ESSAY ON AFFINITY I

I found myself frequently using the word affinity, and wondered what I meant by it. An attraction, for sure—to certain works of art or literature, to fragments or details, moods or atmospheres inside of them. To a sentence, for instance, or an essay, but just as easily to an impression diffusing in the mind that could not be traced back to source. A fascination with this or that artist, writer, musician, filmmaker, designer. With a body or a body of work. Fascination—already finding words with which affinity has affinities—as something like but unlike critical interest, which has its own excitements but remains too often at the level of knowledge, analysis, conclusions, at worst the total boredom of having opinions. But also: the way things, images and ideas sidled up to each other, seemed to seduce one another, in ways I could not (or did not want to) explain. So that when I wrote affinity in a piece of critical prose, perhaps I was trying to point elsewhere, to a realm of the unthought, unthinkable, something unkillable by attitudes or arguments. Not a question of beauty or quality or taste, other eternal aesthetic values. Something fleeting in fact—affinities don’t all, or always, last. In the end, and for reasons above as well as others to come, something a little bit stupid.
     I’d been writing about images for about twenty years, finding affinities rather than deploying any kind of expertise, because I’m no art historian. Still, it had felt like an education, a second training in the image, after my first in the word. For a long time I had been saying or writing affinity, but also dreaming, never exactly conceiving, a way of thinking about art, about objects and images, that belonged to artists, including the contemporary artists whose studios I might visit and find myself staring at pictures (not their own) they had stuck to the wall, books and artefacts on their shelves. I had thought in passing about how these, or the smartphone photographs and notes-app reading lists the artist sent me afterwards— how they sat alongside each other in more or less oblique relations and then, when I came to write up my encounter with the work, would not easily translate into the language of influence, subject matter, research. (Would not do so, that is, if the art was of any worth; sometimes everything explained itself too well.) How to describe, as a writer, the relation it seemed the artists had with their chosen and not chosen—what is the word? Talismans? Tastes? Sympathies? Familiars? Superstitions? Affinities.
     During the first pandemic lockdown of 2020, I imagined I might spend time in shut-in contemplation of many images and artworks (in books and catalogues or online) I had either written about already or long hoped to write about. Sometimes I drifted about staring at my bookshelves or handling the piles of books that gather around any writing project, no matter how small. What was I looking for? Free-floating reflection, liberated from the need for argument or judgement (or deadlines), somehow therefore more intimate, more attuned to its object. I thought I might stare at certain pictures—mostly photographs—and they would go to work on me, leach into soul or sensibility. I fancied I could memorize these images like poems. (As if I had ever in my life successfully memorized a poem, no matter how I loved it.) An idiotic project: naive, impossible, disingenuous in disavowal of knowledge, judgement, the privilege of planning such a monkish task before page or screen, while the world went to hell. But idiotic too in the original sense of an uncultured, uncivil, private urge. Was it quite so stupid to want to dodge at this moment the public and professional, try to refind a mode of dumb fascination? Could you make out of this a habit—or even a book?
     The volume you hold in your hands is not that book—the book of pure uncritical escape, which proved implausible—but a collection of writings about art and artefacts that have hung around in my ‘image repertoire’ (Roland Barthes’s phrase) for years. And some that have only lately entered the canon or collection of images that will not leave me alone. All of them have recently—what is the word? Impinged. They seem to enact something when placed together in the imaginary space that a book makes. A book of evidence that I’d been an idiot all along, always looking with a slightly stupefied gaze. Not the intense and protracted gaze of a writer and project devoted to a single rapture: T. J. Clark, for instance, in The Sight of Death, looking long at two paintings by Poussin. Or Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, in which he excitedly delineates every moment the wordless benign trickster is on screen. Because when it comes to writing about art and images and objects I have mostly spent time and attention in short spans: days, weeks or if I’m lucky months devoted to the artefact or the corpus in question. (Of course some of them return, time and again.) Relishing the chance to concentrate, but also loving the constraint of deadline and word count: something will have to come from this more or less extended disposition or humour into which I have got with the thing itself.
     What would it be like to put some of these fits of affinity alongside each other, and allow myself to discover new examples to insert among the more familiar? And still unsolved: what did I mean by affinity? It seemed impossible to address the question on its own, as if it were an abstraction in aesthetic theory: answers would have to emerge while the particular affinities (the things to which I was attached) were going to work on each other. It was not as if I didn’t know that others had been here before me, that a lineage of sorts existed among poets, critics and philosophers who knew affinity by one name or another. It was possible I simply intended what Charles Baudelaire or Walter Benjamin meant by correspondence, or what art historians and theorists (Georges Didi-Huberman, Alexander Nagel, Christopher Wood) had rescued from anachronism. These writers and their ideas hovered, but it seemed that affinity landed a little way off. In what follows the essays on specific artists or images alternate with unmethodical passages on affinity itself, its meaning and meandering. In the life of any writer about art or (weak word) culture who is not deliberately partisan about this or that artist or group of artists, who has not turned aesthetic or political preferences into a self-conscious programme, who doesn’t have the liberty of only ever writing about what they choose—in such a case affinities can remain unthought, until you place them together like this and are forced to see where they connect, or do not.

(...)