“Like Day and Night—On the Pictures of Jan Peter Tripp”
Not long after he had made his way to the other side, two years after he had passed over the border, as Sebald himself might have put it,1 a volume entitled Unerzählt (Unrecounted) was published under the names of W. G. Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp. It is arranged with facing pages of Tripp’s images of pairs of eyes and Sebald’s laconic lines and implicitly contemplates the issues of perception, reality, and citation: this is a constellation at play, we saw, in the last lines of both Austerlitz and The Emigrants and which we pondered more pointedly in “Air War and Literature.”2
There had also been another, earlier encounter of Sebald’s writing and Tripp’s images in Logis in einem Landhaus (A Place in the Country).3 How shall we pose the question of that relation? At the close of the preliminary remarks to that volume, we read:
And beforehand as a reader I therefore pay my tribute in what follows to the colleagues who went before in the form of several extended marginalia which otherwise make no particular claim. That at the end there is an essay about a painter—that is quite in order [Ordnung], not only because Jan Peter Tripp and I went to the same school in Oberstdorf for a rather long time and because Keller and Walser are equally meaningful to both of us, but also because I learned from his pictures that one has to look into the depths, that art does not get on without handwork and that one has to take many difficulties into account in enumerating things.
(Logis in einem Landhaus 7G)4
The tribute to previous colleagues takes the form of “marginalia.”5 What would it mean to write marginalia, to write on the margins of another’s work, just outside its frame? Is it the same as what the narrator of Austerlitz speaks of as vision at the edge of the field of sight (Austerlitz, 35E, 51G)? Would this account as well for Sebald’s essay on the painter? Or does Sebald’s attempt here to read Tripp’s work, particularly at the close of that essay, go off in a different direction? What does it mean to look into the depths? Moreover, the essay on Tripp has its own order and is bound up with the difficulties of listing, enumeration, accounting for things.
As I account for this accounting I want, if at all possible, to set out on the right foot. And so I begin with a citation, and with a citation within that citation, from the works of Jan Peter Tripp that I take from “Like Day and Night: On the Pictures of Jan Peter Tripp” (“Wie Tag und Nacht—Über die Bilder Jan Peter Tripps).”6 I wish to speak of what remains untold in the story of two paintings and to do so by way of Sebald’s essay, which in its closing pages purports to do just that and yet still leaves a thing or two unrecounted.
“Remembrance is fundamentally nothing but a citation” (“As Day and Night” 90E, 184G),7 Sebald tells us. Echoing Umberto Eco, he goes on to write: “And the citation incorporated in a text (or image) by montage compels us . . . to probe [literally: to the looking through of] our knowledge of other texts and pictures and our knowledge of the world. This, in turn, takes time. By spending it, we enter into narrated time and into the time of culture” (“As Day and Night” 90–91E).8 Already we are out of time, or compelled at least to spend it, by entering into another time, “narrated time” and “the time of culture,” in which our own “knowledge” (Kenntnisse) is put to the test. What does it mean to step into the frames of time recounted or the time of culture? What can we know of other texts and other images? What can we know of time that has been narrated, given over, thus, to storytelling? What can we know of the world?
Sebald proposes to “show” the necessity of all this by citing, that is, by the incorporation by montage (Einmontierung) of Jan Peter Tripp’s La Déclaration de guerre into his text. Despite its apparent lack of ambiguity, something is immediately amiss.9 There is indeed a war raging, as the title of the painting insists, though perhaps not openly declared, and certainly not explained (erklärt),10 in the juxtaposition of the two patterns. “Let us finally try to show that in the picture ‘La déclaration de guerre’ measuring 370 by 220 centimeters and in which an elegant pair of ladies’ shoes is to be seen on a tiled floor. The pale blue-natural white ornament of the tiles, the gray lines of the joints, the lozenge-net from a leaden glass window cast by sunlight onto the picture’s middle section, in which the black shoes stand between two shadow areas, all this makes a geometric pattern of a complexity not to be described in words” (“As Day and Night” 91E).11
A challenge is made to the pattern of the ornamental tile on which the shoes stand, a challenge made by the rhomboid net, a second pattern, cast as shadow by the sunlight passing through the leaden glass window we are compelled to imagine at the right (“As Day and Night” 91E, 184–85G).12 The right shoe is aligned with the grid of the shadow; the left shoe with that of the grouted tile joints. A war is played out as well between the visual complexity all this produces and the descriptive word that is bound to fail: a complexity that is not to be described in language. If there is some sort of declaration of war, it jumps to the eye, then, as a question of form and it announces as well the limits of representation. This takes place with respect to an object that, nevertheless, apparently claims to communicate as a “mediating object of [the] representation” (Darstellung; “As Day and Night” 92E, 186G).
FIGURE 6.1 Jan Peter Tripp, Déclaration de guerre. Copyright © Jan Peter Tripp. Reprinted by permission of the artist (in “As Day and Night” 91E, 185G.).
Still, suddenly thereafter, we enter a realm in which description proves to be no challenge whatsoever. “A picture puzzle arises out of this pattern illustrating the degree of difficulty of the different relationships, connections and interweavings and the mysterious pair of black shoes—a picture puzzle which the observer who does not know the prehistory will hardly be able to solve. To which woman do the shoes belong? Where did she go? Did the shoes pass over into the possession of another person?” (“As Day and Night” 91E, my emphasis).13
The narrator shifts the stakes abruptly from the clashing formal relations between texts and images into a realm we might call “narrated time,” a “time of culture,” or even “knowledge of the world” (“As Day and Night” 90–91E, 184G). The essay turns from the war of patterns within the image to finding a woman without. It passes as well from the incommensurability of image and text to assuming that the enigma of the picture might be solvable. It poses the frame-jumping question ‘To whom did the shoes belong?’ and will venture to show us what has happened to her. This will take place by way of Tripp’s second painting. The two shoes of the Déclaration do not declare and do not explain. They do not give away their secret (“As Day and Night” 91E, 185G), at least not before they are mounted into a subsequent work of the artist. What Sebald himself creates is a picture puzzle (Bilderrätsel).
FIGURE 6.2 Jan Peter Tripp, Déjà vu oder der Zwischenfall (Déjà vu or the Incident). Copyright © Jan Peter Tripp. Reprinted by permission of the artist (in “As Day and Night,” 92E, 186G).
What sort of solution will that second citation make possible? Can it bring about the shift from image to language that we expect in a rebus? The pages solving the puzzle begin with the description of what we observe and end with us as the object of observation. This solution stands, admittedly, in place of the formal conundrum in which words were seen as incapable of either describing or explaining the Déclaration. We find tales of people and dogs, of time and space, of paintings and their painters, and the artist as creator, observer, and witness; stories of fidelity and secrets revealed, of knowledge and perspicacity, of domestication and wildness, and, above all, of the inexplicable losses and gains implicit in citation’s relation to realism.
Two years later, to be sure, the painter shifts his puzzle-image at least a bit further into the public sphere. In a work of a significantly smaller format (100 x 145 cm) the larger painting reappears, not only as a quotation but as a mediating object of representation. Filling the upper two-thirds of the canvas, it now evidently hangs in its place; and in front of it, in front of “La Déclaration de guerre,” turning away from the viewer, sideways on a white-upholstered mahogany chair, sits a flamingly red-haired woman. She is elegantly dressed, but somehow is someone tired by evening of the day’s burdens. She has taken off one of her shoes—and they are the same that she contemplates on the large picture.
(“As Day and Night” 92E)14
Just as the smaller painting, has, in the act of citation, shrunk the scale of the much larger one reproduced therein, the name of the larger will also soon be shortened and domesticated into the German Kriegserklärung. The woman in white contemplates the image of the two shoes. Turned away from us, the observers, she sits in for us as well, domesticating not only the foreignness of its title but also of its representation. For she appears as an answer to the questions it first posed (To which woman do the shoes belong? Where did she go?), and she poses in turn, in a compelling manner, the third and most puzzling of the narrator’s queries: “Did the shoes pass over into the possession of another person?” (“As Day and Night” 91E, 185G). For only here, as we observe the second painting, just as we seem to account for the initial pair in La Déclaration de guerre, just as we seem to have found the woman to whom the shoes belonged, one of her pair goes missing.
Thus we must recognize “that one has to take many difficulties into account in enumerating things” (Logis 7G) and that art is no simple doubling of this world into an aesthetic realm: it cannot be accounted for by the “obliteration of the visible world in interminable series of reproductions” (“As Day and Night” 84E, 178G). In this regard, art distinguishes itself from photography, as Sebald chooses to understand it. “The photographic image turns reality into tautology. . . . Roland Barthes saw in the by now omnipresent man with a camera an agent of death, and in photographs something like the residue of a life perpetually perishing” (“As Day and Night” 84E).15 In photography, life dies into and becomes the image. But, Sebald insists, art is in need of “the transcendence of that which according to an incontrovertible sentence is the case” (“As Day and Night” 84E, 178G). Thus Tripp’s second painting only half-heartedly suggests that the shoes in the work of art result from reality being ferried over into a nether world by an agent of death. Were that inexorably the case, how to explain the anomaly that, while both shoes appear in La Déclaration de guerre, the left shoe remains on the woman’s foot?16
What citation generates, just as the narrator had forewarned, requires turning to yet other texts and other images, to the time of culture and narrated time. For what Sebald now invents to explain the puzzle is a series of stories about what happened over time, to the woman and to the dog, speaking of them, so caught up in their realism is he, as if they had lives independent of Tripp’s creation. Thus it is evening and the woman, “wearied from the burdens of the day” (“As Day and Night” 92E, 186G), has removed one of her shoes, which is now no longer to be seen—shoes that are (but are also not) the same as those in the puzzling La Déclaration de guerre. She ponders an inexplicable loss (unerklärlichen Verlust; “As Day and Night” 93E, 188G).
As surely as we regard her from outside the frame of art, she too, from within, regards the painting hanging before her. “Originally, so I was told, she held this shoe taken off in her left hand, then it lay on the floor on the right, next to the chair, and finally it had wholly vanished” (“As Day and Night” 92E).17 How are we to understand this slide from left to right and ultimately to nowhere? If the elegant woman held the shoe to one side, was it she who, taking on a life of her own, then shifted it and laid it on the floor to the right? What to make, moreover, of the utter lack of agency in its ultimate disappearance: “and finally it had totally vanished” (“As Day and Night” 92E, 186G). Or are we to understand, pairing this passage with the one to come, that what the narrator has heard told, what has taken form in “narrated time,” is, rather, three versions of the painting, the first with the shoe in her left hand, then with it laid on the floor at her right, and finally out of sight? For not only the shoe but the dog as well has done some moving around. “The woman with the one shoe, alone with herself and the enigmatic declaration of war, alone except for the faithful dog at her side, who, to be sure, is not interested in the painted shoes, but looks straight ahead out of the picture and into our eyes . . .” (“As Day and Night” 92E).18 The woman and dog are a couple, but are, then again, like night and day: she aligned with the right shoe, the dog with the left in Déclaration de guerre; the one with her back to us seems caught up in the painting, the other, indifferent to that which is painted, casts his eyes outside the frame and confronts us head on. The woman makes us the observer of the observer. With the dog we become the observed. Still, since “an X-ray would show that earlier on he had once stood at the center of the picture” (“As Day and Night” 92E, 186G), it might tell us, then, as well, that the dog, who gives such evidence of a conscious, intentional gaze, is himself merely paint and was once painted over.
And yet, we go on to read, between finding his original place in the middle (as the materiality of the artist’s medium) and shifting his stand to the left (where he appears as mimetic representation), he takes on a mysteriously kinetic and embodied presence (as though real): a fanciful story redelivers the dog to narrated time and the time of culture: “Meanwhile he has been underway and has brought in a sort of wooden sandal, from the fifteenth century or more specifically from the wedding picture hanging in the London National Gallery which Jan van Eyck painted in 1434” (“As Day and Night” 92–93E, emphasis mine).19
More is left hanging than the pictures: of marriage and war, of union and conflict. The dog makes something of a trip between the paintings of the two Jans. And doesn’t this explain the title of the painting, which Sebald has chosen to obliterate: Déjà vu oder der Zwischenfall? What we contemplate is the citation of La déclaration de guerre (this is the déjà vu) or the announcement of a small and almost unnoticed incident (Zwischenfall), perhaps the breaking out of a conflict of another kind, as the dog moves between (zwischen) one version of the painting and the next: “Meanwhile he has been underway.” (“Inzwischen ist er unterwegs gewesen”; “As Day and Night” 92–93E, 186–87G). What marked the middle of Tripp’s picture (the dog) now finds its place at the left. The narrator tells of what happened in between (inzwischen)—between middle and left, between the twentieth and fifteenth centuries, or between continental Europe and London. In this story the canine, which was formally conceived in minute strokes of color, takes form as in the machinations of a trick film and comes, like one of its living, furry counterparts, to occupy and pass through time and space. It brings back a sandal, we read, either by returning to the concrete, three-dimensional world of a historically earlier time or by jumping the space of the Channel to the formal, two-dimensional realm of van Eyck’s painting in the London National Gallery. At the same time, it figures as a creature for whom space and time are no object. The dog runs “with ease over the abysses of time, because for him there is no difference between the fifteenth and the twentieth centuries” (“As Day and Night” 94E, 188G).
While the woman in white, something of a bride without a bridegroom after all, “ponders the history of her shoes and an inexplicable loss, [she] never guesses that the disclosure of her secret lies behind her—in the shape of an analogous object from a world long past” (“As Day and Night” 93–94E, 187–88G). The dog, having left its place in the middle of the canvas, and, having turned its back on the enigmatic image and image puzzle (Rätselbild and Bilderrätsel; “As Day and Night” 91–92E, 185G) cited therein, has in the meantime become the “bearer of a secret” (“As Day and Night” 94E, 188G). But is the revelation of the secret, even to us, a certainty? Is the “inexplicable loss” (“As Day and Night” 93E, 188G) of her shoe explained? Do we discover thereby whether or not her shoe has gone over into the possession of another (“in den Besitz eines anderen”; “As Day and Night” 91E, 185G)? Doesn’t the dog remain, rather, as the text reads, simply the bearer of the secret rather than the agent of its revelation? Isn’t it this that contemplating the painting of van Eyck (and reading the narrator’s ostentatiously faulty description of it) tells us?
[The dog] brought in a sort of wooden sandal, from the fifteenth century or more specifically from the wedding picture hanging in the London National Gallery which Jan van Eyck painted in 1434 for Giovanni Arnolfini and the Giovanna Cenami affianced to him in a morganatic marriage “of the left hand,” as a token of his witness. Johannes de Eyck hic fuit, one is told, on the frame of the round mirror in which the scene, reduced to miniature format, can once more be seen, from behind. In the foreground, near the left lower edge of the picture, lies that wooden sandal, this curious piece of evidence, beside a little dog that probably entered the composition as a symbol of marital fidelity.
(“As Day and Night” 93E)20
Spending some time with the painting, one sees that here it is not a question of a complexity that cannot be described in words (“As Day and Night” 91E, 185G). It is, on the contrary, a work that both calls for and performs the act of description. The convex mirror that inevitably draws the eye (while functioning as one) reduces the scene to a miniature format, as Sebald tells us. In this it plays the same role as Tripp’s second painting, considerably reducing the larger, initial image and introducing the figure of the observer. In Van Eyck’s painting, although Sebald neglects to remind us of it, the mirror not only lets us see the initial scene again, this time from behind, it also adds what is presumably the image of van Eyck as a sign of his having been witness to the event (zum Zeichen seiner Zeugenschaft) and adds as well, alongside the painter, another observer at his side. Whereas Sebald speaks of one sandal, in van Eyck’s painting there are, of course, two. Whereas van Eyck has signed Johannes de Eyck fuit hic, Sebald inverts the word order to hic fuit—putting in question precisely the hereness of the “was” in a statement that is said to fix it in place: Johannes de Eyck was here. Sebald tells us that the declaration is to be found “on the frame of the round mirror” when it is, in fact, outside that frame, prominently and elegantly displayed on the wall.21
FIGURE 6.3 Jan van Eyck, Portrait of Giovanni (?) Arnolfini and His Wife. Copyright © the National Gallery, London.
If the photographic image turns reality into tautology, this is not the case as the narrator describes van Eyck’s painting. Let us just say in passing, in place of a more thorough reading of Sebald’s gloss, which shifts things around so obviously, that the more subtle lesson to be learned here is less that of the narrator’s divergences and differences from the wedding picture as the object of his description than the nature of the union that van Eyck actually celebrates. One wonders how it could be anything but intentional that what we witness van Eyck witnessing (or creating) is “a morganatic marriage ‘of the left hand’” (“As Day and Night” 93E, 187G). This was a marriage with the provision that the passing on of the husband’s property or title was, from the beginning, out of the question. It is a relation in which all inheritance, even that of a wooden sandal, simply could not take place. The ritual sign of this declared impossibility was the offering of the left hand instead of the right: it is echoed in Tripp’s second painting by the substitution of the left, not quite “analogous,” sandal from van Eyck for the missing right leather shoe. Were the weary lady to slip on its replacement, she would hobble unevenly at best. It disturbs the desire to create a couple, to form a pair.
What the dog carries over both challenges and testifies to the prohibition against such activities, against delivering it “into the possession of another.” The sandal’s anomalous appearance definitively explains the van Eyck as the source of Tripp’s citation. The figure of the dog in Tripp’s painting is a witty stand-in for the conventional rhetoric of art history, which would explain the appearance of Arnolfini’s left sandal as a citation or allusion to the fifteenth-century masterpiece and as a testament to Tripp’s stunning skills of mimicry.22 But the story of the dog in Sebald’s essay “Like Day and Night” is, after all, not an answer to the questions apparently posed by the real-life setting of the painting, or, rather, by Sebald’s fabula—not an answer, for example, to the query “Did the shoes pass into the possession of another person?” Nor does it explain the “inexplicable loss” that, we read, the red-haired woman ponders. The “secret” of that loss is nowhere revealed.
Still, the dog is the locus of knowledge: he “knows a great deal more precisely than we do” (“As Day and Night” 94E, 188G). What he knows, like his movement, is marked as an abyss between left and right and is evidenced in a strange double gaze.23 Sebald’s last image, a cropped citation of the second, smaller painting, places the dog once again in the middle of the frame. “Attentively his left (domesticated) eye is fixed on us; the right (wild) one has a trace less light, strikes us as averted and alien. And yet it is precisely by this overshadowed eye that we feel ourselves seen through” (“As Day and Night” 94E).24
In the essay we find a previous history of this state of affairs, which, while not solving the riddle of the dog, might help us to frame that cropped image of it from another perspective. Under the aegis of what might be left behind, it is again a question of an inheritance of sorts and of painting and the observer in relation, this time, to the nature morte. Citing Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sebald writes:
The nature morte, for Tripp . . . is the paradigm of the estate we leave behind. In it we encounter what Maurice Merleau-Ponty . . . called the regard préhumain, for in such paintings the roles of the observer and the observed objects are reversed. Looking, the painter relinquishes our all too facile knowing; fixedly/unrelatedly,25 things look across to us. “Action et passion si peu discernables . . . qu’on ne sait plus qui voit et qui est vu, qui peint et qui est peint.” (“Action and passion so little separable . . . that one no longer knows who is looking and who is being looked at, who is painting and who is being painted.”)
(“As Day and Night” 80E)26
Our knowing is ill-considered, frivolous, and must be relinquished (unlike that of the dog). Perhaps this is because, as observers (and isn’t this what the dog sees through?), we foolishly presume to know what Tripp (and art) are about. Sebald, too. For is not much of the essay “Like Day and Night” a series of ever shifting takes on Tripp’s work, perspectives that are implicitly cited, if not precisely kept in view, and ironically undone by the closing passage?
FIGURE 6.4 Detail of Jan Peter Tripp painting Déjà vu oder der Zwischenfall (Déjà vu or the Incident). Copyright © Jan Peter Tripp. Reprinted by permission of the artist (“As Day and Night” 94E).
In thinking of Tripp, this is what Sebald tells us all along: we cannot avoid the question of realism and of fidelity to reality: Wirklichkeitstreue. “What seems to me worth considering in it is only the assumption . . . according to which the inherent quality of a picture by Tripp, just in view of what one might believe to be its purely objective and affirmative nature, probably cannot be attributed to that identity with reality which all its viewers admire without fail—or to its photographic reproduction—but to the far less apparent points of divergence and difference” (“As Day and Night” 84E).27 If the narrator dismisses such fidelity to reality in Tripp’s art as completely off the mark, for most of the essay, nevertheless, it remains his point of departure. Thus art may call for ambiguity and polyvalence and for the transcendence of that which seems to be the case, but Tripp’s art is repeatedly viewed less as a radical departure from than as modification of the faithful replicating material of the photograph: with additions, interventions, divergences, and differences (“As Day and Night” 84–85E, 179G). His claims notwithstanding, the narrator fundamentally maintains the assumption of this art’s almost fidelity to, and even identity with, reality (“As Day and Night” 80E, 174G and 84E, 178G) with which Tripp’s work inevitably lures every observer: for what Sebald writes, at least early in the essay, is that just a small shift needs to take place: “Something is shifted to another place” (“As Day and Night” 84E, 179G).
Still, toward the end of the essay there is a shifting sense of shifting (rücken) that gets quite out of hand. The Déclaration de guerre, we read, closes itself off in a private realm, but, when cited in a second work, “the painter shifts (rückt) his puzzle-image at least a bit further into the public sphere” (“As Day and Night” 92E, 185G, emphasis mine). This shiftin the name of openness and revelation is immediately followed by the shift of the shoe in the hand of the woman in white, the shift of the dog from the middle to the left, the shift of the dog in and out of the frame, and the shift of van Eyck’s sandal into Tripp’s picture—shifts that cannot simply be grounded in fidelity to reality. The outlandish tale Sebald finally creates responds to his essay’s initial naïveté. So does the title of Tripp’s second painting, which Sebald keeps secret: Déjà vu oder der Zwischenfall (Déjà vu or the Incident). The title gives us a choice—or perhaps rather insists on our seeing double. The second painting presents art as Déjà vu. The painting of the two shoes, Déclaration de guerre, which we see imaged in this second work, previously had a place in a more immediate realm. Déjà vu or the Incident, because it contains a replica of the first painting, announces its fidelity to a reality outside its canvas (the Déclaration de guerre) that is passed from this world over the threshold to that of art. It is the passage to death (nature morte) of which we have already read—passing over the border on the way to the other side (“As Day and Night” 86E, 180G).
Moreover, one can think of the shoe on the woman’s foot (or the missing shoe, for that matter) as one of the original pair in the Déclaration de guerre: they are the same as those she contemplates on the large picture (“As Day and Night” 92E, 186G). In this sense, once again, not only what we see but also what she sees in the Déclaration de guerre is Déjà vu. The painting is a matter of fidelity to reality, as a replica of objects of the world, the painting, the woman’s shoe(s).
“Déjà vu oder der Zwischenfall” (Déjà vu or the Incident): what the canvas and Sebald’s storytelling also make of this incident (Zwischenfall) is the inzwischen, the intervening time, the time that falls between, of the outrageously elaborated adventure of the dog underway through time and space. In this little story of a little trip Sebald thereby claims to present as explanation for the woman’s loss that which is both beside the point and impossible.
Mimetic language had already met its match when confronted with the Déclaration de guerre as an image of such complexity, we were told, that it cannot be described in words. Shifting that image into Tripp’s second painting seemed a move toward bringing it into a more public sphere. The scene of the woman contemplating the Déclaration de guerre pretends to speak of, or even partially explain, the relation between what is inside and what is outside of art. It hints at but fails to fully account for a conventional economy of art. The narration of the essay, however, then takes an entirely different tack with regard to Déjà vu or the Incident in the totally far-fetched story of the dog, which violates all norms of time and space. The story conjures reality (but then who is to say that the dog really is?) out of the material and materiality of art rather than the other way around. This purely paint-of-a-dog, shifting in and out of the frame of the picture, moves miraculously and indifferently through the no longer meaningful parameters of time and space, or so the narrator was informed (“As Day and Night” 92–93E, 186–87G). And, through no act of imitation, he does what no real dog could do: he brings van Eyck’s sandal into Tripp’s frame, carrying it both like a secret and a real thing. This is at once a testimony to (Tripp’s) exemplary mimetic, artistic accomplishment and/or a writerly tale of a painter forced to give up his own “all too facile knowing” (“As Day and Night” 80E, 174G).
And yet, the paintings are cited to begin with in order to explain that “Remembrance is fundamentally nothing but a citation” (“As Day and Night” 90E, 184G): and that citation sends us scurrying out of our present context into storied time and the time of culture. It is a test of all that we know: texts, images, the world. Sebald’s tale both mirrors life and creates it: it is both déjà vu and that which comes to invent the no-man’s-land of an incident (Zwischenfall) that falls in between. It tells us that, between the dog’s obliterated, painted-over place in the middle of the canvas and his final place at the left as representation, the illusory creature created in colors entered into lived (three-dimensional) space or back in time or, more outrageously, into another work of art to rob it of an object/image. Thus all the frames that mark off art from reality are both perfectly intact and utterly blasted. This is no less true for the imaginary plane that (as with all paintings) separates Déjà vu from the locus of its observer. What might it mean that across that divide the alien eye of that same dog seems to see right through us? This is a tale we reserve for the “Endnote” to follow.
