“we are looking at a picture in which the painter is in turn looking out at us” but the “painter is turning his eyes towards us only in so far as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject. We, the spectators, are an additional factor. Though greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself.”
“We are observing ourselves being observed by the painter, and made visible to his eyes by the same light that enables us to see him.”
“the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other’s terms: it is I’m vain that we can say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say. And it is in vain that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying”
“The entire picture is looking out at a scene for which it is itself a scene.”
“the profound invisibility of what one sees is inseparable from the invisibility of the person seeing”
Foucault and the Canvas (Friday, September 12, 2014, 7:21 AM)
Your pun got me thinking. Canvas was made by some programmers to be a web platform for collaboration. Institutions can sign up and so we have SFU Canvas, but it could just as well be UBC Canvas or CIA Canvas. It’s a platform, or, as is obvious, a canvas—a canvas like the one portrayed in Las Meninas, in that we have the frame, the structure, but the actual surface is blank (for us, or rather, the programmer) because we cannot see it. The canvas is just a tool, an implement, from this perspective, rather than a piece of art. But back to the programmers. In this case, they take the place of the actual artist who exists simultaneously with the spectator external to the painting. We, the students, or any other intended users of the platform, are the artist(s), the ones meant to create something on the canvas. Then, all the periphery, the princess, the lord and lady, the man in the stairwell, are, like professors or other staff, there to facilitate the scene for the artist to construct. Without them the painting itself loses it’s structure, the structure which will be in itself represented on the micro-structure of the canvas-on-easel. In the mirror, then, we see the “true” representation of the scene as invisaged by the programmers (and spectators and participants), contrasted with the null space of the actual painting. The painting may actually look like the image in the mirror, but it could just as well be entirely different, an artistic rendering, rather than a “true” representation. This is the interstitial space captured by Foucault’s triangle. We, as the artists who wield the tool of Canvas, have subjective power over the canvas, because our minds, our artistic capacities, can only be accessed by the spectator if we turn the easel and show them. I suppose the question is, then, do we? Should we? The analogy broke down a long while ago but I think Foucault wouldn’t have minded.