Hans Belting

ABSTRACT

From Mimesis to “Repeating Forward”
: The “Disappearing” in <Santa Faz> of Francisco de Zurbarán

The Spanish baroque painter Francisco de Zurbarán(1598-1664)
adopted “monastic” repetition as his major modus operandi to
contemplate the biblical legend of Veronica. The aim in this <Santa Faz>
was not only to recreate his testimony to the truth of this “miracle” that
is acheiropoietic, but to contemplate the difference between this truth and
its coming into being outside the mimetic realm. In 1658, six years before
his death, emerging from his canvas are mere faint traces of a head
almost completely devoid of figurativeness. A number of scholars
interpreted this non-representational holy face, paradoxically enshrined in
a highly ascetic yet realistic mimetic setting as an image, as a divine
trompe-l’oeil(Caturla), an image to be completed by the spectator’s
imagination (Belting and Stoichita), a mimetic presence and paragone
(Ostrow) or an image opening up the dialectics of auratic contact
(Didi-Huberman). Zurbarán’s staging of the enigmatic disappearance
confirms these accounts, but the specificity of his repetition leading up to
this disappearance calls them into question. Our question, a
Beltingian-Deleuzian one, is to ask if the disappearing of representation
can be understood as aiming for a concept of future beyond the
tautological theories of destruction of icon, “zero degree” or
differentiation.

Key Words
Acheiropoietos, Difference, Francisco de Zurbarán, Gilles Deleuze,
Hans Belting, Making disappear, Mimesis, Repetition, Visagéité

From the end of the 1980s the innovations of Cultural Studies and the more recent positions
of Visual Studies have been the object of a broad international debate. Having to
deal with the postcolonial question in a renewed global dimension, art history has been
affected by the methodological crisis which had already involved other historical disciplines.
It therefore turned to several disciplines, among which anthropology, in order
to update its own methods. Hans Belting took effective part in this debate without ever
abandoning his studies in the field of medieval art, but moving closer to different histories
and cultural areas. In this way he developed his Global Art History, research which
extended from the study of art to that of its audience. Thematizing the historicity of the
concept of art and the universalizing demand for a historicist approach, he consciously
opened the geographical and cultural confines of his investigation. In the study of the
image, Belting identified one of the cornerstones of his proposal and formulated the
hypothesis of new narratives, free from the colonial gaze, necessary for the constitution
of a Global Art History.

Images of abnormalities and aberrations abound in visual culture, and these have recently enjoyed a growing scholarly interest. My article takes as its collective subject this kind of image. Specifically, I discuss Neill Blomkamp’s blockbuster District 9 due to its abundance in aberration. Under the label ‘aberrant image’ I consider an array of
previously described visual (and experiential) categories, namely the grotesque, abject, monstrous-feminine and uncanny, because of the characteristic way they destabilise viewers. My hypothesis is that they share a particular kind of image operation, a concept which I borrow from Hans Belting. In aberrant images, this operation incorporates both visual elements and their affects (here understood as emotional and physical sensations experienced by sentient beings). For this reason, I read how these images work and work on us in terms of Georges Didi-Huberman’s phenomenological and psychoanalytical delineation of ‘the
symptom’; an ‘incomprehensible sign’ which both displays and dissimulates the process of figuration because it reveals the materiality
of images. However, I aim to broaden Didi-Huberman’s definition of representation with Belting’s conceptualisation of the image as operation, by applying it to the cinematic medium and to aberrant images. Therefore, I adapt the concept of ‘the symptom’ to describe a broader kind of image operation whereby what the image represents is
destabilising to the engendering of this image, so that it becomes a ‘symptomatic image’.

Come suggerisce il sottotitolo, non c’è alcun filo rosso che lega i saggi che compongono questo volume sul piano dei contenuti. Ciò che li accomuna è il fatto che si tratta o di lavori che finora sono rimasti inediti, in tutto o in parte, o che comunque lo sono stati in italiano. La prima parte, Figure, presenta scritti che si concentrano su aspetti particolari di studiosi noti e meno noti: Erwin Panofsky (di cui viene preso in considerazione il saggio del 1927 sull’imago pietatis), Frederik Adama van Scheltema (di cui viene tratteggiata la filosofia della storia e della storia dell’arte), Hans Belting (di cui viene indagato il rapporto con l’ermeneutica). Risulta più a sé stante l’articolo conclusivo, nel quale vengono sviluppate alcune considerazioni sul museo contemporaneo a partire dal Museo del Silenzio di Fara in Sabina. La seconda parte, Bilanci, si apre con un saggio che prova a rileggere l’iniziativa, promossa in Germania a metà degli anni Ottanta, che va sotto il nome di Funkkolleg Kunst e termina con un tentativo di ricostruzione della ricezione degli scritti su Paul Klee di Placido Cherchi.

The «end of the history of art» is one of the formulae with which Hans Belting is usually associated. For the German scholar, the end does not imply any apocalyptic vision but rather an internal and external critique of the discipline, in view of an «opening up of the science of art to a science of culture». Bidding farewell to the consolidated ways of presenting artistic historiography we arrive at the adoption of a multi-disciplinary approach, whose aim is to «look at one’s own culture through the eye of an ethnologist». While recognising the importance of the explicit distancing from Eurocentric positions like those we see in the bricolage of Lévi-Strauss, in his connections with posthistoire, and Malraux’s musée imaginaire, we should point out above all that Belting’s intent does not aim at operational finalities: «the eye of the ethnologist» does not refer primarily to the undertakings and methods of ethnoanthropological disciplines, but appeals to the attitude of the scholar vis-à-vis his own culture and in this way calls once more upon the fecundity of the hermeneutic principle of distancing. The direction towards a history of culture also manifests itself, as a result of the awareness of branches’ contemporary fragmentation, due to the end of every «binding narrative schema». We might mention the importance of Belting’s recognition of his debt to David Freedberg, given that it was he who led him to doubt the possibility, previously admitted, of a linear history of the image.

Failures and errors have always had a special position in image and communication systems. They can offer alternative "escape routes" to controlled pathways within informatioin society. From the domains of philosophy and cinema to the Internet, this keynote lecture explores different examples of suspensions, delay, or errors that gesture beyond the system in which they operate, signaling a more open space-time for reflection to materialize in. Key references are to Henri Bergson, Douglas Gordon, Hans Belting, Darko Fritz, Gilles Deleuze, Rosa Menkman and Alfred Hitchcock. This keynote lecture was held at the international film studies conference: FIGURATIONS OF INTERMEDIALITY IN FILM, organized by the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Department of Film, Photography, and Media, Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania, 2014 October 24-25, hosted by Ágnes Pethő.