Addressing Ekphrasis: A Prolegomenon to the Next

Author(s): Adrian Rifkin

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Classical Philology, Vol. 102, No. 1, Special Issues on Ekphrasis<break></break>Edited
by Shadi Bartsch and Jaś Elsner (January 2007), pp. 72-82
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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 ADDRESSING EKPHRASIS: A PROLEGOMENON TO THE NEXT

adrian rifkin

kphrasis is, according to Georges Molnié, a figure that “[l]eads us

E to the most fundamental and troubling questions of discourse: that of

representation and of mimesis . . . which are precisely the base of
certain Aristotelian conceptions. . . .” 1 That ekphrasis has, in recent years,
become such a big issue in contemporary cultural studies suggests that we
cannot but be haunted by this ancient problem of aesthetic procedure, one
that is bound up with the beginnings of poetic description and of “art” itself.
Ekphrasis coincides with an enigma in the subject/object relation that may be
nothing more or less than the fragility of enunciation, the arbitrary moment
of its commencement and its expiring. 2 For if ekphrasis begins with the
making of Achilles’ shield in the Iliad, then it was preceded by a breathing
out, the exhaling of Hephaistos’ twenty bellows on his forge as he set to work.
The idea that this long history could run out of breath lets loose an anxiety
about the fate of these “certain . . . conceptions,” and projects ekphrasis into
a future of loss. At the same time it allows us to think that if the subject is
founded and founders in the same breath, then there is no problem of word
and image in itself, but that this relation, in its complexities, has to do with
something else—as in the recounting of a dream.
In this paper I will circle around these matters, especially that of a starting
point, and I will, with scrupulous anachronism, accumulate an improbable
number of examples in a chiastic flow of possibilities. I do this to float a
kind of definition and resist yielding to it. And so too I hope to bring together
some questions arising from classical studies with those that particularize
contemporary visual culture.
Some years ago, thinking about Edgar Wind’s discussion—in one of his last
seminars—of Botticelli’s Calumny of Apelles, or Michael Baxandall’s Giotto
and the Orators (1971) and his exposition of ekphrasis as a fundamental
procedure in the establishment of humanist knowledges and their visual prac-
tices, I wrote some ekphraseis for BBC Radio 3. Passing off what Molnié calls

1. Molnié 1992, 121. Molnié attributes an Alexandrian character to ekphrasis.

2. Glossing aspects of Benveniste (1974). Other than the major works on ekphrasis (such as Heffernan
1993 and Krieger 1992), I have consulted Aubriot 1997 and several other articles from Chefdor 1997, in-
cluding materials on the question of enunciation and description in Proust on Chardin, Julien Green, and
Claude Simon. Also see Scott 1988, Cosgrove 1997, Riffaterre 1994, Chateau 1997, and Becker 1995. The
many on-line discussions of ekphrasis include some valuable materials on music, such as Siglind Bruhn’s
“Towards a Theory of Musical Ekphrasis,” at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~siglind/ekphr.htm.

Classical Philology 102 (2007): 72–82

[ç 2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved] 0009-837X/07/10201-0005$10.00

72
 Addressing Ekphrasis 73

a classical “figure macrostructurale de second niveau” as a form of highbrow

pop culture, these six short programs, Snapshots for Ever (coauthored with
Steve Edwards), consisted of verbal/musical evocations or re-creations of
quite well-known photographs (Rodchenko, the old lady reading; Margaret
Mather, a male nude) or a genre of photography (a mug shot), of which quite
general titles were given in the Radio Times, but which were themselves
treated as if forever lost. Writing these precipitated a number of alarming
practical and theoretical questions—an ekphrastic fear perhaps, but not one
like that adumbrated by W. J. T. Mitchell in his well-known discussion (“[T]his
is the moment of resistance or counterdesire that occurs when we sense that
the difference between the verbal and visual representation might collapse
and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally
and actually”), 3 and when I wrote the programs and recorded them I knew
nothing whatsoever of Bob and Ray! My discomfort had more to do with
the moment of separation that is marked by the first word to be written, the
transition from sème to the figural, but there are many other ways of putting
it—something that I think is an opposite of kind to both Mitchell’s ekphrastic
“indifference” and his “hope,” without either of them becoming the same.
Where to start? With which bit of the photograph, and what anyway is a
“bit”—even before the arrival of digital photography? A grain of silver or
platinum is not quite the same as a brushstroke, even if a finger in a photo-
graph and, say, a neoclassical or an impressionist portrait can be thought
to have a direct resemblance, one open to a clear differentiation through
description. Should I begin with something that would give the game away
to a knowledgeable listener, or rather somewhere that would confuse and
deny the listener recognition and suspend the mystery? This would be very
different from the stanzas on Achilles’ shield, where Hephaistos’ excessive
craft attracts a surfeit of recognition and identification in the plenum of the
cosmos that it represents. So the starting point entails a multiplicity of voices
and addresses to and on behalf of the image, each randomly requiring the
other in the enunciation and its subject-hood, and these enable the subject
to speak in the place of the image—that it has anyway called into being. But
here two other tropes are confounded in the ekphrasis: apostrophe and pro-
sopopoeia. The first, the invocation of the dead, of the invisible or imagined
object, makes it speak in its turn (the second) as if address had given it (new)
life; and this too is an anxious confusion, a suspension of the very efficacy
of the utterance as well as a revealing of its fragility. Furthermore, the re-
lation of this anxious writing with the reader/hearer is also the aporia of the
sadistic gesture—of whether it is better to give or to withhold. Born out of
this, the starting point is an always and only equivocal satisfaction.
What, too, would be a musical equivalent for the starting point? One that
meets an idea of the image somewhere on a ground between figuration
and formal procedure, a difference or similarity between a technology that

3. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” reproduced as part of the Romantic Circles Electronic
Edition of Shelley’s “Medusa” by kind permission of the University of Chicago Press.
74 Adrian Rifkin

is modern (photography) but capable of any mode of representation, and a

music that can approach photography technologically, rather than program-
matically, let us say on the grounds of the twelve-note row? That is to say,
numerically rather than analogically—or, otherwise, one whose melodic
capacity might only meet the photograph on the level of the premodern in
an acoustic performance, or differently again if the performance and recording
themselves are identically electronic or identified in an electronic form? In
posing these questions I want not only to render the question of ekphrasis
and its starting point more dense, but also to underline how, if all these
starting points are in principle undecidable and arbitrary even as they have
to be decided, then ekphrasis may be thought of as a figure that straddles
mourning and melancholy in an uneasy balance. As Julia Kristeva wrote of
Gérard de Nerval in her Soleil noir, 4
[u]ne privation initiale est ainsi indiquée d’emblée: privation cependant non pas d’un
“bien” ou d’un “objet” qui constituent un héritage matériel et transmissible, mais d’un
territoire innommable, que l’on pourrait évoquer ou invoquer, étrangement, de l’étranger,
d’un exil constitutif.

If this process is autonomous and precedes ekphrasis’s unfolding, then it

also implies that its inaugural qualities, of being able both to separate from
possibly inexistent things and to fetishize them in the same gesture, precede
any gendering or sexual specificity. Ekphrasis cannot, as with Heffernan
(1993), in itself be a master discourse of the word over the feminine of the
image, but only the conjunctural and particular instance of such a relation.
This beginning of a definition is one reason why I do not think that Giorgio
Vasari’s descriptions of works of art in the Vitae are ekphrastic, and that one
must make some distinction between kinds of description and their driven-
ness. Despite scholarly discussions on the matter, Vasari has manifestly little
problem in where or how to start. His libidinal energy is so powerfully in-
vested in his world of art—his world and its triumphant history—that the
lost time of the Dark Ages or the absence of the greatest ancient works is
nothing alongside how, in this time, his civilization has reenacted the found-
ing gesture of all that, for Vasari, art ever was for Vasari: God’s creation,
a creation in which the subject and its figure came into being in a single
gestural series without separation other than from primordial chaos, and
where language and description come into being in a single moment. 5
And the almost-repetition of this figure is why the passage near the be-
ginning of Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March, where the first Baron Trotta und
Sipolje contemplates the portrait done of him by his son’s friend probably
is an ekphrasis, or an extreme and reflexive example, hinting as to what it
might mean to repeat Creation. By creation here I mean the point at which
“in the beginning was the word” and “in the begining was the void” can be
interchanged through the wordlike status of the void’s nonenvisageable
quality. Roth describes the making of the painting, done from memory as

4. Kristeva 1987, 156–57.

5. See Alpers 1960; Rubin 1995; and Didi-Huberman 1994.
 Addressing Ekphrasis 75

the Baron had forbidden painting in his house, as separate from the viewer.
In looking at a painting that has apparently no relation to him, the Baron
smiles, turns it around to see the back, compares it with his “real” mirror
image, and wonders where to hang it; the painting itself is described, in
only two lines, as a description of its subject, for him as for us, and he ex-
periences this comparison (himself, the reflection, the painting) as “the first
pleasure he had had in many years.” 6 In effect the old man goes through a
mirror stage and (re)becomes a subject with a sure sense of his own pleni-
tude. But the reader perceives the whole episode as an aporia of the almost
worthless description, the represented thing and that which it represents as
a vicious circle, which turns out to be a microscopic figure for the melancholy
of the whole novel—starting out from and culminating with the drawn-out
ending of an epoch. The “first moment of pleasure” only draws attention to
its own momentary quality as an impossibility figured in the instant that the
ekphrasis adheres to the subject.
If I take it as an a priori, then, that the ekphrastic should be a vehicle for
melancholy, even if with the radio programs it was something apparently
as superficial as a discomfort with the beginning and what comes next, the
moment in which the description must begin to eat up its own future in a
prolonged foreclosure, necessarily this melancholy will regard the future—
not the long term, the time of global warming and desertification, of war,
exploitation and apocalypse, but the very next thing, the next breath. The
moment of the future is no longer future, in Saint Augustine’s terms, but only
that space of the envisageable, where it might now appear that a decision
has been made, or that an event either has or has not yet taken place. That
Achilles’ shield will quite soon be used, for example, all the more quickly
if one turns forward a few books; or that its fixed stories, however mobile,
will never end nor come to rest; or that for Aeneas, in another shield, his
future is as lost as is his past; or, when I arrive at it, that Hollis Frampton’s
film Nostalgia will turn out to be a dark and poisonous nostalgia for the
next.
One polymorphous, chiastic unfolding of the tense, as distinct from the
space, of ekphrasis is Wotan’s monologue in Act 2 of Richard Wagner’s Die
Walküre. Starting out from the background of an almost silent orchestra,
Wotan recounts the history of what has not happened in the Ring, what has
happened, and in general what will or must happen; his description is neither
the first nor the last résumé of the mythological structure of the four operas,
but insofar as this one represents them as the vision of the absolute power-
lessness of absolute will, his description itself coincides in its totality with
the melancholy of an end that, we already know, will never have been
mourned. At the same time it is the monumental figuring of a “great man,”
himself, and of the events of a life in the unfolding of an epoch, thus meeting
all the potential functions of ekphrasis. The music, as Carolyn Abbate has
shown, does not so much accompany the narration as it is dragged into life
around its ineluctable advance: the leitmotive no longer point to or recall an

6. Roth 2003, 18.

76 Adrian Rifkin

onstage event, but are resignaled by the monologue’s idealized description

that itself reinstates the materials out of which it has been built—a perverse
analogy for what one might think of as the oxymoronic mobility that ani-
mates Achilles’ shield. 7 But in underlining the complex temporal absurdity
that links these two descriptions in the melancholic introjection of their found-
ing social myth, I want to change ground, to begin again.
So, to take in the question from another angle: I suspect that it was easy
to be inattentive to the significance of ekphrasis and the “visual turn” in cul-
tural theory if, as I have done, one worked in art schools. Here the starting
point is in the studio conversation, where word and image enjoy a relation
so imbricated or intertwined, without a resolved priority, that one is bound to
notice that, at its best, contemporary studio teaching is free from the horrors
of this trope, other than as a tactic or a strategy. Here a good description
has to be one that fails, that opens up to and embraces its successor and its
alternatives without anxiety, that engages in the tracking of all those false
trails that form a tissue for the subject of the discourse, in verbal and visual
pentimentos. At the same time it is hardly possible to think of différance
without the pentimento (whether painterly or electronic), to the extent that,
sometimes, the theory (of différance) itself looks something like a lesson in
how to make a mark, an inaugural mark that covers origin and leaves it as
a supposition, once again decided but undecidable. The descriptive parameters
of such a relationship are of a strange complexity in the split between denoting
the mechanism of discourse and its symbolic outcomes, but are invested in
nextness as other than foreclosure. 8
So one of the problems of (art) theory that vexes me is this: what does
a theory or a concept look like? How does it stand textually, historically,
hermeneutically in relation to its object/subject? This after all is a question
in the matter of words and images, and the value of their relation as a site
of intellectual work; clearly it haunts philosophy as writing, from Plato’s
considerations of the image to Descartes’ looking at his own hand in front
of him in the Second Meditation, or the Abbé de Condillac’s recourse to
painting as a representation for verbal figures in De l’art d’écrire and
Diderot’s Salons, in his intense evocations of a painting—the list is properly
endless. Perhaps this amounts to no more than saying something so obvious
that one should hesitate to say it at all: that there is no such thing as writing
that is not figural. But it does matter, if one wants to think, What does writing
look like?—a question already raised by Mitchell in Picture Theory (1994).
Certainly it vexes the reader of T. S. Eliot’s poem “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday
Morning Service,” as it does the poem’s passive protagonist, Sweeney.
In the opening lines, “Polyphiloprogenitive / The sapient suttlers of the
Lord / Drift across the window-panes. / In the beginning was the Word. / In
the beginning was the Word. / Superfetation of to; e§n” (a useful reminder of

7. Abbate 1996, chap. 5, “Wotan’s Monologue and the Morality of Musical Narration.”
8. A useful investigation of the relation between the painterly and writerly description in the division
of the landscape between the viewer, the critic, and the painter is undertaken in Marin’s discussion (1999,
120–40) of Félibien’s Entretiens. See also V. Sarapik, “Landscape: The Problem of Representation,” down-
loaded from http://www.eki.ee/km/place/kp02/KP2_sarapik02.pdf.

One Line Long

 Addressing Ekphrasis 77

the theological underpinning of both the power of ekphrasis as of its revers-

ibility), the rocking chant of the verses mimes Sweeney’s unease in the final
stanza at the nature of his own inclusion in the scheme or representation and
its descriptions: “Sweeney shifts from ham to ham / Stirring the water in
his bath, / The masters of the subtle schools / Are controversial, polymath.”
Between the opening and final stanzas that I have quoted ekphrasis first un-
coils, “A painter of the Umbrian school / Designed upon a gesso ground / The
nimbus of the Baptized God. / The wilderness is cracked and browned . . . ,”
and then undoes itself in the poetic unease with poetics itself as the stanzas
slide the description of the imagery into an image of something else, some
“real” thing. 9
At times I feel like Sweeney, trapped in his poem. In the light of the visual
turn, which somehow reempowers the linguistic turn, I shift uneasily from ham
to ham, and I reproach myself for failing to see that this was a change. For
example, as I have remarked elsewhere, when I crane my neck to look at the
main vault of the Gesù in Rome, I don’t see Gilles Deleuze; 10 the Deleuze
of Le pli, Leibniz, et le baroque is nowhere in sight, not even when I look back
down to the great silvery altar of Saint Ignatius with its tricky overlighting:
even less when I look at a painting such as Lanfranco’s Moses, with its evident
but inexplicable twisting of the look. Yet, in spite of this, I might, in certain
moments of my own looking, see something of Deleuze writing on Foucault,
that hypostatized and sublimated version of the fold. But what I do see rather
regards my own trying to find a place in the enunciation that is the painting
as it glances back at me, in the fold of this relation that includes me in its
topology, as a subject in language, together with the image, and our exchange
of knowledge. Anyhow, could one come to think of Deleuze on the fold as
an ekphrasis of the baroque as a concept, one that comes to stand in for the
ensemble of baroque works of art, musics, et cetera? Indeed I suspect that
this is a part of the theoretical currency of the fold, that it enables writing on
the baroque as if it were just a concept—but a concept that allows for certain
of its representations, its parts, such as Caravaggio, to be detached and stand
in for it, so that in turn we will see in Caravaggio, as it were, the origins of the
fold. Is this narcissism an ekphrasis, not unlike the Baron Trotta und Sipolje’s
narcissism in separation and ambiguity, reenfolding with an ideal self as a
paradigm for oneself? The return of the queer gaze by Caravaggio is as though
to describe his work were to describe also a moment of its own inaugura-
tion, haunted by the melancholy of describing the illusion of a self and its
vicissitudes. Inevitably this interacts with individuals and moments if ek-
phrasis may also be the description of an event or a great man.
I do not think my blindness is to do either with my cussedness or with the
Gesù, but more to do with painting itself, with the queer relation between the
taming of the gaze and its affirmation that characterizes the lure of painting
as the screen—to put things in broadly Lacanian terms. And, at the same time,
the place that I try to find for myself when I contemplate my own looking
is not one in art history, least of all an art history in which the baroque figures

9. Eliot 1936, 55–56.

10. Deleuze 1986 and 1988.
78 Adrian Rifkin

as a period or a style, nor in literary history or theory, but in something so

particular that its aptness to description may have little function for any kind
of history or may disfigure history’s potential to be accomplished.
One problem in thinking of theory as resembling or repeating its objects,
then, would be that theory itself becomes nothing more than an assemblage of
particulars—that is to say, neither theoretical nor critical, but dependent upon
the classification of objects. Necessarily, it must resist ekphrasis, an ekphrasis
towards which its instrumentalized, disciplinary uses are forever pushing it—
unless, as with a theoretical discourse founded in lack, it can resemble its
object in that object’s unseizableness, which is one reason perhaps Lacan’s
description of the event of the floating sardine can in his Quatre concepts
fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (1973) is more compelling than Derrida’s
dealings with Valerio Adami’s work in his La vérité en peinture (1978).
What I am trying to broach in saying this is that I am not now comfortable
in a discussion on ekphrasis with the given order of the events, of the images
and discourses and the temporal priority of the one before the other as in its
mythic origin, the Homeric description of Achilles’ shield. The relation
between the written, or the recounted, and the never seen, rather implies
both a regression and a transmission (something Heffernan almost brings to
light in the insistence that the shield offers for wounding the image of what
it has been made to protect), the recapturing of an original of which discourse
is the only trace, and which supposes the original as its dependent clause,
rather like Judith Butler’s notion of the performative. It is in the present, as
writing or maybe as painting too, and it is not quite the same question as the
three phases of ekphrasis outlined in Mitchell’s account (n. 3 above), though
it stays closer to the element of fear.
For example, a theoretical—possibly narratalogical—discussion of
Pausanias’ description of the painting of the Trojan Wars by Polygnotus in
Book 10 of his Description of Greece could look like a solution to this prob-
lematic relation. It could itself look like both the words and the lost images
in such a way as to provide a new figure for both of them; for example, an
archaeological art history and a study of historical narrative at once. It would
regard both Pausanias and Polygnotus separately and together, locating them
in a common field of their presence to and in each other, and in this it would
not look like any of the discussions of Achilles’ shield that dominate the
bibliography of ekphrasis. For a start, with Pausanias, the periphrase is a
form of speculative and comparative historical synthesis that constantly leads
him from the image to a consideration of its specificity—but only as a version
of a possible historical veracity, understood in terms of local conditions, the
deploying of different epics as models for the image and so on. For instance,
he remarks that Polygnotus has made Charon old, following the Minyad
rather than Homer, while the kind of a Eurynomos shown in the painting—
“between blue and black like the flies that settle on meat” is only one of a
range of possibilities. 11

11. See Paus. 10.25–31, esp. 10.28.1–4. On Pausanias generally, see Alcock, Cherry, and Elsner 2001.
 Addressing Ekphrasis 79

Thus if the description tends to direct us to a variety of other forms of

information, historical discourse, and so on, it oddly bears resemblance to
another, very different kind of text that also pays sustained attention to a
painting, but with the devotional objective of directing us elsewhere. This
is Miguel de Unamuno’s reflection on Velasquez’s Christ on the Cross,
Poem 21, “Forefinger of the Right Hand”: 12
The accusing finger of thy right hand
from the standard of the cross shows to us
What is written in the eternal book
of life. Only once Thou, Jesus, the Word,
didst write on the ground, and without either ink
or a reed, with thy bare finger, the one
that gently touched the lids of the blind man
and made him see.

Here the rapt, unconstrained attention to the image, which clings to its every
detail above the level of the brushmark, loses its object just as soon as it has
to trace a line between the painting and its reason; each moment of attention
dissolves into a theology that draws the writer back to himself and the con-
dition of his writing, which is an imitation of the figure represented, not the
image. The poem will conclude with the hope that the description will leave
it open to Unamuno to “write on the ground of the land of my birth / what
thou dost leave us, the lesson of pardon!” Exceeding the description from
which it has set out, it reveals once again the space or the moment of setting
out in its ambivalent relation to the object, which in this case lies in its
imitation not of the Crucifixion but of what we might call its concept. It is
this space that melancholy invades, as the object is lost or, as with Achilles’
shield, this loss registers the life and the death of the socius that it has brought
to life. It is the “[u]ngraspable nature of this thing necessarily lost so that the
‘subject’ ‘separated’ from the ‘object’ might become a speaking being” 13
that is both necessary for the subject and menaces it.
Ekphrasis, if it is understood, in the moment of separation, as the impos-
sibility of description, engrosses the multiple temporalities of the anchoring
moment of enunciation and holds them in a fragile balance. But an under-
standing of it that takes it overliterally as word(s) risks closing the matter
of the image that follows the text. That is to say, not the illustration or the
iconographical repertoire, but the reflection upon and the filling of an absence
in the text—the whole visual history of the Passion, for example. Here images
and texts become so thoroughly interchangeable that it might even be better
not to think of them as having a relation to each other, other than through
the énoncé, that is to say, the subject and its historical formations.
Here I want to loop once again through the themes of this paper with two
examples of its central ambivalences. The first is a radio program from my
childhood called How Things Began, but after a little of my own history I

12. Unamuno 1951, 106–7.

13. Kristeva 1987, 156–57.
80 Adrian Rifkin

follow with Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History. This is a concept I cannot

grasp at all unless I can find images for it, as if here words had no meaning
other than that which might be pictured.
How Things Began was a radio series, broadcast in the early 1950s for
junior school kids, concerning early prehistory. It described in what I recall
as intense detail the life of trilobites, pterodactyls, and dinosaurs, and when we
had listened to each broadcast—was it fifteen minutes?—we were expected
to make drawings of what we had just heard. It was easy to do, as we never
questioned the authority that required us to make these drawings, and indeed
enjoyed it enormously—though I recall the sweat of fear when I made a bad
line and rubbed through the paper trying to get it right. I really could not
draw, and have never done so.
But I am certain that these were ekphraseis, as the broadcast was an
oxymoron, an unrepresented figure of a lost world, something that could be
passed on only by realizing and not by repetition; not “listen to this,” but
“look here see this, this is what the broadcast was about,” proudly showing
one’s drawing of the dinosaur after the transient listening event—just as
Homer shows an ideal Greece of Archaic times in the shield. It is a practice
that still returns to me when I write about a work of art, art-critically that is,
though I don’t want to hack that away from “art-historically.” Yet again,
where do you start, but this time from something that one has never seen.
In effect the sequence of Snapshots for Ever is set in reverse. I would first
try to begin with the dinosaur’s tail or with the tip of its nose, tracing a long
tube with an intermediary bulbous distention for a diplodocus, or possibly,
for a stegosaurus, with the plump central portion on which the finlike scales
can be safely posed, and then, perhaps, the splayed, clawed feet fitted under-
neath? If I judged it badly, the creature might spill off the page, and there
would be no room for one extremity, so that a stegosaurus might have to
arch its neck in a pose unknown to the archeological record. Or, well judged,
a neatly placed tyrannosaurus would leave place for a few eggs or a even a
brood of young. You can see the problem is endless, just as it is in beginning
to write about a painting: with this brushmark or with a look of the whole
thing if you stand back a few meters and see it within the context of the “social
history of art”; or with these two brushmarks, which is a totally different be-
ginning, or an iconographical repertoire of its component fragments, which
is yet another. Begin again—perhaps from altogether somewhere else, outside
the image, with one theory of the viewing subject or another, which itself
will then determine what counts as a sème in the work, and indeed enable
one to assert something as basic as whether there is a diegesis of some kind
or not! Is Roland Barthes’ S/Z an ekphrasis? It depends on what you think
of Balzac’s Sarrasine, whether or not the eye comes to rest on Barthes’ frag-
ments as if they were fragmented objects rescued from the text’s illusory
wholeness. But even in embracing each beginning’s loss I find that I have
never managed to describe an entire painting, nor have felt the need to do so.
The Angel is more difficult, because it implies that we adopt one position
or another, looking forward to see “him” and looking back at “it”—a reason
why the concept of the screen remains of interest. I thought that I saw “him,”
 Addressing Ekphrasis 81

Benjamin’s Angel, in Rome at the exhibition “Maiestà di Roma” in 2003.

It was Ingres’ copy of Giulio Romano’s Mercury from the ceiling of the
Farnesina. In seeing him, one is thrown into the posture of history as it
might have been by that strange creature of Benjamin. Mercury’s direction
is subtly but uncannily reversed, receding into Ingres’ flat canvas as if
driven by a wind, whereas from the coffered ceiling of Giulio he emerges,
hovering and stable. The imitation engages in what I call the aporetic of the
classical gesture, inverting the idea that founds it. So if the Giulio, typically,
sublates the viewer, then to interrogate Ingres’ monster, or to daydream before
him, is to become melancholic in the absence of an historical continuum,
broken by an image that cannot connect even to its own avowed source in the
process of transcription. It is a history that, as a result, one cannot oneself
embody, even though one may also try to write what and who one is across its
shredded pages. And this is one thing I mean by the ekphrastic melancholy—
Ingres’ loss.
In another work, by the English artist Elizabeth Price, we see the ex-
perience of Ingres’ involuntary angel back to front. It is a single-track video
in which we strain to see what turns out to be the empty ranks of a darkly
illuminated lecture theatre through the camera’s lens. Flickering with light
of what might be moving images, haunted by music and sound, the camera
records the projection of Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr passing on the screen behind
it. Our inclusion in this space of the camera makes us witness to the desert of
a past, the film that has just passed across the screen, its meaning waiting
to be reinvented only if we turn around and lose the camera’s object alto-
gether: and yet it is a description or a transcription. Not the junk of history,
but its affect, as we face backwards to a promised land—the full image on
the screen, both outside the work and its very substance.
These two figures, Price and Ingres, constellated, make what I want to call
an ekphrastic object, a representation of something that, like the shield, has
never been, something to be made with figures: this something that was, and
is what Benjamin’s Angel sees, and yet remains to be seen—the Paul Klee
usually coupled with it is a poor substitute, as are its many verbal exegeses.
So in putting these things together I have constellated an ekphrastic moment
or instance—a moment around which to pivot the duality of word and image,
an instance that allows the figuring of ekphrasis as a topology of this relation
in which the duality is dissolved.
I will round off with a brief reflection on Hollis Frampton’s film Nostalgia,
which takes me further than the Angel and Vampyr into the realms of the
undescribable. The more I look at it, the less I find it possible to say what
it is about, or how it works, not because of any untoward complexity but
because of a radical and visionary simplicity. Fourteen times a photograph
lying on a hotplate burns as a voice recites over it an ekphrastic description
of the next image that will appear: something that on a first viewing, or even
a fifth, is difficult to assimilate, as the richness of the formal composition of
frames within frames, the blowing and curling of the burning paper ash, the
part-allegorical character of the spoken text, distract from the distraction
of the displacement. This is what makes it unapt to description, the abusive
82 Adrian Rifkin

figuration of a displacement that confounds any history of rhetorical pro-

priety, becoming a “purely” philosophical proposition. True to the sym-
metrical, quasi-looplike structure of the film, the final image will never be
seen. Yet, as it was not the first, undescribed one, and as the final reading
is “blind,” it is the only one that really demands our direct and unmediated
attention. Frampton writes that it was made only after a period of disillusion
with the photographic image, and that his expectations of it are quite intense: 14
When I came to print the negative an odd thing struck my eye. Something, standing in
the cross-street and invisible to me, was reflected in a factory window and then reflected
once more in the rear view mirror attached to the truck door. It was only a tiny detail.
Since then, I have enlarged the negative enormously. The grain of the film all but oblit-
erates the features of the image. It is obscure. By any possible reckoning it is hopelessly
ambiguous. Nevertheless, what I believe I see recorded in that speck of film fills me with
such fear, such utter dread and loathing that I think I shall never dare to make another
photograph. Here it is! Look at it! Do you see what I see?

The answer, I suppose, is: Always, if I keep my eyes closed.

Middlesex University

14. There is an extensive and important bibliography on Frampton, including his own writings, but see
especially October 32 (1985), for a special issue of this journal devoted to him, and the essay “Frampton’s
Frames” at http://www.7hours.com/powder/frampton.htm, from which I have confirmed my transcription
of this quotation.