Y1,1 (prophetic mode)

The advent of photography is comprehended in religious terms like "prophecy." It is a movement of the spirit, which art points toward. There is a merger of contraries in the long citation from Wiertz, the artisanal element in art being subsumed, matched, and exceeded by what is possible technologically. We can note that Wiertz's text comes to us as a poem, another derivative of religious experience, in short stanza's with line breaks indicated, though the poems is forced into the prose of the citations, a formal echo of the content of the citation, an intervention in that citation, where the spiritual is forced into the mold of the mechanical, the supposedly prosaic. We can note as well that the movement is from the artisanal, bricklaying, to the architectural as it is enabled by photography: control of the various elements of the photograph/painting is so complete that the artist is freed to think at a higher level, is freed from a type of work or a type of labor: and of course this echoes the construction, the architecture, at stake in the arcades and the Arcades Project. The "full sense" of the painter or artist is in this type of architecture.