Las Meninas transmedial: Malerei. Katoptrik. Videofeedback

Publikation: Bog/antologi/afhandling/rapportBogfagfællebedømt

  • Slavko Kacunko
The art-historical methods of exploring the significance of pictures have often been demonstrated in the contemplation and interpretation of Velázquez’ Las Meniñas (1656, Madrid, Prado; 318 x 276 cm). The painting has been analysed for its relation to the viewer, its luminism, its spatial qualities and use of colour, and for the real(istic) thereness of the figures (re)presented in it. The inconsistencies of interpretation to date are a result above all of the numerous interpretative contributions on the picture’s iconography.
Velázquez’ painting takes the interplay of model and double as dramatised in painting for centuries before, and turns it into a virtual triangular relationship. Here the painter represents the only real point of reference. Michel Foucault, on the other hand, saw in the picture ‘a virtual triangle which by its contours defines this picture of a picture: at the upper corner, as the one visible point – the painter’s eyes; at the base, on the one hand the invisible standpoint of the model and on the other the figure who is presumably sketched out on the front of the canvas.’
It was only much later – roughly co-inciding with the first publication of Les mots et les choses (1996/7) that a medium would be capable of uniting the model, the author (artist) and the viewer as one – with the appearance on the market of the first portable video apparatus (camera and recorder) and via the feedback-based ‘closed-circuit’ relationship between the recording and the reproduction apparatus.
Foucault’s theory of the model-like quality of the classical representation in Las Meniñas shares its discoursive framework with a host of art-historical literature on this painting.
To cease to distinguish between questions of meaning and those of representation, as Svetlana Alpers proposes, would not, in fact, resolve what this art critic bewails as the incomprehensibility of Las Meniñas within the bounds of the history of art. For her, too, therefore, the famous painting is still a ‘puzzle with no solution.’ Its ‘unravelling’ may, however, lie in the ‘bounds’ and methods of art historiography. One way forward might consist in extending the range of the ‘sample’, both to take in specific media and to cross their borders – and in taking seriously such artistic practice as founds on reproduction technology, doing them justice in our investigations. Meanwhile, trans-media interpretations of works of art created in traditional media would be a worthwhile undertaking. As long as painting is ‘read’ as painting only, or film as film, interpretations will remain caught up in the grid of preconceived media ‘laws’ and all attempts at contemplation through the history and theory of art or of (the) media must end in tautology as a consequence.

The approach of the presented monograph differs, while tentatively adopting certain elements of these approaches, from using Las Meniñas as an example to describe a possible trans-media point of view (Las Meniñas becoming not just a res interpretanda, but a [trans-media] instance for comparison). The goal was to ‘decipher’ the ‘action’ manifest in the painting, from the perspective of the reprotechnical media of photography, film and video. The ‘time’ inherent in Velázquez’ painting is to be determined in a manner commensurate with the manner in which it was ‘recorded’.
The point of departure for the investigation was certain – ‘the mirror’ and its characteristics as a medium.
In that respect, the proposed solution rests on three analyses which can only be reconciled from such a simultaneous perspective of the histories of art and media. The crucial analysis in question is the formal and ‘catoptric’ one by Hermann Ulrich Asemissen , which was proposed to consolidate on the epistemological framework of the Foucault analysis, with Victor I. Stoichita’s iconological notes.

Foucault’s comment that ‘the picture as a whole looks upon a scene for which it, in turn, is a scene,’ unmistakably referred to the ‘realistic’ vis-à-vis situation perceived likewise by earlier writers and usually interpreted by them (and him) as a juxtaposition of the royal couple and their daughter with her entourage. For Asemissen, a review consistent with the media at play left him in no doubt that this vis-à-vis impression where the ladies-in-waiting were concerned was due to a kind of mirror wall.
Much suggests that the artist himself installed the painting for the king shortly after he had completed it, as an intimate catoptric theatre. On the basis of Asemissen’s analysis, it appears entirely plausible that Velázquez should have conceived the work from the beginning to suit that environment and that kind of contemplation.

REFERENCES:

1 ASEMISSEN, Hermann Ulrich 1981
2 FOUCAULT, Michel 1971 and FOUCAULT, Michel 1997 (1984), pp. 262-72.
3 STOICHITA, Victor I., ‘Imago Regis. Kunsttheorie und königliches Porträt in den Meninas von Velazquez’ in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 2, 1986 (pp. 165-89)

Bidragets oversatte titelLas Meninas transmedial : Painting. Catoptrics. Videofeedback
OriginalsprogTysk
StatusUdgivet - 2001

ID: 37898097