ROSALIND KRAUSS
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Further, Degas had mechanized the creation of the image. The print he
pulled had gone through a process that removed it from his 'direct control,
so that, like the photographic image, it looked back at
him
with a strange
opacity-an image that had reproduced itself leaving him with the job of
deciphering it . To decipher the image, Degas applied the colored strokes of
pastel. Because the lithographic ink of the monotype base is oily, these
strokes refused to blend or fuse with one another, contracting instead into
granular beads of chalky color that appeared to separate themselves from the
underlying forms . The result is an internally bifurcated image: a residual
structure of black and white forms maintain their own coherence on one
level; on another are notations of color perception that rise in front of the
monochrome shapes like a mist.
Until the monotype gave Degas a way of really absorbing the message
of photography, he was not an Impressionist. Before the mid-1870s he was
an inspired naturalist painter. The 1873
Cotton Exchange, New Orleans-in
which a dozen or so men assemble in a large office-is a splendid, very spe–
cial work; but it is not an Impressionist one. In the
Cotton Exchange,
texture
is seamlessly integrated to a sense of underlying mass, and the space could
have been laid out by Euclid. Only after the monotypes does one feel Degas
consistently forcing a separation, a rift, between the masses of bodies and
the particles that stand for the optical recording of their texrures.
It
is as
if
the eye, looking at the figures, could only catch their surfaces, because the
figures
themselves
were looking the other way.
Degas' final, most extreme production ofmonotypes is a group of land–
scapes of the 1890s. They have the quality of a completely inward-looking,
imaginary space. Radically flattened, exquisitely grained, they seem to
stretch over the eyes of the viewer like an opaque film. Within that film, the
image has reproduced itself according to its own laws; we see the spread,
drip, and stipple of ink recording the invisible pressure of a smooth plate
against the irregularities of laid paper .
What photography had revealed to Degas and Monet was the remote–
ness of perception from reality . Excluded from the inherent organization of
narure seen as distanced and self-absorbed, the alternative they found was a
unity forged from their own corresponding introspection. Their art becomes
the first chapter of that compulsion to make art from the didactic organiza–
tion of perception that is the text of modernism.
Finally, then, Impressionism feels neither so remote from the formal
procedures of recent art , nor so alien from the narcissistic considerations that
are their by-product. The erotic component of certain sculpture of the last
ten years
(I
am thinking of Hesse, Judd, Morris, Nauman and Serra) com–
bines the sensuousness and frigidity that is the narcissistic subtext of the
