Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr College Dissertations and Theses 2013 Credulous Spectatorship from Zeuxis to Barthes Carrie Robbins Bryn Mawr College Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.brynmawr.edu/dissertations Custom Citation Robbins, Carrie. "Credulous Spectatorship from Zeuxis to Barthes" PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 2013. This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. https://repository.brynmawr.edu/dissertations/87 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Credulous Spectatorship from Zeuxis to Barthes by Carrie Robbins October 2013 Submitted to the Faculty of Bryn Mawr College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Abstract This dissertation explores intersections between trompe l'oeil painting and photography. It began as an interest in contemporary photographers, such as Thomas Demand, whose photographs of constructed paper models encourage viewers to discover the nature of his interventions. His strategy resonates with a centuries-old strategy in trompe l'oeil painting, but now in the terms of photographic, rather than pictorial presence. That is, most of Demand's photographs do not compel the viewer's belief in the tangible presence of the object represented; instead, they exploit photography's indexical promise of delivering the world as it once appeared, in order to temporarily trick viewers about the terms of that indexical delivery. Beyond intersections in artistic strategies, I track reception accounts of trompe l'oeil painting and photography for their reliance on a credulous spectator. Pliny's Zeuxis, who is tricked by Parrhasius's painting of a curtain, remains the model for this errant credulity. In their efforts to reveal the manipulation of photographs, historians and theorists assume that the natural attitude for viewing photographs is wholly credulous and recast postmodern viewers as contemporary Zeuxises. Instead of admonishing spectators for such credulity, I argue that trompe l'oeil facilitates a pleasurable experience of oscillation between belief and disbelief. I also suggest that these trompe l’oeil deployments of oscillation tend to coincide with historical moments of perceived change in visual technologies—changes due to digitalization, as well as mechanical or other forms of reproduction. Trompe l'oeil artists play upon our supposed willingness to accept reproductions for the objects they represent. The inclusion of photographs and/or engravings in these trompe l’oeil paintings simultaneously stages and reprimands our desire for the aura of the actual object. Finally, I suggest that a contemporary renewal of trompe l'oeil in the medium of photography reveals an interest in recuperating belief in photographs—a belief not unlike that which Roland Barthes narrates in Camera Lucida. Just as Barthes can discover something of photography's indexical promise, even after decades of his own scholarly efforts to unveil photography's rhetoric of construction, so might we, even while heeding the postmodernist lessons of disbelief, recuperate a moment of belief in a skeptical age. Table of Contents Acknowledgments.........................................................................................................vii List of Figures ................................................................................................................xi Introduction.....................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 The Curtain as the Site/Sight of Credulous Spectatorship...............................................20 Chapter 2 Graspable Objects .........................................................................................................71 Chapter 3 Representing the Photograph as a Trompe l’Oeil Image-Object ...................................114 Chapter 4 Auratic Disclosures .....................................................................................................176 Chapter 5 Transparent Envelopes ................................................................................................253 Bibliography ...............................................................................................................301 Figures ........................................................................................................................311 vii Acknowledgments These pages are not just the material index of my effort to produce them, but of the generous belief of so many others in me to be able to do so. Without the extraordinary example and encouragement of my undergraduate advisor Jenny Anger—with whom I first read Camera Lucida—I never would have considered the possibility of continued study in the field of art history. Grinnell College’s Center for the Humanities helped me take this seriously by awarding me a semester-long post-baccalaureate fellowship to rehearse what it might be like to be a graduate student. A delightful award letter from Lisa Saltzman in the spring of 2006 signaled what would be the first of innumerable forms of intellectual, emotional, and financial support of my graduate career by Bryn Mawr College and its faculty and staff. Foremost among those believers is Steven Z. Levine, my advisor, mentor, teacher, champion, needler, best reader, and friend. Thank you for tolerating my insecurities and fraudulence, jokes and deflections, even meeting them (with kind imprecision) as if a reflection in a mirror. I have been indelibly pierced by your intellect and perceptiveness. As I type this, the insufficient signifiers of my affection and gratitude for you spill from my eyes and not onto these pages. I convened the rest of my committee based on the remarkable impact that each professor had on me in coursework. Lisa Saltzman taught me to think about the seeming inherence of categories, such as history, memory, and photography. She guided my initial interest in Thomas Demand from seminar papers toward a dissertation proposal. I continue to benefit from her extraordinary scholarship, her professional support, and her generous friendship. Homay King’s ability to concisely and clearly summarize important viii and difficult theory is only part of what makes her such an excellent teacher. As the first professor under whom I served as a teaching assistant, I am especially grateful for her example in the classroom. In response to a final paper I wrote for her film theory seminar, she applauded my (quite accidental) appreciation and explanation of the historical context for the feminist scholarship with which I was about to disagree. This became a lesson I try now to remind myself (and my students) to heed. Both of these women have organized the weekly colloquia in visual culture, and these presentations have been a continual source of intellectual inspiration throughout my time at Bryn Mawr. Whether in a seminar on Baroque sculpture or on fin-de-siècle Vienna, Christiane Hertel encouraged me to think creatively and comparatively across the boundaries of disciplines in ways that have powerfully informed this dissertation. It is through her example as well that I am regularly reminded to go back to the object itself and to look carefully at it. I also wish to thank Bethany Schneider for stepping in at the finale as chair. Outside of my committee, I would like to thank Barbara Lane for her example, for her friendship, for the diversion to work on her project, and for her steady reassurance along the way; this includes a typically forthright reminder that I was not to know in the course of my writing the findings of my dissertation, and that if I did, I would be very bored. I am grateful to the following individuals for adding to the liveliness of my scholarly endeavors: David Cast, Pam Cohen, Catherine Conybeare, Emily Croll, Robert Dostal, Martha Easton, Madhavi Kale, Margaret Kelly, Dale Kinney, Gertrud Koch, Camilla MacKay, Gridley McKim-Smith, Imke Meyer, Mary Osirim, Stephanie Schwartz, and Alicia Walker. ix I am grateful for the friendship of many colleagues at Bryn Mawr College, especially my collaborator, cheerleader, and perennial CAA roommate, Marissa Vigneault, and my Double Take co-conspirator and near-daily commiserator, Nathanael Roesch, as well as Ben Anderson, Emily Bereskin, Mark Castro, Rebecca Dubay, Matt Feliz, Lina Grant, Amy Haavik-MacKinnon, Tienfong Ho, Mey-Yen Moriuchi, Katherine Rochester, and Helen Vong. Beyond Bryn Mawr, I have relied upon the dissertation distractions of Monday evenings with Mark Bourne, happy hours with Megan Landers, and much “dishing” with Dick Wisenbaker. Throughout my entire course of study at Bryn Mawr College, I have been funded generously by the History of Art Department, the Center for Visual Culture, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In addition to providing a living wage, these funds supported travel to London to attend the symposium “Agency and Automatism: Photography as Art since the 1960s” at the Tate Modern, as well as travel to Copenhagen to see the many examples of Cornelius Gijsbrechts’ trompe l’oeil in the Royal Danish Kunstkammer at the National Gallery of Denmark. A dissertation fellowship from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation allowed and encouraged me to finish in a timely manner. A research assistantship in the college photography collection led to a curatorial fellowship to produce Double Take: Selected Views from the Photography