About Abstract Illustration
There is a possibility that an image implies the existence of something, and also that an image implies a possible existence.
Illustration, in general, almost always refers to something. Within the context of a book, for example, there may be a character constructed through an extremely precise description—whether of their physical appearance, their psychology, or their relationship to something else. That character, who may have a name and a particular way of existing within a complex story, may also have a voice, a way of walking, or a particular way of coughing.
A particular way of coughing.
That character's peculiar cough might end up being what we remember most vividly about the book. Why? How strange. It was not a book about coughing; it was a novel about Duria Antiquior, the first pictorial representation of a prehistoric scene based on fossils discovered by Mary Anning, the first woman to be recognized as a paleontologist.
Perhaps the character of Mary Anning had an especially extravagant cough. Or perhaps, while reading the novel, we ourselves had a persistent cough, causing something in our brains to become anchored to Mary's way of coughing, until it became the most enduring memory we retained from the book—even though the book itself was extremely good. Even though the edition contained beautiful illustrations: of the fossils, the cliffs of Dorset, Mary Anning herself at different excavation sites, the other scientists of her time who prevented her from participating in the British scientific community of the early nineteenth century, and Try, Mary Anning's dog.
All of this is simply to suggest that Mary Anning's way of coughing has probably already acquired a correspondence in the mind of whoever is reading this now. Mary Anning coughing. A specific image or impression that exists alongside the entire construction a person is capable of producing in their imagination from an idea or a description.
What tends to happen with figurative or traditional illustration is that it comes along and beats that image into submission—that unique and irreproducible image that language, whether spoken or written, had formed in the reader's mind. And in doing so, it also erases the possibility of considering the legitimacy of a form of knowledge that is not based on representation.
Ana Montecucco proposes a system for questioning the processes through which images are produced to illustrate books, ideas, recipes, and scientific theories, but above all as a way of reflecting on the mechanisms involved in translating one form of information into another—the codes and relationships between word and image, and the place of representation within knowledge.
