Cheryl Meszaros
Marked as Withdrawn
- The Ground of the Image
- Jean-Luc Nancy, Fordham University Press,* New York, 2005
- Multiple Arts: The Muses II
- Jean-Luc Nancy, Stanford University Press,* Stanford, 2006
- Ruth Beer: Scenes Unseen
- Western Front, Vancouver, 8 July to 12 August, 2006
The image […] is given in an opening that indissociably forms its presence and its strangeness.1
Jean-Luc Nancy—that gentle yet fierce philosopher of sense and community—has turned his formidable gaze toward the arts many times throughout his life. In each of these encounters, he offers the arts as access—access to sense. This sense, though, does not “appeal to sense as prior content; it does not communicate any sense, but makes it.”2 Nancy performs this startling arrival of sense for us with his texts. To watch these texts perform their melodic dance of precision—to watch them make sense—is to be touched, however fleetingly, by thinking itself. It is this gentle touch of Nancy’s thought as it whirls toward sense that I pursue here, following one line of thought through two of his books and landing, resting for a moment, in the company of a Scenes Unseen, a recent installation by Vancouver artist Ruth Beer at the Western Front Gallery in Vancouver.
Nancy’s thought works toward sense by un-working the stability of meaning that clusters around evocative words such as surprise, the distinct, and by contrasting it to conventional notions of Sense. In The Muses, he takes up the surprise:
Man began with the strangeness of his own humanity. Or with the humanity of his own strangeness. Through this strangeness he presented himself: he presented it, or figured it to himself. Such was the self-knowledge of man, that his presence was that of a stranger […] The schema of man is the monstration of this marvel: self outside of self, the outside standing for self, and the being surprised in face of self. Painting paints this surprise. The surprise is painting.3
This surprising strangeness of painting, this firm and persistent alterity that animates The Muses, re-surfaces in The Ground of the Images as both the figure and process of the distinct. The distinct is a force of separation, demarcating what is set aside, removed, cut off,4 operating as the mark and marker of difference. The project of the distinct is the creation of a sacred distance, a substantive alterity that is opposed to maintaining religious _bonds_—be they with others or oneself, with nature or with the gods. A “scared” distinction begins when art begins “not in religion but set apart.”5
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About this Article
Marked as Withdrawn was first published in Fillip 5 in Spring 2007. For more articles from this issue, see the Table of Contents.
Cheryl Meszaros is a lecturer and museum consultant specializing in interpretation. She holds a PhD in Education and is the recent recipient of a J. Paul Getty Museum Scholar Grant.
Notes
image: Ruth Beer. Courtesy of the artist and the Western Front, Vancouver
The views expressed in Fillip are not necessarily those of the editorial board or the Projectile Publishing Society.
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