Jorella G. Andrews

Cutting The Line

Although Henri Matisse first made use of the technique of cutting and assembling pre-coloured paper in the 1930s as a way of working out the composition of large-scale artworks,1 commentators agree that it was during his last years of life as an invalid following a serious operation in 1941, that the creation of the cut-outs as independent artworks became his predominant artistic activity. “I now find the simplest and most direct way in which I can express myself is by cutouts,” he told Maria Luz in 1951.2 Matisse spoke also of his pleasure in cutting: “A pair of scissors is a… wonderful instrument… working with scissors in this paper is an occupation I can lose myself in…. Why didn’t I think of it earlier?”3

The Photographic Stare

Using an image taken by Reuters’ photographer Nicky Loh during the 2009 earthquake in Sumatra, this article rethinks in positive terms the experience of being captivated by photographs, including ‘disaster’ photographs that are often described as problematically spectacularizing. In order to do this I bring together two propositions, that of the photograph as a uniquely articulated prosthetic stare on the one hand, and as an inorganic but powerful ‘agent’ or ‘actor’ on the other. My main theoretical resources come from Donna Haraway’s well-known 1988 essay ‘Situated knowledges’ and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1961 essay ‘Eye and mind’.

Painterly Transubstantiations/Political Change

“With no other technique than what his eyes and hands discover in seeing and painting, [the painter] persists in drawing from this world, with its din of history’s glories and scandals, canvases which will hardly add to the angers or the hopes of man — and no one complains.”1 So writes Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the first section of his late essay ‘Eye and Mind’ which was published in 1961. By way of example, he cites Cezanne who “lived hidden away at Estaque during the war of 1870” where he continued to paint.2 (The war in question was the Franco-Prussian War; Melting Snow in L’Estaque [or The Red Roofs] (Figure 1)3 was one of the paintings produced by Cezanne during this period.) Nonetheless, returning to ‘Eye and Mind’, the compulsive transformation of “the world into paintings” at issue here — whether enacted in literal or in metaphorical retreat from a world in socio-political crisis and having no apparent impact upon it — is presented by Merleau-Ponty as an interrogative project marked by the utmost urgency. “What, then, is this secret science which [the painter] has or which he seeks?” he asks. “That dimension which lets Van Gogh say he must go ‘further on’? What is this fundamental of painting, perhaps of all culture?”4