Hello everyone,
Our current show is called Images of Romantic Distress and Consolation. The ‘Images’ part of the title is what’s most important in describing what the artists in the show have tried to accomplish, I think, because the issue of explicitly addressing the Romantic in an artwork is obviously fraught. Why that even is, is quite hard to say, to begin with. In thinking about it, both the show and the issue more generally, I’ve had some thoughts about how imagery and representations connect to the nature of romance (and Romanticism), which I’ll try to formulate in writing. Here goes.
Images both are and are not the ‘real thing’; as representations they point toward an understanding of another thing: but also possibly lie about it, by seeming to represent or incarnate a set of qualities, but actually deceiving with respect to them. Postmodernism for instance, as an intellectual ideology, has sometimes attacked the Existentialist notion of ‘authenticity’, re-defining the idea to construct a new meaning for it: which is, that which exhibits its nature as ‘something which is inauthentic, paradoxical, in contradiction with itself’, becomes what is taken to be authentic. Anything which can be regarded as textual, and which tells us that it’s ipso facto lying, is seen as being authentic, in that it succeeds in telling the truth about untruth. It would therefore seem that all visual images in fact accomplish this admirably. Therefore, any image can be considered a true and perfect one, fulfilling the nature of imagery to be simultaneously true and false; because to be persuasive, representations must employ mimetically forceful rhetoric, be they in any style whatsoever. That said it still appears that real life romantic feelings, possessing their usual notoriety, seem to be difficult to represent in visual art. To see them is to see them change: and so it’s quite difficult, even say to photograph a loving facial expression on a person, for example. Metaphor becomes a necessary and capable tool in creating a still image of feeling that reminds us of our own parallel emotions, because of its ability to compress a message, and simplify problems into forms that can be read and understood.
In one of his extraordinary letters to his girlfriend Milena Jesenska, Franz Kafka discusses his longing and frustration by arguing for the impossibility of communicating romantic desire in a letter; implying that artistry is powerless to emote, and deliver the feeling itself. He says of writing letters: “It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts…Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold – all else goes beyond Human strength…Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts…The ghost won’t starve, but we will perish.” The sense of isolation and distress are made perfectly clear; he seems to prove that artistry is capable of telling the truth about what may or may not be ‘lies’, and immerse us in strong emotional sensations. Art can therefore tell us what love is, but not give us the experience; point out its absence, but also make us capable of it.
In the case of real, empirically tangible objects whose artistic function is to communicate to the viewer some message or meaning about our human romantic predicament, we run into the problem of what constitutes ‘communication’. We automatically ‘get’ some things, but others, maybe never. It would seem that like in other areas, here too, we have to keep trying to represent what would seem to be very difficult to capture. Artists who try are ambitious people.
