What is the relation between image and signal? Are the image and signal evident at once, or does the recognition of one entail a shift in attention away from the other? Traditionally, the mimetic image is associated with a space of illusion. The image takes coherent shape once the subterfuge that supports it – the material grounds or conditions for the image – are forgotten (or momentarily elude notice). The medium and the signal withdraw so that the image may appear. Clement Greenberg famously resists this conception, associating it with earlier forms of art and arguing that modern art is characterised by an attentiveness to medial conditions. The aesthetic essence of the painted image becomes linked to its material supports (the flatness of the canvas). This is exemplified in the transition to modernist abstraction, which works precisely to suspend the traditional mimetic conception of the image. It is by attentiveness to the specific conditions of the image signal that a new, non-illusory image emerges, with its formal parameters tied inextricably to its failure to constitute anything strictly supervening.
But then what kind of image is this new image? Is this actually an image at all? It links form – the apparent abstraction of form – to a space of material immediacy. In this manner, the image becomes less an apparition than an ensemble of immediately apperceptible elements and relations. It is less an image than a thing, not that an image is not a thing, but an image is characteristically a kind of thing that undermines the simplicity of here and now being – always pointing to and projecting an elsewhere. In any case, Greenberg’s modernist image has a contradictory aspect. It both welcomes and turns its back on the signal. The modernist image can only be seen on the condition that the signal be constrained and strictly reduced. Above all, the signal cannot be a cacophony (echoing the cacophony of the modern world). It must find means to become quiet. It can only appear by stripping itself back, by eliminating everything that is apparently superfluous. Hence the conception of the modernist medium, as the sphere of the aesthetic signal-image, depends upon an effort of ascetic purification. The signal must be cast in terms that are unproblematically material – in a way that the material can be simply seen and observed, that it can attain static formal shape. Art’s role is to discover points of utopic stillness, in which medium and signal cease to represent fields of elusive transition and multiplicity, in which instead an image – an image as non-image – can appear.