Marion’s theory of the icon is a theory of the way the invisible (unseen) reveals itself, and as such the icon is defined in opposition to the idol. A thing or being becomes an idol when the human gaze directed toward it allows itself to be completed or satisfied by this visible thing or being. Thus the “idol” is essentially a confirming concept of God. The intention of the human gaze is completely absorbed in the sight/site of the idol. This means that intention and gaze allow themselves to be fixed on a given visible shape. As Victor Kal has argued, intention and gaze do not see through the visible; rather, they are enraptured with the visible.171 The idol, then, is the representation of God adjusted to human, finite standards; it is the human agent who is in control of the viewing, who is in possession of the viewed.
A helpful analogy—in the specific context of Viola it serves as more than analogy here—may be with the Renaissance construct of linear or scientific perspective, a mathematical and technical procedure for measuring and controlling a three-dimensional view onto a two-dimension plane, giving the effect of distance—what we’ve come to mean as “having a perspective” on something, or putting information “into perspective.” Simply put, perspective (in painting) is a visual system by which an illusion of depth is created by geometric means on a flat surface, and organized from a single point of view. In perspective construction, the viewer, rather than the world seen, has priority. The appearance of things in pictorial space is a function of their distance from the viewer. The picture is, then, the artist’s (and ultimately viewer’s) construct; it is his ordering of a view that posits a unity perceived at a distance from the viewer. And the perception of that unity and mastery over it is contingent upon setting up the distance.
Viola himself confirms the appropriateness of this analogy in referring to Renaissance picture construction as “new technical systems of art based on optics and sight [which] were supplanting medieval schemes based on modes of an invisible, spiritual reality.”172 Vision, in this sense, is not a matter of multiple, simultaneous, and perhaps conflicting observations, experiences and impulses, as it was in pre-modern depiction; rather, it is a hierarchically constructed relationship to the known world; the world as fitted to our measure and position, where we have a clear, confirming, and reassuring sense of our place and proportion relative to the “vision.”173 It presupposes that the beholder’s eye occupies a fixed point in space; thus a perspectivally organized picture situates the viewer in place in order to see the view “correctly”—it is a rationalization of seeing.
Similarly, Marion’s idol is the human experience of the divine; it refers to the structure of thought on God within human limits, God as manifest presence, grounded in knowledge.174 “The idol,” the philosopher argues in God Without Being, “consigns the divine to the measure of a human gaze,”175 which St. John of the Cross had called “vanity” and “doll-dressing,” “nothing more than idols upon which they [the vainly pious] center their joy.”176 As a result, the gaze creates the idol, and the onlooker is fully satisfied by what he sees. Marion calls this way of seeing “idolatry.” The idol is created by the desire to see and fix what is seen; the idol is exactly there where the gaze stops, and as such the idol is like a mirror; it merely reflects my desires—it does not allow a “beyond.” That which is reflected in the mirror is the gaze itself, the gaze obsessed by itself. I see nothing but my own gaze, my own intention. There is no Other there, it is all Me. Viola echoes this idea when, in conversation with Hans Belting who had made reference to the story of Narcissus’s reflection and self-love, responds: “That’s wonderful—an image that is evoked or created by the observer to fulfill a desire or function . . . a creative image, but a hazardous one.”177 The idol may be a “picture” of God, but cut to the size and limits of the human imagination. Philosophically, the idol takes the shape of an idea or concept—and conceptualization means assimilation by human imagination.178
The icon, by contrast, represents a non-conceptual, non-idolized “appearance” of God. The icon is not produced by the human gaze; rather, “the icon summons a gaze.”179 It is this summoning I wish to highlight here. The theology of the icon, Marion observes, is found in Colossians 1:15: “He is the eikon of the invisible God . . .,” incomprehensible by nature and therefore inaccessible to human intentionality. And that “He”—Christ, for St. Paul, the visible eikon of God—may well be, for us, the invisible God in the visible Other. The icon, then, overcomes the mirror and the intentional gaze, and itself claims or summons the gaze of the onlooker. In other words, the visible icon, qua object, refers beyond itself to the invisible. “The icon does not make the invisible tangibly present. The icon makes the invisible as invisible present for the glance. The icon can be seen and refers beyond itself.”180 Marion summarizes this in God Without Being: “In the idol, the gaze of man is frozen in its mirror; in the icon, the gaze of man is lost in the invisible gaze that visibly engages him” (my emphasis). The icon “unbalances human sight in order to engulf it in infinite depth;” it is about the “presence of a non-object.”181 I do not focus upon the icon, my gaze does not rest or settle on it; rather the icon focuses on me. The icon is the intentional gaze of the other in me; Marion refers to it as the “perfect reversal” of intentionality. The icon approaches me, it gives itself.182 It is a soliciting force. We might think back, for instance, on the call for our response in Viola’s Man of Sorrows, and, as with the medieval icon, in the crossing of time and space within the encounter between Self and Other, self and divine stranger, is Levinas’s “naked appeal of the Other.” “The stranger before me,” writes theologian Richard Kearney, “both is God (as transcendent Guest) and is not God (as screen of my projections and presumptions).” Kearny elaborates:
Out of this tension faith leaps. There can be no immediate appropriation of the divine Other as my “own,” but only a relationship to someone other than myself who is, so to speak, like me while remaining irreducibly unlike me qua Other.183
Observance (2002)
This is precisely what I think is occurring in Viola’s Quintets and, more directly perhaps in his Observance (see Figures 21 and 22) from 2002 which substitutes the traditional notion of a painting as window through which the viewer looks at the image of the world, for the religious icon which calls the viewer into the divine image. Viola, again, resists the traditional definition of the picture:
The idea of art as a kind of diagram has for the most part not made it down from the Middle Ages into modern European consciousness. The Renaissance was the turning point, and the subsequent history of Western art, can be viewed as the progressive distancing of the arts away from the sacred and towards the profane . . . Painting became an architectural, spatial form, which the viewer experienced by physically walking through it . . . What Brunelleschi [the inventor of perspective] achieved was the personification of the image, the creation of a “point of view” and its identification with a place in real space. In doing so, he elevated the position of the individual viewer to an integral part of the picture by encoding this presence . . . The picture became an opaque mirror for the viewer, and the viewer, in turn, became the embodiment of the painter, “completing the picture” . . .184