“We Have Never Been Byzantine: On Analogy,” in Byzantium/Modernism, ed. Roland Betancourt and...

iii

Byzantium/Modernism

The Byzantine as Method in Modernity

Edited by

Roland Betancourt Maria Taroutina

LEIDEN | BOSTON

This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV

vContentsContents

Contents

Acknowledgments IXPreface XIList of Illustrations XVList of Contributors XIXExplanation of the Cover XXIII

Part 1Byzantium and Modernism

Introduction: Byzantium and Modernism 1Maria Taroutina

Section 1 The Avant-Gardes and Their Counter Movements

1 Modernism’s Byzantium Byzantium’s Modernism 15Robert S. Nelson

2 Kazimir Malevich and the Liturgical Tradition of Eastern Christianity 37

Myroslava M. Mudrak

Section 2 Modernism’s Precursors

3 Arts and Crafts and the ‘Byzantine’: The Greek Connection 75Dimitra Kotoula

4 Archaeology of Decadence: Uncovering Byzantium in Victorien Sardou’s Theodora 102

Elena N. Boeck

Section 3 Byzantine Tactics, Modernist Strategies in Architectural Discourse

5 Abstraction’s Economy: Hagia Sophia in the Imaginary of Modern Architecture 135

Tulay Atak


vi Contents

6 Byzantine Architecture: A Moving Target? 163Robert Ousterhout

Part 2The Slash as Method

Introduction: The Slash as Method 179Roland Betancourt

Section 4Reading across Time: Modern Subjects, Byzantine Objects

7 Byzantium and the Modernist Subject: The Case of Autobiographical Literature 195

Stratis Papaioannou

8 One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish: Byzantine Visual Structures in the Light of Twentieth-Century Practice and Theory 212

Anthony Cutler

Section 5 Byzantine New Media: The Photographic and Filmic Icon

9 Iconicity of the Photographic Image: Theodore of Stoudios and André Bazin 237

Devin Singh

10 Tarkovsky: Embodying the Screen 254Marie-José Mondzain

Section 6 Presence, Representation, and the Gaze: The Byzantine at the Ends of Modernity

11 ‘Action-Paradise’ and ‘Readymade Reliquaries’: Eccentric Histories in/of Recent Russian Art 271

Jane A. Sharp

12 Lacan and Byzantine Art: In the Beginning was the Image 311Rico Franses


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13 Beyond Representation/The Gift of Sight 330Charles Barber

CODA

14 We Have Never been Byzantine: On Analogy 349Glenn Peers

Select Bibliography 361Index 367

ContentsContents vAcknowledgments ixPreface: A Mosaic Approach xiList of Illustrations xvList of Contributors xixExplanation of the Cover xxiiipart 1 xxvByzantium and Modernism xxvIntroduction to Part 1 1Introduction: Byzantium and Modernism 1Maria Taroutina 1Section 1 13The Avant-Gardes and Their Counter Movements 13Chapter 1 15Modernism’s Byzantium Byzantium’s Modernism 15Robert S. Nelson 15Chapter 2 37Kazimir Malevich and the Liturgical Tradition of Eastern Christianity 37Myroslava M. Mudrak 37Section 2 73Modernism’s Precursors 73Chapter 3 75Arts and Crafts and the ‘Byzantine’: The Greek Connection 75Dimitra Kotoula 75Chapter 4 102Archaeology of Decadence: Uncovering Byzantium in Victorien Sardou’s Theodora 102Elena Boeck 102Section 3 133Byzantine Tactics, Modernist Strategies in Architectural Discourse 133Chapter 5 135Abstraction’s Economy: Hagia Sophia in the Imaginary of Modern Architecture 135Tulay Atak 135Chapter 6 163Byzantine Architecture: A Moving Target? 163Robert Ousterhout 163part 2 177The Slash as Method 177Introduction: The Slash as Method 179Roland Betancourt 179Section 1 193Reading across Time: Modern Subjects, Byzantine Objects 193Chapter 7 195Byzantium and the Modernist Subject: The Case of Autobiographical Literature 195Stratis Papaioannou 195Chapter 8 212One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish: Byzantine Visual Structures in the Light of Twentieth-Century Practice and Theory 212Anthony Cutler 212Section 2 235Byzantine New Media: The Photographic and Filmic Icon 235Chapter 9 237Iconicity of the Photographic Image: Theodore of Stoudios and André Bazin 237Devin Singh 237Chapter 10 254Tarkovsky: Embodying the Screen 254Marie-José Mondzain 254Section 3 269Presence, Representation, and the Gaze: The Byzantine and the Ends of Modernity 269Chapter 11 271‘Аction-Paradise’ and ‘Readymade Reliquaries’: Eccentric Histories in/of Recent Russian Art 271Jane A. Sharp 271Chapter 12 311Lacan and Byzantine Art: In the Beginning was the Image 311Rico Franses 311Chapter 13 330Beyond Representation/The Gift of Sight 330Charles Barber 330CODA 347Chapter 14 349We Have Never been Byzantine: On Analogy 349Glenn Peers 349Select Bibliography 361Index 367


349We Have Never been Byzantine: On Analogy

Chapter 14

We Have Never been Byzantine: On Analogy

Glenn Peers

Still a modern conceit: honor passing to the prototype, the classic position for explaining the non-essential relation of an icon to what it depicts, which found its first Christian statement in the fourth century. The object does not receive honor, for that misdirection would be idolatry, and so the object serves as a transit zone, a conducting wire to the divine—that object loses its own being. The details of this divine economy, particularly how ‘representation’ changes the prototype, are never fully explored.1 And perhaps Georges Didi-Huberman is right to bring up the possibility that representation kills with its substitution magic.2 This explanation of the dynamics between humans and icons still ap-plies in theological and social contexts, and it signals a constant vigilance nec-essary before charismatic objects in charged situations.3

No absence exists in an object, thing, or situation. Faced with inevitable presence, so often greater than our own self, one searches for meaning in rela-tions. All the essays in this volume take us to a past that is overwhelmingly present, and in the best sense, they lead us to no truth in text or excavated, now-revealed insight. Rather, to my mind, they give us stimmungen, feeling, mood, atmosphere, because we have no real key to understanding Byzantine/modern here. The mood for giving ourselves over in body and feeling, and

* Roland Betancourt read this essay and made fascinating comments on it; I thank him sincerely for that engagement. This note was written while I was a senior fellow at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, and I would like to thank the directors and my colleagues for providing such a stimulating and comfortable environment in which to work. In the course of the semester, I came to know, a little, Harun Farocki, and his passing during this time is a deeply sad loss for us all, since we need his extraordinary work now more than ever.

1 Asked by Michael T. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York and London, 1993).

2 Georges Didi-Hubermann, “How to Open Your Eyes,” in Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom? trans. Patrick Kremer (London, 2009), 46–47.

3 This essay also relies in obvious ways on the work of Bruno Latour, and I would cite here only a recent translation, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, trans. Catherine Porter and Heather Maclean (Durham, N.C. and London, 2010), particularly p. 101, where Latour argues that religion does not speak of things, but from things—entities, agencies, situations, sub-stances, relations, experiences, whatever is the word—that are highly sensitive to the ways in which they are talked about (his emphases).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004300019_017


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finding a new ethical center in our historical studies and writing is found in relations. The substance and reality of the world is also relation, and maybe our work can now be guided more fully by it than we have allowed it to up to this point.4

We so easily overstep the boundaries between ourselves and the world we imitate. Pace Benjamin, our world still possesses magical correspondences and analogies, familiar to ancient peoples. Indeed, analogy may be one of our most fundamental tools to make sense of the world: “Nature creates similarities.”5 But we create them more fully, energetically, instinctively, and we still fight them, because analogy pushes back against our explanations of ourselves as distinctive bodies. Humanity has this analogical capacity, as a gift in Benja-min’s terms, to see resemblances, and this gift is directly related to the compul-sion “to become and behave like something else (ähnlich zu werden und sich zu verhalten).” Restless, unsatisfied, we are always trying to Other ourselves to different ways of being. Language is not a reliable means to necessary mimicry, but things are.

Occasionally, Byzantine analogies have served us well: as we seek similari-ties, which nature has already created, we find the ones we need at the right moment, mostly. Those analogies, as we learn here in this book, have provided strategic ways for us “to become and behave like something else.” Every point in the past permits its return. Byzantine allowed an othering to any number of positions. Religion, faith, devotional practices are among the first aspects in certain contexts in which confessional or ethnic continuity appears necessary or desirable. Social idealism or aesthetic clarity could be part of othering, mim-ing positions to get somewhere else.6 From the other direction, analogy is a retrojective search. Our analogies propose that this past culture knows itself better when we show it comparable modes of thinking or being or doing. So, we learned in the second part of this volume, from the points of view of formal reading of Byzantine objects and theoretical exegesis of them, both directions.

That selfless service is of course deeply invested in our own returns. Byzan-tines do not care how we explain them or how we feel about them. But their things, their material residues, do. And so when we commit those things to

4 See the productive work by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford, 2012).

5 “Über das mimetische Vermögen,” in Rolf Tiedemann, ed., Sprache und Geschichte: Philosophische Essays (Stuttgart, 1992), 91–94, here 91; “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in Peter Demetz, ed., Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1978), 333–36, here 333.

6 I am thinking of Duthuit and Matisse, to take one example. See my “Utopia and Heterotopia: Byzantine Modernisms in America,” in Karl Fugelso, ed., Defining Neomedievalism(s), Studies in Medievalism 19 (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), 77–113.



analogies, we look for similarities that even nature may have created, and those analogies wait for us. Our analogies are excavations, digging stratigraphically into lower reaches of our common history.7 Often, they privilege depth over surface, vertical layers over horizontal fluidarities (to oppose earth and water similes).8

Objects, other things, feel and know. Naturally, not feeling and knowing like we do, every species, every person, has its own epistemology, but experiences the world the way plants do, say. Michael Pollan wrote on plant intellect in a recent New Yorker, and he is taking us back to ways of thinking about science from the nineteenth century and beyond.9 Byzantine persons, things, live and think in ways that we don’t understand, because the glacial temporality is out of our reckoning, but exhibition analogy can articulate, in a very controlled setting, how objects showed their thinking and feeling.10 Here, I am not claim-ing that we anthropomorphize the world, project out what we feel and think, so I am not going back to Lacan’s alterity and alienation when Petit Jean jok-ingly told him, ‘You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you!’11 Things, however, do demonstrate their sense of the world, mostly in silence and non-verbally. Exhibition analogy can reveal objects’ inner life or interiority, and analogical beckonings. Byzantine Things in the World attempted similarities that would demonstrate new reflectiveness.12 We (art historians more than

7 Ian Alden Russell, “The Art of the Past: Before and After Archaeology,” in Dieter Roel-straete, ed., The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art (Chicago, 2013), 296–313: “Based on the theory and practice of stratigraphy, the depth metaphor proposed that, as in archaeological excavation, human thought, narrative, and material culture exist in layers, and the penetration of and peeling back of the contemporary layer can allow access to earlier layers of thought or deeper meanings,” (305–6).

8 See Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London and New Brunswick, N.J., 2000).

9 See “The Intelligent Plant,” The New Yorker (December 23, 2013), as well as Oliver Sacks, “The Mental Life of Plants and Worms, Among Others,” New York Review of Books (April 24, 2014).

10 I have written further on this possibility in a forthcoming article, “Transfiguring Materiali-ties: Relational Abstraction in Byzantium and its Exhibition.” I would also add Gabriele Kübler and Renate Gebessler, eikon = das Bild: Christliche Ikonen und moderne Kunst (cat-alogue of an exhibition held at the Stiftung für konkrete Kunst, December 8, 1991–March 29, 1992) (Reutlingen, 1991); I would like to thank Alex Nagel for this reference.

11 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth, 1986), 95.

12 My contribution to the conference behind this volume described the then-upcoming exhibition at the Menil Collection, and now that the show has passed and a book appeared


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anyone else) should search exhibition in order to get us back to a Peircean first-ness that would then lead to new secondnesses that Peirce proposed.13

Erotics, for example, is related to a sensing person; one room of the exhibi-tion was laid out and organized to encourage a bodied response distinct from the meditative reaction of previous rooms, so that the flamboyant Willem de Kooning paintings were intended to bring a viewer back to energized pleasure overall, before encouraging visitors to examine works and their relationships among the clusters in the room (Fig. 14.1).14 In this way, the room made pleasur-able the participation in looking and in discovering unforeseen unity in (or analogies among) desire. That desire is largely fantasy, and in the absence of touch and smell and taste those beautiful things and bodies were tantalizing only. But here, just as Benjamin would say, I think that becoming something else and behaving like it motivates the pleasure of this set of relations among things and bodies.

(Byzantine Things in the World [Houston and New Haven, 2013]), I am taking the liberty of including some brief reflections on the exhibition.

13 Beautifully explored by Richard Shiff, “Watch Out for Thinking (Even Fuzzy Thinking): Concept and Percept in Modern Art,” Common Knowledge 19, no. 1 (2013): 65–87.

14 “Untitled IV,” 1976, oil on canvas, 80 × 70; “Untitled VI,” 1977, oil on canvas, 80 × 70.

FIgure 14.1 Installation view of Byzantine Things in the World. Photo: Paul Hester, courtesy of The Menil Collection, Houston, TX.




The erotics in the room were on one level unformed pleasure and general-ized fantasy, while the Byzantine works opened up another facet through their figuration. Two works make this case for fantasy and desire: a small icon of St. Marina, lying on her back in a vitrine on the floor, and another of St. Onuph-rius, facing her on the wall (Figs. 14.2–14.4).15 Marina’s gender ambivalence is not perfectly obvious to non-specialists, but among her identities is a cross-dressing persona. The imaginable tactility of the framing raised-gesso design, and the smooth face and hands with tapered fingers, complicate how one feels her. Onuphrius works more clearly to attract and compel looking. Below his clouded face, his physique is highly pronounced, a swimmer’s shoulders and waist, and the beard cascades down his body and fondles the inner passage of his calf. And the bush-speedo is held in place by some provocatively located tendrils lightly sitting on his thighs and hips at his drawn-in waist. Referring to Donatello’s David was one way to make sense of the sensuality of this desert hermit; the feather on Goliath’s helmet caresses David’s inner thigh in the bronze, both declarations of heroism and desirability (Fig. 14.5).16

Another room in Byzantine Things was intended to communicate aspects of the experience of the senses in that culture, as well as aspects of nature, and,

15 Respectively, thirteenth century, tempera and metal leaf on wood, 8 ½ × 6 3/8 × 7/8; and first half seventeenth century, tempera and gold leaf on wood, 21 7/8 × 14 3/8 × 1 7/8.

16 Bronze, 1440s, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.


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FIgure 14.3 Saint Marina, Lebanon, possibly Tripoli (13th century). Tempera and metal leaf on wood, 8 1/2 × 6 3/8 × 7/8 in. (21.6 × 16.2 × 2.2 cm). 1985057.04 DJ. Photo: Paul Hester, courtesy of The Menil Collection, Houston, TX.

FIgure 14.4 Emmanuel Lambardos (Iraklion, Crete). Saint Onouphrios (early to mid17th century). Tempera and gold leaf on wood, 21 7/8 × 14 3/8 × 1 7/8 in. (55.6 × 36.5 × 4.8 cm). 198432 DJ. Photo: Paul Hester, courtesy of The Menil Collection, Houston, TX.

Figure 14.3

Figure 14.4



FIgure 14.5 Donatello. “David” (1430–1435). Bronze, height 158 cm. Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

Figure 14.5


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like the other spaces, it attempted its work through evocative juxtapositions. It mostly failed in terms that I had proposed. In a corner, two small tokens from the shrine of St. Symeon the Younger were placed side by side and in obverse-reverse tandem. The book for the show contained large-scale photos and sev-eral analyses, but that prominence in the written argument and in the visual rhetoric of the book was not matched in display. The tactile qualities of the tokens were on display, in the palm-shaped reverse and in its retention of the palm whirls in the clay itself. Traces of the maker’s body were dramatically present. That index of maker was demonstrated on a larger scale and with self-narration by the Robert Morris drawing immediately next to the tokens’ case (Fig. 14.6).17 In the drawing, Morris attempted to draw a rectangle while blind-folded, and his several attempts are captured on the paper, along with traces of his hands’ engagement in the process. This picture was the strongest because of the immediacy of its tactility and the intimacy of address in the small text inscribed on the picture.

The Byzantine tactility was intellectually present, but scarcely perceptible, and the modern works mostly carried the sensual presence and bodily facets of things. Sueno, by Kiki Smith, demonstrated the full potential and discomfort of a feeling body in her flayed subject; and the Bamanan boli next to it revealed

17 Respectively, ca. 600, clay, 1 1/4 × 1 3/16; and “Blind Time I,” 1973, graphite on paper, 40 × 26.




its charismatic body, a still-living, changing creature, and its seeming contra-diction of inside and outside, too, showed all bodies, human and non-human, as more than surface (Fig. 14.7).18 Here, the open flows among things were in action.

The Byzantine objects in the room were in relation to these dynamic pieces, but their sensual qualities were largely suppressed by the hum of these irre-pressible non-Byzantine things. Perhaps the sensual museum—aside from children’s museums—is simply impossible for us, and analogical exhibition too risky, with regard to comprehension. Stagecraft is not an answer. The au-thenticity of experience is remote to us, of course, and yet exhibition should not abdicate sensual engagement when focusing on a world as fully fleshy as that one.

Analogy should not then be about meaning, as such, but neither should it limit itself to declarative statements. The meaning needs to generate from our existing knowledge, since analogy allows us to find resemblances we already knew but had not recognized—it shows in relief something already there. Even if the analogy is strongly inventive or counter-intuitive, the nature of our thinking only finds identities, similarities, and our impulse is to imitate (even

18 Respectively, “Sueno,” 1992, intaglio, 41 3/4 × 77 1/2; and date uncertain, various animal and vegetable materials, clay, wood, sacrificial materials, 18 × 21 × 8.



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if this imitation is only the mental process by which we give predictable form to something new).19

Finding the order in analogies between Byzantium and modernism can only occur in the present moment, Kubler’s actuality, for example. If actuality is a useful concept, then we accept the strong limitations of our perceptions, because actuality is a negation, a “void between events,” but it is the only expe-rience we have directly. The film Boyhood (2014) ends with the statement (if you do not count the answering, affirmative “yeah”), “It’s always right now.” And the fullness of that right now is very intense at that cinematic threshold to the rest of the life of that character beyond the film, but as soon as the right now, the actuality, is passed, the struggle of finding meaning begins.

But even in the present moment, those analogies are all we have. Finding order from the past is only possible through the surface and substance of things. Writing is not reliable, since it is always an ‘adherent signal’ or a second-ary impulse, and it is so often only about its own world.20 Objects or things, art and everything, are available to our senses, and nothing else is, really. History, in these terms, comprises these things in orders we devise, and Byzantine and modern is as good a history as any, as long as we know it is about us, in all these analogies and resemblances we make. The potential benefit of making analo-gies is great, and I share Kubler’s optimism about this enterprise:

Should the ratio between discovered positions and undiscovered ones in human affairs greatly favor the former, then the relation of the future to the past would alter radically. Instead of regarding the past as a micro-scopic annex to a future of astronomical magnitudes, we would have to envisage a future with limited room for changes, and these of types to which past already holds the key. The history of things would then assume an importance now assigned only to the strategy of profitable inven-tions.21

In the spirit of Kubler’s attempt to bring anthropology and art history into a more productive, mutually beneficial union,22 other ways into analogy and imitation could also be explored, if only briefly. His call for greater attention to the history of science came from this position of things at the center of a mesh

19 These paragraphs are strongly influenced by a reading of George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven and London, 2008).

20 See Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, as well as Kubler, The Shape of Time.21 Kubler, The Shape of Time, 115.22 See his comments in “The Shape of Time: Reconsidered,” Perspecta 19 (1982): 112–21.



or network. Physics could tell us a great deal in analogy. Gravity, for one thing, is a natural aspect of our existence, but not one that is consistently understood through time. If everything finds a ‘natural’ place in space, things too find their own.23 If blood does not circulate, it still finds its own natural place in and out of the body, as it carries the soul.24 Likewise, descriptions and explanations of molecular-level operations change very slowly, and Byzantine physics and chemistry must have created tremendously useful explanations, even if never quite articulated as such.25 Getting below things to ‘stuff ’ or ‘matter’ is another area where analogies can reveal the fundamental workings of worlds.26

Analogy at the level of historical consistency across time took for Kubler the shape of fibrous bundles,27 but one could take a position that is more horizon-tal, two-dimensional in the sense of downplaying depth for the spread of meaning and experience across many cultures and times. Analogy can work as a means to discover and defend an ontological kinship, as Kaja Silverman ar-gues, and it has the potential to provide a useful unity of purpose in Byzantine and modern. Her defense of ‘flesh,’ which we all share across entities and time, establishes readings for analogies that reveal essential elements in our exis-tence.28 I can second the slogan, ‘Byzantine art would never be the same,’ but

23 See, for example, Kellie Robertson, “Exemplary Rocks,” in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (Washington, D.C., 2012), 91–121.

24 See Elinor Lieber, “Asaf ’s Book of Medicines: A Hebrew Encyclopedia of Greek and Jewish Medicine, Possibly Compiled in Byzantium on an Indian Model,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 38 (1984): 233–49.

25 Michel Serres, The Birth of Physics, ed. David Webb, trans. Jack Hawkes (Manchester, 2000).

26 See Kijan Espahangizi and Barbara Orland, eds., Stoffe in Bewegung: Beiträge zu einer Wissens geschichte der materiallen Welt (Zurich and Berlin, 2014); Maurizia Boscagli, Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism (London, 2014); Barbara Naumann, Thomas Strässle, and Caroline Torra-Mattenklott, eds., Stoffe: Zur Geschichte der Materialität in Künsten und Wissenschaften (Zurich, 2006: and Hans Peter Hahn and Jens Soentgen, “Acknowl edging Substances: Looking at the Hidden Side of the Material World,” Philosophy and Technology 24 (2011): 19–33.

27 Kubler, The Shape of Time, 111: “…with each fiber corresponding to a need upon a particu-lar theatre of action, and the lengths of the fibers varying as to the duration of each need and the solution to its problems. The cultural bundles therefore consist of variegated fibrous lengths of happening, mostly long, and many brief. They are juxtaposed largely by chance, and rarely by conscious forethought or rigorous planning.”

28 For example, Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford, 2009), 36: “By declaring the aim of life is death, Freud levels the ontological distinction between humans, plants and ani-mals. He also helps us to see that rather than being a self-contained volume, authored by


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only by finding and describing meaningful, imitable affinities among appar-ently disparate entities and among all their interiorities.29

us, our history is only one chapter in a vast book, whose meaning and shape we cannot even begin to grasp, let alone determine.”

29 With critical distance on the position, Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago and London, 2013), 201–31.


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