The Poetry of Blotches

1.

One of my favorite recent books I have read is George Didi-Huberman’s Fra Angelico (translated by Jane Marie Todd, she writes a great translator’s note), about the Italian Renaissance artist. Didi-Huberman argues that both ideals of “realism” and allegory fails these paintings; these are not Fra Angelico’s aesthetics but rather academic ideals imposed on the work.

Rather, writing from a place of un-knowing fascination, Didi-Huberman argues that Fra Angelico’s paintings are about “rendering mysterious bodies” and creating pictorial “enigmas”, not through ”resemblance” but “dissemblance.” Strangeness, noisy mimesis.

The key for Didi-Huberman is what he - in translation - calls “the blotch.” The blotches are “little spots of red pigment… They do not describe anything.” Instead of describing and defining, these “pure physical, colored traces” are associative, labile, “transit signs.” They create vibrations, movement.

2.

A key example of this for Didi-Huberman is Fran Angelico’s painting Noli Me Tangere, which shows Jesus post-resurrection meeting up with Mary Magdalene:

Didi-Huberman focuses in on the flowers in the meadow:

These flowers are not realistic - not containing any details of a flower (calyx, stamen, whatever) - but rather they are blotches, materially intensive:

“The iconic character of these red signs moves to the background, submits to the logical aporia, while their nature as indexes, as blotches, as pure physical, colored traces, takes center stage”

But it is also the same way, the artist elsewhere paints Jesus’s stigmata, suggesting a field of wounds.

Even as they are not realist, these “thick pigment of terra rosa” make the allegorical dimension "(the “iconic” dimension) of the flower secondary as well. They “interrupt” this sort of reading. Didi-Huberman acknowledges that he as a spectator is put in a state of doubt, vacillation. As in Keats’ famous idea, it seems the paintings draw Didi-Huberman away from the rhetorical mastery of so much academic study, and into a state of “negative capability.”

Didi-Huberman associates the “blotch” with Pierce’s idea of “index”:

“The term should be understood here not only as the material remains of a past enigma, its trace… but also as the vestige of a contact, a blow, a material imprint.”

I think of Francis Bacon’s famous paintings where a realist space gets blurry, usually in the face, often the face of a screaming person, as if the blur was registering the sonic impact of the screen by going blurry, blotchy.

3.

Having recently written about David Lynch, I can’t help but see in this model of the blotch, the role of color in his films. The most obvious is Blue Velvet, in which the powerfully textural fabric of the title has a kind of materially intense blotch vibrancy.

We might expect Dorothy Valens to wear the dress when she sings, but blue velvet exists in the lyrics of the song and in the light on stage (echoing the blue light on Marlon Brando in Kenneth Anger’s queer masterpiece, Scorpio Rising). There’s already a mobile, labile quality to this blueness: it exists in the song, the light, but also the sound of the song feels so powerful it’s hard not to think about the material itself. (Whenever I think about this movie, the first thing that pops into my head is just blue velvet - it’s in the title.)

Importantly, at the end of Dorothy’s performance, Jeffrey sees Frank handling a piece of blue velvet tenderly and sensuously.

Frank’s fondling suggests a tactility to art and his experience of art, emphasizing the texture of blue velvet. The insistence on the texture helps create this mobile sense of blotch that disrupts both allegorical and realist readings of the movie. Often Lynch’s movies are ready allegorically, but I always find those readings unsatisfying precisely because they tend to jump over the material vibrancy of the images.

4.

It’s also hard for me not to think about Eva Kristina Olsson’s work, particularly The Angelgreen Sacrament. I’ve written a bunch about this book, including the post “The Art of the Angelic Book”, where I call attention to the tension between the sensuous materiality of the poem: not just the “pistachiogreen” of the text but also the sensuousness of the book design:

On one hand, this is a poem about encountering an angels, but on the other hand it insists on the materiality of its color, its texture. This creates a blotch effect.

In my essay on translation and mimicry, I write about Olsson’s vibrant, excessive green-ness using Michael Taussig’s writing on color:

It is as if color is stronger than language. In what Taussig might call moments of “metamorphic sublime,” color overwhelms the print medium. In this hyper-sensuous, nonsignifying ambience, I am reminded of Taussig’s discussion of sacred color that can transform the viewer: “Color vision becomes less a retinal and more a total bodily activity to the fairytale extent that looking at something, we may even pass into the image.”

Here I’m using Taussig to get at the power of color - and the same applies to Fra Angelico’s “thick pigment of terra rosa.” The effect of color can be powerfully physical, tactile, bodily.

In an interview with me, Olsson revealed that perhaps the book is not about angels but about a dress that she wore as a teenager. Like Lynch’s velvet, the dress is both powerfully material and almost symbolic. They could be said to be “indexical” - the residue of contact, blow violence. There is of course a big difference here: While Frank has cut up the velvet dress, as part of his sadistic relationship with Valens, Olsson herself touches, moves her dress - and as you can see in the photo, I have handled her book extensively, or I should say the cover design registers the traces of my reading - as it takes on erotic as well as ethereal dimensions.

5.

In a lot of art I love there’s this blotchy moment/image/word that generate a volatile ambience, disrupts easy readings; it’s an effect not of interpreting but of being struck by the art, being contacted by it. Not “accessible” poems but poems that accesses. Not realist art, but art that involves the spectator in something like its material intensity.