What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (review)

To use a phrase from the former postman and subsequent philosopher of science and literary critic Gaston Bachelard, this rich volume is of an "intimate immensity," (as quoted by Mitchell, 262) sufficient to engage anyone—that is, everyone—interested in visuality under any guise at all. Ungaretti's one-line wonder, "M'illumino d'immenso," comes to mind also, such is the range and depth of material Mitchell offers us.

I was swept up, in the middle of the current, by the discussion of the objet trouvé, how it finds you, how it is foundational, and then, related to that, the discussion of objecthood. Before I go one step further, let me say that Mitchell's use of word play is more like the unpacking of concepts than anything superficially pun-like. "What do pictures want?" also implies, for him, the other sense of want: "what are they lacking?" Implied is the response: they want us and pull us in—draw us in, "hail" us, as in Althusser's term.

We might think of this whole and fascinating book as a dialogue between viewer and image, but a dialogue with a chorus around it. Mitchell has a rare quality of generosity, to thinkers, published and unpublished, who have worked on these topics. He is in no way a monologist, and in every way a catalyst for others' thoughts. Other theoreticians are generously quoted here, generating a constant conversation.

At one point, Mitchell describes Damien Hirst's installation of Love Lost—fish swimming about, a gynecological examining room: table and stirrups and all, with a computer nearby, under water as if for ages—around which the spectators are circling, like so many detectives interpreting the clues. He compares this to Atget's empty Paris streets, inviting interpretation—and in fact, his biocybernetic meditation (his phrase) does just that: invites us to share in the experiment. Mitchell has the great aura of a teacher—we are called upon and within. He is frequently witty, never boring, and always able to move rapidly from one sense to another (in all senses) without any self-conscious delight. This is serious stuff, regardless of its humor.

In a central chapter, the essential differences between the ideas of the fetish, the idol, and the totem are sketched out and exemplified—another tripartite division. In fact, a great deal here feels tripartite: the book moves from images to objects to media: "The book as a whole, then, is about pictures, understood as complex assemblages of virtual, material, and symbolic elements" (xiii).

I appreciated especially the chapters on objecthood ("Founding Objects," "Empire and Objecthood," and "Romanticism and the Life of Things"), and was glad ofMitchell's tying it to Bill Brown's Thing Theory. He moves, with clarity and no visible effort, from the true Romantic Thing, to the College Art Association's panel on "Trash," bringing us back to the Garbage theory that the Diacritics at Cornell once dealt with.

The discussion of the object calls implicitly upon a subject in contrast and in dialogue, as we would expect from the title. As promised, Mitchell spends a good many pages in an intelligent imagining of thinking of what a picture might want or need from us. As for the images' "lives and loves," this is indeed a kind of biography of seeing and its showing: much is on display here. Wonderfully, many of the pages and topics here lead to others, in the volume and in our minds. So much is here and newly explained: how tracks and traces work as objects, how fossils and dinosaurs intersect, how temporality and empire end, how presentness works and doesn't. In "the work of art in the age of biocybernetic reproduction . . . " Mitchell states,

"as a bald proposition, then, that biocybernetic reproduction has replaced Walter Benjamin's mechanical reproduction as the fundamental technical determinant of our age. If mechanical reproducibility (photography, cinema, and associated industrial processes like...