Espace vague
The restricted space is an unreal
Vague space is, in an image representing a scene, the space that indicates the real, at the margin of the scene itself. The notion of vague space is justified by research into perspective, which, since Alhazen's treatise (10th c., Latin translation from Arabic, Opticae thesaurus, Basel, 1572) distinguishes in the functioning of the eye a clear vision at the center of the visual cone and a blurred vision on the sides, blurred but whose fragments harvest the details and diversity of reality. In the seventeenth century, Father Étienne Binet, in his Essai sur les merveilles de nature (Rouen, R. de Beauvais and J. Osmond, 1622), suggests that this blurred vision be rendered "blurred" in painting: "Shortening, tucking, deepening, to make painting appear far away it is necessary that the thing be painted blurred, that is, softly, for if it were rough and not blurred, it would appear too close." (XXIX, 309; quoted in Emmanuelle Hénin, Ut pictura theatrum, p. 295.)
The mediating function of vague space
In late medieval and Renaissance paintings depicting the Virgin and Child, only the central part of the picture is assigned to the actual representation of the Virgin with her child. The sides and background of the painting depict a landscape, a town, peasants at work: all these elements have nothing to do with the generic title of the painting. Rather, they have to do with the social, historical and cultural space in which and for which the picture was painted. We're already in the painting, in the representation, but we're not yet in the scene proper, which gives the painting its title. This intermediary space, which bridges the gap between the space in which the spectators find themselves and the space in which the scene proper is located, will be called vague space, firstly because its status is vague, floating, belonging exactly neither to the real world nor to illusion.
Vague space is the space through which the spectator enters the restricted space. This path and function are sometimes thematized, represented in the vague space, where the artist installs spectator characters, who will serve as visual clutches. When there is a break-in device, the voyeur spectator's gaze is established from the vague space to the restricted space.
Although he is in the foreground on the left, Actaeon belongs to the vague space: accompanied by his dog, he is arriving from the forest, which is depicted in the background on the right. Diana and her nymphs are depicted as if on an island, surrounded by vague space. The separation between vague and restricted space is first represented by the stone factory, with its pillars and Gothic vault (compare with Memling), then emphasized by the red drapery and the watercourse.
Although in the left foreground, Actaeon belongs to the vague space: accompanied by his dog, he arrives from the forest, which is depicted in the background on the right. Diana and her nymphs are depicted as if on an island, surrounded by vague space. The separation between vague space and restricted space is represented first by the stone factory, with its pillars and Gothic vault (compare with Memling), and then emphasized by the red drapery and the watercourse.
Precision, visibility, depth
However, whatever Father Binet may say, the vagueness of vague space never translates, so to speak, into a blurred effect: on the contrary, it's the minutiae of reality, the enjoyment of detail, of the small true fact, that characterizes vague space. This is not to be confused with artistic effects such as sfumato, which affect the entire representation.
In theater, vague space has nothing to do with offstage, which remains invisible: it corresponds not to the backstage space behind the stage, but to the backdrops, or even to the mute characters located in the background, or to the mute pantomimes played concurrently with the dialogue.
In the foreground, the artist has depicted the protagonists of Racine's tragedy, from left to right, Abner, Athalie's advisor; Athalie, the questioning queen; Joas, the child who answers her; Josabet, her adoptive mother; Zacharie, Josabet's son. These characters make up the limited space of the stage, framed by the curtain above them. They are observed by a whole series of characters, spread across a vague space that runs from Josabet's back to the door at the back, supposedly leading to the interior of the Temple.
Another function of the vague space is to give the impression of depth. Vague space opens up depth of field, or geometric depth. When the space of representation is a surface (in painting or drawing), this depth must not be sought behind the image, below it, but on the image itself, next to it, around the restricted space, around the scene itself.
Diminishing the vague space
In the classical era, vague space becomes such an obvious and habitual ingredient of representation that we sometimes come to represent it only allusively. In such cases, it may be represented very schematically by an object indicating the presence of an undetermined outside: a door ajar, a screen, a staircase, a window. This type of allusive representation of vague space is particularly common in illustrative engraving, which strives to depict the scene in the most spectacular way in the smallest space. In this case, there is little room for the vague and the gratuitous.
From left to right, Marianne, Valville and the surgeon make up the restricted space of the scene, focused on the foot. But the vague space is only sketchily represented, by Valville's hat and sword thrown to the ground in the foreground (acting as a visual clutch), by the door in the background at right, suggesting the existence of an outside.
Here we touch on the economic dimension of vague space: over the course of the eighteenth century, it will gradually appear as wasted, even useless, space. It's striking, for example, that in Greuze's work, vague space tends to disappear, often in favor of a bare background wall that crushes perspective. No doubt this is not simply a fault of Greuze's, but rather the fulfillment of a logic that makes the most of space and effect: Greuze the bourgeois painter capitalizes on all space; vague space disappears with the fallow...
From left to right, Caracalla, Severus and Papinian. The restricted space, delimited by the hanging behind Severus' bed, opens only onto a wall, while the paving in the foreground remains empty: there is no longer any vague space to speak of.
Critique et théorie
Archive mise à jour depuis 2008
Critique et théorie
Généalogie médiévale des dispositifs
Entre économie et mimésis, l’allégorie du tabernacle
Trois gouttes de sang sur la neige
Iconologie de la fable mystique
La polémique comme monde
Construire Sénèque
Sémiologie classique
De la vie à l’instant
D'un long silence… Cicéron dans la querelle française des inversions (1667-1751)
La scène et le spectre
Dispositifs contemporains
Résistances de l’écran : Derrida avec Mallarmé
La Guerre des mondes, la rencontre impossible
Dispositifs de récit dans Angélique de Robbe-Grillet
Disposition des lieux, déconstruction des visibilités
Physique de la fiction
Critique de l’antimodernité
Mad men, Les Noces de Figaro
Le champ littéraire face à la globalisation de la fiction
Théorie des dispositifs
Image et subversion. Introduction
Image et subversion. Chapitre 4. Les choses et les objets
Image et subversion. Chapitre 5. Narration, récit, fiction. Incarnat blanc et noir
Biopolitique et déconstruction
Biographie, biologie, biopolitique
Flan de la théorie, théorie du flan
Surveiller et punir
Image et événement