2015年1月12日 星期一

Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate by Alberto Manguel《意象地圖---閱讀圖像中的愛與憎》



Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate

Reading Pictures looks at the work of great artists–from the intensely familiar to the undiscovered–and examines the stories behind them, tracing the passage of life into art. Pablo Picasso torments his mistress Dora Maar and then paints brilliant studies of her grief-crumpled face; these evolve into the weeping woman in his great indictment of fascism,Guernica. Manguel untangles what this story, and countless others, shows us of our twin impulses toward creation and destruction. A tour of the psyche more than of the museum, this book dares to ponder, with contagious wonder, why we create.

Not since John Berger’s influential Ways of Seeing has an essayist so eloquently examined what happens when we are moved by profound works of art and how we decode a wordless language that touches us so intimately. Richly illustrated, Reading Pictures shows us that there is no limit to the stories we may find if we look with care and delight.
阿爾維托.曼古埃爾 (Alberto Manguel)/著《意象地圖---閱讀圖像中的愛與憎》 (Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate),薛絢譯,台北:台灣商務,2002

內容簡介

  納的激情夢幻,檢視建築師彼得‧艾森曼矛盾而失衡的力量,這一切都在教我們欣賞並理解我們生活在其中的這片視覺景觀。運用一套獨特的語言來讀懂影像的意思,可以在翻閱有圖畫的書本或漫步畫廊的時候不再處於被動。本書不是美術史討論,也不談藝術理論,卻能影響我們「閱讀」視覺世界的態度,幫我們敞開眼與心來看其中無比的豐富。
  畢卡索的「人像畫」之中特別令人難忘的當然是一九三七年十月的那幅「哭泣的女子」。這幅小畫大約有人的臉那麼大,卻充滿自熾熱的互補色,把眼睛往相反的方向拉,顏色有綠與紅,紫與黃,橘與藍。揉出尖角的白色手絹有了牙齒咬緊之狀。在背景的閃金棕色與淺黃色(部分是適合聖像聖物著色的金葉,部分是透著俗世激情的巴黎小館牆壁)襯托下,紅色的帽子和帽上的深色矢車菊之令我感動甚於畫中的任何其他部分。
  這女子把自己裝扮漂亮,戴上喜洋洋的帽子,梳理得體,本來期待著幸福,卻在所有人的眼前落得這樣,因傷心而變得醜陋,那歡喜的、時髦的、絲毫不在乎她的帽子正在嘲笑她。我們怎能忍心觀看這麼私人的悲哀?這畫中少了什麼,以至於局外人的我們可以輕易進入其空間,同時既可憐它又讚賞它?我們在半個
  多世紀以後能從這畫像故事得到什麼線索,能教我們讀懂這被情緒折磨的令人目眩的臉?
  作者:阿爾維托‧曼古埃爾 Alberto Manguel,生於布宜諾斯艾利斯,先後在義大利、法國、英國、大溪地居住,1985年成為加拿大公民。青少年時期曾為視力受損的名作家波赫士誦讀,大受啟發。有很多部作品獲得重要獎項,其中又以《閱讀地圖》(A History of Reading,1999年臺灣商務印書館出版,聯合報讀書人版年度十大翻譯好書獎) 最為傑出。其他作品包括《虛擬處所辭典》(The Dictionary of Imaginary Places)、《同時,在森林的另一處》Meanwhile, in Another Part of the Forest)、《黑水》(Black Water,二冊),以及《異國的消息傳到了》(News from a Foreign Country Came)。
  譯者:薛絢,國立臺灣大學外文系畢業,專事翻譯。譯作包括《福爾摩啥》(大塊)、《植物的秘密生命》、《空間地圖》、《美學地圖》(以上商務)、《費正清論中國》(正中)、《書架──閱讀的起點》(藍鯨)等。

目錄


第一章 平常的看畫人:影像說故事
第二章 瓊.米契爾:影像無語 Joan Mitchell: the Image as Absence
第三章 羅貝.康班:影像設謎  Robert Campin: the Image as Riddle
第四章 蒂娜.莫多蒂:影像作證  Tina Modotti : the Image as Witness 
第五章 拉芬妮亞.芳塔娜:影像是了解 Lavinia Fontana: the Image as Understanding
第六章 瑪麗安娜.嘉特納:影像是夢魘  Marianna Gartner: the Image as Nightmare
第七章 菲洛澤諾斯:影像是內省 Philoxenus : the Image as Reflection
第八章 帕布羅.畢卡索:影像是暴行 Pablo Picasso: the Image as Violence
第九章 阿萊扎丁諾:影像是顛覆 Aleijadinho : the Image as Violence Subversion
第十章 克勞德.尼克拉.雷杜:影像是哲學 Claude-Nicolas : the Image as Philosophy
第十一章 彼得.艾森曼:影像為記憶  Peter Eisenman: the Image as Memory
第十二章 卡拉瓦喬:影像是劇場 Caravaggio : the Image as Theatre
結語
HC:中文版印刷惡劣。本書內容牽涉到許多藝術-建築-評論等領域,所以許多小翻譯瑕疵或可諒解,包括中文的人名和術語都尚未統一(台灣的情形比中國更嚴重)。 我們稍作討論。


  

我是個好奇過度又漫無章法的旅行者。我喜歡偶然中發現一個地方,說不定是因為這地方呈現了什麼影像:景觀和建築物,明信片和紀念古蹟,博物院和美術館,都是收藏一地的肖像記憶。我愛閱讀字句,也一樣愛閱讀圖畫,並且喜歡從各類藝術品之中讀出直接或隱藏在內的故事──同時卻不必訴諸晦澀的、外行人不懂的詞彙。這本書之所以寫成,是為了要幫像我這樣的普通看畫人找回閱讀這些影像及故事的責任與權利。

  我對於更淵博文化的無知限制了我提供的西方美術範例,我選用的影像──畫的、攝影的、雕刻的、建築的──是我覺得特別難以忘懷或含有暗示意義的。我之所以沒有選中其他別的,是因為偶然的機遇、我個人受到的吸引、以為有故事可發掘的心理,驅使我選了這些來完成這本書。我並沒有打算要設計或發現一套有系統的解讀畫面的方法(例如藝術史家巴克山鐸或岡布瑞區的高論)。我唯一的理由是,我並未跟從任何藝術理論的導引,只不過是受了好奇心的影響。

  我這欠牢靠的讀畫能力,因為許多館院機構肯好心為一個門外漢敞開大門而得到試練機會。其中我必須感謝安大略美術館的谷瑞洛(Lynn Kurylo);艾伯塔省卡加利市的格倫波博物館(Glenbow Museum)的查普曼(Sherry-Anne Chapman);艾伯塔省班夫藝術中心(Banff Centre for the Arts)的菲利普斯(Carol Phillips);巴黎的美國圖書館(American Library)的雷德(Kay Rader);巴黎的加拿大文化中心(Canadian Cultural Centre)的蘇雪(Simone Su-chet);倫敦國家畫廊(National Gallery)的佩平(Anthea Peppin)、麥奇(Rebecca Mckie)、阿德勒(Kathy Adler)和坎伯(Lorne Campbell);加州奧克蘭的米爾斯學院(Mills College)的羅士教授(Moira Roth)。墨爾本《美術月刊》(Art Monthly)的提姆斯(Peter Timms)接受了本書第十二章的初稿;多倫多《詳談》(Descant)的穆哈倫(Karen Mulhallen)刊出了本書第六、八章早先的稿本;多年前,穆恩(Barbara Moon)在多倫多《星期六夜》(Saturday Night)上發表了我初訪阿克埃瑟南(Arc-et-Senans)的記述;感謝以上三位主編對我的信心。與本書第十一章約略不同的一篇文字曾在柏林的雜誌《思維與形式》(Sinn und Form)、斯德哥爾摩的《瑞典日報》(Svenska Dagbladet)、荷蘭提耳堡大學的《連繫》(Nexus)上刊出,謹向四位主編致謝(Joachim Meinert, Anders Bjorsson, Rob Riemen, Kirston Walgreen)。卡加利大學的馬金─弗萊乃根計劃(Markin-Flanagan Programme)提供我一年的財務支援,不勝感激。

  多位朋友和同事看了我的原稿並提出中肯建議,可惜我未能一一採納。為我吃苦不少的出版者,也是我的好友,丹尼絲(Louise Dennys)凡是該問的問題都問到了,並且在我每次飄得離讀者太遠的時候耐心地引我回頭。我的四位編輯(Courtney Hodell, Liz Calder, Marie-Catherine Vacher, Lise Bergevin)提供了許多高明的意見;賴德(Alison Reid)以袖珍畫家一絲不苟的利眼對稿編輯;史衛特(John Sweet)的校對敏銳而詳細;曾為我前一本書《閱讀地圖》作過分析的弗蒂耶(Simone Vauthier)這一回又被說服再幫一次無懈可擊的忙;莫里茲?史瓦茨(Lilia Moritz Schwarcz)幫我解釋清楚巴西巴洛克的疑團;畢安卡尼教授(Stefania Biancani)好心閱讀了我論芳塔娜的一章;海恩(Dieter Hein)為我找來有關猶太人大屠殺紀念堂爭論的豐富資訊;二位潘考夫(Gottwalt & Lucie Pankow)提供了好客的招待與深入的參考書目;加拿大諾普夫(Knopf)出版公司的莫里納(Deirdre Molina)是追蹤文圖版權的最大功臣;郝吉森(Paul Hodgson)與羅柏遜(Gordon Robertson)以優雅創意完成本書從頭至尾的設計,我對每一位都衷心致謝。同時照例要向威士伍(Bruce Westwood)及多倫多威士伍創意美術家(Westwood Creative Artists)團隊、倫敦的A. P. Watt的強斯(Derek Johns)、巴黎的拉博特爾(Michelle Lapautre)道謝。

  開始寫這本書時,原本要寫我們的情緒以及情緒對於我們閱讀藝術品的影響(或藝術品對其的影響)。結果似乎離我設想的目標很遠,很遠。不過,勞倫斯?史登(Laurence Sterne, 1713-1768)說得對:「我覺得其中是有天數的──我難得走到我本來預定要去的地方。」做為一個寫者(也是一個讀者),我相信這一定從來都是我的箴言。

After an international success with his prize-winning A History of Reading, writer, novelist, translator and editor Manguel, a Buenos Aires ex-pat now living in Canada, returns with a series of meditations on why great art moves us. Twelve chapters focus individually on painters from Caravaggio to Picasso and Joan Mitchell, the photographer Tina Modotti and architect Peter Eisenman an intellectually ambitious range supported by an impressive section of notes at the back of the book suggesting familiarity with a vast array of scholarly books. Yet the book's subtitle and frequent use of the first person betray the fact that this is less a work of art history than a catalogue of reactions, many of which are triggered by excruciatingly banal questions: "But can every picture be read? Or at least, can we create a reading?" leads to the assertion that "[the] attempt not to communicate is at least as complex as the attempt to communicate, and undoubtedly as old." The chapter "Pablo Picasso: the Image as Violence" contains this observation: "most men in Western art suffer stoically." The wandering style that worked so well in History is less masterful here, and the lack of sustained thought throughout makes it hard to imagine most readers (of either gender) stoically getting to the end. (Sept.)Forecast: Many buyers of A History of Reading, which was translated into 22 languages, will pick up this book by association, as will readers looking for the next How Proust Will Change Your Life. The result will be better than average sales, but not a History-style breakout.

Blurred vision

Reading Pictures by Alberto Manguel asks the question: can we ever articulate a painting? by Michael McNay


Picasso's Guernica

One forgets that Roger Fry, who more than anyone educated his countrymen into an appreciation of the "formal relations" in painting, wrote almost equally of their literary power. Of the Arena chapel, Padua, Fry wrote: "Giotto has touched a chord of feeling at least as profound as can be reached by the most consummate master of the art of words." So why not read pictures?
In the case of Alberto Manguel, the answer might be that he seems ill-equipped as a guide because of an incapacity to do the other part of the job. One example will serve: discussing Picasso's paintings around Guernica , he writes of the "haphazard canvases" portraying Dora Maar, Picasso's muse for the weeping woman with baby in Guernica ; but in all art history there are no portraits less random than these cubist-based paintings. At a guess, Manguel means to describe the way Picasso fractures and reformulates his sitter's features; but that's not what he says.
Haphazard might better describe his own loosely linked series of essays dressed up as chapters. But if this is a book with almost nothing useful to say about painting as such, it is full of suggestive ideas about social forces and their effect on art. Manguel's passage on the supreme difficulty of producing an art of the Holocaust is as good as anything on the subject; although it seems a shame that it is based on the memorial project for Berlin rather than the completed piece in Vienna by the sculptor Rachel Whiteread. I have seen only photographs of this, but they seem to bear out Adrian Searle's verdict in the Guardian : "The building's emphatic muteness and silence is the appropriate response to the enormity of its subject."
Manguel might not have been convinced, for he has his own experience of the immutability of evil, at school in an Argentina under the yoke of the military junta. "Each instance of evil exists in its own terms," he writes. "The Holocaust, for instance, is its own paradigm; each other instance of evil - the torture of Argentine children by the military or the ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia - is only equivalent to itself. We don't need to assemble them to have a gestalt portrait of evil. Evil, like God, is in the details." But then he also writes, beautifully, "absence too can be a monument"; and maybe the silent voice of Whiteread's Judenplatz memorial meets his argument.
The two central chapters concern image-making and iconoclasm, ideas that, as the actions of the Taliban remind us, are always current. Manguel is fond of faintly opaque Biblical quotations, and on the difficulties of art turns to Ecclesiastes (1:8): "All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing." But he does not quote the more transparent and utterly central justification of the iconoclasts: "Cursed be the man that maketh any graven or molten image, an abomination unto the Lord" (Deuteronomy 27:15). Indeed, he is more interested in the multiple meanings of images than in the impulse to absolute prohibition.
His starting point is the sixth- century Pope Gregory's justification of pictures in churches: that for the illiterate they are the equivalent of reading. Manguel traces the development of imagery from the strictly controlled content of early Christian portrayals to modern figurative art, in which, "Since the artistic language of our time is not specific in its connotations, our interpretation remains private, one of many, a story added to the private story of the painting itself, a second or third or tenth layer of meaning that grows not from the original skin of the painting but from our own time and place."
Every portrait, Manguel argues, is a self-portrait because "we [the viewers] bring to a portrait our perceptions and our experience. In the alchemy of the creative act, every portrait is a mirror." But: "In order to know objectively who we are, we must see ourselves outside ourselves, in something that holds our image but is not part of us . . . as Narcissus did when he fell in love with his image in the pool." Perhaps; but perhaps, too, this analysis is over-subtle. Does it help us to understand Rembrandt by himself, or the self-image of the aged Titian peering yearningly into the face of the dead Christ? Only darkly. When it comes to words seeking to unravel the innermost content of painting, we are thrown back on the preacher: "vanity of vanities; all is vanity" (Ecclesiastes, 1:2).


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