Wittgenstein Meets Ghosts, Meets Art
“Let us remember too, that we don’t have to translate… pictures into realistic ones in order to ‘understand’ them, any more than we need translate photographs into colored pictures, as though black-and-white men or plants in reality would strike us as unspakably strange and frightful. Suppose we are to say at this point ’something is a picture only in a picture-language.’”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophical Grammar: Part I, The Proposition, and its Sense : Part II, On Logic and Mathematics
On some level here, Wittgenstein is saying a picture is a ghost - or that taking a picture is transforming - whatever the object may appear to be - into a ghost. Art, by definition is a language and, by extension, a dialog with ghosts. Some ghosts are much more interesting than others. For example, what passes as public media (journalism) is most often a series of bad, one might say, ‘false ghosts.’ “Giving up the ghost” is the way a good artist or poet transforms a ghost into legibility, a “picture language.” To do otherwise - as an artist or writer - is to operate in bad faith.
It is also why a “ghost” of what was provokes a deep sense of lament. What was is not only no longer here, but the language of its (the ghost’s) reappearance violates the original site, whatever is personal to one’s memory. What was once an image in “living color” is now in black and white. Or, if still in color, as when altered by digital software, such as offered by Adobe Photoshop. At the same time - or perhaps subsequently - while or when we are seduced by the new, ghost language, ‘the art’, we are provoked into sorrow as we instinctively acknowledge the loss, the shadow of the memory of the ‘original’ person or object.
Yet, isn’t the illusion, the appearance of permanence in the well made, preserved ‘art object’, the very thing that one finds an uplifting, a balm to an otherwise state of woe - the persistence of grief (the “quiet life of desperation”) without terms or redemption? A good image, a “picture language” is, someone has said “a walk away lover” - a courtship, a marriage to ….well, you tell me.