Reni Celeste The starting point of this issue is the conviction that the artwork has been one of the most important sites for speculation on the concept of time, from systematic German aesthetics to contemporary visual and cultural studies. The multiple critiques within the theoretical fields of the past century can be said to center around a re-evaluation of the concept of temporality, from Nietzsche’s exaltation of Dionysian thought, to Bergson’s analysis of duration, Heidegger’s challenge to metaphysics, and Derrida’s notion of différance. The contemporary theory that has been the legacy of these critiques has continued to assert the fundamental importance of the interlacing of time and the artwork to the re-evaluation of thought. On one hand the work of art has been conceived as the arrest of time, of time frozen and possessed, and on the other as the vehicle itself of becoming, expressing a form of knowledge that exceeds the limits of systematic, linear thought. This issue does not seek to take a unified position on the question of the artwork’s relation to temporality, …

Andrei Molotiu In The Life of Forms in Art, the 1935 volume in which he summed up his theory of art, Henri Focillon argued against any art-historical explanation that tries to account for the evolution of artistic form through exclusively contextual, extrinsic factors. The art historian phrased his view in memorably epigrammatic form: “The most attentive study of the most homogenous milieu, of the most closely woven concatenation of circumstances, will not serve to give us the design of the towers of Laon.”1 From one who has entered our disciplinary shorthand under the rubric of “formalist,” such a statement can come as no surprise: Focillon, in this passage, could easily be interpreted as trying to eschew engagement with the concerns of what later came to be called “the social history of art,” as attempting to safeguard an idealized realm of pure form untainted by messy social realities. Interestingly enough, more recently, Focillon’s views have found a close echo in the work of a thinker who can not be so quickly relegated to the backwaters of our …

Amy Herzog “Existing not as a subject but as a work of art….”1 Gilles Deleuze, in his two books on film, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, proposes a revolutionary approach to film theory. Drawing on Deleuze’s own philosophy of repetition and difference and the work of Henri Bergson, the Cinema books extend these theories to foreground those aspects that are most essential to the medium: that film unfolds in time, and is comprised of ever-differentiating planes of movement. Deleuze’s writings as a whole resonate with correspondences between concepts of transformation, difference, and the forces of impersonal time. Bergson’s work is consistent with the thrust of this project, so Deleuze’s exploration of Bergson in this context seems, on the one hand, unquestionably valid. In addressing the cinema, however, Deleuze transposes these theories, which are inherently bound up in the shifting and unique movements of life, and uses them to discuss the mechanized and standardized movements of film, a means of reproducing or representing that life. How are we to account for Deleuze’s …

D. N. Rodowick To most, the title of this essay will seem paradoxical. For in his two books on cinema, Gilles Deleuze never mentions the concept of conceptual personae, a central concern of Chapter Three of What is Philosophy? And he writes even less on questions of sexual identification. Nonetheless, my parti pris here is the following: To think the question of ‘gender’ in relation to the time-image, we must pass through conceptual personae who may become, for their part, the unthought of sexual difference. This is an equally curious idea since conceptual personae have only an oblique relation with either characters or cinematic identification. They are philosophical figures. Their oblique relation to art should not be surprising since the objective of What is Philosophy? is to demonstrate the singularity of philosophy in its relations with art and science. This is why Deleuze and Guattari distinguish conceptual personae from, on one hand, aesthetic figures, and on the other, psycho-social types. Aesthetic figures are certainly close to what one might call filmic ‘characters.’ Constructed across the bodies and voices of actors through framing, …

Lori Wike “By nature, the photograph has something tautological about it: a pipe here is always and intractably a pipe. It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself…. (I didn’t yet know that this stubbornness of the Referent in always being there would produce the essence I was looking for).” “Every photograph is a certificate of presence.” –Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida1 “To be what it is, all writing must, therefore be capable of functioning in the radical absence of every empirically determined receiver in general. And this absence is not a continuous modification of presence, it is a rupture in presence, the ‘death’ or the possibility of the ‘death’ of the receiver inscribed in the structure of the mark…. What holds for the receiver holds also, for the same reasons, for the sender or producer.” –Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context”2 Roland Barthes, in his 1980 book Camera Lucida, and Jacques Derrida, in his 1977 essay “Signature, Event, Context,” are, in at least one respect, engaged in similar projects: both endeavor to …

William V. Ganis In Andy Warhol’s serial art, a media-reflexive gesture appears in the endless reproduction, dissemination, and simulacra made possible by photography and machines. Warhol’s serial work is the “unpresentable presentation”1 of infinite image repetition. It is this self-referentiality toward perpetual reproduction which gives these works their power and larger importance. In spite of his superficial naïvete, Warhol demonstrates self-awareness of his illimitable action, and presents this unpresentable infinity by implication. By completely covering the canvas with images, Warhol suggests that the picture plane continues ad infinitum and that there are always more images beyond the frame. One perceives more dollar bills, Coca-Cola bottles, and publicity photos of movie stars existing outside any one painting. Indeed, this implied repetition exterior to the painting takes place in the imagination. Gilles Deleuze points out that ‘repetition is itself in essence imaginary… it makes that which it contacts appear as elements or cases of repetition.”2 In any serial Warhol work, visual repetends may or may not exist in the work itself, rather the absent repetition of a work’s image …