![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/83-DO2-IMG1-IM_Rosamond_HR_DetailFig9_CMYK_esse_web.jpg\")
Metalepsis<\/em>, d\u00e9tail | detail fig. 9<\/em>, 2014.
Photo : permission de l\u2019artiste | courtesy of the artist <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
This suite stages a dense thought process: threads and strains of almost-arguments seem to circle endlessly around an absence of a central \u201ccontent.\u201d This affective absence, however, at the heart of the work, feels highly specific, full of the feeling of emergent thought; it embodies the same sort of future-facing, but as of yet still silent fullness of a pensive face that is just about to speak. The suite proceeds meticulously through additions, negations, obfuscations, juxtapositions, and inflections of one image with another. Yet within this plurality of processes emerges an oft-reiterated concern. Without, I hope, placing too centralizing a claim on this concern (I would still rather say that the heart of this work can\u2019t be said, and even more than this, that this sense \u2014 and concept \u2014 of the unspeakable is itself central to the logical\/affective structure of the work), I want to argue that this suite<\/em> performs a double procedure, according to which the mysteries of transcendence are staged as both a trope and a mode of enquiry. This enquiry proceeds largely though a methodical and multi-faceted examination of the historical conditions through which conceptions of abstraction have been linked to \u2014 or severed from \u2014 conceptions of transcendence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One aspect of this suite of concerns, which several of the photographs perform (and which are also performed between various pairs of photographs the eye selects) is doubt as to whether the depicted qualities in a given photographic image are properties of the objects depicted or of the medium itself. Is the orange orange because of the pigments in its skin, or the idea of \u201corangeness\u201d that has seeped from the orange into the image\u2019s processing? Is a sudden darkening of the background due to a darkroom trick, or a nearly imperceptible change of materials? These images stage a sublimation of the representational concerns of the image towards transcendental interests in the dematerialization of imagery, and in the conditions of the medium itself as the very ground for the staging of that materiality. As such, they enact an epistemological doubt about the difference between the object of one\u2019s perception and the perceptual grounds through which that object must come to be known. This is well-known art historical territory; the Greenbergs and McLuhans of the mid-twentieth century <\/sup> have produced (through argumentative description) a firmly entrenched portrait of a cultural and historical moment in which a concern with content, representation, and messages gave way to an urgent concern for examining the background, the medium, the conditions through which representation could come to be staged in the first place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet for all this, the use of photography, here, as a medium for examining the genealogy of abstraction\u2019s concerns ups their indexicality, their ostensible drive to have \u201ccontent.\u201d Indexicality \u2014 the ability to rhetorically point to an actual thing in the world that remains outside of, yet is metonymically linked to, representation \u2014 is a \u201cnative\u201d concern of photography in much more pointed a way than, say, painting. As such, it is also, perhaps, photography\u2019s red herring; these images\u2019 indexical properties \u2014 their insistence on referring to an actual space that exists outside of the photograph \u2014 disintegrates under close inspection. Planes that seem to represent a swath of space from a distance, up close appear to present flat surface textures, perhaps of construction paper, MDF, or another mottled, pulp-based surface, that have been carefully placed (Thomas Demand-style but flatter and more formalistic) to give the illusion of three dimensionality. (Harvey-Regan\u2019s images disperse their own indexicality, taking it through detours, pinging it in unexpected directions.) For all these images\u2019 panache in exploring such complexities of mid-twentieth century attitudes toward abstraction, this in and of itself is only one strain of Metalepsis<\/em>\u2019 thought. For what, after all, are those puzzling images of prayer doing in the mix? These images prevent the series from becoming too pat in its handling of the above concerns; they open it out onto a much wider enquiry, tracing a broad historical change in the relations between abstraction and transcendence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At the turn of the twentieth<\/sup> century, abstraction, spirituality, and transcendence (both as concept and as embodied practice) seemed to go hand in hand. For Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich, abstract painting was a means though which to explore theosophy, to transcend and sublimate representational and quotidian concerns in order to arrive at a more general, philosophical enquiry into origins. This prevalent link between abstraction and transcendence persisted well into the 1950s; emblematic of this insistence is Barnett Newman\u2019s work, in which interests in both the sublime and mythological\/religious references are inextricably intertwined. Newman sought to reduce, to abstract a sense of encounter until it was merely a \u201czip,\u201d a sense of felt particularity that emerges before words, before symbolization can catch it. The sense of emergence-before-words his zips aspired to was a gateway of sorts to the sublime dimension of experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet the emerging generation of postmodern artists of the 1960s identified, pronounced, and helped to produce a fundamental shift in the epistemic relation between concepts\/practices of abstraction and those of transcendence. For them, abstraction, having become a normalized, and even hegemonic procedure in New York School painting, became simply repression. Martha Rosler was among the many artists of that generation who would come to view Greenberg and the bland, wallpaper-like canvases he touted to be fundamentally conservative, exclusionary, duplicitous. Their claim to \u201ccontentlessness\u201d could only function as a tacit claim to privilege \u2014 a short-sighted, individualistic abandonment of the aesthetic tasks of citizenship, the latter of which, for many in Rosler\u2019s generation, urgently required representation as both a mode of enquiry and a subject for analysis. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00c0 ce transfert \u00e9pist\u00e9mique fondamental, les images de pri\u00e8re de Harvey-Regan r\u00e9pondent par un argument qui l\u2019infl\u00e9chit. Admettons (semblent-elles nous dire) que le lien qui unissait l\u2019abstraction \u00e0 la transcendance ait \u00e9t\u00e9 rompu au cours du si\u00e8cle dernier. Comment ce lien pourrait-il \u00eatre r\u00e9activ\u00e9, r\u00e9\u00e9nergis\u00e9 \u2013 et que pourrait-on apprendre d\u2019une telle r\u00e9activation\u2009? Les images de pri\u00e8re \u2013 infus\u00e9es d\u2019une certaine distance ironique<\/em> (au sens tr\u00e8s particulier o\u00f9 l\u2019entend Franco Bifo Berardi, non pas sardonique, cynique ni surcharg\u00e9e d\u2019une r\u00e9f\u00e9rentialit\u00e9 par trop habile, mais plut\u00f4t comme ouverture possible entre l\u2019image et la fa\u00e7on dont elle est lue1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Franco \u201cBifo\u201d Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance<\/em>, Los Angeles, Semiotext(e), 2012, p. 159\u2013166. <\/span> \u2013 viennent en aide ici aux abstractions, en leur transfusant de ce contenu qui leur fut jadis transcendant, \u00ab\u2009natif\u2009\u00bb. Ce mot, \u00ab\u2009natif\u2009\u00bb, au sens o\u00f9 je l\u2019entends ici, s\u2019apparente davantage \u00e0 \u00ab\u2009nativit\u00e9\u2009\u00bb qu\u2019\u00e0 \u00ab\u2009naturel\u2009\u00bb\u2009; en effet, l\u2019id\u00e9e d\u2019un lien originaire entre l\u2019abstraction et la transcendance, lien form\u00e9 d\u00e8s la naissance de l\u2019abstraction au d\u00e9but du 20e si\u00e8cle, ne le rend pas n\u00e9cessairement \u00ab\u2009naturel\u2009\u00bb. Elle le fait paraitre naturalis\u00e9, plut\u00f4t, en jouant pour lui le r\u00f4le d\u2019un \u00e9chafaudage mythologique, proc\u00e9dure id\u00e9ologique inh\u00e9rente selon laquelle la transcendance se rattache \u00ab\u2009nativement\u2009\u00bb \u00e0 l\u2019abstraction d\u00e8s son point d\u2019\u00e9mergence. La religiosit\u00e9, vue comme un contenu r\u00e9pressif \u2013 et comme une relation r\u00e9pressive au fait de repr\u00e9senter<\/em> du contenu \u2013 par une grande partie de la g\u00e9n\u00e9ration postmoderne, bascule et devient la grande r\u00e9prim\u00e9e de la postmodernit\u00e9. Dans quelles conditions le lien peut-il (et devrait-il) donc \u00eatre ressuscit\u00e9\u2009? Prise comme un tout, la s\u00e9rie photographique \u2013 une esp\u00e8ce de moteur aliment\u00e9 par le couple abstraction-transcendance, concepts aux charges oppos\u00e9es et pourtant inextricablement li\u00e9s \u2013 se trouve \u00e0 la fois \u00e0 r\u00e9activer l\u2019appariement natif de ces concepts et \u00e0 remettre en question les motivations mythologiques qui sous-tendent une telle r\u00e9activation. Elle s\u2019abstient aussi, d\u00e9lib\u00e9r\u00e9ment et n\u00e9cessairement, de conclure \u00e0 cet \u00e9gard\u2009; sa t\u00e2che consiste \u00e0 \u00e9taler les circuits de son paradoxe et \u00e0 baliser un espace vide de contenu au centre de ces p\u00f4les de r\u00e9flexion en conflit. De ce point de vue, elle r\u00e9alise vraisemblablement une relocalisation du concept de l\u2019absence de contenu, une r\u00e9organisation du transcendantal contemporain s\u00e9cularis\u00e9 en tant qu\u2019espace entre les p\u00f4les d\u2019un paradoxe \u00e9pist\u00e9mique. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For me, there is one image in this series that has the final word, that invents its own modality of abstract-imagistic transcendental enquiry, or perhaps poses the series\u2019 questions most urgently. The praying image of Samuel cut into triangular shards, linked up side by side on a black background, carries a small but potent hint of violence toward embodied materiality, enacted through geometry (it is an image whose geometry flagellates its own reverent subject). It hints at a history that would link abstraction not only to transcendence but also to iconoclasm. It enacts the disembodiment of an aim toward the heavens as a both a reverence for, and a violent aim to break away from, the powers of images and their indexical procedures. On its own, perhaps the image would not do this, but in its place in the series, given the specificity of the content stream it swims in, it retells the sublimation story by posing another problem with representing sublimation through images (against what ground can it be shown, given that the ground is always already infused with a faith in images?). The fractured Samuel speaks powerfully to the embodied experience of the discipline of transcendental experience arrived at through (among other things) intense questioning: an experience which is potent enough to shatter represented reality into shards, and yet at the same time hold those shards dear, protect them in an alien pasture of geometric, self-similar, abstractable space. <\/p>\n\n\n\n [Traduit de l\u2019anglais par Sophie Chisogne] <\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/83-DO2-IMG2-IM_Rosamond_HR_DetailFig8_CMYK-CORR-GG_esse_web.jpg\")
Metalepsis<\/em>, d\u00e9tail | detail fig. 8<\/em>, 2014.
Photo : permission de l\u2019artiste | courtesy of the artist <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/83-DO2-IMG3-IM_Rosamond_HR_DetailFig4_CMYK_esse_web.jpg\")
Metalepsis<\/em>, d\u00e9tail | detail fig 4<\/em>, 2014.
Photo : permission de l\u2019artiste | courtesy of the artist <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/83_DO_IM_Rosamond_HR_DetailFig10_CMYK-scaled.jpg\")
Metalepsis<\/em>, d\u00e9tail | detail fig <\/em>10, 2014.
Photo : permission de l\u2019artiste | courtesy of the artist <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/83_DO_IM_Rosamond_HR_DetailFig7_CMYK-scaled.jpg\")
Metalepsis<\/em>, d\u00e9tail | detail fig <\/em>7, 2014.
Photo : permission de l\u2019artiste | courtesy of the artist <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/83-DO2-IMG4-IM_Rosamond_HR_Metalepsis_detail-left_CMYK_esse_web.jpg\")
Metalepsis<\/em>, 2014
Photo : permission de l\u2019artiste | courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/83-DO2-IMG5-IM_Rosamond_HR_DetailFig1-13_CMYK_esse_web.jpg\")
Metalepsis<\/em>, d\u00e9tail | detail fig. 1 & 13<\/em>, 2014.
Photo : permission de l\u2019artiste | courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n