James Elkins

I found What Heaven Looks Like — James Elkins’ commentary on a 17th-century book of unknown origins held in the University of Glasgow’s “collection of alchemical manuscripts” — among the jilted review copies at a magazine where I fact checked six years ago. It’s a natural resting place for a work about a painter best taxonomized as a hermit and mystic, outside and far, but not utterly remote, from any establishment and tradition. And yet, having disinterred and reburied the book among my others until recently, I can’t help but wish that more people would discover the fifty-two paintings within, conjured up by a solitary, wandering mind’s encounters with fifty-two (or fewer) imperfect wooden circles.

The number fifty-two seems like it should be significant, as do plenty of the images in the book, the painter’s many references to Christian figures, Greek gods, and contemporaneous guides to alchemy. Elkins observes that no subject ever reaches a point of finality, where we might comfortably claim there is some sense to it. “Nothing is unwelcome, unless she recognizes it,” he writes. (He has decided, quite plausibly, that the artist is a woman.) “I would like to think she lost interest in her project when she began to feel at home in the contours of her imagination.” Elkins wants to avoid meaning and its inevitable outgrowth, narrative, in the work. He seems to struggle against the same impulse in his writing, a form where it is even more difficult to evade, and is aided by a self-imposed limit — a single page of commentary for each painting.

Through his commentary, I found myself led, but not strong-armed, into noticing the many features I had missed about the paintings. His brief explanations of historical context are also helpful. One place of disagreement comes in his thoughts on the title page; he is mildly skeptical of the idea that the inscription might be by the artist herself. In particular, though, the description in these few lines of the painter as an “Ape of Nature” appeals to me — it reminds me of Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy,” in which an ape named Red Peter explains the method by which, after his capture and transportation to Europe, he fashioned himself into a human. In his novel Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee has the eponymous writer deliver a lecture in which she notes that “Red Peter took it upon himself to make the arduous descent from the silence of the beasts to the gabble of reason.” I sometimes think this painter must have tried to climb in the opposite direction, journeying into muteness and effecting, as Elkins notes, a certain forlorn distance from the rest of humanity.… (más)

It's difficult to find really interesting books on photography other than the "usual names" (Benjamin, Barthes, Sontag and a very few others). Elkins bravely decided to write a direct confrontation with Barthes' Camera Lucida and constructed a strange and fascinating book which has both merits and downsides. Elkins definitely knows what he's talking about (even from the technical point of view) and some of his reflections will definitely leave a mark in photography theoretical discourse. Everyone interested in the nature of photography should read it.… (más)