The art of not describing: Vermeer - the detail and the patch

Didi-Huberman, Georges

doi:10.1177/095269518900200201

Cited by 71 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…On the one hand, it is a matter of exercising the imagination, of attending to nuances, ambiguities, idiosyncrasies, of looking into patches, blind spots, areas of reduced visibility. In other texts – to which this argument will return later on – the philosopher insists on the work done by ‘patches’ and other ‘formless zones’ (Didi-Huberman, 1985: 44; 1989: 149). It is therefore a matter of taking the partiality of images as a trigger to reframe the understanding of conflict, rather than reducing images to mirrors of analytical positions formulated and organized elsewhere.…”

Section: The Turn and Its Limitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This article offers a non-representational approach, which can be defined as the attempt to move beyond the separation between image and reality, by thinking of images as having impacts on our everyday lives. Finally, this article introduces the term ‘patch’ – borrowed from art historian Georges Didi-Huberman (1989) – to describe how the opacity and excess of art practice vis-à-vis instrumental logic brings us closer to an understanding of conflict as a dynamic social phenomenon.…”

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confidence: 99%

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The patch as method: The arts’ contribution towards understandings of conflict

Rugo

2023

International Political Science Review

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This article asks: how do art practice and research give form to changing dynamics of conflict? Its argument is two-fold: art’s contribution can be developed from empirical considerations (what art finds out), and from methodological ones (how art finds something out). Bringing in art practice and the research methods it informs into political science helps understand conflict and its changes: by engaging simultaneously with the interaction between the collective and the personal, art practice and research elucidates those complex and layered narratives used by various actors in conflict that often resist approaches rooted in social and political sciences. By paying attention to everyday interactions and emphasizing dynamism, art provides a different way to chart changes in armed conflict. Art documents discourses that are difficult to communicate otherwise and allows us to detect and engage with the grey areas, transformations, processes and ambivalences of conflicts that escape neat categorizations.

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Section: The Turn and Its Limitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

The patch as method: The arts’ contribution towards understandings of conflict

Rugo

2023

International Political Science Review

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“…In Vermeer's painting The Lacemaker, Georges Didi-Huberman singles out one detail, a dark shapeless patch between the lacemaker's fingers that could be an accidental brushstroke (Didi-Huberman 1989). It is not an absence but a dense zone of "material opacity" (Didi-Huberman 1989: 153).…”

Section: The Holementioning

confidence: 99%

Monumental Names

Oustinova-Stjepanovic¹

2022

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What stands behind the propensity to remember victims of mass atrocities by their personal names? Grounded in ethnographic and archival research with The Last Address and Memorial, one of the oldest independent archives of Soviet political repressions in Moscow, the book examines a version of archival activism that is centred on various practices of documentation and commemoration of many dead victims of historical violence in Russia to understand what kind of historicity is produced when a single name is added to an endless list. What do acts of accumulation of names of the dead affirm when they are concretised in monuments and performance events? The key premise is that multimodal inscriptions of names of the dead entail a political, aesthetic, and conceptual movement between singularity and multitude that honours each dead name yet conveys the scale of a mass atrocity without reducing it to a number. Drawing on anthropology, history, philosophy, and aesthetic theory, the book yields a new perspective on the politics of archival and historical justice while it critically engages with the debates on relations and distinctions between names and numbers of the dead, monumental art and its political effects, law and history, image and text, and the specific one and the infinite many.

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“…75 The distorted junction of walls in the background, which disobey the laws of perspective, further supports this modification and may be characterized as an example of what Georges Didi-Huberman terms the 'patch', or what David Peters Corbett defines as the 'indexical, nondescriptive, and dissemblant part' of the painting where an artist negates or clouds the mimetic order. 76 The concept of the 'patch' gestures to an evocative description of Vermeer's View of Delft in Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu , specifically the enigmatic detail of a 'Petit pan de mur jaune'. 77 Didi-Huberman defines Proust's 'pan' as '[…] a slab of paint that has an almost explosive power; it is paint considered as a "precious" and traumatic material cause'.…”

Section: Le Verre De Porto (A Dinnermentioning

confidence: 99%

Mobility and the Matter of Memory: John Singer Sargent's Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife

Stone¹

2019

Art History

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The art of not describing: Vermeer - the detail and the patch

Cited by 71 publications

References 1 publication

The patch as method: The arts’ contribution towards understandings of conflict

The patch as method: The arts’ contribution towards understandings of conflict

Monumental Names

Mobility and the Matter of Memory: John Singer Sargent's Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife

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