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To cite this article: Gottfried Boehm & W. J. T. Mitchell (2009) Pictorial versus Iconic Turn: Two
Letters, Culture, Theory and Critique, 50:2-3, 103-121, DOI: 10.1080/14735780903240075
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14735780903240075
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GottfriedBoehm
Culture,
1473-5784
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Taylor
2009
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gottfried.boehm@unibas.ch
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Theory
Article
Francis
(print)/1473-5776
& Critique
2009 (online)
10.1080/14735780903240075
RCTC_A_424181.sgm
and
Francis
Dear Tom,
Has the science of images begun to write its own history much too early,
before it knows what it is or what it can be? One could misunderstand Hans
Beltings Viennese Colloquium, which sought to take stock of the field, as
such an attempt. There, however, the matter was one of unwritten and future
books, rather than an observation on what had already been achieved. Nevertheless, the ominous talk of the pictorial and/or iconic turn is nearly unavoidable when we discuss our own work. Indeed, although the terms refer back to
the beginning of the 1990s, they designate more generally the attempt to
gauge the legitimacy of our own work in actu. It therefore seemed appropriate
to direct questions at the two of us as the coiners of these terms questions
received with mixed feelings, given that there is no lack of turns; they belong
to the jargon of the science and to its marketing.
Although quickly proclaimed, it is yet to be determined how much this
new kind of scientific questioning whether related to materials or also to
methods is actually worth. The turn vacillates between what Thomas S.
Culture, Theory & Critique
ISSN 1473-5784 Print/ISSN 1473-5776 online 2009 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/14735780903240075
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I
The attempt to make progress on the subject of the image was at first, i.e. in
the late 1970s and early 1980s, very lonely work for me indeed; I will return to
these beginnings with a few comments later on. After having achieved sufficient security, I attempted to break out of my isolation by compiling an
anthology, Was ist ein Bild? (What is an Image?), that was finally published in
1994 by Fink Verlag in Munich. I had been working on the anthology since the
late 1980s and it was initially planned as a volume of the Edition Suhrkamp
series, where it had already been scheduled to appear in 1991. I wanted to
show that in philosophy especially, but also in works of modern art, a cryptic
image debate was taking place that I hoped to interpret in order to lend
validity to my own intentions. This debate comprised positions by Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Jonas, Bernhard Waldenfels,
Michael Polanyi, Max Imdahl and others.1
However, conceiving of the image as paradigm was not possible without
outlining in one way or another its relation not only to language itself, but
also to the dominant philosophical position. This position, incidentally, was
1
Contributions by Jacques Lacan, Meyer Schapiro and Kurt Bauch were also
published from the older discussion.
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For the genesis of the Copernican world formula, see Blumenberg (1965) and
my attempt at transferring it to visual art (Boehm 1995).
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II
And thus I have outlined the theoretical aspects of the project. For the philosophically-educated art historian I understand myself to be, it was not primarily a matter of intervening in academic philosophical debates, but rather of
formulating those questions to which I had been led by an intense exposure to
art and by the practice of art history itself. Those who are fascinated by
images in the most fundamental way, those who have thoroughly examined
and analysed great numbers of them and possess what one could call an
image-sense, know with certainty that there is such a thing as an iconic intelligence that the artist restores in order to free himself from the demands of
language, from canonical texts, or from other mimetic instances, and to
establish evidences of a unique type, also and especially in cases involving
e.g. traditional historical images that re-tell the time-worn content of the bible,
mythology, or history.
It was not abstract art in the first instance that brought forth meaning for
which there is no model in reality although it does so irrefutably and
which goes as far as to surpass the known Real. Independent of language,
how does this exposition of meaning succeed? What are its objective foundations and what comprises its mechanisms? We know as yet much too little,
and the little we do know lacks the desired exactitude. The best point of
departure for further research seems to me to lie in the immanent order and
reflexivity of images themselves, whose riches, whose historical and cultural
potential for change offer unrelenting resistance against premature generalisations. I can imagine that you had something similar in mind when you
spoke of immanent representational practices (Mitchell 1994: 14/15). The
recognition of such genuinely iconic meaning is, however, completely uncontested on a practical level. Millions of people would not be visiting museums
to look at pictures if they were only being fed what they already knew or had
heard at some point. The desire to recognise is indeed a strong and satisfying
human urge, but the same can also be said for curiosity, which can only be
satisfied when the boundary of what is already known has been transgressed.
On the other hand, appreciation of this image-sense has been a tricky matter
on a methodological level and for art history in general, and has remained so
to this day. Contradictions have emerged over the course of its history, beginning with the opposition of connoisseur and antiques dealer, then of Wlfflins
visual operations and Panofskys pre-textual methodologies, through to
For contributions in which the emphasis is on the side of perception see Boehm
(1992).
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4
Panofskys is an iconology in which the icon is thoroughly absorbed by the
logos (1994: 28), and to explore the way that pictures attempt to represent themselves (24).
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III
These matters were discussed in the anthology Was ist ein Bild? from 1994, in
which older sources and preliminary works were involved that themselves
5
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References
Boehm, G. 1978. Zu einer Hermeneutik des Bildes, in H.-G. Gadamer and G. Boehm
(eds), Seminar: Die Hermeneutik und die Wissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
8
See Boehm (1978) sections V and VI. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2003: 11175).
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Dear Gottfried,
Thank you for the generous spirit of your letter. I think you are absolutely
correct that the relation of the pictorial versus iconic turn is not one of
priority, but of a parallel wandering in the forest. Now that we have strayed
into the same clearing and have a chance to compare our itineraries, perhaps
we will both have a chance to re-orient ourselves. I want to respond to five
themes that I see in your letter the question of image-science, the figure of
the turn, the nature of our respective intellectual formations, our convergences on the same concepts and theorists, and the divergences in our
approaches.
1. Image science: I agree with you that it is too early for image science to write
its history, in the sense of reaching its end. But it is not too early to write a
history in medias res, or at least to record our respective itineraries through
this labyrinth. We are clearly, not at the beginning, but somewhere in the
middle of things, uncertain at this point what sort of science a science of
images would be. The very word science has such different connotations in
English and German that we would need to head off possible confusions
right at the outset. In English, the historical and interpretive disciplines are
rarely granted the honorific title of science, which is reserved for the exact
or hard or experimental sciences, where proof, demonstration, and
quantification are essential criteria. Of course there are intermediate cases,
historical sciences such as paleontology, which involve a strong emphasis on
interpretation.
I suspect that, for you, the relevant science is hermeneutics, the study of
the way images make meaning in human history. But there would be other
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See my article, Realism and the Digital Image, in Baetens and van Gelder
(2006).
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My impression is that the neglect of Peirce is now ending for some German
scholars. I have been especially impressed with the work of John Krois of Humboldt
University in Berlin, who provided a short seminar on Peirce to our Bildwissenschaft
Group at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in January and February of 2005.
13
E-mail correspondence, 30 May 2006 with Whitney Davis, chairman of the Art
History department at the University of California, Berkeley.
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References
Baetens, J. and van Gelder, H. (eds). 2006. Critical Realism in Contemporary Art. Leuven:
University of Leuven Press.
Crary, J. 1991. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Deleuze, G. 1993. The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, J. 1994. Spectres of Marx: State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International. London: Routledge.
Derrida, J. and Stiegler, B. 2002. Echographies of Television. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Elkins, J. 2000. What Painting Is. London: Routledge.
14
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