T. J. Clark quoted in Brian Dillon, Essayism, London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017

Many of us, maybe all of us, look at some images repeatedly, but it seems we do not write that repetition, or think it, once written, worth reading by others. Maybe we deeply want to believe that images happen, essentially or sufficiently, all at once. . . . Maybe that actual business of repeated gawping strikes us as embarrassing, at least when set out in sentences. (‘Too passive? Too privileged? Too rudimentary? Too male’?) Maybe we fear that the work we depend on images to do fur us — the work of immobilizing, and therefore making tolerable — will be undone if we throw the image back into the flow of time. Whatever the reason for the omission, I think it should be repaired. [p. 121]

***

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, Jeff Fort (trans.), New York: Fordham University Press, 2005

There are other modalities in which the text is not given as such [ . . . ] In fact, each of these modes may or may not display a text. In any case, there will be a title, a tag, even if only the negative “untitled.” Somewhere there will be an indication that there is what one calls a “work”. The minimum of discourse is the word work, or some other designation or deictic (a pointing finger, a pedestal) with the same funcation. Work then means not so much the product of a setting-into-work, not so much a particular piece of work, as the following indication: freeze frame here. A still image, meaning also: a still text, a fixed point and a cut of the weave in process, an immobilized needle, an eternalized movement. [p. 71]

***

Nadine Boljkovac, ‘Mad Love’, Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text, Eugene W. Holland, Daniel W. Smith, Charles J. Stivale (eds.) London: Continuum, 2009.

La Jetée‘s heartbeat, its tracing of love, indeed evinces Bergson’s classification of an ‘image’ as that which exists ‘halfway between the “thing” and the “representaiton”‘, once more a thisness (Matter and Memory, p. 9) [p. 139]

***

Marguerite Duras, The Lover, Barbara Bray (trans.), London: HarperCollins Publishing, 1984.

So, I’m fifteen and a half.

   It’s on a ferry crossing the Mekong river.

   The images last all the way across. . .

I think it was during this journey that the images became detached, removed from all the rest. It might have existed, a photograph might have been taken, just like any other, somewhere else, in other circumstances. But it wasn’t. The subject was too slight. Who would have thought of such a thing? The photograph could only have been taken if someone could have known in advance how important it was to be in my life, that event, that crossing of the river. But, while it was happening, no one ever knew of its existence. Except God. And that’s why — it couldn’t have been otherwise — the image doesn’t exist. It was omitted. Forgotten. It never was detached or removed from all the rest. And it’s to this, this failure to have been created, that the image owes its virtue: the virtue of representing, of being the creator of, an absolute. [p. 8-14]

***

W. G. Sebald et al., The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald, Lynne Sharon Schwartz (ed.), London: Seven Stories Press, 2007.

[the pictures included with the text] have a number of different sources of origin and also a number of different purposes [ . . . ] The first and obvious notion is that of verification [ . . . ] The other function that I see is possibly that of arresting time. Fiction is an art form that moves in time, that is inclined towards the end, that works on a negative gradient, and it is very, very difficult in that particular form in the narrative to arrest the passage of time. And as we all know, this is what we like so much about certain forms of visual art — you stand in a museum and you look at one of those wonderful pictures somebody did in the sixteenth or the eighteenth century. You are taken out of time, and that is in a sense a form of redemption, if you can release yourself from the passage of time. And the photograph can also do this — they act like barriers or weirs which stem the flow. I think that is something that is positive, slowing down the speed of reading, as it were. [p. 41-42]

. . . writing and creating something is about elaboration. You have a few elements. You build something. You elaborate until you have something that looks like something. And elaboration is, of course, the vice of paranoia. If you read texts written by paranoiacs, they’re syntactically correct, the orthography is all right, but the content is insane, because they start from a series of axioms which are out of synch. But the degree of elaboration is absolutely fantastical. It goes on and on and on and on. You can see from that that the degree of elaboration is not the measure of truth. And that is exactly the same problem because, certainly in prose fiction, you have to elaborate. You have one image and you have to make something of it — half a page, or three-quarters, or one-and-a-half — and it only works through linguistic or imaginative elaboration. [p. 114]

***

Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, London: MIT Press, 1994, p. 210 – 214.

The silence and the stillness go together, the stillness that is painting’s hallmark, painting’s genius. She remembers Picasso saying, “For me, Hélène, the role of painting is not to depict movement, to put reality into motion. Its role is rather, I think, to arrest motion. In order to freeze the image you have to outdistance motion. If not, you are always running behind. Only at that very moment,” he would add, “do you have reality.”

That very moment, she muses, is a paradox. That very moment involves the amazing speed of the eye as it outruns motion by synthesizing it into the single image of its “meaning.” Photography’s picture can never be anything but frozen movement, the gesture deprived of its inner life. Painting, she thinks, in its very stillness, its carefully structured immobility, is the true analogue of the visual completeness of this mastery by the gaze.

Silence, the silence of these studios in which Picasso obsessively works, the completeness of this silence, guaranteed by this baking, dazzling sun, is the necessary medium within which the blade thrust of this gaze which is both lightning-quick and timeless — hanging as it does in the perpetual suggestiveness of this race between the tortoise and the hare — will be able to swell to infinity.

She tears her eyes away from the painting mounted on its easel to look through the deep arches of the doorway-windows. Her gaze sweeps over the tops of the olive trees past the silhouettes of the distant buildings to the sea lying in wait in the background. Under the flaming sun the sea is molten, a buckling sheet of metal, its surface radiating waves of heat. She hears the cicadas’ frenzy as they fill the air with a constant shriek. “There is this kind of invisible cloak of crazy heat,” she thinks, “under which the whole of nature vibrates, the air trembles,” as even the sound of the highway below — “this incessant ronron,” she smiles — completes the quality of the atmosphere in its almost hysterical pulsing, shimmying, beating, bopping…

She looks back at the painting on the easel, Jacqueline royally lounging on her green chaise. “The absolute silence of this place,” she jots in her notebook, “its utter stillness, this perfect ambience for painting’s timeless, motionless gaze.”

Hélène Parmelin is, in this, nothing if not orthodox. She agrees with the art historian about painting’s genius, painting’s truth. She agrees that this is coextensive with the truth of the terms of vision. Those terms, she concurs, have their existence in a space that has nothing to do with sequence, with narrative, with movement through time. The terms of vision’s truth are instead a function of what happens in the twinkling of an eye.

The visual pyramid on which classical perspective is built is a geometry, after all, by which the lines of sight and the lines of light are absolutely coordinated, a coordination that produces the identity (in mirror) between the vanishing point within the picture and the viewing point within the eye. And it is not for nothing that this geometry turns around the almost unimaginable limit of “infinity,” a point that is literally reduced to nothing. Far from nothing coming from nothing, the truth that arises from this Euclidean meeting of parallel lines at the point beyond the limit of imagining is the solidity of the construction’s basis in geometrical law. And the infinite smallness of this point in the eye from which the entire architecture is suspended is, as well, an infinite rapidity. If, in the art historian’s perspective diagrams, the eye is always pictured open and fixated, staring into the pyramid’s tunnel, that’s because it is an eye that sees with such dazzling quickness that it has no need to blink. It sees in a twinkling, before the blink. And this twinkling, this infinite brevity or immediacy of the gaze, is the analogue for the picture’s own condition in the all-at-once, for painting’s ontological truth as pure simultaneity.

It is in this sense that painting is radically unassimilable to time. For it lives in a perpetual “now”.

If the Renaissance had diagrammed the punctuality of this viewing point, it was modernism that insisted on it, underscored it, made the issue of this indivisible instant of seeing serve as a fundamental principle in the doctrine of its aesthetic truth. Modernism was to absolutize this “now,” to insist that Painting exist within the indivisible present of the extremest possible perceptual intensity: the rush of pure color; the shock of light-on-dark as ground pulls level with figure; the reduction of the world to pattern. Nothing was to segment off the “now” from itself, not the chatter of narrative nor the distraction of description nor even the sense of a separation between the surface life of the image and the physicality of its support. The singleness of the pictorial datum was to be the mirror image of the form through which it was apprehended, it was to be the very picture of the instantaneity of vision-in-consciousness.