ROSALIND KRAUSS
103
one thinks of as modernist, the video artist searches for images that will
reveal his basic procedures. And what he finds are images that invariably
function as analogues to the erotic encounter with oneself that is narcissism.
The contact one has through video is with the self-forever immediate and
forever distanced. The satisfactions of that art form do not seem to contain
anywhere the promise of contact with others.
But the world to which the Impressionists turned, the world they re–
corded in one canvas after another, seems to have been one of
~ontinuous
extroversion . The sign of its gregariousness-printing itself on those scenes
of luncheon parties, urban crowds , racecourses, and riverbanks-is the sign
of the exteriority oflight : of the sun 's impressing upon all those subjects the
stamp of its own independence .
It
was as though sunlight became an em–
blem of everything that is external, everything that is given, everything that
is distinct from the inner space of consciousness.
Yet the discussions of Impressionism always bog down in what appear
to be the internal contradictions of the style. Because with Impressionism,
gregariousness contains the seeds of a growing introversion . The heightened
realism of the Impressionist subject brought with it an equally heightened
sense of artifice, diverting one's attention form the outer world to the inner
processes of its depiction . Zola, quick to champion the Impressionists, was
as quick to back away once the style came into its own . Where he had earlier
seen the promise of a developing naturalism, he began to observe a growing
sketchiness, which had developed to the point where the subjects of pictures
were betrayed by the fractured crust of color that seemed to overlay them.
As Meyer Schapiro once remarked, it was as if Zola watched the Impression–
ists turn his cherished "slice of life" into a "slice of cake."
Right from the start, the Impressionists' move away from the studio
and out into the world was accompanied by tendencies subversive to their
own ambitions for realism. As Zola saw, pictorial illusion broke down into a
display of the picture 's physical parts: deposits of pigment , trackmarks of
the brush, occasional patches of bare white canvas. Furthermore, the bor–
rowing of stylistic devices (from the Japanese print, from Dutch painting,
from photography) combined with the heavy painting and divided brush–
work to create a barrier between the viewer and what he wished to see.
Degas' portrait subjects or his images of spectators at the races contrast with
their surroundings in the striking silhouettes that we associate with the for–
mal contractions ofJapanese art. It is impossible not to see this obtrusion of
"style ," and to sense it as an internal brake on the realist painter's attempt
to
connect with his subject. It is as if, built into the Impressionist's demand
for direct contact with his subject, there were already doubts about the
feasibility of that demand.
