![]() They are fast food for the eyes, and mostly junk food. Most images pass by and through us so quickly that we scarcely notice them. Of course this infinity of potential aspects in a picture is rarely experienced. (Think here of Leonardo's advice to painters to look at the random splashes of mud left on plaster walls by passing carts, and to meditate on the forms of figures and landscapes that seem to emerge from them or Nelson Goodman's notion of the "density" and "repleteness" of analog symbol systems). As William Blake puts it, infinity is located in the "Definite & Determinate Identity" of the "bounding line," and not just the endless, empty space of perspective or the void of the unmarked space, the blankness or chaos of potential out of which images emerge. It is also right there on the surface, in the infinity of aspects that a line or color or blurred erasure can provoke. This is not just a matter of the infinite or indefinite spatial depth that is suggested the moment a surface is marked and thus opened as a space for perception and reflective thought. #Define metaimage series#First, it suggests that any picture is at least potentially a kind of vortex or "black hole" that can "suck in" the consciousness of a beholder, and at the same time (and for the same reason) "spew out" an infinite series of reflections. The ever-present potentiality of the metapicture has several implications for the rest of your question. This third meaning implies, of course, that any picture whatsoever (a simple line-drawing of a face, a multi-stable image like the Duck-Rabbit, Velasquez's Las Meninas) can become a metapicture, a picture that is used to reflect on the nature of pictures. Third, the picture that is framed, not inside another picture, but within a discourse that reflects on it as an exemplar of "picturality" as such. ![]() Second, the picture that contains another picture of a different kind, and thus re-frames or recontextualizes the inner picture as "nested" inside of a larger, outer picture. ![]() (Technically, I gather, the term first appeared in reference to heraldry, where the division of a coat of arms into increasingly diminutive sectors containing other coats of arms traces the evolution of a genealogy). This is most routinely and literally seen in the effect of the "mise en abime," the Quaker Oats box that contains a picture of the Quaker Oats box, that contains yet another picture of a Quaker Oats box, and so on, to infinity. In Picture Theory I tried to distinguish three different kinds of metapictures: First, the picture that explicitly reflects on, or "doubles" itself, as in so many drawings by Saul Steinberg, in which the production of the picture we are seeing re-appears inside the picture. Bal calls for a "qualified return to ‘close reading' that has gone out of style" (10) in What Do Pictures Want?, you suggest that answers to the central questions of visuality "must be sought in the specific, concrete images that most conspicuously embody the anxiety over image-making and image-smashing in our time." We'd like you to comment on this, but perhaps you first could talk a little bit about what you in Picture Theory call the "metapicture," since that conceptualization made us think about Bal's notion of a "thinking" object in the first place? In What Do Pictures Want? you describe critical practice as a way of responding to a "resonant" object, and this made us think about Mieke Bal's description of the object that "talks back" in her Travelling Concepts of the Humanities (8-10).
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