"I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom. I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients." Gustave Courbet

09 December 2014

Looking.

Rembrandt, Self-Portrait at the Age of 63, 1669


The look of someone looking at himself looking at the look he has when it is a matter of looking not just at anything, at something else, but back to the place from which one is looking … Would that do better? Is that what self-portraiture is about? Simple questions in this area seem to open onto infinite dialectical regress. And isn’t one of the things we admire in the best of the genre precisely the effort to represent this dialectical vertigo? Isn’t that what Rembrandt is doing?

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