複製の知覚 : スライド鑑賞の諸問題

Abstract

Photographic slides reproducing works of art are often still used in lectures on art history. The apparatus is, in fact, essential for art history; one might say that the slide has become a kind of artificial eye for the discipline. However, as the slide has always been regarded as nothing more than a self-evident and transparent medium, it has not been treated very seriously; indeed, its existence is rarely noticed at all. The slide itself is materially and figuratively "opaque" and it is only when this opaque slide is illuminated, that images become visible, letting one look through the slide at something. In this article, I would like to focus on this process specific to slide-projection and to utilize the same process, in a figurative sense - that is, by throwing a light on the slide itself, to make visible the problems contained within the medium. Through this process, I intend to make clear what transformations of perception were caused by slides and what relation this medium had to the human body. More concretely, I will reveal the following issues pertaining to early years of slide-viewing : the sense of abnormality that was experienced in perceiving pictures through slides, the contrast between a reproduction of a slide and other kinds of reproductions, what discourses were given on this medium, and with what political intent this apparatus was applied. As a result of the study, it becomes clear that the photographic slide, in line with other optical devices such as stereo-graphs, panoramas, art-photography, and experimental devices, realized a different kind of perception, which was accepted as evident in everyday life, and that viewing via this medium was closely related to the problem of attention and distraction, which had become a main subject of study in physiological psychology and other disciplines. While viewing pictures through slides, we are reproducing with our body these experiments in perception.