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DOI Artikel:Lipiński, Filip: "Obraz o krążeniu obrazów": "Jastrzębie nocy" Edwarda Hoppera pomiędzy rozproszeniem a pragnieniem
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.29069#0143
„OBRAZ O KRĄŻENIU OBRAZÓW": JARERŻĄR7F WOCY EDWARDA HOPPERA
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envelope for quotations I resort to Rosalind Krauss's notion of differential specificity.
I also propose to talk about the intepictoriality of Hopper's painting, which links the
hermeneutic concept of RfMhcAAeh with its focus on immanent properties of the
work and the diffusive logie of intertextuality.
In the first part of the essay I summarize the discourse around the
author's, art critics' and historians' commentaries regarding the signihcance of the
work, its importance for American art and connection to popular culture. I also
sketch the diverse references to other areas of visuality (e.g. film noir) and ways of
quoting or appropriating HoppeFs work, which started after the artisfs "re-
discovery" in the 1980s, coinciding with both new interest in painting and the post-
modernist art of appropriation: painterly pastiches, posters, comics, commercial
appropriations and non-professional transformations of images online. Finally, I
discuss Marek Bieńczyk's statement in which he condensed all the most important
issues which I refer to throughout the essay: reproduction, repetition, fantasy, the
matrix of dreams, recollection and desire. On the one hand he is annoyed at the fact
his favourite picture is mass-reproduced and lost its uniqueness, on the other, he
notices its special way of being in repetition, which generates new images and opens
itself to the viewer's projection. For an art historian/critic it initially functions only
in the modę of the virtual: memory, fantasy, imagination, for an artist/pasticheur it
also gets materialized in a form of another image.
The opening of the second section of the essay consists of the presentation of two
contrasting interpretations of by Gordon Theisen and Hubert Beck. The
former treats Hopper's painting as a cultural text weaved of multiple references but
with little attention to its pictorial quality. Conversely, the latter, inspired by Oskar
Batschman's henneneutics, devotes a part of one chapter to the analysis of the visual
structure of the painting, whereas he disregards any interpictorial references. In
view of the abovementioned interpretations, I believe the two approaches comple-
ment each other and, only when combined, they do justice to the desire of the pic-
ture.
The architecture of the bar and its window in relation to the shape and surface
of the picture is comparable to a window partially opened to the inside, as if the bar
and the whole scene were a result of such an opening. The window can be identified
as a repetition and a differential variant of the pictorial surface. At the same time,
the construction of the main motif, as related to essential elements of the picture
(which is the surface and boundary of the picture), involves an internal rupture:
a tracę of the other - the row of houses in the background on the left reminds the
viewer of another HoppeFs famous work, FJarfy Morn.Mg' (1930), an inters-
tice which manifests the interpictorialAdrtual potential of the painting. The space
between the transparent, physical surface of the picture and the transparent, imagi-
nary pane of glass is a buffer zonę which generates not only the feeling of doubled
irreducible distance between the interior and the viewer's eye but also the body.
Hence, the painting presupposes the embodied gazę. It is related to the feeling of
double separation - double glazing eliciting the inereased desire to cross the bounda-
ries. A substitute for the desire to cross the threshold of picture and the bar are the
141
envelope for quotations I resort to Rosalind Krauss's notion of differential specificity.
I also propose to talk about the intepictoriality of Hopper's painting, which links the
hermeneutic concept of RfMhcAAeh with its focus on immanent properties of the
work and the diffusive logie of intertextuality.
In the first part of the essay I summarize the discourse around the
author's, art critics' and historians' commentaries regarding the signihcance of the
work, its importance for American art and connection to popular culture. I also
sketch the diverse references to other areas of visuality (e.g. film noir) and ways of
quoting or appropriating HoppeFs work, which started after the artisfs "re-
discovery" in the 1980s, coinciding with both new interest in painting and the post-
modernist art of appropriation: painterly pastiches, posters, comics, commercial
appropriations and non-professional transformations of images online. Finally, I
discuss Marek Bieńczyk's statement in which he condensed all the most important
issues which I refer to throughout the essay: reproduction, repetition, fantasy, the
matrix of dreams, recollection and desire. On the one hand he is annoyed at the fact
his favourite picture is mass-reproduced and lost its uniqueness, on the other, he
notices its special way of being in repetition, which generates new images and opens
itself to the viewer's projection. For an art historian/critic it initially functions only
in the modę of the virtual: memory, fantasy, imagination, for an artist/pasticheur it
also gets materialized in a form of another image.
The opening of the second section of the essay consists of the presentation of two
contrasting interpretations of by Gordon Theisen and Hubert Beck. The
former treats Hopper's painting as a cultural text weaved of multiple references but
with little attention to its pictorial quality. Conversely, the latter, inspired by Oskar
Batschman's henneneutics, devotes a part of one chapter to the analysis of the visual
structure of the painting, whereas he disregards any interpictorial references. In
view of the abovementioned interpretations, I believe the two approaches comple-
ment each other and, only when combined, they do justice to the desire of the pic-
ture.
The architecture of the bar and its window in relation to the shape and surface
of the picture is comparable to a window partially opened to the inside, as if the bar
and the whole scene were a result of such an opening. The window can be identified
as a repetition and a differential variant of the pictorial surface. At the same time,
the construction of the main motif, as related to essential elements of the picture
(which is the surface and boundary of the picture), involves an internal rupture:
a tracę of the other - the row of houses in the background on the left reminds the
viewer of another HoppeFs famous work, FJarfy Morn.Mg' (1930), an inters-
tice which manifests the interpictorialAdrtual potential of the painting. The space
between the transparent, physical surface of the picture and the transparent, imagi-
nary pane of glass is a buffer zonę which generates not only the feeling of doubled
irreducible distance between the interior and the viewer's eye but also the body.
Hence, the painting presupposes the embodied gazę. It is related to the feeling of
double separation - double glazing eliciting the inereased desire to cross the bounda-
ries. A substitute for the desire to cross the threshold of picture and the bar are the