Footnote: Rendering

Painting. Debt. The Commodity.

Qui me rendrà mes chaussures?

Pourquoi dire toujours de la peinture qu'elle rend? Qu'elle restitue? [Why do we always say of painting that it renders? That it restores/repays?] - Jacques Derrida, La Vérité en peinture

Comments

[R.Mutt]

Yes, why?
http://www.artland.co.uk/WarholDiamondDustShoes1980lilacbluegreenKW800.jpg

(via FJ)

[alphonsevanworden]

Maaaaaatt! Matt? Where's Matt? He'll know.

[alphonsevanworden]

(Me I only have the vulgar Marxist answer.)

[alphonsevanworden]

"Precipitately! After years, years of abuse of authority!

"Precipitately, as though an honest man could sleep, live, enjoy life, as long as those whose well being he is called upon to watch over, those who are in the highest sense his neighbours, are robbed and exploited!" - Multatuli, Max Havelaar

[alphonsevanworden]

Whatever the purpose of the transaction, we can tell Badiou that the "artness" of the repayment is the interest.

[Alain]

Render, among its many meanings, is to transmit something to another, to deliver and give it up. I take it that the repayment in question is the structure of mimesis, that it promises to deliver the thing in its absence. And (not to get too Heideggarian) the world it reveals is more true than the "shoes themselves."

[alphonsevanworden]

Thanks Alain.

Heidegger btw was firmly convinced the shoes belonged to a peasant in the country. That part of Truth In Painting which deals with this conviction is uproariously comical. I really recommend it.

[Mark Kaplan]

Doesn’t Deleuze (in his book on Bacon?) make much of Klee’s distinction - : 'not to render the visible, but to render visible'.
But his perhaps excludes a sense in which the visible needs also to be 'rendered visible'.

Render: Agree with Alain that it lends itself to Heideggerian formula – suggests a giving back, a returning of something to itself, even a kind of justice (a number of people, eg Rilke) write about art in terms of justice). And it also suggests doesn’t it something unforced – a sort of yielding. It’s like the artist has done a restoration job, letting the true surfaces of the world emerge.

There is a passage in Berger, while we’re quoting him, where he says that a painting is a record of something been seen (with that ‘seen’ in straining italics). And he doesn’t mean that the artist has really seen the thing and thus was compelled to paint it. He means that the painter saw it BY painting it. To ‘see’ a thing in this sense is something like to rescue it from the way it keeps ‘disappearing’ into its pragmatic context. Or, Berger might say, from the immateriality of its Value.

(None of this is necessarily the view of the present commenter, of course)

[......................]

it's not the painting we see, or that is merely the prelude: the art world and the aristocrats who own the paintings are on display; van gogh might be a great artist (tho that's debatable) but what is more marvelous to the consuming classes is art as an investment and symbol of success and aristocratic pleasure.

I'd much rather view it via vulgar marxism (what variety of marxism isn't vulgar?) if not darwinian naturalism, rather than via Derrida, and the naturalistic power is undeniable, but that is not what the usual museum visitors are seeing; they are seeing the context of the art world, if not the auctions, and the ueberwealthy westside or corporate bag of shit who buys the thing for 5 mil and puts it above his divan where he buttfucks his LA Weekly ho's on Fridays after lunch at Trader Vics

[Anthony Paul Smith]

Be careful, that's almost a phenomenological arguement you're making. I know you'd hate that.