본문 바로가기
  • Home

On the Figure of Absence in Georges Didi-Huberman’s Theory of Image: His Critical Analyse of Fra Angelico, Minimalism, James Turrell’ works

  • Journal of History of Modern Art
  • 2019, (45), pp.65-91
  • DOI : 10.17057/kahoma.2019..45.003
  • Publisher : 현대미술사학회
  • Research Area : Arts and Kinesiology > Art > Arts in general > Art History
  • Received : May 6, 2019
  • Accepted : May 30, 2019
  • Published : June 30, 2019

LEE NARA 1

1동의대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Georges Didi-Huberman’s idea of the image is about the visuality, the symptom, the presence, not the visibility, the imitation, the representation. Concerning Charcot’s photographies on hysteria patients, he has recognized these as the symptoms image that shows the simultaneous presence of contradictions. In the 1990s, he put forward critical researches about religious paintings of the 15th century, as well as about minimalism and James Turrell’s works. After 2000, on the contrary, he focused on thinking about the image of History. If the former is to analyse the figurability, the Freudian idea, that assembles contradictory symbols and associates one signification to the opposite, the latter on dialectical image. For him, the symptom, the figurability, the place are conditions to reveal the absence and the void. His comments on Fra Angelico’s religious paintings, minimalism and James Turrell let us know that his thinking about image is closely linked to the figure of the absence. James Turrell shows the absence by the use of frame’s paradox slitting the space and hiding this limit. In this sense, his critical image thinking of history is not different to the symptom image of something missing that affects us although we have lost it.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.