The World as Representations: Collecting and Collating Images

Contemporary artists’ keen interest for collecting and collating images has recently given rise to a number of exhibitions and events,¹ 1 - In particular, Collecter/Recycler. Usages de l’archive photographique dans la ­création contemporain, March 20 to May 9, 2010, Centre photographique d’Ile-de-France, Pontault-Combault; La Revanche de l’archive photographique, June 4 to July 31, Centre de la photographie, Geneva; and L’Image à la puissance image, a one-day conference organized on January 21 at University of Rennes 2 by the magazine 2.0.1. reflecting as it does the widely received idea that we live in a world of images. Today, the shortest road to the heart of the world is through its representations.² 2 - The idea was already Schopenhauer’s in The World as Will and Representation (1818) (see Gallimard: Folio, 2009, for a new French translation in four volumes). For the ­significance of the work, see below. It would be an injustice to the artists’ work, however, to dwell on this generality without examining the specific leanings it encompasses. For while current “iconographic artists”³ 3 - Garance Chabert and Adrien Môle, “Artistes iconographes,” Art 21, No. 25 (Winter 2009-10). likely all share the same observation, their goals diverge nonetheless and follow two different orientations. Some attempt to document the world, making transitive use of images that represent samples of existence that help better understand its doings and events; this current follows the great artistic tradition of enquiring into the real. Others simply compile their inventory of snapshots, implicitly positing that that is all there is. They accumulate a great variety of images, amateur photos, postcards and posters, magazines and ads, for, in the footsteps of such artists as Warhol, who lauded the surface, they are interested in representations as such.⁴ 4 - Also see Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (1969), and its leitmotif inspired by Paul  Valéry: “le plus profond, c’est la peau” — or skin is as deep as it gets.