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  • Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art
  • Robert Pepperell
Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art by Dario Gamboni. Reaktion Books, London, U.K., 2002. 243 pp., illus. ISBN: 1-86189-113.

Chapter VII of Potential Images opens with a satirical cartoon from 1907 showing a viewer at the Salon d'Automne standing on his head in order to make sense of an indeterminate modernist painting. The caption reads: "The difficult thing is not to paint a picture . . . but to know how to look at it" (p. 131). This viewer's predicament serves to illustrate the central theme of this book: the extent to which responsibility for generating meaning lies with the viewer or the creator of a work of art.

It is a problem that has engaged artists for centuries, as Gamboni demonstrates in the first part of the book with a historical overview of hidden, suggestive and amorphous images, from early human history to the beginnings of modernism. What Gamboni calls "potential images" are characterized by the extra perceptual and conceptual demands they place that "make the beholder aware—either painfully or enjoyably—of the active, subjective nature of seeing" (p. 18). What is surprising in this regard is the number of pre-modern artists, from Leonardo to Delacroix, who were fascinated by, and indeed exploited, the polysemic richness of inchoate and accidental forms.

But while examples of ambiguity and indeterminacy can be found in artworks and decorative works from across cultural history, it is their concentration and elevation in modern art that Gamboni addresses in most detail. In the mid-19th century, a confluence of emerging aesthetic and intellectual forces—including Symbolism, Romanticism and occultism—produced a milieu that emphasized the imaginative contribution of the viewer. In 1846 Baudelaire wrote that "the poetry in a picture must be created by the spectator . . . because it lies in the spectator's soul, and genius consists in awakening it there" (quoted on p. 59). By the end of the century the most important French artists, from Monet and Cézanne to Gauguin and Moreau, were producing works that demand ever more imaginative participation as they deliberately resist precise identification.

These late-19th-century tendencies are part of much more than a simple drift away from representational art towards abstraction, as conventional histories might recount. Instead they signify a shift away from deterministic picture making towards images that are unresolved, open and fugitive. Gamboni cites James Trilling's claim that in modern art "the opposition between representation and non-representation is less important than that between determinacy and indeterminacy, which he defines as 'the lack of fixed boundaries or demarcations'" (p. 131). This extends even to the work of iconic abstractionists such as Mondrian, in whose checkerboard grids "the colours are distributed in such a way that they can be put into numerous different combinations and encourage the eye to run constantly over the canvas forming new constellations" (p. 212). These ideas not only bind figurative and nonfigurative art together in a way that seems novel and genuine, but also point to the essentially interpretative "user-determined" nature of all visual perception—a point that resonates strongly with current theories of visual perception.

Gamboni concludes by pondering the wider social and political implications of ambiguous and indeterminate art, pointing out that previous critics have noted a correlation between the closed unity of authoritarian art and the essentially progressive social attitudes associated with art that leaves meaning open to the viewer. Examples of official Nazi art on the one hand and the work the Nazis labeled as "degenerate" on the other serve to illustrate the point. Citing Umberto Eco's caution about losing the distinction between plurality of possibility and undifferentiated chaos (p. 242), Gamboni closes by asserting the parallel between the Utopian ideals of an open art and that of social progress: "By aiming at equality, symmetry or even interchangeability in the positions of artist and spectator, the practice and theory of potential images correspond to the democratic ideal in the political order" (p. 243).

The only criticism I can raise against Potential Images ironically serves to confirm the depth and importance of its central thesis. Given...

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