… perspectivism amounts to a relativism, but not the relativism we take for granted. It is not a variation of truth according to the subject, but the condition in which the truth of a variation appears to the subject. This is the very idea of Baroque perspective. (Deleuze, The Fold 20)

Baroque perspective seems ever to see something through something, as through a scrim or water, an experience of which Ruskin also wrote, "we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow." Still the face of Velasquez’s Venus does not resolve in her mirror with the degree of clarity that composes the flesh of her buttocks or the folds of the bedding. As is the case with Las Meninas, the position of the observer becomes a necessary aspect of the subject (see Wellman). The face that the onlooker beholds in the mirror is not those parts of her body that Venus herself sees, given the incidence of light; but most would presume impossibly that she looks at her own face, the split between body and face, uncritically mirroring male desire (Bal 222). In his Venus, Velasquez documents the role of subjectivity in the founding of modernism, in senses other than those indicated by Foucault in his famous analysis of Las Meninas. The Venus also illustrates the meaning of Leibniz’s perspectivism. so important to Deleuze.

For Frank Stella, Mark Rothko serves as an exemplum of modernism as it approaches perfection of objective form. Stella writes "emphasis on surface and materials" replaces representation as subject of engagement (113). Rothko’s luminescence is a presence that charges the surface with looming energy. Stella’s own solution is to violate and explode the surface in a work like Thruxton 3X. Francis Bacon works with figural elements in order to dodge the narrative bullet that reduces expression to mere representation (see David Sylvester on Bacon’s antipathy to illustration, 22). Deleuze describes Bacon’s forms, with their heavy, smeared impasto, as draining themselves into contorted folds as though matter could pass into the canvas through a hypo. More recently Stephen Tyler on the topic of postmodern ethnography writes, "… form—that familiar perversion of the modernist" as he attempts to imagine an ethnography that is evocative rather than representational (206). Unlike Rothko, in none of these examples do objects exist with any clarity of their own. In Stella and Bacon we have different transgressive actions that violate not only margins, but also surfaces. Objects (as subjects of study) disappear (that is Tyler’s point). Expression becomes evocative in a baroque shifting of point of view.

Still as recently as 1985, Marjorie Perloff, in The Dance of the Intellect, insisted on the crucial importance of the distinction between expression and form, arguing that in the 1960s construction emerged triumphant in the struggle with the romantically conceived ego (an argument concerning the undesirability of "lyric interference" staged in Olson’s "Projective Verse," for instance). For Perloff and many others, postmodernism becomes the triumph of abstraction over the ego. Mimetic formalisms of processes indicate a synergy among complex systems that poetry, like fractal geometry, can be said to model. One response to this modeling of process is to examine the material facts of surfaces; another is to say that the usual postmodern position is not abstract enough. In an art like painting, where illusion lies all on the surface, decorative and figural elements themselves may express an explosive or transgressive range of emotions. In both the images by David Reed and by Matisse presented here, optical contrasts create a tactile experience.

The transgressive substance does not respect rigid boundaries. It is tactile, "relishes … the different skin of things. Sensation now penetrates beyond the solid object into the realm of the immaterial." (Wölfflin 27). Surfaces, like that "different skin" become tactile through color contrasts as in Reed’s work and indeed in Matisse’s. The baroque impulse that is central to my thought has been said to "deprive perception of its object" (Bal 3). It is a flight from representation that engages expression on a material level. I am intrigued with Matisse’s obsession with turning the human figure into a decorative element.

For Mieke Bal (and Stella’s Working Space is an important, if not adequately acknowledged precursor to her studies), the baroque allows a transhistorical dialog between paintings of different generations, specifically affecting the conception of postmodern subjectivity in a variety of contemporary artists, some of whom explicitly quote Caravaggio, like David Reed, as they explore folded (ornamental or decorative space). Henri Focillon may have said as much when he wrote, "The baroque state likewise reveals identical traits existing as constants within the most diverse environments and periods of time" (58). He identifies the baroque "as the freest and most emancipated" in "the life of forms." Baroque forms violate frames with their ornamental exuberance. "They proliferate like some vegetable monstrosity. They break apart even as they grow; they tend to invade space in every direction, to perforate it, to become as one with all of its possibilities. …. They are obsessed with the object of representation" (58).

Matisse often speaks to a progressive depersonalization of expression. "Expression to my way of thinking does not consist of the passion mirrored upon a human face or betrayed by a violent gesture. The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. The place occupied by figures or objects, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything plays a part. … Composition the aim of which is expression alters itself according to the surface to be covered" (Chipp 132). For instance, Matisse’s studies for "The Dance" (Barnes Foundation) become progressively "decorative" less personally expressive as color harmony is established." (Bois 80).

Expression in Matisse’s Decorative Figure of 1925 seems to frame a universe of repeated elements very much like that described by Leibniz. "Every portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants, and like a pond full of fish. But every branch of a plant, every member of an animal. and every drop of the fluids within it, is also such a garden or such a pond." (Monadology 67) Baroque space is illusionistic; but mirrors are never entirely transparent. The mirror in Decorative Figure is entirely opaque. But, Matisse’s paintings like Leibniz’s monad emit light. Distinctively then for John Elderfield, "Throughout his work, that which separates and connects does not receive light but gives light. His paintings are not windows onto an external nature. They are not windows through which light passes, but mirrors that return light, and with it a transformed nature. Matisse thought of his paintings as emitting a beneficent radiation." (66). Leibniz is, of course famous for maintaining that the monad has no windows, famous for that and for the invention of the calculus, a measure of contours that fade and turn in the light through multiple gradations.

For Matisse, "Thus there is an inherent truth that must be disengaged from the outward appearance of the object to be represented. This is the only truth that matters" (137). Is his reference to a higher truth or to a similarity of form that distinguishes fig leaves from other leaves? One series of paterns from a second? The inner truth of which he speaks is consonant with form, with modernism's evaluation of form. Many will argue that modernism began with the historical Baroque in the seventeenth century: " … the inner images of things are near to reality, less opaque to the light, than are the things themselves in the outer world" (228). So Frances Yates describes the philosophy of Giordano Bruno, placing him midway between medieval mysticism and Leibniz, a theme developed in the last chapter of The Art of Memory.

My final example of the transhistorical baroque is a photograph in which Robert Rauschenberg poses before his Inside-Out(1962). The ‘composite painting,’ like other examples of the baroque (understood transhistorically), "creates a visual situation that implicates the viewer in the object itself" writes Frank H. Goodyear III in ARTnews Oct. 2002 (140). The photograph has the baroque resonance of the artist’s self-presence as in Velasquez, Las Meninas. Of this transhistorical baroque, we can say that the surface of the painting folds virtual and material worlds. "… Baroque vision vacillates between the subject and object of that vision," changing the status of both" (Bal 7). Different viewers will occupy the virtual spaces of the mirror, but that space will always be haunted by the presence of the artist.

Other compelling gestures toward the baroque in Rauschenberg's photograph include the wheel of a baby carriage (an homage in the direction of Merz), operating cosmologically with reference to both the lens of the camera illuminated by the flash of the instant and the boss of a tile of tin ceiling, almost planetary in appearance, decorated with specifically baroque motifs, scalloped and folded vegetation. In several ways the image uses collage and a decorative impulse to evoke a transhistorical play of references that is also nonrepresentational.

Conclusion:
I have tried to come to terms with the ways in which transgressive contemporary art, in its questioning of pictorial space, associates itself with the baroque and the ways in which this questioning contests the assumptions about aesthetic form that are fundamental to modernism. Transgression at the borders of stable categories flips or folds or rolls subjective and objective positions into a series of undetermined, undermined states. The interplay of so many virtual images receding into one another, resonating like Leibniz’s goldfish is profoundly baroque—but so is the disruption that alters the flatness of surface in evocative ways, challenging the ontological status of both object and form, for that is what the postmodern baroque does..
 
 

Works Cited

Bal, Mieke. Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago: Chicago, 1999.

Bois, Yve Alain. Matisse and PicassoParis : Flammarion ; [Forth Worth, Tex.] : Kimbell Art Museum, 1998.

Chipp, Herschel, ed. Theories of Modern Art. Berkeley: U Cal P, 1968.

Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical. Tr. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1997.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Tr. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1993.

Elderfield, John. Henri Matisse: A Retrospective. NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1992.

Focillon, Henri. The Life of Forms in Art. Tr. Charles B. Hogan and George Kubler. NY: Zone, 1989.

Flam, Jack ed. Matisse on Art

Leibniz, G.W. Philosophical Texts. Tr. and ed. R.S. Woolhouse and Richard Francks. Oxford: Oxford, 1998.

Matisse, Henri. Notes of a Painter. Tr. Alfred H. Barr. Chipp 131-139.

Perloff, Marjorie. The Dance of the Intellect. Evanston: Northwestern, 1996.

Stella, Frank. Working Space. Cambridge: Harvard, 1986.

Sylvester, David. Interviews with Francis Bacon. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992.

Tyler, Stephen. The Unspeakable: Discourse, Dailogue, and Rhetoric in the Postmodern World. Madison: Wisconsin, 1987.

Wölfflin, Heinrich. Principles of Art History. Tr. M. D. Hottinger. NY: Dover, 1950.