engleski

Anti-image or Absolute Image? The Painting by Julije Knifer in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Julije Knifer repeatedly spoke and wrote that his goal was to create an ‘anti- image’ – the absolute absence of meaning, symbolism and pictoriality, as his meanders should have only been compared to pure ‘visuality’. Since ‘anti- image’ is a concept that etymologically and semantically brings to mind two endpoints in the existence of an idea or object – in this case it is the difference between the image and what is not an image – my fundamental interest in this paper will be to understand the internal logic of the concept of anti-image on the one side and to disclose the inherent polarities which it supposedly carries on the other. All this should contribute to the understanding of both specific Knifer’s artistic strategies and still unresolved questions posed by theory of painting in general. I’ll try to advance the thesis that Knifer’s paintings (‘the meanders’) can be considered anti-images only from the standpoint of art- historical hermeneutics, that is, as evidences of what Filiberto Menna called ‘the analytical line of modern art’. In contrast, when it comes to understanding Knifer’s paintings as pure visual facts or visual phenomena, then we are confronted with the episteme that I would like to call the ‘absolute image’, that is, a moment in which the difference between image and everything else which is not an image comes to the fore in the most prominent way.

anti-image ; absolute image ; modernist painting ; phenomenology ; iconic difference

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