On the Value of Transparency

1 When reading works of art that come close to perfection, we experience sensations about which we say to ourselves something like: “I’m missing that, I should see reality that way, this should be part of my experience, I should complete my experience with this.”

2 «All our knowledge is based on sensations»¹, and we know them through their figuration.

3 Can we say we know them «with-science»? These sensations seem to be discrete, to have a die-cut shape—but inside they seem to be continuous, a monotone.

4 But then what do we gain by picturing them to ourselves, something for memory?, is consciousness just a stone wall with which we conceive? The question is whether the images, the interferences we see on the wall…

5 Perhaps it would be better to say: «All our knowledge is based on sensations,» and we know them by conceiving them. Would it be better to add at the end: conceiving them with a stone wall, with the earth, with a receiver, with a detection panel?

6 Perhaps «conception” is still a concept that looks at things too much “from the outside,» sees the Samurai in the stone wall², the result, but not the process (if there is a process). It is too immaculate a concept, appearing out of nowhere and so seeming to repeat the question.

7 Reading An der Zeitmauer. The prophet feels himself to be a plague bird. The rejection of the new spreads like a radiation convinced there are errors everywhere, and only with time is it cured of this error.

On the other hand, whoever, in this sense, has acquired a taste for «living dangerously» can offer nothing else with which to «be able» to be satisfied—nor be satisfied with the obvious truths of those who have not yet acquired «the taste for dancing in the fire»³. Even art can be too safe an enclosure for the author.

8 What does the rendezvous say of something that works both coming and going, from one side as from the other, what does it say?

9 «Conception» is a global view of a process; it already implies two parts. But the surrealist picture we conceive with the clouds or with a stone wall does not come from the clouds or the wall, it comes from us; the wall acts as an emplacement structure, a handhold, virgin ground.

10 It is interesting that once that surrealist picture has been conceived on a given wall, we cannot look at that wall again without seeing that picture: its memory is inevitable.

11 In order to conceive another picture, virgin ground is needed; the previous wall is occupied by the previous picture.

12 Still, what the wall contributes is no small thing: the shapes of the stones, their reliefs and hollows, the different shades of ocher, the shadows and bright patches the light produces on the stones—all of this determines the work of art.

Even the material determines its duration: what is conceived with the clouds does not last the same as what is conceived with the wall.

The invariance of the work of art depends not only on the material of the emplacement structure, but also on our perspective: if, for example, we get very close to the wall, we see other features of the stone and the picture can become distorted or disappear; the illusion is lost there.

13 Of course, we have not painted this picture yet; only we can see it. If we gave someone a photo of the wall, others probably would not be able to see it; they would see only a wall, or whatever they conceived with it. In this we see something that makes painting possible, something of its value, as much as that of writing.

14 In the work of art we can show others conceptions that otherwise only we can easily see.

17 Can this be put down to the fact that we have not changed?: do we need virgin ground because we do not change, or because our dynamic nature is constituted by the transparency of its constituents?: these two things are not opposed: invariant dynamics is not a contradiction; this is what quantum physics keeps finding, a specter, a ghost.

18 Is the opposition between discrete and continuous a false opposition?, in any case does it lack transparency?