The Brooklyn Rail

When a photograph features a painting, one pictorial medium depicts another. How is this situation to be perceived? How does it differ from a painting depicting a painting, or a photograph incorporating a photograph? To reply by invoking basic operations of consciousness might seem both reasonable and pointless, for such acts of association, entailment, and judgment are habitual, applying in all cases. Yet, when openly acknowledged, the tacit fundamentals of mental processing complicate the specifics of aesthetic appreciation, provoking alternatives to the usual understanding. Alternatives may not improve on prevailing concepts of reality and its representations; at the least, however, they introduce to common belief some productive nuance and doubt.

Begin with the assumption that perception channels immediate sensations through available cognitive functions. In perception, thinking connects sensation with meaning. Cause-and-effect establishes an experiential link to comprehension. Analogy, metaphor, and simple likeness also work as links, as do growth, diminishment, evolution, and degradation. All are figures of comparison—functions of relation, difference, and change. Consciousness, ever flexible and accommodating, registers polarities, such as fact and fiction, only to reconcile them. The common wisdom, “fact is stranger than fiction,” amounts to a colloquial reconciliation. Meaningful fiction alludes to fact.

Now imagine sensory experience without the links that process it. Immediacy would still be a factor in consciousness but devoid of any complementary transiency. As one sensation follows another, the term “follow” might no longer properly apply, for transition—awareness of change, the temporal sense of before and after—would be absent. And with comparative qualities lacking, even temporal ones, each distinct moment would be equally intense, which is to say, without intensification, because the intensity of sensation is comparative.

Nor would memory come into play, the consciousness of a classifiable sensation, condition, or event. Perhaps the context of the moment, and beyond this an awareness of history, determines what can be remembered, which is tantamount to what is worth remembering. Memory registers value. And memory is a form of imagination. Like imagination, it is creative and, as such, an unreliable witness to facts (if there are any). A memory retains an identity, like an entry in a registry under a certain designation, while it nevertheless keeps reconfiguring itself, changing in substance though not in name. Memory is the collective term for all the cognitive associations, all the links, including the temporal ones. We need to think of memory as anticipating a future as much as recording a past. Like fate, it projects the past and the present into the future. Things not remembered have neither past nor future; they have only immediacy.

Art criticism is interpretive even when it attempts to restrict itself to description of the here and now. It’s an exercise in creating a memorable present. What follows is an experiment in how a complex work of art—or, for that matter, just an image or just an object—might be interpreted by concentrating on what the thing is, as opposed to what it refers to (reference itself is comparative). Let the present dominate the past and the future of the entity being submitted to observation and interpretation. The focus of this study, the stimulus for it, is Ode to My Grandmother (2026), an example of Joost De Jonge’s photographic practice and, in name, a memorial. This photograph is compositionally straightforward, frontally oriented, and without optical trickery. Yet, as I look at it, I find it mystifying. Why? To reflect on my response, I need to extend my looking and my thinking.

Looking

De Jonge’s photography, patently representational, parallels his work as a painter of abstract compositions. As a young artist, he developed skill in representational rendering; eventually, however, abstraction (non-objective imagery) became his primary interest. In Ode to My Grandmother, he includes one of his large abstractions at the center of a photographic display of various objects, both large and small, collected for their aesthetic qualities as well as for the personal and historical associations they evoke. Such objects exemplify not only abstract form but the common products that identify a culture. All representations, whether as photographs, paintings, or otherwise, are reductive abstractions; they abstract from a source, real or imagined. Some abstractions, such as camouflage patterns or geometrical proofs, double as the representations of themselves.

In its lower register, Ode to My Grandmother captures the conjunction of several relatively large objects—an ornate chair, a fire screen, a cane with an elaborately decorated handle. As depicted, these items, somewhat rarefied yet of everyday use, generate an abstract rhythm of curved and angled contours. So, too, the decorative objects on the fireplace mantel generate formal relationships, diverse and mutable. As “abstractions,” all these configurations relate not only to each other but to motifs that emerge within the large painting situated above them. Note, for example, how the linear frame of the chair is reflected in the curved edges of the painted forms, especially in the elongated pink shape articulated by the red and violet forms beside it. The comparison renders both chair and painting either abstract or representational, depending on which element of the polarity is taken as the standard by which to judge the other—a thoroughly arbitrary choice. In any event, given the reconciliation of antithetical qualities so common to thinking, the chair and the painting can each be identified as at once abstract and representational.

In the photograph, the featured painting is unframed, though bordered by gilt pilasters, a pseudo-frame within this context, both happenstance and arranged. The pilasters rise above the mantel that holds the collection of diminutive objets d’art. The title of De Jonge’s composition, Ode to My Grandmother, refers not to the painting but to the entire photographic ensemble. His maternal grandmother introduced him to art at a very young age: “In a way all painting I do is commemorating and honoring her memory.” The photograph itself seems to honor, and perhaps to elevate, the practice of painting by implying that it amounts to the culmination of the aesthetic interest to be found in every other item included within this organized domestic environment.

Technically, a photograph projects volumetric space onto a single pictorial plane. Ode to My Grandmother compresses into flatness the objects that its lens extracts from the living surroundings. The painting and its border of pilasters already give a flat appearance, save for the modest texture of these surfaces—low relief in the case of the pilasters, very low relief in the case of the hand-rendered abstraction with brushstrokes that vary slightly in thickness. The objects on the mantel—sculpted figures cast in metal, figurines of different sorts, vases, cups, and a bottle—exist as volumes fully in the round within the encompassing space of an architectural interior. These objects reflect light from their convex surfaces. So, in relation to the far less reflective surface of the painting, we hardly perceive these objects as flat. And yet they are indeed flat—flat as represented—their three dimensions having been reduced by lens projection to a two-dimensional profile. Flat or rounded, flat and rounded: this is the nature of pictorial illusion, a commonplace phenomenon. In our daily perceptual experience, we encounter many optical conditions that convert volumes to planes, as when a foreground object is silhouetted against a background of brilliant illumination.

One of the objects in Ode to My Grandmother is an ornate ceramic vase, partly obscured by a large blue perfume bottle placed in front of it. It displays a scene of aristocratic leisure, printed or stenciled within a cartouche on its curved exterior (presumably produced in multiple in a workshop or factory); this object alludes to an artisanal environment of unique artifacts but is likely the product of commercial reproduction in quantity. The abstract painting on the wall above the mantel is decidedly contemporary (De Jonge’s own) and, as an authored creation in this medium, one of a kind. Yet photography multiplies the singularity of paintings, potentially commodifying them as images rather than as material entities. Because De Jonge is the author of this photograph of his painting, he is multiplying his own singularity. But since his photographic compositions are themselves designed works of art, rather than replicative derivations from originals, they establish an independent, parallel practice.

In Ode to My Grandmother, just as photography reduces the dimensional presence of the volumetric objects, it reduces the painting on the wall, but in a different respect. Because it shares with photography the two-dimensional nature of a “picture,” the painting has very little volume to lose, only (as I’ve noted) its surface texture. While the photograph doesn’t appreciably alter the appearance of the painting dimensionally, it affects it by obscuring some of its proper visibility. Flowers in vases on the mantel interfere pictorially with the plane of the painting, sharing its fictive space. It is as if both the plant life and the painting were compressed to an ultimate thinness, occupying one and the same slice of physical reality, a reality created by the monocular “vision” of the photograph. In traditional painting, this is a common conceit of composition, a device of overlap that allows painters to demonstrate their skill at distinguishing round from flat within a complex illusion. Johannes Vermeer’s Young Woman Standing at a Virginal, ca. 1670–1672, is a famous example; here, a woman’s head, highlighted like a globe, contrasts with a flattened Cupid, the subject of a painting on the wall behind the living person. Vermeer creates the illusion of a dimensional difference between the woman (as fact or reality) and the Cupid (as fiction or illusion). Like Vermeer’s painting of a painting, De Jonge’s photograph, showing a painting conjoined with objects, also becomes the illusion of an illusion. Yet, because photography and its electronic derivatives are the standard or default position for reliable representation in our culture, we customarily allow photographic illusion to substitute for reality.

If the screen-like array of objects that De Jonge set on the mantel were translucent (like the blue perfume bottle through which the red vase can be seen), then the entirety of the painted abstraction would be visible, though perhaps its coloration would be altered. Instead, the composition of De Jonge’s abstraction becomes complicated by the incorporation of opaque elements that, in actual space, stand apart from it. Those objects do not belong to the painting physically yet become features of it pictorially. This pictorial situation of one-thing-in-front-of-another is all so obvious that it passes unremarked and even unnoticed. Binocular vision compensates, but photography’s monocular vision does not. It may be that the daffodil, having been incorporated into the pictorial plane of the abstraction, loses its identity and integrity. In this regard, it, too, becomes an abstraction. The curves of its petals accord with similar curves within the abstract painting and with the proximate inscription of the artist’s signature, featuring more curves. We might say that the daffodil is simultaneously flower and abstraction. Yet to reach this reasonable conclusion is to undermine our practice of distinguishing the real from the illusory (as Vermeer did). To escape the dilemma, we might infer that every sensory phenomenon participates in this innocent duplicity—all perception being at once reality and dream (a case of reconciliation with disturbing potential).

I described the painting in Ode to My Grandmother as “one of a kind.” But is it only “one”? In experience, it must be multiple. If what we sense is both reality and dream, then each unitary phenomenon is not one but at least two. Or many more, for what begins as rational identity quickly expands into the possibilities of fantasy. This is the implication of what De Jonge identifies as the philosophical foundation for his material practice. Ironically, his foundation is not much of one, for it remains forever insecure. Material things are always in flux, he suggests. They change in relation to themselves—like the Heraclitean river that flows—while they also vibrate in accord with other things in the environment, including the sentient, animate beings, the people we are. Because of the vibrations, we emotionally communicate with objects as well as with people. Feeling is both reciprocal and universal.

Concerning the untitled abstraction at the center of Ode to My Grandmother, De Jonge states: “Panta rhei [everything flows] … everything vibrates at a certain frequency. This is the key motive of the painting.” The harmonic vibrations flow not only among the relations of color and shape within the painting, but among the various objects assembled for the photograph. The photographic composition in its totality—objects, painting, interior environment—cannot be stable, despite the fact that photography, much more than hand-oriented painting, stills the image that it generates. De Jonge’s photograph, at least as he conceives of it, must be simultaneously still (fixed, permanent) and in motion (flowing, vibrating).

Thinking

I recognize now that my introductory remarks concerning memory, temporality, and the reconciliation of opposites were Heraclitean, but inadvertently so. If the Heraclitean river, always changing, can be still only in concept, only in name, then the paradox involved in comprehending its identity is one that applies to all naming, all nouns. “The river we stepped into,” Heraclitus wrote, “is not the river in which we stand.” Reality escapes nouns; it rejects the nominative. Reality can be captured only in verbs—so-called words of action, translation, and transmission. Reality, like personal identity, like a self, is forever in motion, always changing. Heraclitus again: “To live is to die … for the one flows into the other, and the process is capable of being reversed.” De Jonge’s photograph of a De Jonge painting fixes as a single iconic image what presents itself as a set of momentarily suspended indexical movements. As such, it exemplifies the Heraclitean paradox. Ode to My Grandmother has an identity that is a non-identity. It is not one or even two but many.

Rather than drawing from the wisdom of the ancients, the phrasing of my title, “A Photographic Paradox,” is inspired by interpretive troubles arising among the moderns. The title relates to Roland Barthes’s essay of 1961, “The Photographic Message,” which has a subsection, “The Photographic Paradox.” Before digitization began to dominate photographic practice, Barthes analyzed the special case of the journalistic “press photograph.” Photographers for the daily newspapers recorded factual situations as they occurred, with immediacy and veracity outweighing any concern to embellish the image aesthetically or enhance its polemical potential. As a result, the public had cause to believe that cameras, at least some of them, neither fabricated nor lied. Reality could be stilled, seized as a moment to be set into history. But only if this reality remained untouched, not a composed reality.

As the argument of “The Photographic Message” proceeds, its author undergoes a curious transformation: Barthes, the structuralist critic who sought to identify the fundamental syntactic units of cultural forms, morphs into Barthes, the post-structuralist who exposes faults in photographic objectivity and the impossibility of unambiguous messaging. Given the rigor of his analysis, one denotative form after another, despite their claim to timeless autonomy (a square always remains a square), yields to culturally-specific connotations (one geometry uses the square as its base, another uses the circle). Barthes undermines his initial assumption that any photograph, because it establishes a point-to-point analog in relation to its depicted object, constitutes “a message without a code.” Such communication requires no contextual understanding or translation for its decipherment.

Barthes concludes that only “traumatic” photographs remain uncorrupted by an effluence of deviant meanings. The traumatic is not subject to change; it can neither be remembered nor forgotten. Despite Freudian analysis, interpretation does not affect it. A traumatic photograph yields no compensatory meaning to mitigate its emotional shock. Otherwise, it would not be traumatic. Another way of putting it: the traumatic image, like other images, is an object of experience, but this experience acquires no pragmatic value. Barthes did not state the matter quite this way, but his “traumatic” image is analogous to, though the inverse of, a message without a code. Denotation that remains devoid of connotation has no pragmatic value. A message without a code communicates nothing. We can agree that blue is blue. This is self-evident to sight, even if—because every person is physiologically unique and every moment is cosmically unique—my blue differs from your blue. They differ as one instance of the same differing from another. Such tautological repetition fails to signify anything at all. To the contrary, blue acquires discursive value when regarded as a sacred color, or as a specific meteorological phenomenon, or merely as the conceptual complement to orange.

A year after Barthes published “The Photographic Message,” Andy Warhol painted 129 Die In Jet, a work in acrylic on canvas (his use of silkscreen began only some months later). By hand and at greatly increased scale, Warhol reproduced the front page of the June 4, 1962, issue of the New York Mirror, which, tabloid-style, devoted this prime space to nothing but a bold headline that captions and frames a press photograph. The image recorded the aftermath of a deadly crash at Orly Airport. This work would soon be thematized alliteratively as an early example of Warhol’s involvement with “Death and Disaster.”

129 Die in Jet may also have emblematized, or contributed to, the death or demise of fine art. It endowed painting with the look of commonplace printing and photography, elevating instances of coarse mechanization to the detriment of several refined crafts of the hand. The New York Mirror generated “news” at the low end of American journalism; it featured sensationalism, scandal, gossip, and salaciousness. By painting on canvas what was already inked on porous, cheap newsprint, Warhol transferred a flat image to another flat format, using his cultivated illustrational skills to mimic the crudeness of his source. His culturally ironic practice expanded in the subsequent years while his early inspiration, the New York Mirror, ceased publication in 1963, having been outflanked by other tabloids in the competition for bad taste.

As printed, the original New York Mirror photograph has a low-resolution appearance. Warhol’s “copy” reduces the resolution further while simultaneously refining the play of tonal values as a painter might instinctively do. It is a painter’s work, to be sure—complete with the aestheticization characteristic of fine art. Yet such aesthetic quality was likely to pass unnoticed by those shocked to see the page of a newspaper framed as a fine-art composition in a high-end commercial gallery. Think of Stuart Davis or Gerald Murphy as American precedents, painters of mass-produced objects and printed commercial imagery—or even Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in their trompe-l’oeil hand-renderings of commercially printed trompe-l’oeil patterning. But such cases of popular imagery entering fine art look refined by comparison with Warhol’s use of tabloid photography.

Barthes brought the interpretive nuance of connotation to the strictly denotative claims of press photography. He perceived multiple cultural dimensions in the two-dimensional flatness of photographs that purported to observe the real without altering it in their representation of it. At nearly the same historical moment, Warhol transferred a flat printed page with its flat press photograph to a canvas painted flatly. Do the cases of Barthes and Warhol illuminate De Jonge’s incorporation of his own paintings into his own photography? His photographs have obvious denotative features; they show an array of objects clearly enough for each to be identified. Yet, unlike press photographs taken in the flash of a moment’s newsworthy event, with the pretense of recording only the facts, De Jonge’s various photographs are heavily connoted. The represented objects, including the artist’s own abstract paintings, are carefully arranged, and each has historical or anecdotal meaning, whether recoverable in the artist’s memory or subject to a viewer’s guesses. Significantly, his photographic images have been caringly constructed by placing objects to evoke multiple formal analogies and rhythms. A formal order can itself be memorable. In its painstaking composition, a De Jonge photograph locates itself far from press photography yet remains within the realm of straightforward representational imagery. Does it matter that the untitled painting at the center of De Jonge’s Ode to My Grandmother is an abstraction within a composition of objects that are, nominally, hardly abstract at all?

There is another way to consider the situation. The photograph may have become as much of an abstraction and a fantasy as the painting. It may have escaped Barthes’s photographic paradox by being so thoroughly constructed that a viewer is willing to assume that this photograph has acquired the qualities of either a painted still-life or a digital fabrication. In other words, it has lost all denotative value, having been organized by its own coding: De Jonge’s acquired sense of design. It is all invention, all fantasy. Let’s assume, for the sake of the argument, that when a photograph becomes a total construction—a total design, in which every detectable element contributes to the whole—the photograph is so thoroughly coded that it reverts, by hyperbolic inversion, to the status of a message without a code. In uniformity, in totalization, in faultlessness, there is no code. Perhaps the image instills a feeling of harmony or disharmony, but this is not a coded, connoted message.

I can find numerous compelling relationships of form and color—analogies, echoes, harmonies, assonances—within the painting depicted within the photograph. Its structure approximates four horizontal registers, yet this description is much too definitive and, in any case, won’t lead to meaning unless forced into an existing semiotic mold. The reds, pinks, and violets, as well as their admixtures, are offset by a range of yellows from an opposing part of the spectrum; but this observation, too, has no compelling bearing on meaning. The formal relations within the borders of the painting appear to spread to the objets d’art and everything else contained within the margins of the photograph. What does it all mean? The significance that I discover is that of myself seeing. I recognize that nothing is fixed within this fixed image (merely a photograph, after all). As I perceive that everything relates to everything else—tentatively, not definitively—I grasp as reality the fact that everything vibrates. This is not a message; it is a feeling.

If there is subject matter to be identified in this image, or even a story to be told, it is at one with the form of the image itself. Here, subject (or message) and form are not mere supplements to each other. The same could be said of a press photograph (pre-Barthes), or a traumatic photograph (post-Barthes), or any message without a code. We perceive in these images that subject and form are one. Ode to My Grandmother projects the same sense of wonder that De Jonge as a young child must have experienced when introduced to art, for which he had as yet no conceptual understanding. Art extracts from reality its sensuality, intensifying, by distillation, the frequencies of vibration. In this respect, it becomes a message without a code.

I’ve just made a generalization so grand that it’s tantamount to a theory. Theories are guesses masquerading as pathways to certainty. To theorize either photography or painting has not been my interest. I’ve merely been following the lead of a specific work of art to discover what the experience might suggest. I do so, of course, with a mind already oriented by previous encounters with art and every other element of the social environment forming my identity. The unassuming directness of De Jonge’s photographic practice recalled for me Barthes’s analysis of press photography as he explored its “paradox.” Initially, Barthes noted that these transparent, candid images convey a unitary, denotative meaning, the fact of their verity, a meaning that, presumably, requires no code of interpretation. Call it self-evident, not logically, but culturally. Barthes then realized that press photography necessarily supplements—and contradicts—its verity by developing multiple connotative meanings within the social context.

Barthes’s analysis led me to Warhol because Warhol painted (and later silkscreened) press photographs. Perhaps inadvertently, De Jonge inverts the effect of Warhol and of Barthes as well. He renders aesthetic practice fully accessible—his own art and that of the designers and fabricators of objets d’art, whose identities usually remain unknown to him. With Ode to My Grandmother, a photograph of many things, De Jonge has generated evocative art that remains entirely open to interpretative commentary. Yet, like a press photograph that can hold attention even when it lacks an explanatory caption, De Jonge’s photography, as well as his painting, demands no interpretation. It can receive meaning but does not need meaning to, as it were, mean something. It stimulates sensory experience. This, I realize, is what it means to me.

An objection might follow: Ode to My Grandmother has a title, which connotes the image in the way that a caption connotes a press photograph. Yes and no. De Jonge’s title is analogous to titles that seem more like place-markers than anything more specifically informative. I think of Painting as one of Willem de Kooning’s titles for a painting, and One as one of Jackson Pollock’s titles (also known as One: Number 31). De Jonge’s title could be used elsewhere. Recall his words: “In a way all painting I do is commemorating and honoring [my grandmother’s] memory.” So, each of De Jonge’s works, implicitly, bears this same title. And just as all press photographs must project anonymity, even when their authorship is known, De Jonge’s photography presents his paintings as things among things of equivalent or exchangeable cultural value. His photographs and his paintings vibrate, whether as flat images or dimensional objects. In press photography, evidence of a crime and scenes of a wedding hold equal pragmatic value—or no value, depending on the psychological disposition of the viewer. And in De Jonge’s photography, the value derives from the realization that all sensory fantasy is sensory reality. This realization of feeling should be worth something to everyone.