Painting and Plurality

The images: can we picture to ourselves, when we hear of a plurality of images, not a collection of discrete individual images but an abundance unsurveyable and without internal differentiation? Just as one hears in so many languages of the waters: die Wässer, les eaux. . . . In the flux of experience it may be no more possible to isolate a singular “image” than it is to isolate a singular “water.” The waters, according to Roberto Calasso in his meditation on Hindu mythology, Ka, symbolize the glittering flow of inner images, the ceaseless proliferation of specters and simulacra, that constitutes consciousness.1 Nevertheless, in the most prevalent theories of images developed by theology, by classical epistemology, by the academies of art, premodern and modern alike, and by anthropology, the image is paradigmatically still, framed, and graspable. The image stands alone, outside time. Whereas in experience, which is a flow of images in time, every image is in the process of becoming another image, for percepts, memories, and dreams are images generated and coordinated by the body. According to Henri Bergson, perception is nothing other than an aggregate of images “referred to” one particular image, the body.2 The body itself is an image insofar as it receives movement, and in