THE URGE FOR IMAGE AND THE SATURATED EYE
(A SPECULATION)
Joseph Nechvatal

Behind the eroding traffic of vision the image seems never to cease,
spurred by our desire to see what cannot be seen. All anti-oedipal and
tautological enterprises which propose to bring representation to an end
are beguiling and yet urgent due to this. Our specular mania is our new
found sublimity, where uncertain signs are swarming, mesmeric as they hint
at an all-inclusive meaning. The signifying apparatus is having it both
ways by resolving any paradox with ambiguity. Hoist by it's own petard.

The spectacle, with it's manipulative powers, terminates the social into an
indeterminate mass, so the scene of the seer follows an endless succession
of day-glow salable signifiers, towards the abjection of our own nullity,
now bleached and liquidated and nullified by the information system.

This imploded view of paradoxical stupefaction has been brought to a
pleurisy by reproduction (the tumescence of the image virtually exceeding
it, inducing a fascination that could just as well exist without an image.
Or must exist without an image. This, one might say, is the abstraction of
excess, and the de-reification of the image. It is in the glazed extreme
of the eye, and the supremacy of it's splendor, that this profusion of the
image offers us a double prospect: first, the solipsistic images of
spectacle's excess, and then it's repression. It is this scene in which
the grazing eye is glutted, then seeps into the unconscious, and saturates
the social body. This runaway reproduction represents the outdoing of even
itself It represents the deceit of the image and our unabating infatuation
with it. Captivated by the expanse of our own spectacle, as in a
psychedelic glamour, is the gap, the orifice which needs to be unhidden.
It is the ghostly reverberant structure of the image; it's structure of
becoming and passing, where there is always something repressed. It is
this trace, this decoy which is the difference between manifest and latent.
It is this mad discourse which has become the subject of my art.