Las Meninas in the Flesh
A soft challenge to the primacy of seeing things "in person"
I recently gave a talk in which I recounted how there can be some works of art — this is about visual art in particular — that can bear importance for someone even if that work has not been seen in person. Until just recently, Las Meninas, Diego Velázquez’s masterwork of portraiture and mutual regard, had long been one such work for me
I first learned about Las Meninas perhaps thirty years ago, when first reading Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (Les Mots et les choses in the original, published in 1966), and I suspect this is how many U.S. college students first encounter this work, even today. Foucault’s treatment of Las Meninas stands equal to classic examples of ekphrasis. But of course Foucault’s description is also an analysis, one which lays the groundwork for the very idea of the episteme — all that can be said and written, which is to say represented, in a given time — which Las Meninas serves both to illustrate and embody, if only as a break between two such periods (the Classical and the Modern in Foucault’s thinking).
That a work of art could condense a rich philosophical idea, that it could more than represent that idea, but could be shown to operate it, to be a manifestation of it, captured my imagination. I have always held that what makes art important — to me at least but I would argue in general and for others — is that at the end of the day it is about such ideas. The “experience” of the work is just one moment in the discovery and the working out of those ideas, and it need not be the most important moment or the only one that matters.
We continue to give prominence to a model of aesthetic experience that privileges the “in-person” above all else, however, and in my opinion this sensibility needs to be cast aside — the prominence, that is, not the experience itself. To be clear, this is not an argument for Instagram, or that all value in art today can be conferred by canny marketing practices, though these should not be discounted either. It’s simply to note that people will come to the art that matters (both in general and to them) through many different channels — images, arguments, recordings, retellings — and that artists and their advocates need to embrace all of those channels and, in fact, to manage them.
I also want to challenge somewhat the idea that the best art is that which exceeds our ideas of it, that good work is good because it cannot be described or lies “beyond” language in one respect or another. This argument indulges the Romantic idea that art’s value lies at the other end of rationality, an escape from “mind” (inevitably a privileging of the body, and dualism). Sure there is value there, but this spectrum is a misguided measuring stick. The sacred and the profane offer just two nodes of a single-axis way of thinking through and about art’s value, and not always the most interesting.
More interesting, I think, is encountering works of art through how other thinkers and artists have approached them, and here Las Meninas is no exception. Putting Foucault to the side for a moment, Velázquez’s painting plays a role in the origin story of Richard Serra’s sculptural practice as well.
Upon graduating from Yale in 1964, the story goes, Serra traveled around Europe (with Philip Glass) eventually making it to Madrid where he saw Las Meninas and experienced something of a conversion. Serra told Philip Lopate in 2004 that, upon seeing the work,
I was completely dumfounded because the space I was standing in was implicated in the space of the painting—as if there were a wall that had come down between the space of the painting and the space in front of the painting, which implicated the viewer in that space; now that hadn’t occurred to me before, the shift of subject and object…it really stopped me from making painting…I really thought that if there is going to be a subject and object shift where the subject, namely the viewer, can be part of the three dimensional construct then, I’d better start dealing with that.
Within four years Serra had moved the medium of sculpture well beyond the subject-object limits that the minimalism of Donald Judd and Robert Morris and, most importantly, Carl Andre had managed to recently redefine.
Recall too that Foucault published Les Mots et les choses in 1966, which means that his work on that book was likely underway in 1964. I like to imagine that the artist and the philosopher may have been contemplating Velázquez’s painting in the same weeks and months, with outcomes of arguably equal weight for their respective fields of practice.
Another artist and another temporal correspondence: In the same year that Serra was confessing his artistic conversion to Philip Lopate, Eve Sussman released 89 Seconds at Alcázar, a short film that imagines the action just prior to and following the scene captured in Las Meninas (for Game of Thrones fans, note that 89 Seconds features a young Peter Dinklage). I did not see the piece in 2004, when it was screened at the Whitney Biennial. I first learned of it when the public art organization Creative Time debuted Sussman and The Rufus Corporation’s Rape of the Sabine Women at the Armory Show in 2007, another moving-image work based on a painting, in this case Jacques-Louis David’s Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799), which imagines the drama of that history painting — part of the founding mythology of Rome — as a 1960s period piece.
Sussman et al made these painting pictures into a trilogy with whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir (2009-2011), a work that may one day stand, like Las Meninas does, at the break between two epistemes. Taking its cue from Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918), Sussman’s film interprets the Russian painter’s attempt to go beyond representation as a science fiction story about a geophysicist contracted by a mysterious corporation to do work in a foreign city. Just what that work is, or who the geophysicist is, never gets worked out, as time is tricky business in whiteonwhite.
What’s essential to understand about whiteonwhite is how it attempts to move beyond a dimension of Sussman’s own authorial intentions for it. As Sussman once told me, the editing of her Rape of the Sabine Women had been a lengthy and laborious process, one that she was not eager to repeat. If she was going to make a third film to complete the trilogy, it was going to require that she not have to sit in an editing suite for days and weeks on end.
Enter the algorithm. Every clip and accompanying track in whiteonwhite is a separate digital file tagged with some salient feature (or set of features) of that file. When the work is screened, the algorithm “chooses” what and how much to present and when to present it based on what is playing and what has already appeared. The result is something more than mere film collage, but less than strict dramatic narrative. (Hollywood types would probably recognize in it echoes of the more elliptical moments from the films of Terrence Malick.)
One implication of the editing algorithm is that whatever story there is to tell isn’t being told by the film’s creator, at least not in the conventional sense. If the film frame is the limit of the author’s intention in space (what’s in and what’s out of the film is a matter of what the filmmaker chooses to show), then the edit, the “cut", is conventionally the limit of the author’s intention in time (what comes before and after is equally a matter of the story that the filmmaker wants to tell). If the choice of what cuts to make is up to the algorithm, then a significant dimension of the filmmaker’s intentions — the dramatic arc, say — are no longer her own.
But this is not even the only implication, nor the most interesting. Because from the audience’s perspective, there is a very real sense with whiteonwhite that no two people will ever see the same film. The combinations of clips and tracks that the algorithm can serve up are so extensive as to make the work in some sense limitless. Of course two people could have something close to the same experience of the work if they were co-present and enter and leave a screening at the same time. But to put these kinds of strictures on the experience of a work of art is somewhat perverse. As if to say because Serra and Foucault did not see Las Meninas on the same day, at the same hour, while standing in roughly the same exact spot in front of the work, that they did not see the same painting.
There are arguments to be made that, at bottom, everyone’s experience of everything — even the same thing — is different from everyone else’s, but that’s not what I’m trying to get at when I suggest that the in-person experience of a work of art is not the most important and so should not be given priority over all others. whiteonwhite is a work that can be experienced in-person, but that experience of it will always differ in fundamental ways (and not solipsistic ones) from someone else’s experience of it, such that even Vimeo clips of it, or first- or second-hand accounts of it, are in some sense equally important and perhaps primary experiences of it as well.
My own encounter with Las Meninas, the occasion for these reflections, took place this past July 13th. Jet-lagged and hot (it was regularly hitting 105 degrees Fahrenheit in Madrid that week) I made my way through the embarrassment of the Prado’s riches to get to the center room where the painting holds pride of place. Photographs aren’t allowed, mostly to protect other visitors’ experience of the work, which is welcome, lest the painting become a selfie backdrop. I took a quick snap anyway, and suffered the reprimand. I was impressed with the lengths of time that my fellow visitors were dedicating to looking at the work, until I realized that most were listening to audio guides streaming through their phones. No judgement there. It’s a work that calls out for good narration. A multichannel experience.
To enhance it further, an enterprising curator at The Prado might think to install Sussman’s 89 Seconds on an adjacent wall, and perhaps Serra’s One-Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969) in the middle of the room, just to add a frisson of threat to those pilgrims who choose to station themselves opposite the central, sovereign point of Velázquez’s royal portrait.
Las Meninas is far from a let down, but I did not find it epiphanic either. Good reproductions do it justice. There are no details or surface incidents that pop only in person. Mostly it meets expectations. And pilfered pictures like mine, or better, Thomas Struth’s more self-consciously photographic projects, give one a good sense of scale and what kinds of crowds may be on hand (but note that the Prado galleries had more up-market wall treatments when Struth was shooting in 2005; today they are more appropriately painted austerity taupe). When I got back to my hotel I googled up a PDF of Foucault’s text and read it again. Just as good. No better. No worse.
If you find your way to Madrid, by all means go and see Las Meninas. It won’t be time wasted (unless you fail to buy advance tickets and have to wait in line). But if and when you do go, I have one important piece of advice: don’t miss Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights in the basement.
Just came across this... Great read, Jonathan! And so nice to see all three pieces of the Rufus Trilogy discussed here, via your articulations and insights. (I worked on all three, and we discussed whiteonwhite all those years ago in NYC....) Cheers—Jeff