(excerpt) Exhibition «La Fabrique des Images» Quai Branly, 18th May 2010

[more here: 
http://www.quaibranly.fr/fr/programmation/expositions/a-l-affiche/la-fabrique-des-images.html]
I selected these texts to propose some reflections on the tensions of WHAT IS NATURE?

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Many peoples in Europe until the Renaissance, in the Far East, in West Africa, in the Andes or in Mexico see the occupants of the cosmos and their components as all different from each other. This is why they strive to find relationships among all these singularities, in order to establish some kind of structure and permanence in their lived world. Given the role played here by analogical thought, we may call analogism this way of combining moral discontinuities and physical discontinuities.

Australian Aborigines think that, despite their differences in form, certain humans and certain species of animial and plants within a given group share the same essence, the same substances, and the same dispositions accruing from an original totem. Because of its composition and the qualities that define it, each set of humans and non-humans is different from the other. We can call totemism this way of highlighting the moral continuities and physical continuities between humans and non-humans.

In certain regions of the word, animals and plants are seen to have an inner self, similar to that of humans. Under their fur, their feathers, their leaves, they are people like us. But each species, including different human tribes, is distinct from the other in its physical form and in the type of activity that its body permits. This way of combining moral continuity and physical discontinuities can be called animism.

For some centuries in the West, we have distinguished humans from the rest of the world’s entities because they are the only ones, we say, to have an inner self, a mind, a conscience. But we also see humans as beings of nature since they share certain physical characteristics with all non-humans, including inanimate objects. Because the idea of nature plays a central role in articulating moral discontinuity with physical continuities, this configuration can be called naturalism.

Naturalism as a vision of the world is the inverse of animism. It is not by virtue of their body but because of their mind that humans differ from non-humans. It is also because of shared ideas and values that they differ from each other as members of distinct cultures. As for the physical dimension of humans, it is ruled by the same laws of other organisms, or even of inorganic objects; it doesn’t make of them a species apart.

Born in Europe only a few centuries ago, this way of thinking expressed itself in images which figure simultaneously the inner self specific to each human and the physical continuity of beings and things in space. Over the course of time, however, notably with scientific photography, human subjectivity disappears from images; it becomes a physical parameter, a simple expression of biological mechanisms.

The beauty of the everyday

In Holland, in the 17^th century, a type of painting was born that conferred on the material world and its banality a peaceful beauty and a dignity that no one had shown before. The everyday took precedence over the sublime, mystery was now expressed in ordinary life. The subjectivity of humans was now depicted in situations that no longer pertained to the history common to Christian cultures, but to a moral environment more complex to decode. The ambiguous behaviour of these tranquil citizens shows that the inner self has not disappeared, but it is now subordinate to the visible encounter of subjectivities within the relationships depicted. We see this tenderness for reality in landscapes and still-lives, where time is suspended and the concern for faithful details transcends former aesthetic and religious constraints.

Naturalization on the move

The progressive liberation of images from the canons of aesthetics and symbolic meanings finds its expression, in the 18^th century, in a split between two manners of representing the human body: on the one hand, ‘peintres galants’ such as Watteau, Boucher or Fragonard depicted the games of love and sentiment in a quest for the ideal and for style. On the other hand, a score of little-known mechanics, anatomists and illustrators, following Descartes and la Mettrie, applied themselves to building automata that would emulate life, to making anatomical figures that would unveil the physical aspect of humans, and to reproducing with exactitude the flora and fauna of far-away places. In being faithful to Nature, they freed themselves from the representation of interiority in favour of intelligible parameters that could be visually rendered.

The Physical world in and of itself

Over the course of the last two centuries, the Renaissance ideal of canonical beauty has only rarely returned to the artistic scene. With the development of photography, with the Impressioinists, the image ceased to be an expression of a model and became instead a mere sensible trace.

The techniques of capture and reproduction of previously invisible dimensinos of corporal materiality (chronophotography, X-ray, MRI) amplified the impression that the inner self had disappeared from the human body. After six centuries of experimentation with images, naturalism is about to reduce one of its two dimensions to the other, by displaying the mind in its materiality. The ineffable self has become something that can be represented as an imprint and no longer as a copy of an ideal model.