Auto-fictional art historical lecture
Barriers

”The hardest struggle is not fought against the forces of the reality; it is fought against the forces of the imaginary.” G.B.

In Gaston Bachelard’s poetological writing dreaming is a sleeping into looking. From 1942-1948 he wrote four consecutive books on dreaming. Lacking any attempt at defining dreaming, sleeping or looking, these books instead explicate their thinking in their associative writing: Dreaming is something that is flowing through us. A flowing that blends sleeping with looking. Dreaming is the blending of sleeping and looking that is life proper. Looking then in this state of life is not enclosed by our eyes but is akin to a tense ear that is able to follow these flows as they travel through us in a darkness of lesser or greater intensity.

Andrei Tarkovsky tried in Mirror (1975) to dam these dreamed flows by raising vertical image barriers. His tactic is a confrontational one not of sleeping into looking but of looking into sleeping. Mirror is a dreamed flow, but what strikes me is the moments of this flow being blocked. Tarkovsky had learned this tactic of raising image barriers from the modern tradition he develops. Image barriers creating a modern topography of handling forces: reservoirs, subaquatic vistas, pressure, overflow, breakdown. Image barriers as apparitional edifices that block the flows, they thus make visible.

Borrowing this tactic and its topology, art historical writing itself is aquatic to me, a writing-seeing between flowing and blocking. A stumbling upon image barriers to study them and watch them overflow or break down. Writing art as aquatic? I will try to follow this line of thought with examples ranging from personal traumatic experience over modernist tactics to feminist glaciology.