The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. By David Freedberg. 1989. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London.
The Power of Images: Response and Repression
People are sexually aroused by pictures and sculptures; they break pictures and sculptures; they mutilate them, kiss them, cry before them, and go on journeys to them; they are calmed by them, stirred by them, and are incited to revolt. They give thanks by means of them, expect to be elevated by them, and are moved to the highest levels of empathy and fear. They have always responded in these ways; they still do. They do so in societies we call primitive and in modern societies; in East and West, in Africa, America, Asia, and Europe. These are the kind of response that form the subject of this book, not the intellectual constructions of critic and scholar….My concern is with those responses that are subject to repression because they are too embarrassing, too blatant, too rude, and too uncultured; because they make us aware of the unlettered, the course, the primitive, the undeveloped; and because they have the psychological roots that we prefer not to acknowledge.
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The God in the Image
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| The Madonna of Rocamadour |
Not anger with it, but anger with her… What is at issue is the response that is predicted on the assumption of presence, not on the fact of representation. In such cases, what is represented becomes fully present, indeed representation is subsumed by presence: “angry with it”, not “angry with her”. Now of course when one is irritated, exasperated, or angry, it is sometimes easier to be angry with someone than with something. But still the sign has become the living embodiment of what it signifies. Perhaps it will be suggested that a strong or ingrown belief in the power of the Virgin easily inclines the believer to see her present, disencumbered of everything that makes her dead representation. Perhaps the suggestion will run that one cannot believe that the virgin is in the picture – or is the picture – unless one believes to begin with, in the Virgin. Then, wanting her to be there, to exist, we willingly concentrate on the image, and what is represented becomes present again. She is, quite literally, re-presented. The slip from representation to presentation is crucial, from seeing a token of he Virgin, to seeing her there. What happens? How do we proceed without engaging in the analysis of the prepositional status of statements about belief, or the relations between the nature of beliefs and reports about them?
….effectives proceeds specifically from the image; the image, rather than the Virgin is believed to work. But of course the image only works because of the fusion of image and prototype, and this is precisely the fusion against which all image theory has always raged. in that needful rage lies tacit acknowledgment of the effectiveness that proceeds from fusion.
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A remarkable West African ceremony presents similar issues of fusion and inherence….Until it suppression by the colonial authorities, the Ndako gboya cult of the Nupe people of Nigeria used a mask that was different from any other in that country (Nadel [1954] 1970, pp 190 – 91, 198 – 201, 208 – 23). It was not in the slightest anthropomorphic but was made of white cloth, shaped like a cylinder, and was just wide enough to hold a man. It must have an eerie and terrifying sight as the man inside it moved it forward at varying speeds. “occasionally jumping and running,… lifting and lowering it, and making the cloth tube swing and sway”. It is not surprising that the Ndako Gboya mask should have been used to drive out people suspected or convinced of being witches.
The anthropologist who investigated the ngako gboya noted that “once the performer is inside the mask, he is inseparable from the thing he ‘represents’; he is the ngako gboya, the people insist, and no longer so-and-so, whom you know and have talked too”. The anthropologist tested this claim, perhaps a little naively: “Once during the ceremonial, I offered food and drink to the ‘man in the mask’, suggesting that he must be in need of some refreshments after his exhausting performance. My offer was ridiculed, and I was told that ‘spirits do not eat.’” There are significant corollaries to all this: “Any person who has not been initiated into the ndako gboya society or has omitted the preparatory rites would be killed by the mask as he entered it. The mask, of course, is just cloth, and must be cut and tailored; many masks also show patches and signs of repair. But again, once the sacrifice has been performed over them, they are no longer merely a material object, but the thing itself which they signify.” (Ibid., pp. 190 – 91).
How this description beggars belief! “Just cloth”, and “merely a material object” – this, of course, is just what the mask is not: it is nothing less than the ndako gboya itself; and in order for it to be thus invested with the living spirit, it has to look a certain way and be consecrated in a certain way. The case from West Africa is the same as the case from Byzantium. The image, once properly prepared, set up adorned and decorated, becomes the locus of the spirit. It becomes what it is taken to represent.
There is a difference, of course: in the African case, the mask – like so many of the masks used in ritual ceremonies in non-Western cultures – is quite literally animated. Spirit, it may be argued, thus passes into material object only through the mediation of some live performer. But whatever the technicalities of mediation, the fact remains that responses to the mask are predicated on the very conflation of sign and signified…But again the matter is apparently not quite so simple. The image seems to acquire its effectiveness only following some act of consecration or another, which invests the “mere” materiality of the mask or image with powers not attributable to the material itself.
As soon as the image is consecrated, it has at all times to be properly venerated; insult to the image is insult to what it embodies. (What do Pictures Want – Holes in the eyes of photos??), represents, or signifies; and terrible punishment is visited on those guilty of such lese-majeste.
The further parallels are striking too, including the notion of respect – indeed demanded by – consecration. The trouble is that we in the West acknowledge these things very little – if at all. We choose to ignore the kinds of response that transcend cultural and chronological differences, and we refuse to acknowledge those aspects of response to all images that precede detachment and rational observation. Historians of art ignore those symptoms of the power of images that go deeper than more or less anodyne aesthetic attraction and repulsion. We may be quite happy to believe that images in primitive cultures are felt to partake in the life of what they represent, or even in the life of things other than what they represent. But we do not like to think this of ourselves, or of our own society. We refuse – or have refused for many decades – to acknowledge the traces of animism in our own perception of and response to images: not necessarily “animism” in the nineteenth-century ethnographic sense of the transference of spirits to inanimate objects, but rather in the sense of the degree of life or liveliness believed to inhere in an image.
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...we too have the kinds of beliefs about images that people who have not been educated to repress those beliefs and responses have; and we respond in the same ways. We too feel a “vague awe” at the creative skills of the artist; we too fear the power of the images he makes and their uncanny abilities to both to elevate us and to disturb us. They put us in touch with truths about ourselves in a way that can only be described as magical, or they deceive us as if by witchcraft. But because we have been educated to talk and think about images in ways that avoid confronting just these kinds of effects, the only way we can be frank is to attend to the responses and reports of those whom we regard either as simple, unsophisticated, or provincial; or, indeed, to attend to the peoples of Africa, Asia, and America whom anthropologists have thankfully ceased calling primitive.
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It could perhaps be argued that all this is quite wrong, that the only way in which we can be adequately analytic about the phenomenon of response is by acknowledging the differences between traditional and “primitive” cosmologies and our own modern “scientific” world view. Perhaps we should simply admit that responses based on the attribution of life and lifelike powers to objects are characteristic to societies in which the basic explanatory category is in terms of the gods of a pantheon; we, on the other hand, use science - not religion – as a basic term of explanation. This intellectualist stance may well have a certain analytic utility, but it makes just the distinction I wish to avoid.
…we may find it easier to describe belief in the power of images in terms of fantasy, superstition, and magic; but we know too that such categories are evasive. They seek to be explanatory, but they do not explain enough (or anything). Rather they are telltale signs of our inability to account for the never-ending disruption of natural law that arises from the relations figured objects and people. That inability is why we invoke them so often.
It is not, for the most part, that the painter is a magician, or even acts like a real magician; it is just that when images are set among us, the dead are kept among the living and inert matter becomes lively – to such an extent that we may even be afraid of it. The role of artistic skill in this process is undeniable.
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“Painting possesses a truly divine power in that not only does it make the absent present (as they say of friendship), but it also represents the dead to the living many centuries later, so that they are recognized by spectators with pleasure and deep admiration for the artist….Through painting the faces of the dead go on living for a very long time. Painting is also a great gift to man, in that it represents the gods we worship, for painting has contributed considerably to the piety which binds us to the gods, and to filling our minds with sound religious beliefs. …
(L.B. Alberti, On Painting and Sculpture: The Latin Texts of the De Pictura and De Statua (London, 1972), pp. 60 – 61
Its [Painting] powers, in short, are such that it can only be described as supernatural and divine. But in what sense divine? Is the claim just an extravagance, a figure of speech that offers a discursive means of coping with the complex powers and effects of images? “Through painting the faces of the dead go on living for a very long time” – “go on living” in what sense? This is the heart of the matter. When we speak of the living faces of the dead, are we again just using a figure? Is the fact that in many languages the same word is used to convey the liveliness of representation and the liveliness of the living being a convenient way of talking imprecisely about a distinction that so resiliently eludes precision? No: for the evidence of the history of images is such that we find that responses are frequently predicated, in high circles as well as low, in refined ones and unrefined, on the perception of dead images as living and as capable of the extensions and intentionality of beings that breath.
But this is not just a matter of images – at least not for Alberti. Throughout the passage one conviction remains, even when unspoken. This is the conviction that it is art which transforms inert material and enables the realization of its potential.
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Alberti is perfectly clear about the strong responses images evoke, and he knows that sometimes these are based on the inevitable fulfilment of their potentiality in their beholding – and therefore behaving – spectator, or perhaps in the exchange with the spectator. This realization transcends rationality, and so he fittingly invokes the category of the divine; but there is another level on which he thinks that this applies only to wrought images, and therefore with the skill with which they are made. Sometimes those skills are so transcendent and so beyond human capabilities, that here too we are to think of the divine, or – at the very least – to think that the productions of an artist like Phidias are advised with the divine, preternaturally and inexplicably.
When we see the image come alive, when we start at the flesh that bleeds and the eyes that do, after all, follow us round the room, we may think that our responses are culturally conditioned; but we also know that we cannot, by thinking in this way, wholly subvert or repress the psychological processes that lead us to invest images with powers that make them work, with qualities that make them seem alive, with the ability to rouse us to empathy, incite us to action, and provide us with a mode of articulating the recollection that fades.
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| Peter Paul Rubens: Cimon and Pero (ca. 1635), Rijksmuseum |
Of course Valerius does not say the figures in the picture are living bodies; people feel they are like living bodies. He is using a simile; as so often the “as if” is fully implied, if not actually articulated. But one cannot thus dismiss the extent and implications of the innumerable instances where responses are based on the perception of bodies as real, and not merely as if real; where simile is renounced, or even undermined by the need to reconstitute the body. For it is not only a matter of projection of desire. To the observer who strives for detachment, the results of such reconstitution may well seem miraculous or supernatural.
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| Mondrian: Broadway Boogie Woogie 1942 - 43 |
In a straightforward, important, and in some ways old fashioned sense, painting exemplifies one key aspect of response and effect more strikingly than sculpture: it is less hard to grasp why three dimensional images, particularly if coloured, may seem to be living and why we want to touch them as if they were real. But with painting, depiction is more readily understood as representation; it is irredeemably two-dimensional and thus irredeemably inert. Or so we may think, and yet paintings also seem real, lively; they too demand us to feel them; or, perhaps, to think of them as invested with the kind of animation both painter and public may sense in a picture like Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie of 1942 – 43.
..But Alberti , just like Hawthorne over four hundred years later, assigned painting a special status precisely because of its very lack of three-dimensionality made it seem all the more supernatural, or made the beholder construe it as such. Its powers seemed more mysterious and further beyond the capacities of normal creativity…
We cannot understand the extraordinary potentiality of painting in terms of natural law. Its operativness can only be construed in mystical terms, or in terms of categories that pertain to the supernatural; and it must therefore be of a higher order to that sculpted form which makes reality so plain.
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| Fifth-Century Funerary Statue, Cyrene |
When the stone is placed in an anthropomorphic setting or when it takes the place of that which normally provides us with the most visible testimony to the life of the statue – the face – then we may clearly say that the god resides in that setting too. But the matter can be sharpened further. When we see the remarkable and mysterious fifth-century statue of a woman assimilated either to Demeter or to another god in the museum of Cyrene, we are too likely to come under its spell. Its face is completely unformed: could it not be that it was intended to convey a particular sense of localized power precisely because of its resemblance to an unformed and un-worked stone of some kind? Although we unfortunately lack evidence of the responses it evoked, it does not seem extravagant to suggest that in its original location it must have been at least as arresting as it seems to us now, perhaps even more so. We find it arresting because of our expectation of a face in an otherwise anthropomorphically worked image is thwarted. For fifth-century beholders that “face” can hardly but have generated an association with the kinds of mysterious powers so often associated with un-worked stones.
The point is that the head makes plain the divine presence already existent (or pre-existent) in the otherwise almost completely (if not wholly) un-worked statue.
What is clear is that the god in the un-worked stone or stock continues to reside in the worked stone or stock. The god in the tree prolongs his stay in those images which still remind their beholders of their arboreal origins.
If the god is in the statue, then it is animated, and we treat it as if it were invested with life. The anthropomorphization of an image makes its animate qualities both more palpable and more terrifying. It is more palpable because it now looks like what we familiarly know to be invested with life – and more terrifying for two related reasons: its divine powers belie its human appearance, and its animate quality denies its inanimate materiality. The divine power in the object becomes the divine power in the images, and we cannot say that progressive anthropomorphization diminishes it.
Even if we played down the evidence of responses to images in which lifelike powers seem to be condensed, and even if we no longer perceived the consequences of this phenomenon in our own responses, we would still have to take into account the burden of the past in sharing them. If images were once, let us say, invested with lifelike and supernatural powers, it would surely be extravagant to suggest that any subsequent perception of a work of art could free itself of this history entirely.
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