Spring 1998
Volume 24, Number 3

In what sense do the late Cézanne landscapes, specifically the Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings, attempt to represent the world? And is this to ask, In what sense are these works representations based on the code of resemblance? Resemblance, as Nelson Goodman has reminded us, is not an especially good criterion of representation, since anything can stand for anything else and, contrarily, one twin does not represent the other. Do I want to suggest that some code of representation besides that of resemblance is at work here? And here we should say besides and not other, since admittedly these works bear a certain mark of resemblance to certain aspects of the world.

The Mont Saint-Victoire works produced in the last four years of Cézanne's life were realized in watercolor and pencil and oils. These final works charge forward and open out, or open up, to a certain furious animation of surface--a surface ruptures with a pulsation of marks that tend not so much to elide as to ignore the code of resemblance . . . It is as though such marks and such a surface were generating a space that was moving into a different, yet-to-be-named space, one that hovered at the edge of resemblance. Formed of a sediment of touches, this space and these marks lift into the rush of a charged field of forces. What name is there for this so-called sky that transmutes with so little transition into this so-called mountain? What name is there for this faceted skein of marks that fall now like a veil and now like a wall below a horizon that is itself permeable to surge and flow between top and bottom, not to mention the suggestion of far as near and near as far? What name is there for this hallucinated compression of the proximal and the distal that would tilt up a space not so much everywhere equidistant to vision as one converted/confined/released/bound over to an oxymoronic zone of haptic coloration? What sort of space has the capacity to both hover and yet anchor itself to a surface? (Surely that grotesque, clanking grid leaning in the art historical corner is a far too rusty and Procrustean bed on which to stretch these works.)

. . . .Wittgenstein's remark that "we predicate of the thing what lies in the method of representing it" brings us close to the representations.1 If our urgency for a description is irrelevant to the activity that engaged Cézanne in producing the works, we nevertheless have an object before us that should, we think, submit itself to description. But we flounder in the metaphysics of identity in our descriptions. Identities in these works begin to implode in this field of ruptured, virtual objects (sky/sky? mountain/mountain? ground/ground?) that exchange forces with one another.

These last works reek with a sense of bursting renewal squeezed in the grip of finality. That they show more than can be said we readily admit; that they admit more than can readily be seen allows us to wedge the foot of a word in their doorway. But what does the attempted precision of our descriptions have to do with getting in the doorway? Wittgenstein asks, "Is it always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often exactly what we need?" (PI, 71).

I want to ask in what ways these works might be tied to the world beyond the code of resemblance. I might begin by suggesting that these works perhaps less represent than recall the world. Here I immediately fall into difficulty. A recalling does not fall outside, or even beyond, a representing. A recalling surely assumes a representing and flows from it. But in the case of the works under question I want to ask about such a recalling as a "re-calling" of what might be meant, what might have been attempted, in such a renaming, in such a repositioning of art-making to the world. That is to say I want to ask what are the terms, the implications and the consequences, and the shifts of meanings, amounting to a recoding of the painting, that these works hold. To ask this is to ask, What is being reflected from them as the mirror of ressemblance is perhaps dimmed? What sort of optics are being put in place of a mirror-like surface, and how are the traces of the world encoded under such a regime? What are the assumptions and strategies of such a realignment, and how was this re-calling staged?

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York, 1953), 104; hereafter abbreviated PI.

Robert Morris is an artist who occasionally writes. His collection of essays, Continuous Project, Altered Daily, appeared in 1994. His "Professional Rules" appeared in Critical Inquiry (Winter 1997).