence that the Bastianini-affair took place simultaneously with the emergence of art history as an academic discipline of which connoisseurship and attribution constituted the foundation. Attribution is a certain type of observation, which deliberately disregard the image for to—within the image—search for traces and symptoms of its historical origin. The confusion caused by the Bastianini-affair is a confusion between this aesthetic non-locality and non-identity and the new art historical attributionism with its focus on indexicalities—or the paradigm of trace, as Thierry Lenain calls it with reference to Carlo Ginzburg.
The consequences of this shift becomes even more apparent when the art world moved to New York. The painters of abstract expressionism are typically producing one and the same image over and over again which then can be distributed to virtually every museum around the world in accordance with Alfred Barr Jr’s principle of museological art collecting under the dictum of “one-of-each”. Now the iconic invisibility of modern iconoclasm is totally eclipsed under the veil of the individual trademarked style.
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‘Robert Motherwell’ [modern fake]: Elegy to the Spanish Republic, [1990s?].
The indexicality of pictures is now not only refering to its origin, but rather embodying a physical presence in its own right. Constituting an immanent, almost physical connectedness of the observer with the observed.Warning: getimagesize(/home/www/barnabooth.portheim.org/museum/fake/pollock_fake01.jpg): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/www/portheim.org/pub/textbild.php on line 63
A Rosales ‘Pollock’ sold for $17 millions, but painted with colours not existing in Pollock’s time.
Now, the entanglement of Being and non-Being in the image (eikon) in The Sophist is a wholly other type of entanglement. Now the Being is equated with the trace or materiality of the image, in concordance with the modern notion of immanence, and the non-Being is on the other hand, not the signified, but the historical point of reference of the origin of the trace. They are as entangled as before, as the presence of the trace can not exist without its historical point of reference (else we would cheerish any material trace on any support we would stumble upon). The historical point of reference is what guarantees the authenticity of the trace and thus the authenticity of the affects and percepts in which the observerer and the observed partakes. But it does not exist in this world of immanence. Deleuze would say it belongs to the plane of reference which is separated from the plane of immanence or the plane of composition.In their What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari makes an almost water-tight division between the three planes, a division I personally don’t find very convincing, as it is precisely this historical indexicality of the image which make fakes possible in the first place. It is this very antinomy which open up for the possibility for art images of manipulating with causality in time and space.
Jan Bäcklund