Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art

by Dario Gamboni
Reaktion Books, London, 2002
243pp., illus. b/w & col.
ISBN 1-86189-113

Reviewed by Robert Pepperell
Polar (The Posthuman Laboratory for Arts Research)

pepperell@ntlworld.com

Chapter VII of Potential Images opens with a satirical cartoon from 1907 showing a viewer at the Salon d'Automne standing on his head in order to make sense of an indeterminate modernist painting. The caption reads: "The difficult thing is not to paint a picture . . . but to know how to look at it" (p. 131). This viewer's predicament serves to illustrate the central theme of this book: the extent to which responsibility for generating meaning lies with the viewer or the creator of a work of art.

It is a problem that has engaged artists for centuries, as Gamboni demonstrates in the first part of the book with a historical overview of hidden, suggestive and amorphous images, from early human history to the beginnings of modernism. What Gamboni calls 'potential images' are characterised by the extra perceptual and conceptual demands they place that "make the beholder aware – either painfully or enjoyably – of the active, subjective nature of seeing" (p. 18). What is surprising in this regard is the number of pre-modern artists, from Leonardo to Delacroix, who were fascinated by, and indeed exploited the polysemic richness of inchoate and accidental forms.

But whilst examples of ambiguity and indeterminacy can be found in artworks and decorative works from across cultural history, it is their concentration and elevation in modern art that Gamboni addresses in most detail. In the mid-nineteenth century, a confluence of emerging aesthetic and intellectual forces – including Symbolism, Romanticism and occultism – produced a milieu that emphasised the imaginative contribution of the viewer. In 1846 Baudelaire wrote that: "the poetry in a picture must be created by the spectator . . . because it lies in the spectator's soul, and genius consists in awakening it there." (quoted in p. 59), and by the end of the century the most important French artists, from Monet and Cézanne to Gauguin and Moreau, are producing works that demand ever more imaginative participation as they deliberately resist precise identification.

These late-nineteenth century tendencies are part of much more than a simple drift away from representational art towards abstraction, as conventional histories might recount. Instead they signify a shift away from deterministic picture making towards images that are unresolved, open and fugitive. Gamboni cites James Trilling's claim that in modern art "the opposition between representation and non-representation is less important than that between determinacy and indeterminacy, which he defines as 'the lack of fixed boundaries or demarcations.'"( p. 131). This extends even to the work of iconic abstractionists such as Mondrian, in whose checkerboard grids "the colours are distributed in such a way that they can be put into numerous different combinations and encourage the eye to run constantly over the canvas forming new constellations." (p. 212). Not only do these ideas bind figurative and non-figurative art together in a way that seems novel and genuine, but also point to the essentially interpretative "user-determined" nature of all visual perception – a point that resonates strongly with current theories of visual perception. For example, see Inner Visions by Semir Zeki, reviewed in LDR.

Gamboni concludes by pondering the wider social and political implications of ambiguous and indeterminate art, pointing out that previous critics have noted a correlation between closed unity of authoritarian art and the essentially progressive social attitudes associated with art that leaves meaning open to the viewer. Examples of official Nazi art on the one hand and the work the Nazis labelled as 'degenerate' on the other serve to illustrate the point. Citing Umberto Eco's caution about losing the distinction between plurality of possibility and undifferentiated chaos (p. 242), Gamboni closes by asserting the parallel between the Utopian ideals of an open art and that of social progress: "By aiming at equality, symmetry or even interchangeability in the positions of artist and spectator, the practice and theory of potential images correspond to the democratic ideal in the political order . . ." (p. 243).

The only criticism I can raise against Potential Images ironically serves to confirm the depth and importance of its central thesis. Given what one would expect from the subtitle, I was slightly disappointed by the relatively brief consideration given to Cubism, especially compared with that given to Odilon Redon (on whom the author has previously written extensively). There was little mention either of Arshile Gorky or Willem de Kooning, whose work seems particularly germane to the topic of ambiguity and indeterminacy. But these omissions only point up the scale of Gamboni's thesis; there is hardly any period of art, let alone modern art, that does not exploit the opportunities for seduction offered by the unfixed image. One gets the sense that this work could easily have run to three or four volumes, and still have had a lot left to say. It may be that the book's legacy is to stimulate a whole new area of art criticism, and indeed art history, which builds upon the solid, imaginative scholarship Gamboni presents here.

As a literary production, Potential Images excels in all respects. The use of images is generous and informative, the notes and references are concise and comprehensive, and the clarity and precision of the author's style radiates authority. This is a hugely important book.