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November 14, 2009
I've been trying to read Derrida's The Truth in Painting online during an Adelaide heat wave. I was curious about this text because we usually associate truth in art with photography and, despite the promise of a certain meaning within a fixed historical frame this is the terrain where meaning, communication, and historical context threaten to collide. This gestures towards a crisis in art history that is between truths and between fictions.
Despite a well established critical discourse existing around the issues of truth (the "spotless mirror " that photograph has been so often compared with) photography is still viewed as capable of functioning as an indexical record of a disparate range of events. The fact that photographic evidence is admissible in a court of law and that photography is used extensively by policing agencies is a simple example of this.
So I was wondered if there any of the linkages, commonalities and differences between painting and art be explored. Would the space the space between photography and painting be at once closed and reopened by Derrida? Would there be a dialogue between these media that allows the idiom in photography to reveal the truth in painting? And vica versa?
Gary Sauer-Thompson, rock face, Port Elliot, 2009
If I approached Derrida's text with certain questions I quickly gave up reading the circling text--it's an impossible task working through Derrida's reflection on the art work as pictorial artifact in a heatwave. I got lost in the layers of meanings deriving from Derrida's textual and visual attributions and appropriations and in the end I recoiled from the supremacy of postmodernist text over modernist image.
The text starts from Cézanne's statement "I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you" in a letter to Émile Bernard. Sadly, Cézanne died a few weeks later, before his promise to Bernard could be fulfilled. Derrida asks: 'What does it mean for Cézanne, for any painter, to write this, to say this'? I could follow that Derrida was interested in the idiom of painting --in the sense of a combination of words that has a meaning that is different from the meanings of the individual words themselves.
Consequently, Cezanne's statement can have a literal meaning in one situation and a different idiomatic meaning in another situation. Derrida joins idiom, truth , and painting, whilst making clear the folly of attempting to fasten on the idiomatic, much less to reproduce it.e wrote four times around The Truth in Painting).
The titles of the four discourses in this book are Paregon (frame) which is concerned with Kant's Critique of the faculty of judgement; Tarergon which is concerned with Varerio Adam's exposition titled (The voyage of sketch, (1975); Cartouches (Cartridges), is concerned with Gerard Titus-Carmel's exposition titled he Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin (1978); Restitutions is concened with concerns Heidegger's The Origin of Works of Art and is a dialogue over the mimesis representation of the painting of shoes by van Gogh over which Heidegger and Meyer Schapiro are debating.
At that point I gave up apart from wondering about around the various conceptions of truth: the ---correspondence theory of truth regards a proposition as true if it corresponds to what is the case; the coherence theory of truth regards a proposition as true if it is a necessary constituent of a systematically coherent whole. I wasn't sure of the pragmatic theory of truth was discussed.
Derrida's text was kinda like hitting a sponge really.Or a tangle. Or a labyrinth whose shape is determined more by its borders than by what it contains.
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Thats a nice pic. Its quite christmassy isn't it.