Marc Escalona Gaba
THE IMAGE AS A KNOWLEDGE OF SPACE Essay by Raymond de Borja This is a book of images, of the image as space, of the image as a production of space, partes extra partes, of the distance between image and text. An image is not an object. Objects contain matter; an image contains. It is a book about what an image can contain, about what a text can contain, how a work can conflate image and text, then how in such conflation relations are severed. I propose that it says the image has a knowledge of space. The image is an agent of epistemology. What knowledge does it contain? As an agent, it acquires and creates. It knows of the nature and availability of space. It creates them. The book starts with a premise. Premise (Duchamp). Then Premise (Question of Trespass). Remember that a premise is a proposition. And that the premise is a place. Space is delimited in the declaration of place. It is a double operation: an image produces knowledge of the evening, the silhouette of a water tank, two burlap garbage bags, a toilet, a no-parking sign; then the no-parking sign carves out a separate space within the space. A proper space. Inappropriable. Then Premise (Guest). Now we have three premises, enough to form an argumentative structure. We understand that these are not pictures of a landscape. “The landscape,” Jean-Luc Nancy writes, “is the contrary of a ground.” “In it must be entirely surface,” and surface alone “throughout.” Instead we have something like receding picture frames – the ground of evening, the figure of a place (the silhouette of water tank, a makeshift eatery, corrugated roof for a wall), and the becoming of a figure, the fuzzy delimitations of no-parking spaces. So the space in the image is no longer representational space. No longer just figure and ground. But a virtual space, where we see the taking place of space.
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