Rosalind Krauss
IMPRESSIONISM:
The Narcissism of Light
What can Impressionism mean to an age of narcissists? With
what kind of directness can Impressionism speak to a sensibility as inwardly
turned as ours? Generosity rises from the surface of Impressionist paintings .
One finds it not only in the splendor of the color, but in that sense of bene–
volence towards objects which is just as important a feature of the style.
Any extended contact with Impressionism-such as the one afforded by
the recent centenary exhibition mounted cooperatively by the Louvre and
the Metropolitan Museum-seems to suggest that nothing could connect
our own sensibilities to that last great phase of realism, except, possibly,
nostalgia. The procedures of our own art involve a constant attempt to mir–
ror the organization of consciousness , resulting in works that function in the
closed circuit of self-reference . With modernist art , the intensity of aesthetic
pleasure is increasingly hard to separate from the pleasures of self-absorp–
tion, until in certain forms, like video , the contemplative act takes on the
quality of narcissism . Video-the latest dalliance of the avant-garde with
technology-uses nonbroadcast television for aesthetic ends . The two most
common strategies of the video artist are to record the image of himself
recording himself or to manipulate his equipment until it records its own
internal capacities for scanning . Therefore, when the avant-garde filmmaker
Hollis Frampton describes the procedures by which video explores its own
being , we are not surprised that he evokes images of auto-erotic display .
He writes :
But let video contemplate itself, and it produces , under endless guises,
not identical avatars of its two-dimensional 'container ,' but rather ex–
quisitely
specific
variations upon its own most typical
content.
I mean
that in the mandalas of feedback, graphically diagrammed illusions of
alternating thrust and withdrawal, most often spiraling ambiguously
like a Duchamp pun , video confirms, finally , a generic eroticism.
Attempting to produce that kind of acknowledgment of the medium
