Abstract:
The writing of Michel Foucault has been received in art history through his essay on Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656, Madrid, Prado). Las Meninas is exemplary of representation, a system of knowledge Foucault defines in relation to speech. Trompe l’oeil encouraged a normative attitude of naïve realism in which we speak of what we see. Foucault’s essay describes how what is self-‐evident in Las Meninas encourages subjective interpretation. The mirror in Las Meninas is one example of what Foucault terms heterotopias, which are sites or figures of spatial indeterminacy. Heterotopias make visible usually ‘invisible’ or tacit practices termed savoir that condition perception. Foucault drew on the composition Les Trahisons des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) (1926, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art) by René Magritte to define spatial indeterminacy. Unlike other heterotopias, Magritte’s pipe and text are not site-‐ specific. This ‘floating’ quality is related to Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion the body is a pipe or conduit for intensive experience. Spatial indeterminacy in Velázquez’s oeuvre is described as gaps and breaks in trompe l’oeil. A possible genealogy for these lacunae is the figure of the idol in Giorgio Vasari’s history of art. Inserted narrative scenes that are possibly mirror images, repeated gestures that subvert the conventional meanings of the figure, and erased text that simulate a blank page are some of the examples discussed.