JEU DE PAUME - EN

EPISODES

To approach images in the light of the "global turn", it is necessary to change scale, from the singular to the plural, from the single object to the series, from the close to the panorama. Attempting this study is the challenge of the Visual Contagions project.

Is the mass of images in globalization orderly? Are there groups of images with profiles that are more similar than others? We must also consider that there is not one kind of image but several, with very diverse potential impacts; therefore, a generalized discourse on the image would be naive. But a flood of images may have effects that do not depend directly on the images concerned: images need an audience to consume them. Nor are there any images without mediums that make them sensitive and material. Are the effects of images in the plural the same on a screen as on a paper format?

Studying many images means confronting more than just visions of the world; it also means touching on very concrete societies, with their hierarchies and their social and cultural divisions.

We approach the global deluge of images as a flow, an incessant circulation whose logic the research must provide insights into.

 

 

Where do the images transit? What are the infrastructures of their circulation? Let us think of the printing presses, the train and plane lines, the shouts of the newspaper seller, the radio waves... There is no flow without economic and political possibilities of circulation (rights? borders?), nor without a logistics that a strict theory of the image or even of images is likely to miss.

Heraclitus rather than Caesar

To approach the deluge of images through the prism of their circulation is to defeat any centralist approach to world culture. It means breaking with the usual interpretations of globalization in diffusionist and nationalist terms.

 

Historians of globalization have long noted that cultural objects, no more or even less than people and capital, do not respect national borders.[1] Some have seen the importance in the circulation of cultural objects of their changes of meaning, of the reinterpretations they undergo, and of the hybridizations that take place. They have thus defended the capacity of regions considered subaltern to appropriate certain forms (mythical, narrative, literary, visual as well as practical, every day or ritual) and to put new ones into circulation. They insisted on the role of the circulation of objects, people, ideas and works in a globalization that is much more diverse than the caricature often made of it.[2]

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In illustration: the Globe, one of the most numerous groupings of similar images in our corpus of illustrated periodicals.

 

Crossing this inspiration with art history and visual studies was not a foregone conclusion. Although art history has always been interested in the circulation of motifs and styles, this interest has long been obliterated by a national, even nationalistic conception of art. A hierarchical conception of artistic circulation dominates; Caesar prevails over Heraclitus.

The systematic need to establish rankings and justify admirations has not been lost since the Lives of Giorgio Vasari, written to illustrate the power of Florence (1550). The ancient interest of art historians in the diffusion of images, practices and motifs has most often taken the form of commentary on the artistic (or even spiritual) domination of certain cities, nations, or ethnic groups over others. What has been called Translatio Imperii since the Middle Ages remains a widespread topos in even the most serious stories, exhibitions, and publications today. This myth of 'the empire's transfer' is based on the underlying story of the circulation of undivided world domination over the centuries: from Babylon to Athens and then Rome - and then, depending on the period and the proponents of the idea, to Constantinople, Ravenna, Florence, Rome, Paris, London, or New York - the economic and military power of successive centres was said to have had as a corollary, or even as a prerequisite, the migration of cultural, religious, intellectual and spiritual superiority. The myth in question has been taken up by many empires, from the Holy Roman Empire to the Third Reich. It has a bright future ahead of it: we often hear that Paris was the "world capital" of artistic modernity until 1945, and that New York has "stolen" this position since the Second World War; more recently, China has set in motion a programme to replace the "American dream" with the "Chinese dream", justifyingthe translatio imperii type.[3]