A Conversation with Hubert Damisch

Media and Methodological Nesting. Two Theoretical Paintings by Lorenzo Lotto

“…It is posed in theory terms; it produces theory; and it necessitates a reflection on theory". 4 So in the wake of Damisch's reflections we can say that there exist "theoretical objects" that use their own visual means to express what is conventionally perceived as theory only if expressed with words, but which in reality is already structurally present in certain painted works, which do not state but simply show such a theory. If we understand this we can analyse old master paintings without underestimating their theoretical value.…”

Imaging Identity

“…Akin to Barthes's move from the studium to the punctum, it is idiosyncratic, untheorizable: it is what moves us because of our memories and our histories, and because of the ways in which we structure our own sense of particularity. 30 The affiliative look is not a gaze that is restricted to 'knowledge' of or about the subject but one in which identification follows the particular intimacy of a familial look or exchange of looks. The affiliative look is characterised by its collective sense of intimacy and familiarity.…”

“…Is it the end of something or the beginning of something else?' 30 Damisch's remarks have been profoundly salient to my critical understanding of our emergent moving-image culture. In relation to the paradoxical art form we call video, for instance, we still lack the hermeneutic ability to speak of it in a language that is as inventive as it is practised today in its mutable forms of representation-production, exhibition and critical reception.…”

“Expectation” of art: the history of its theoretical bases

“…The theoretical object-in reality theoretical-cum-historical-is declared at the theoretical connection of the historical discourse, insofar as it, itself, produces theory, "provides meanings to do so", and consequently gives rise to a reflection on theory. 3 It thus acquires an emblematic status or the function of a model, which, in effect, were, for H. Damisch, those of the "cloud" and the "cloud" object with regard to pictoriality (La Théorie du nuage : pour une histoire de la peinture, 1972), those of the "portrait of the king" with regard to absolute power and its theological-cum-political definition for Louis Marin (Le Portrait du roi, 1981). Based on these two major groundbreaking examples, it can thus be established that the construction of a theoretical object is in no way a schematic way of extrapolating the visible, but, on the contrary, presupposes the closest possible attention to its materiality, its phenomenality, its singularities, its effects, and its uses.…”

“…From this angle, one notion appears central, that of theoretical object. 3 The line of thinking introduced in the 1970s by Hubert Damisch and Louis Marin around the at once heuristic and programmatic notion of theoretical object-a line of thinking which is nowadays gaining ground-confronts the art historian with a renewed task. It implies that as far as the concern for historicity can be pushed-and it is just as well that it is-, the dialogue that the historian engages with art cannot be resolved in just the historical dimension.…”