Toward a/Cloud/-less Art
Damisch begins with a critical analysis of the attempt by artists to use linear perspective to “draw” clouds. This is impossible according to Damisch, “no ‘cloud’ can be drawn with a pointed instrument.” He continues: “The reason why cloud does not encourage drawing is not so much itsshape, but rather its instability and evanescence” (190). This, it seems, is why Damisch has chosen the cloud as a pictorial system to analyze. Clouds resist the historical use of perspective in the West, allowing them to be a point of resistance to that pictorial tradition. In addition, Damisch states that there isnothing terribly radical about the so-called radical approach of someone like Turner whose “art is still governed by the same rules as his predecessors”(191). For a radical break with tradition, we have to wait until the coming of Cézanne, but before that Damisch, in order to “introduce the question of modern paining in terms that are truly dialectic and materialist,” takes an intellectual trip to China.
Earlier in this chapter, Damisch stated that European painters had failed in “the expressionof buoyancy and space in the sky” due to their lack of true understanding ofthe limitations of perspective (191). However, the Chinese painters of the 18 th Century, accordingto Damisch, seem to have succeeded “in getting at the principle of the universe ”that captures something cosmic and true about the relationship between Earth and Sky (202). Yet, it is not so much that the Chinese did not fail, but that they succeeded at all. It does seem that the Chinese artists werefaced with similar issues in depicting /cloud/. Damisch explores this issue in the section “Those who draw clouds andthose who blow them.” As a result, he asks the question: “Does this mean that in China, as in the West, /cloud/defies the order of linearity, and that the way in which it operates inlandscape painting can be defined and appreciated in terms of drawing/color (ifnot the “linear”/pictorial”) opposition…(Damisch 203-204)? The resulting conclusion of Damisch’s study here is that outlines (the results of drawing whether European or Chinese) do not serve the representation of clouds. Still, however, the Chinese by the 18 th Century had been ableto distinguish themselves by formulating at least one way of depicting /cloud/that did not rely on outlines – for the West it was yet to come.
The part of the chapter that focuses on Chinese art is rather extensive and Damisch gives agreat deal of the theoretical framework of Chinese art via Chinese philosophysuch as the theory of Yin/Yang (214-218). The most interesting of the discussions inthis section, however, is the segments on “Opening Chaos” and “The Inscriptionof Emptiness.” These sections point tosome of the differences between the Eastern/Western divide as Damisch states,the West has “stubbornly rejected the idea of emptiness” (225). Moreover, rationalism and order are theunderlying philosophies of Western artists’ use of linear perspective as aconstruct of the classicism that underscores the issue concerning Damisch’s/cloud/, yet the West would not continue to hold those values as absolute. By the late 19 th Century, with the advent of Modernism, Cézanne would further solidify the movement away from linear perspective in the representation of space and landscape. “Cézanne finally enabled the letter of the picture to triumph over the cipher of representation” (Damisch 227).
In the end, although Cézanne is given credit by Damisch as being the definitive breaking point with the Westernhistorical tradition of representation, the fulfillment of the dialectical materialism that Damisch finally states he is searching for is found in theRussian Avant-garde movement Suprematism. Damisch concludes his history of the cloud with a story of its rejection. Finally, European Modernism, as an outgrowth of the Russian movement, “at last liberated [painting] from theclouds that used to burden it” (231). Yet, like a clear day that can never last, Modernism could not sustain the ideal forever. Clouds move back in and we anxiously await the skies to clear once again.
David W. Nees 2004-2012 (This may be expanded in the near future.)
