Failures of Representation

"I think that there is less and less interest in adequate, pleasing, skillful, appropriate, successful, informative, functional representation, and more and more interest in representation that fails. We care about representation when it goes wrong, and we don’t notice when it works well. In part that is the result of our modernist heritage: we don’t spend time with naturalism because we associate it either with older ideologies of the image, those in force from the Renaissance to the rise of Impressionism, or else with capitalist consumerism and its army of coercive representations. Skilfull representation, in particular, is hard to think about except as a constructed idea that responds to certain desires in relation to images and to fine art.i Adequate representation, mimesis, naturalism, and realism sound like old, asked-and-answered problems. On the other hand, we have not abandoned representation. On the contrary: we are fascinated by it. I take this ambivalence, and this somewhat forensic interest in the places where representation fails, as signs that the present moment is neither modernist nor postmodernist in the usual senses. The present moment is concerned with a resurgence of representation, but as a ruin. Representation is no longer capable, adequate, comprehensive, or systematic: it lacks what Robert Williams calls “systematicity.”

James Elkins

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What Counts Now is an Attitude

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