Page 268 - Cyberculture and New Media

Seppo Kuivakari 259
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Graham’s “cinema” is also arranged to enable an encounter with this
danger, in which a contrary effect, that is, a different “remembering”, is
produced. This corresponds to Benjamin’s concept of history: “To articulate
that which has passed historically is not to recognize how it then really was.
It is to empower a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.” The
prerequisite for this is a consciousness of the “nowtime” (Jetztzeit) which
makes time “stand still” so that the “true image of the past” can come alive in
a unique way — it “rushes silently past” and allows in this movement the
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recognition of that which has relevance for the present.
Still, we can argue that acts of the viewers are not reflections of
unmediated mind but the past and the present are always divided by the
abyss. Even the past is produced in Graham’s mirrors as something other.
Graham breaks down the now-time signifiers with uncentered mise-en-
abyme, and dreamwork becomes abysmal. The subject remains in a state of
(de)constitution in the economy of the mirror, which is uncomfortable, as
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Dixon says, but not self-conscious state.
A search for an adequate memorabilia folds naturally into the very
elaboration of truth in arts: Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier claims –
already in another, deconstructive context – that a property of the outside is
precisely that it breaks down the opposition between inside and outside, and
the operation always tends toward an exteriority that comes to ruin the
identity of the proper term, even that of an exterior space. The truth in
painting thus leads painting into the orbit of a truth that is outside of painting,
because it is incumbent upon truth to decenter what it describes. In order to
unfold, the truth in painting supposes a dissimulation of painting: the demand
for an unveiling (of truth) can be realized only by the logic of a diversion (of
painting), by means of which, and in order to respond to the truth in brings to
light, painting would be led to give reflecting its own visibility. Captured in
the mirror of painting, the truth will see the abyss of its discourse open up;
but painting, in subscribing to the obligation of truth, will have to give in to
the rule of exteriority that makes the truth of painting pass through the
breaking open of its propriety. The reflection of painting in truth is both
reciprocal and asymmetrical, and if painting resists anyone who claims to
speak the truth about it, it is nonetheless caught in the originary attraction of a
truth that occludes it. The obliteration of the traits of painting – the face –
even Velasquez’s absent model or Graham’s vanishing visitors in time – of
which is erased from the picture – belongs in this sense to the truth of
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painting. The dilemma thus changes into a deconstructive paradox, which,
in turn, is willing to cross the boundaries laid up by onto-typologies from the
Western tradition of philosophy.
The more context aware a work of art is, the more it operates on
particular levels of recognition than identification (with the other), which, for
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Lacoue-Labarthe, means appropriation. Disappropriation borne of the