Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art

In Potential Images Dario Gamboni explores ambiguity in modern art, considering images that rely to a great degree on a projected or imaginative response from viewers to achieve their effect. Ambiguity became increasingly important in late 19th- and early 20th-century aesthetics, as is evidenced in works by such artists as Redon, Cezanne, Gauguin, Ensor and the Nabis. Similarly, the Cubists subverted traditional representational conventions, requiring their viewers to decipher images to extract their full meanings. The same device was taken up in the various experiments leading to abstraction. For example, it was Kandinsky's intention that his work could be interpreted in both figurative and non-figurative ways, and Duchamp's Readymades suggested the radical conclusion that 'it is the beholder who makes the picture'. These invitations to viewers to participate in the process of artistic communication had social and political implications, as they accorded artist and beholder symmetrical, almost interchangeable, roles.

In this ambitious and wide-ranging exploration of art of the modern period, Gamboni explores the sources, intentions and effects associated with ambiguous images by examining the viewer's degree of participation, the nature of the latent or 'potential' image and its relation to issues of representation and abstraction. He also draws on disciplines as diverse as psychology, semiotics, literary theory, the art of the insane and popular visual riddles in his quest to decipher and interpret the significance of potential images in the history of modernism.