Solvent Form : Art and Destruction [1 ed.] 9781526129253, 9781526129246

Citation preview

A bold and highly original study, Solvent form will be stimulating reading for students of art history and theory. It can also serve as a textbook for understanding how art functions as something perpetually in transit and never fixed. Jared Pappas-Kelley is a visual artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Teesside University

Cover image: Postcard of Winchester House (courtesy of History San Jose, Leib Family Collection)

ISBN 978-1-5261-2924-6

Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com

9 781526 129246 www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

Pappas-Kelley

The book draws on a wide variety of sources, from the theoretical work of Baudrillard, Agamben, and Bataille to the novels of Perec and Tom McCarthy. It also looks at events such as the Momart warehouse fire of 2004, in which large holdings of YBA and other high profile collections were destroyed, and the activities of art thief Stéphane Breitwieser, whose mother destroyed the works he had stolen upon his arrest. From this rich array of materials it assembles an idea of ‘solvent form’, whereby art, while attempting to make secure or fixed, simultaneously undoes and destroys through its inception. Going further, the book asks what it is that can be perceived through the destruction of art, and how this might be linked to a more general failure.

Solvent form

Solvent form is about the destruction of art. It examines objects that have been destroyed—lost in fires, floods, or acts of vandalism—but also those that actively court or represent destruction. More generally, it investigates the concept of art operating through object and form.

Jared Pappas-Kelley

Art and destruction

Solvent form

Solvent form Art and destruction Jared Pappas-Kelley

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Jared Pappas-Kelley 2019 The right of Jared Pappas-Kelley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 2924 6 hardback First published 2019 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Contents

List of figures page vi Acknowledgments viii 1 The destruction of art

1

2 Art and permeable moments

55

3 Solvent form

74

4 The thing that is not a thing 90 5 Things lie

114

Epilogue

129

Bibliography

133

Index

145

Figures

1.1 Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993. Commissioned and produced by Artangel. Photograph by Edward Woodman. p.19 3.1 Louise Bourgeois (American, born France, 1911–2010), Couple II, 1996. Fabric, kneed brace, glass, and wood; couple (overall): 27 × 60 × 32 inches (68.58 × 152.4 × 81.28 cm); vitrine (overall): 65 × 79 × 47 inches (165.1 × 200.66 × 119.38 cm). Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Sarah Norton Goodyear Fund, 1999 (1999:12). © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photograph by Tom Loonan. 79 3.2 Sarah Winchester, Leib Family Collection (Courtesy: History San Jose). 81 3.3 Winchester House, Leib Family Collection (Courtesy: History San Jose). 82 3.4 Urs Fischer, Untitled, 2011. Wax, pigments, wicks, steel. Giambologna sculpture: 248 1/8 × 57 7/8 × 57 7/8 inches, Installation dimensions variable. Edition of 2 + 1 AP. © Urs Fischer. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich. Photograph by Stefan Altenburger. 85 3.5 Urs Fischer, Untitled, 2011 (after more time has passed). Wax, pigments, wicks, steel. Giambologna sculpture: 248 1/8 × 57 7/8 × 57 7/8 inches, Installation dimensions variable. Edition of 2 + 1 AP. © Urs Fischer. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich. Photograph by Stefan Altenburger. 86 4.1 Jake and Dinos Chapman, Fucking Hell, 2008. After the work Hell was destroyed in the Momart fire, Jake and Dinos Chapman responded by remaking it into a bigger

Figures

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and better version called Fucking Hell. © Jake and Dinos Chapman. 92 4.2 Jake and Dinos Chapman, Same Thing Only Better, 2010. © Jake and Dinos Chapman, Photograph by Hugo Glendinning. 106 5.1 Thomas Hirschhorn, Crystal of Resistance (install view), 2011. Swiss Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2011. Photograph by Romain Lopez (courtesy of the artist). 117 5.2 Thomas Hirschhorn, Crystal of Resistance (install view), 2011. Swiss Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2011. Photograph by Anna Kowalska (courtesy of the artist). 118

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to Michael Lent, with his world-changing abilities and his adumbrational book Courting Dissolution. I would also like to thank Jean-Luc Nancy and Sylvère Lotringer for their support and help with what became this book, as well as Simon Morris and Denise Baggett for their care and help. Abundant thanks to my family for their encour­ agement and vision always, as well as the support, permissions, and generosity of Thomas Hirschhorn, Urs Fischer, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gustav Metzger, Rachel Whiteread and Artangel (their ­studios), the Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Tate Modern, and the History San Jose archives for help with all things Winchester. We come most together when coming apart.

Who, on seeing a Parisian apartment house, has never thought of it as indestructible? A bomb, a fire, an earthquake could certainly bring it down, but what else? In the eyes of an individual, of a family, or even a dynasty, a town, street, or house seems unchangeable, untouchable by time, by the ups and downs of human life, to such an extent that we believe we can compare and contrast the fragility of our condition to the invulnerability of stone. But the same fever which around eighteen fifty brought these buildings out of the ground from Batignolles to Clichy, from Ménilmontant to Butte-aux-Cailles, from Balard to Pré Saint-Gervais, will henceforth strive for their destruction.1 Georges Perec

Note 1 Perec, Georges. Life a User’s Manual. London: Harvill, 1996. p. 130.

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The destruction of art

Solvent form examines art and destruction—through objects that have been destroyed (lost in fires, floods, vandalism, or, similarly, those that actively court or represent this destruction, such as Christian Marclay’s Guitar Drag or Chris Burden’s Samson), but also as an undoing process within art that the object challenges through form itself. In this manner, events such as the Momart warehouse fire in 2004 (in which large holdings of Young British Artists (YBA) and significant collections of art were destroyed en masse through arson), as well as the events surrounding art thief Stéphane Breitwieser (whose mother destroyed the art he had stolen upon his arrest—putting it down a garbage disposal or dumping it in a nearby canal) are critical events in this book, as they reveal something about art itself. Likewise, it is through these moments of destruction that we might distinguish a solvency within art and discover an operation in which something is made visible at a time when art’s metaphorical undoing emerges as oddly literal. Against this overlay, a tendency is mapped whereby individuals attempt to conceptually gather these destroyed or lost objects, to somehow recoup them in their absence. This might be observed through recent projects, such as Jonathan Jones’s Museum of Lost Art, the Tate Modern’s Gallery of Lost Art, or Henri Lefebvre’s text The Missing Pieces; along with exhibitions that position art as destruction, such as Damage Control at the Hirschhorn Museum or Under Destruction by the Swiss Institute in New York. In this sense, destroyed art emerges as a sort of ruin or oddity in which one might wander in the present; however, it might also point to the object as something fatal rather than simply a collection of or an attempt to revive the lost for posthumous consideration. From this vantage, Solvent form investigates work by artists such as Jean Tinguely and Gustav Metzger, while expanding to art in a more general sense through considering works by artists such as Agnes Martin, Rachel

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Solvent form

Whiteread, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jeremy Blake, Louise Bourgeois, Urs Fischer, Pavel Büchler, and Tracey Emin (again within the context of the Momart fire). In Solvent form, perhaps, there is an absurdity in grouping art together merely because it has been destroyed—but it reveals a resonance. In this sense, the book is neither an art historical document nor even a proposal for bringing together remnants of memory and remainders into some sort of exhibition. Instead, its aim is to investigate what it means when art is destroyed. Others have similarly considered destruction or undoing as a kind of trick within the inception of a work of art. In an essay on The Brothers Karamazov, Jean Genet proposed that every act “means one thing and its opposite.” The act for Genet implies both the thing but also its opposite, so that creation in form similarly implies a destruction, as he warns: “everyone expects a miracle, and the opposite occurs.”1 From this, he concludes: Having read [The Brothers Karamazov] in this way it now seems to me that any novel, poem, painting, or musical composition that does not de-stroy itself—by which I mean, that is not constructed as a blood sport with its own head on the chopping block—is a fraud.2

While this is the sort of proclamation that gets the blood racing, there is also something more nuanced in our understanding of art that Genet is missing. Art, in its inception, implies its own undoing with the cutting of its own head; and this apart and aside from its impulse or intention— conscious or not—through its construction, as Genet stated, separately from its author or artist. What I’m suggesting here is not simply a trick or booby-trap that an artist might build into the works, but instead an energetic revelation of what is at risk or has already disappeared in the endeavor. With this, any art form that is not in a sense undoing or cultivating a destruction of sorts, in Genet’s words reveals a fraud (also an undoing)—and that is what we see here. For example, it might appear a fatal trick when one looks to an artist such as Michael Landy and his Art Bin, in which he asked artists to discard works they were dissatisfied with in a massive bin. Or similarly Jack Kerouac’s attempts to construct On the Road as one long scroll of paper fed through his typewriter so that he could frenetically type it in a stream of consciousness, exactly as it happened and without pause. Kerouac’s scroll became a nightmare for his publisher, and it was ultimately revised and written again so that there remains no definitive condition.

The destruction of art

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In Solvent form, the intent is not to get caught up in how a specific artist (or, as Genet suggests, novelist, poet, painter, or composer) might choose to construct art to mimic this destruction or contrive it as a booby-trap— as this emphasis tends to cast destruction more as a parlor trick (the work of a didactic clock builder)—or as a clever device a writer or artist constructs and employs. The more accurate observation is that like the shipwreck, which is implied with the creation of the ship, there is a similar destruction implied in the art object itself.3 In this sense, Landy’s Art Bin doesn’t offer this destruction, but a sleight of hand where the work demonstrates the performative action of absorbing the failure and destruction of others into a redemptive act—masking destruction and instead replacing it with compensation. As with the story of Kerouac’s scroll, we are not concerned with the machinations of how an artist attempts to craft a destruction (creating a bin for others to cast their failures into) or the expectations of a publisher, as perhaps the most salient detail of the Kerouac story is that the final section of the scroll was destroyed—apparently eaten by a dog named Potchky.4 These are the primary destructions somehow implied in the work of art. In this manner, this book introduces ideas from Bataille and Paul Virilio (the shipwreck that resides within the ship’s invention) and their conceptions of the negative miracle and reverse miracle, which are correlated to understand a method in which absence makes something visible while simultaneously revealing an impulse within art. Solvent form aims to determine what may be perceived through the destruction of art, how we understand it, and, further, how these destructions might be linked to some general failure in art that allows us to see through instances when art appears to trip on a rug.5 Expanding upon this, the text takes cues from literary and varied sources, such as Perec’s Life a User’s Manual—in which the character Bartlebooth spends twenty years painting seascapes of various ports only to spend the next twenty attempting to erase them. Similarly, McCarthy’s Remainder, in which an unnamed protagonist re-enacts obsessive scenarios following an accident; Mann’s The Magic Mountain as an act of withdrawal from the daily flow and decay of the world; or the amassed warehouses of Citizen Kane. These chartings explore art and its destruction through accounts in the media and newspapers, interviews, and cinematic examples. Amid this accumulation, they weave a narrative of art through events that intermingle with Jean Baudrillard’s ideas on disappearance, Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the image (or imago as votive that keeps present the past, yet also burns), and Giorgio Agamben’s notion of art as an attempt to make the

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moment appear permeable. With this, as Bataille proposes, art emerges from a shipwreck with the moment in which assumptions, expectations, or what appears fixed are ultimately undone. Likewise, these destructions are considered through narratives such as Sarah Winchester obsessively building the Winchester Mansion in San Jose, California, as an attempted house that never ceased. Alongside these attempts to construct an undoing, and amid a volatile remainder in art, these events provide a metaphoric consideration of real and emblematic events in the world that underscore ideas of destruction and solvency in art. Through this, our understanding of art emerges not as a timeless and fixed entity, but as one that both burns and is burning—putting forth and pulling down; an art that is perpetually shipwrecked, undone, and given form through this moment inhabited. With these incidents, the destruction of art absorbs, catching us unaware, yet amassing again in newspapers and online, accumulating in books, or gathering as an impetus for exhibitions—capturing popular imagination and calling a bluff, so that it might appear as if destruction itself is having a moment (or perhaps always is). But what is it that may be perceived through the destruction of art? In conversation, Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer suggested that art had perhaps reached a point where it was not up to the challenge before it, such that art expanded and sped up, becoming more persuasive, cumbersome, and sprawling as compensation and with this, as Virilio observes, “They have masked the failure or the accident with commercial success,” and in the process made a thing of it.6 Lotringer continues: “There were all sorts of attempts to maintain the impact of the visual arts in a world that was rapidly changing. So I wonder whether this failure and condemnation …”7 But then Virilio interjects: Failure is not a condemnation! It’s not the same thing. Failure is failure. Failure is an accident: art has tripped on the rug. In any case you should not forget my logic of failure, my logic of the accident. In my view, the accident is positive. Why? Because it reveals something important that we would not otherwise be able to perceive.8

It is from this perspective of art “tripping on a rug” that we might perceive something more of art through its destruction. Likewise, it is through these destructions that we may distinguish a solvency within art and catch an operation in which something is made visible through these moments when theory emerges and appears oddly literal. In one sense, events like these present an art engaged in an escape from the thing

The destruction of art

5

before us—an undertaking—as artist Pavel Büchler observes of Stéphane Mallarmé and his notion that “the poem is the object escaping,” likewise proposing that the work of art is, “the ‘object escaping’ everything that ‘has a place’…”9 Eavesdropping, but somehow perversely accurate, like Jean Baudrillard decreeing “Art does not die because there is no more art, it dies because there is too much.” Therefore, among the extension of too much, a text might take cues from Georges Bataille in the manner he suggests: “I wanted to present the development of my thought, disclosing in the course of time, little by little, unexpected relations, rather than offer a drily theoretical statement of those relations or of the method I followed.”10 Beginning here it is hoped that through a similar strategy an understanding of the destruction of art might emerge, and that these investigations might likewise appear, little by little, as a series of bombs in the shape of a book for understanding something of destruction in art. In which art is destroyed by floods, fires, looting, and catastrophes; a museum is created to take its place In 2003, critic Jonathan Jones wrote an article about a location he had begun to conceive to house sundry art objects that had been lost and destroyed over the centuries. Setting a stage for destroyed and lost art—in this case work destroyed in floods, fires, looting, and catastrophes—the impulse perhaps being that if we gather them, even in a news story, these unlikely objects might help us understand loss and see what has become invisible, as well as something necessary about art itself. Jones begins his portrayal of the site by evoking a setting and contriving the Museum of Lost Art into existence: The Museum of Lost Art is a low glass building set in parkland, a place you drive past on the motorway, barely registering it. Approach across the rape fields and what at first had seemed to be a greenhouse turns out to contain not tomatoes but paintings. Hanging low in pale daylight are vanished masterpieces by Rembrandt, Cézanne, Manet, Braque and Vermeer.11

Imagined, it is a site conjured from fancy by Jones for the purposes of his article. Perhaps not invisible cities, in the Calvino sense, but conceivably suburbs that are nearly visible from his front porch.12 With this news story, Jones begins to assemble the scene for uncovering, attempting to see something that might be revealed through gathering and examining the absence of destroyed or lost objects that continue to exert their absence

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as a means to envision lost art. Evoked is Richard Brautigan’s conception of a library for unpublished books, which “came into being because of an overwhelming need and desire for such a place,” or Julian Barnes’s invocation of a net, and thus his conception of biography as a “collection of holes tied together with string.”13 The Museum of Lost Art is depicted as nondescript in its outward appearance, barely registering: the type of place one passes on the way to somewhere else.14 Perhaps this museum is a nonplace in the most literal sense, as the Museum of Lost Art, by definition, cannot really exist. Yet, in effect, as an operation, it hews a destination of indistinctness from what is no longer, allowing it to gather like a Chinese ghost story through laying out a bowl of clear water for thirsty ghosts to congregate around. The motif of collecting together art that has been destroyed keeps popping up (this accruing tendency of stories of art and destruction in the form of exhibitions, newspaper coverage, books, and popular media, to attempt to have something to show from what is absent), an attempted respite from disappearance through accumulating what is lost, and that is why Jones’s writings in the popular media are such a good place to start. With a museum of lost art, one attempts to create a space for the consideration, ordering, and envisioning of destroyed and lost masterpieces; to find its place and recoup a loss, which in its own right is worth consideration. Jones observes: Everything in the Museum of Lost Art is invaluable and everything is illegal. There are even masterpieces the world believes to have been lost in floods and fires. As you wander through, paintings take on the appeal of something wrong and sinful. It is my favourite museum.15

Perhaps impossibility grants the works their charm, linking the museum’s fascination with something illicit and forbidden, proscribed literally through their destruction and absence. Also like another project—this one by poet Henri Lefebvre—The Missing Pieces: a text comprised entirely of citations for works that no longer exist or cannot be accessed.16 Through it, each entry strings together as a list chronicling a partial catalog of absence, separated by the ellipsis of a dot (•) and rendered as poetry: “Tilted Arc, a monumental, site-specific work by sculptor Richard Serra; commissioned in 1981 by the US Government for the Federal Plaza in New York, it was dismantled in 1989 by its commissioner.”17 Likewise “On the Road: the final seven meters of Jack Kerouac’s original typescript were eaten by a dog.”18 Additionally,

The destruction of art

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Until 1977, New York artist Jenny Holzer paints on canvas in the style of Mark Rothko; nothing remains of this period; a text by Jenny Holzer, created for the 1982 Documenta exhibition at Kassel and painted on the facade of a building, is erased in May 2002 when the new owner of the building decides to have the facade restored; he did not know it was a work of art.19

Or further: “Forty-two works by Vermeer have come down to us, the others are missing; there isn’t a single line written in his own hand or one self-portrait;”20 alongside “The Regional Center for Contemporary Art in Corte, Corsica, burns down; a hundred works of art go up in smoke, including those by Dan Graham, Carl André, Sophie Calle, and Annette Messager.”21 With each entry inscribed as text in a series, Lefebvre gathers as an object a compendium of absence, drawing material from biographies, autobiographies, and newspapers, as well as statements from painters and writers.22 Similarly, Jones, with his Museum of Lost Art, extols a catalog of artists and lost works for consideration: Apelles, gone; Duchamp, thrown out after the exhibition; Van Gogh and Rembrandt, gone astray; Michelangelo, lost; da Vinci had a terminal damp problem; Vermeer, also lost; Cimabue, floods and earthquake. With each name recited for inclusion into his museum, these objects are transformed by a rationale tainted with the logic of accident into something other and altogether more captivating as an art ideal amid the act of disappearance. Intangible by design, Jones laments of the museum, “Its very principle of selection prevents us from offering physical access to the works on show,” yet observes the following: There are benefits, however, as well as frustrations. There are no queues. The actual works remain, by definition, out of reach, and only their reproduced image – which might be an old, faded, black-and-white photograph, or a copy done by another artist, perhaps merely on the basis of a written description – circulate. 23

There is something appealing about a museum (or book) whose sole contents are works that no longer exist. However, as Robert Smithson cautions, “Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.” 24 Therefore, perhaps with this it is only fitting that we ought now to have a museum for the viewing of destroyed art. Within it, destruction mocks while proving, as Jones observes, a means for ­circulation—the works on display are out of reach and inaccessible. Instead, the viewer is

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invited to walk through and ponder what is more akin to implied ruins left behind in the work’s absence, the holes somehow still inexplicably tied together with string. Here, access is mediated through the circulation of faded photographs, imitations, and descriptions formed from bits of rumor and ether gathered into virtual reliquaries of art—museums of lost art amid the world we inhabit. Yet what emerges is perhaps an absurdist menagerie of sorts, owing its logic to a nearness to Borges’s encyclopedia. Jones notes of the grouping the following: The principle of selection may seem perverse, like Jorge Luis Borges’s description of “a certain Chinese encyclopaedia” in which animals are divided into such categories as “frenzied” and “innumerable.”25

Yet, through this profusion of absent objects, something might be revealed, as if the very act of gathering exposes roughly an origin in the objects, with destruction as its commonality. With Stolen, Looted, Lost and Burned, Jones begins telling particular stories of works, the details and incidentals that caused pieces such as those of da Vinci, Duchamp, Michelangelo, and Van Gogh to become eligible for inclusion in his museum. Jones observes: “Yet when you put them together, patterns emerge.” As if the key to understanding lost objects is through their disappearance, and through gathering them we might understand something of art and also its destruction through its unlikeliness. Jones continues: There is something unlikely about the artists brought together in this exhibition, or at least about the idea that they have something in common and something to say to each other simply because they all fit the class of “works of art that have been lost.”26

However, perhaps this unlikeliness is instead crucial to understanding the negative or reverse miracle to which they point in Bataille’s and even Virilio’s terms.27 In the third volume of the Accursed Share, Bataille recounts a story of his cousin, thought lost in a shipwreck, as a means for examining a paradox of happy tears and what he terms the negative miracle. The story involves a cousin by marriage who was an officer in the British Navy and served on board a ship called the Hood that sank during the Second World War, with nearly every person onboard dying. Assumed lost, the cousin was reported as dead to his mother, yet later was discovered to have been assigned to a separate mission on a smaller boat just hours before the Hood sank. Of the unfolding of events, Bataille explains,

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“But some days after, my mother received a letter from him relating the circumstances in which he had, ‘by a miracle,’ escaped death.”28 Not particularly acquainted with the cousin at the time, Bataille did not consider the events especially affecting, but remembers, “I had the opportunity to tell the story to friends, and every time I did so, to my great surprise tears came to my eyes.”29 Bataille thought these tears puzzling, explaining that he had not felt exceptionally attached to the events, and wondering of this unlikely response. “Everyone knows that one weeps for joy. But I did not feel any joy.”30 It became interrelated with an idea of the miracle or, if not the miracle, then the cut and deliverance of the unexpected event, which could not hope to be repeated. He clarifies, “This miraculous quality is conveyed rather exactly by the expression: impossible and yet there it is”31 which he likewise links to the allure of art in general.32 It is this unanticipated or unlikely response “where one would least expect it” that reveals what he terms a negative or reverse miracle, and which is perhaps also what Jones encounters and attempts to gather with these lost works of art. Bataille observes, “what was it if not, in negative form, the unanticipated, the miracle that takes one’s breath away? Impossible, yet there it is.”33 Yet the negative miracle of the destruction of art perhaps simultaneously implies the positive miracle that art in its own way posits—suggesting that in the midst of destruction and shipwrecks, there is the capacity to find something (perhaps not a conveniently lost cousin spirited back for the third act, but something capable of taking our breath away all the same). Bataille proposes that through loss “we discover the negative analogue of the miracle, something we find all the harder to believe”34—as if it had not been struck down, and was also right here before us (or, conversely, right here yet nowhere to be seen). Wherein absence takes our breath away; a masterpiece as disruption From this vantage of contemplating the unlikeliness of the lost works of art, Jones introduces the notion of the masterpiece as it becomes entangled in the object’s propensity to be absent or lost. Seeing the masterpiece through a capacity to become unbound, a work striving to go beyond our ability to create it, likewise houses this unanticipated quality. Of what in Bataille’s terms is an ability to take our breath away, perhaps only half facetiously Jones proposes of the masterpiece: “The very idea of a masterpiece is mystical, extreme, redemptive. It is the idea of a work of art so great that it rivals the creativity of the gods themselves, gives birth

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to a new nature, transcends the limitations of the human.”35 For Jones, the masterpiece exceeds us in its unlikely ability to launch new natures. Bataille sees this in terms of genius, or an ability to call forth the unanticipated that marks in these instances the difference between genius and talent. He notes: “This is why the measure of art is genius, while talent relates to the rational, explicable means, whose result never has anything unanticipated about it.”36 For Jones, the notion of the masterpiece is also closely linked to loss and disappearance—that this loss might best exemplify what is at the heart of the masterpiece. He observes the following of destroyed art: And no work of art fits that description so well as the one we can’t see, the one that exists only as a myth, a rumour. Even the greatest existing work of art can leave you cold if you see it on a bad day. But that fabled lost masterpiece never disappoints. It is perfect. It is completed and transfigured by your own imagination. And imagination never has to subject its splendours to critical scrutiny.37

In these terms, the masterpiece is the object detached from scrutiny— inscrutable, the type of thing one might say of a Mona Lisa. For Jones, the masterpiece could be that which possesses an ability to untether itself, to undo what links the work to the mundane and expectations, which allows an object to exist as myth or rumor transfigured and somehow apart. Cautious not to advocate for the destruction of art itself, Jones warns: This does not mean that we should shrug off theft or vandalism, or anything that destroys art. But art does not die so much as multiply its power when it disappears. What was stunning to look at is, in its absence, tantalising to think about.38

Bataille echoes this caution when he also perhaps gets too close to advocating the destruction of art,39 saying “This does not in any way involve an intention to eliminate what remains: Who would think of getting rid of the work of art or of poetry?”40 This impulse to destroy might be read merely as a problem of iconoclasm, which Dario Gamboni sees in terms of revolution or a political act.41 For example, as in 2011 when Susan Burns walked into the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and tried to rip Paul Gauguin’s painting Two Tahitian Women from the wall before beating it with her fist, later saying, “I feel that Gauguin is evil. He has nudity and is bad for the

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children. He has two women in the painting and it’s very homosexual. I was trying to remove it. I think it should be burned.”42 Gamboni defines iconoclasm as the “destruction of, and opposition to, any images or works of art and, metaphorically, the ‘attacking’ or overthrow of venerated institutions and cherished beliefs …”43 Such that in the destruction of art, one might find a challenge to the work’s legitimacy or right to exist through a clearing away—or the very act of getting rid of the work of art through thefts and vandalism. It is in these terms that Gamboni surveys works of art destroyed since the French Revolution, focusing on notions of vandalism and iconoclasm, while locating impulses of the avant-garde. However, this is to overlook what, for Jones and Bataille, remains. For, conceivably, it is for them something of this destruction that grants poetry and works of art their ability to persist. Therefore, far from advocating for the destruction of art, what appears central for Jones, in particular, is a desire to gather this fleeting aspect of the lost art object; and, perhaps, this is where we might first look,44 assembling with it that which does not die with its disappearance but instead appears multiplied and amplified. Recalling, as Jones observed and Gamboni might agree, that what was stunning to look at is, in its absence, tantalizing to think about. And perhaps that is the allure of lost art. Through it, a sort of ruin emerges in which we can wander in the present, in light of the work’s absence and loss, a story that is never completely fixed in our understanding. And yet isn’t this also in part the fascination of art itself? Art has a capacity to forestall through a ship’s wreckage, to catch our breath, revealing this interplay between what is lost yet still there—shipwrecked, yet still docked. Conceivably, this grants the masterpiece its allure, this ability to be lost that Jones notes, but also this ability to be beyond our grasp. In conjuring a Museum of Lost Art, one attempts to locate a site where we might better understand destruction in art, as well as something of art itself—in a sense to make what is lost and invisible tangible; as if every word spoken in New York each day were rendered as a snowflake, freezing us in.45 Jones observes: “We want what we can’t have. We need to see what is invisible. This gives lost art a compelling power, and it makes artists create the new by trying to reconstruct what has been lost. In the story of art, the end is the beginning.”46 Moreover, if, as Jones suggests, in art the end is the beginning, then indeed it is with the end that we must start if we want to understand art and what its destruction might tell us. Yet it might also be useful to look at this notion of a remainder, or what remains and continues in some form, exerting this fascination—that which Bataille associates with the allure of

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art and poetry and yet which is entwined with the means of the negative miracle; with its ability to persist, which is likewise a disruption. An unknown protagonist remakes an absence when an object falls from the sky: the crack in David Simpson’s wall, spiral jetties, or what Bartlebooth knew (a puzzle) In Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, an unnamed protagonist attempts to recreate and execute a series of obsessive scenarios in real life after a catastrophic accident that leaves him cut off from his experiences and memories. Through it, absence grows and exerts influence; a disruption, it becomes an active participant as a phantom limb of the present through what is lost or destroyed, emerging and supplanting as unexplained compulsions. In the wake of a vaguely specified accident—“something falling from the sky, technology, parts, bits”47—the narrator begins spending his vast settlement money in obsessively concentric reenactments and rehearsals of unrecalled scenarios and oblique constructions, in an attempt to reconcile and give form to what remains and is absent after the shipwreck, so to speak, and through which he is ultimately undone. Piecing events together, he recalls: I don’t even remember the event. It’s a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague images, half impression: of being, or having been—or, more precisely, being about to be—hit; blue light; railings; light of other colours; being held above some kind of tray or bed.48

Not precisely a recollection but a half-remembered something, the trace that exerts its weight through loss, like Jones’s lost art; a change of pressure as “a train enters a tunnel and your ears go funny.”49 The incident troubles as an absence to be filled, from which everything must be reconstructed, surmised, enticingly approximate and unrecalled, like lost art, “shooting an arrow and painting a target around it,” experiencing the gap as something misplaced behind a line drawn. It becomes inscribed through what remains as absence, this invisible force giving form and carrying forward a loss—fleet ships just beyond the horizon. Supplanting in its stead an attempt to recapture and give form to something that was lost, including experience and impressions: “Who’s to say my traumatized mind didn’t just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap—the crater—that the accident had blown?”50

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After being awarded an “unprecedented sum” as compensation for the accident,51 the main character experiences a prompting at a housewarming party held by an acquaintance, David Simpson, triggered by a small crack in the wall. Recalling: It happened like this. I was standing in the bathroom with the door locked behind me. I’d used the toilet and was washing my hands in the sink, looking away from the mirror above it—because I don’t like mirrors generally—at this crack that ran down the wall. David Simpson, or perhaps the last owner, had stripped the walls, so there was only plaster on them, plus some daubs of different types of paint where David had been experimenting to see how the room would look in various colours. I was standing by the sink looking at this crack in the plaster when I had a sudden sense of déjà vu.52

And with this crack an absence intrudes like the shipwreck, as some other that resembles but is just out of reach, and yet insistent: “I’d been in a space like this before, a place just like this, looking at the crack, a crack that had jutted and meandered in the same way as the one beside the mirror.”53 Impossible and yet there it is; and “There’d been that same crack, and a bathtub also, and a window directly above the taps just like there was in this room—only the window had been slightly bigger and the taps older, different.”54 From this crack the narrator traces elaborate scenarios outward: views through a similar window of a red roof across the courtyard on which black cats laze and accidentally slip off from time to time; someone in a flat below who cooks liver—the smell, spit, sizzle it makes, the air heavy with it; a person below in the courtyard who tinkers with a motorbike in his spare time; a faceless porter, sometimes in the hall or behind a door; two floors below someone playing piano.55 The sound: I remembered how it had sounded, its rhythms. Sometimes he’d paused, whenever he’d hit a wrong note or lost his place. He’d paused and started the passage again, running through it slowly, slowing right down as he approached the bit he’d got wrong. Then he’d played it several times correctly, running through it again, speeding it up again till he was able to play it back at speed without fluffing it up. I remembered all this clearly—crystal clear, as clear as in a vision.56

Yet these images cannot be placed, not his flat during a stay in Paris or London, nor childhood, possibly not even his experience, but instead an unplaceable surplus matter, compulsion, acquired from some other slot to fill a gap, the unlikely force fueled by absence. “And yet it was growing,

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minute by minute as I stood there in the bathroom, this remembered building, spreading outwards from the crack.”57 A phantom present, not of size, but of scale; emerging like another crack, opening like a Grand Canyon, another room—this game of resemblances. A crack, as Smithson determines elsewhere, that appears to mumble in unison with this crack experienced in a wall at a party and the premonition of a crack and an apartment building in which to house it that must be recreated like Jones’s museum or Brautigan’s library. Smithson observes: Size determines an object, but scale determines art. A crack in the wall if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon. A room could be made to take on the immensity of the solar system. Scale depends on one’s capacity to be conscious of the actualities of perception. When one refuses to release scale from size, one is left with an object or language that appears to be certain. For me scale operates by uncertainty.58

And this is the scale of uncertainty, with art, which emerges from absence and likewise fascinates through disappearance, giving force to remainder. And with it, Remainder’s unnamed protagonist, like Jones’s museum, reenacts something lost, expanding in scale, shifting beyond the crack and encompassing every minute detail imaginable and reenacting from this initial impulse and half-impression, while eclipsing it both in scale and ambition through the compulsion to create it exactly and ­experience it as tangible. This is the scale from which remainder grows: We hired an architect. We hired an interior designer. We hired a landscape gardener for the courtyard. We hired contractors, who hired builders, electricians and plumbers. There were site managers and sub-site managers, delivery coordinators and coordination supervisors. We took on performers, props and wardrobe people, hair and make-up artists. We hired security guards. We fired the interior designer and hired another one.59

Further, this undertaking reconstructs an apartment building populated with reenactors repeating, slowing down, rewinding, playing out some unrealized impulse written broadly, more elaborately, forensics as an art form and drawn from remainder.60 And in the process, expanding into other scenes (reenactments of a trip to a petrol station, a crime scene involving a shooting in Brixton, a plane flying in the figure eight—­ infinity). Every detail captured and looped, elaborated, in the hopes of discerning vague authenticity through this act of repeating; however, still

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never quite adding up, and instead displaced forward through a surplus being given form, compulsive, a desire to see the entire world reenacted. In this sense, remainder yields as the gathering absence wielded in the present, the unlikely gravitational implied from what is not here or can no longer be directly accessed that gives it form. In an attempt to build a site to house loss, systems producing systems, it multiplies its taut force through disappearance: this engine of negative miracles steering influence through an absence that accrues and gives art and poetry its form. In this sense, remainder appears a puzzle to be pieced together. Yet remainder is not a puzzle to be solved but rather a piece that is left over or absent that pushes and is unaccountable. In Georges Perec’s novel, Life a User’s Manual, another character sets out on an obsessive regimen of fixing events from fragments. Constructed as a puzzle, Perec employs the device of the knight’s tour around the chessboard, and he uses this sequence to ambulate through the rooms of an apartment building in which the novel takes place.61 Similarly, Perec’s description of his character Bartlebooth62 might remind us of McCarthy’s unnamed protagonist: Let us imagine a man whose wealth is equalled only by his indifference to what wealth generally brings, a man of exceptional arrogance who wishes to fix, to describe, and to exhaust not the whole world—merely to state such an ambition is enough to invalidate it—but a constituted fragment of the world: in the face of the inextricable incoherence of things, he will set out to execute a (necessarily limited) programme right the way through, in all its irreducible, intact entirety.63

Like the impulse to recreate and reenact an apartment building from a half-remembered crack in a wall at a party, Bartlebooth sets out to squander his considerable wealth on “an arbitrarily constrained programme with no purpose outside its own completion”64 and in the face of “the incoherence of things.”65, Yet perhaps it is precisely through this desire “to fix, to describe, and to exhaust”66 an entire world through his reenactments, as endeavors expand, that McCarthy’s nameless character strives to “invalidate”67 remainder through his efforts. It is these compulsions, given form, which likewise carry these stories onward. Describing Bartlebooth’s peculiar actions: For twenty years, from 1935 to 1955, he would travel the world, painting, at a rate of one watercolour each fortnight, five hundred seascapes of identical

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format (royal, 65cm x 50cm) depicting seaports. When each view was done, he would dispatch it to a specialist craftsman (Gaspard Winckler), who would glue it to a thin wooden backing board and cut it into a jigsaw puzzle of seven hundred and fifty pieces.68

Yet, through these proposed actions, in their own right reenactments, Bartlebooth sought an expression from which no trace of the operation would ultimately remain. To be successful, the methodology would in effect undo itself. As his scenarios continue: For twenty years, from 1955–1975, Bartlebooth, on his return to France, would reassemble the jigsaw puzzles in order, at a rate, once again, of one puzzle a fortnight. As each puzzle was finished, the seascape would be “retexturised” so that it could be removed from its backing, returned to the place where it had been painted—twenty years before—and dipped in a detergent solution whence would emerge a clean and unmarked sheet of Whatman paper.69

Through his lifework, Bartlebooth attempts similarly an enactment as he travels to each location and executes a single painting. For twenty years he paints the series of sites he visits (seaports) and then has them disassembled into puzzles that he is to spend the next twenty years putting back together, only to have them removed from the puzzle backing and dipped in a solution and returned as blank to the places where they were painted. With the initial ten years under the tutelage of Valène, it takes the entire planned endeavor to fifty years, coincidentally the number that Marcel Duchamp attributes to the age at which a work of art dies.70 Yet through these enactments and reenactments, one operation attempts to undo the other; for perhaps this is the action of remainder—to somehow cancel and carry forward or remove this burden. However, both Bartlebooth and McCarthy’s character attempt (perhaps like Jones’s museum for lost art) to reconcile and abide with what remains, although in this each character is ultimately thwarted (or perhaps resolved) in their attempts. In Life a User’s Manual, the bulk of the novel is finally revealed to be the contents of the apartment building—its stories remaining and frozen in time moments after Bartlebooth’s death on June 23, 1975. Likewise, we are left with Remainder’s character as he escalates in one last reenactment of a plane flying in a figure eight forever, against the remonstrations of the Civil Aviation Authority threatening to shoot it down. A final exchange between protagonist and a panicked pilot:

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“Where do you want to go?” “Go?” I said. “Nowhere. Just keep doing this.” “Doing what? He asked. “Turning back, then turning out. Then turning back again. The way we’re doing it right now.”71

This is the motion of attempting to reconcile remainder, where through it, turning back, then turning out, then turning back again—as Jacques Roubaud observes of Perec’s writings—“life appears as a puzzle endlessly destroying its own solutions.”72 And yet, to briefly jump register (as that is what remainder does), is to inhabit a world hewn and populated (haunted) by these remainders that never quite cancel out nor add up, “a leftover fragment, a shard of detritus” carrying over that prevents these things from being fixed.73 Characters are immersed in an impossibility of logic, a buffer spitting out contents and mingling with the daily, as an action that Perec might rejoin from again another source: At the end of the journey, when time and space no longer quite obey the normal rules, where Edgar Poe answers Dracula and Captain Nemo responds to Bluebeard, what remains in all its violence and emotion is the story of a love so strong that it turned to crime, to suicide and maybe madness, before being turned into a film.74

This is the obsession of remainders, where what is not here presents as more captivating and magnified than what is. Remainder offers accursed shares, tangible as this force, a surplus or “excess energy, translated into the effervescence of life” that must be squandered or else destroyed (or likewise destroys).75 However, through it, what emerges is “a kind of bold reversal that substitutes a dynamism,” and this is its fascination.76 Nevertheless, it is not a puzzle, for this would be to misunderstand its significance. You cannot put a remainder together—it asserts its influence through its irreconcilability—but instead, in what carries forward and undoes this system we attempt to overlay and make sense of what is absent. We become obsessed, as a nameless protagonist attempting to recapture something lost, playing at a game; and as Simon Critchley warns regarding McCarthy’s Remainder, herein lays a trap in which contemporary art may be ensnared, where artists reenact and only remake the works of previous artists from a time before, and art is lost in recreating, verbatim, the form that is not there.77 Perhaps this is also the space that the destroyed art object attempts to again occupy, and this is likewise its disruption.

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A gap and a portrait: the house that Whiteread built and Gale’s complaint The subject of destroyed and lost art is a theme Jones returns to repeatedly in his writing. In Lost Art Comes Back To Haunt Us, he laments, “The art that exists is a tiny fraction of the art that is lost. Vanished works outnumber the surviving masterpieces in museums, just as the dead outnumber the living.”78 However, with this Jones shifts focus onto the ability of destroyed and lost art to leave scars, noting artists such as Klimt, who had their reputations scarred by the loss of important works at the end of the Second World War, or the gap left by a portrait that Lucian Freud painted of his friend Francis Bacon that was stolen from Berlin. Loss affects how we see what remains, or as Jones observes, “Lost art exerts a fascination all of its own. Like ghostly mutterings in galleries, the images of vanished works linger behind the surviving corpus of art.”79 From here, Jones begins to emphasize a more complicated rapport that art develops in relation to disappearance, remarking, “In the 20th century, art’s relationship with disappearance got stranger than ever.”80 Introducing the example of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Jones notes the general ability of some works to sink gradually into their environment. With Spiral Jetty, perhaps it is the site chosen in part that accounts for disappearance, hewn as it was from the instability of its location. Smithson describes the work as follows: About one mile north of the oil seeps I selected my site. Irregular beds of limestone dip gently eastwards, massive deposits of black basalt are broken over the peninsula, giving the region a shattered appearance … This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty.81

As a space for possibility, Spiral Jetty invites the unanticipated—material and site conspiring toward ponderous disappearance. Jones remarks on the immense earthwork’s gradual sinking over time, only to unexpectedly reemerge more recently as the lake receded, before asserting “For me, the most moving lost masterpiece of the last couple of decades is Rachel Whiteread’s House: a work that was not specifically intended to disappear although it had no permission to permanently exist, either.”82 Whiteread’s demolished House consisted of an inverse casting of a Victorian terrace house that in effect turned the original habitation inside out in its appearance, making a concrete object of the negative space within

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the structure. Jones observed of the object: “Whiteread cast the interior of an entire house that was due to be demolished: the resulting grey spectre of a London home stood isolated in a park and radiated negative ions of surreal beauty.”83 The critic Andrew Graham-Dixon described the piece as a “monument made out of void space, a thing constructed out of the absence of things.”84 Searching for a suitable house earmarked for demolition—in this case to make way for regeneration in the form of a park—Whiteread partnered with the organization Artangel to produce the work. Located at 193 Grove Road in East London, the house was one of a few remaining after the rest of the terrace had been vacated and destroyed as part of the razing process (Figure 1.1). The Sunday Times

1.1 Rachel Whiteread, House.

PAPPAS-KELLEY 9781526129246 PRINT.indd 19

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said that Whiteread’s House proved a poignant “monument to the house that refused to become a park.”85 Moreover, “As such, it is a monument to a certain kind of East End stubbornness that withstood wars, bombs, hunger, riots and assorted ethnic invasions but not the building boom of the 1980s.”86 Using the original house as a mold, and retaining traces from bay windows and stairs, a mixture of liquid concrete was poured into the prepared structure, at which point the masonry of the terrace house was demolished, revealing the cast of the interior space. Graham-Dixon said, “The result could be described as the opposite of a house, since what it consists of is a cast of the spaces once contained by one.”87 Within this space, the work of art attempts to make tangible what disappears, gathering it together as a site for accretion in a manner comparable to Jones’s own efforts at accumulation with a museum of lost art. As Jones observed of House, “Lives and memories, the history of a city were held in this powerful monument.”88 However, conceivably there is something of the negative analogue of the miracle as well, that which Graham-Dixon describes in his praise as the opposite of a house (or perhaps something hinted at in the words of Susan Burns concerning Gauguin’s Two Tahitian Women); a capsized aspect implied in a work’s construction as remainder. For Sid Gale, the elderly dockworker who had made his life in the terrace home that ultimately became Whiteread’s House, something is lost in making the monument, and his response in many ways reads as a transposition of Jones’s concerns. Seeing his home of fifty years being turned inside out, Gale lamented in the press, “I thought they were going to build a model of my house, not do this to it. All you can see is the lovely woodwork and mouldings the other way round. I had a lovely front room. I spent my life in it.”89 Gale’s response offers a glimpse of the loss of art that cuts both ways. Like Bataille’s cousin aboard a ship, the East London house had escaped death, but in unanticipated form—gone is the lovely front room where Gale spent his life, save woodwork and moldings, ultimately destroyed into art and rendered in concrete slab. Yet, simultaneously, something thought lost is miraculously found rescued: a cousin vanished at sea is discovered to have been sent on another mission, this time as the concrete structure of Whiteread’s House. Impossible, and yet there it is; crashing into the comforting experience of a lived home. For Gale, the creation of Whiteread’s House is a shipwreck of the house he knew, where he is left stranded without the homely trappings of his lovely front room and life. The launch of Whiteread’s vessel with its poignant and monumental

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capacities is also the shipwreck of Gale, revealed the other way round, impossible, yet there it is, if not for this representation. House gained wide acclaim, winning Whiteread the Turner Prize in the process, yet also notoriety for the local community and the council’s reaction. Intended to remain for only eleven weeks, the project gained support as people campaigned for it to either be extended or made permanent. Nevertheless, it was amid this backdrop that the local council-chair opted to have the structure pulled down.90 House arrived on October 25, 1993 and was demolished eleven weeks later on January 11, 1994—­experiencing a shipwreck of its own, as what housed all these tensions was similarly destroyed. Of this, Jones observes: The demolition of House by a hostile local council who refused to accept its artistic and cultural importance seems, now, tragic. It did away at a stroke with the most serious and worthwhile work of the “Young British Art” generation.91

Yet, conceivably, it is precisely this demise (which further fixes House to Jones’s idea of the destroyed masterpiece) that endures and grows: a capacity to exist only as a myth, a rumor through which it circulates. With the abrupt cut of its destruction, it is rescued—never submitting to the rounding of edges through time, or withdrawal into the mundane, a concrete slab amid a city of concrete slabs. A shame, Whiteread observed, that House “didn’t have the chance to become invisible, the way architecture becomes invisible.”92 For in withstanding it might have disappeared into its role as monumental (which likewise fascinates, as we see with the persistence of Spiral Jetty). Yet of its continued allure, Whiteread noted, “but I also know that part of it is undoubtedly to do with the way it was destroyed.”93 In remaining it made visible the loss of Gale’s house (along with a more general loss), and, in its destruction, it likewise revealed something unanticipated where one would least expect it through absence. It is with our need to see what is absent94 that House grants a means for viewing what becomes invisible, which for Jones also gives lost art its compelling power and fascination.95 However, perhaps it is through this destruction that House went from simply “a worthwhile work of the “Young British Art” generation,” as Jones says, to “the most moving lost masterpiece” that he mourns.96 Yet, when viewed from history, a lovely trick of symmetry also emerges, where the intangibles of a life experienced disappear into the art object only to be destroyed and rendered indistinct again. Through this role the art object itself appears stranded between two intangibles: a fleeting pivot, fervently

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grinding and ground from both directions—the monument of a demolished house that is likewise destroyed. Conjuring a gallery of lost art; an unknown masterpiece When Jones next returns to the theme of destroyed and lost art, it is to announce the opening of the virtual exhibition, Gallery of Lost Art,97 through the Tate the following day. If it was a museum that Jones sought to gather and give form to with his musings on lost art in the Guardian, then, in the process, what appears to have been conjured forth is a gallery of lost art (now within the auspices of a museum). Having first shifted location from a nowhere to the rape fields along a highway in Jones’s imagination, lost art here takes up residence in a warehouse under the backing of the Tate—not bad for less than ten years. In Now You See Them: The Eternal Allure Of Lost Art,98 Jones approaches again this now familiar theme in art—the fascination of the destroyed and lost—wryly observing that the perfect condition for art may be that of lost as “it becomes ­indestructible by being destroyed.”99 Jones ambles the reader through works on display at the Tate’s project, including the likes of a portrait by Graham Sutherland destroyed by Winston Churchill’s widow (unflattering), the case of Bas Jan Ader’s In Search of the Miraculous (death), and Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (fire), while also unfolding a narrative of modern art’s rebellion against its status as timeless objects and its eventual dematerialization through the course of the twentieth century. Jones opens with the example of Erased de Kooning Drawing,100 in which a young Robert Rauschenberg approached Willem de Kooning—a younger artist approaching an established artist in the full reaches of his influence— asking for a drawing from the senior for him to erase, or as Jones observes, so he “could rub it out.”101 Thus, the work of Rauschenberg comprised of making de Kooning’s piece undone, through the effort of revealing the blank page, but also something else. Illustrating this, Jones likewise looks to Picasso’s fascination with Balzac’s story The Unknown Masterpiece (Le Chef-d’oeuvre Inconnu).102 Characterizing it, Jones recounts how an artist spends his life trying to paint the perfect woman, which renders ultimately a blankness visible.103 Similar to Rauschenberg and de Kooning, the story begins with a younger artist (Poussin) approaching an artist also at the full reaches of his influence (Porbus); however, in Balzac’s story, they are joined by the master artist Frenhofer, who, in studio, makes the whole encounter possible.

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Looking at the painting by Porbus on display, Frenhofer observes, “It is all there, and yet it is not there. What is lacking? A nothing, but that nothing is everything.”104 With minor adjustments and setting the scene, Frenhofer isolates “that indescribable something”105 in Porbus’s work through which the portrait of Saint Mary and the Shipman106 emerges with a flourish of the nothing that is everything, just so. [And … might a shipman not likewise resemble a dockworker, and draw the mind back to Whiteread’s dockworker, Sid Gale, and a shipwreck between the two where something unexpected is revealed.] Frenhofer declares it is the labor of the artist to bring the nothing and everything together, saying: “Neither painter nor poet nor sculptor may separate the effect from the cause, which are inevitably contained the one in the other.”107 This is the “innermost secret” of form, which he pursues here as “the mystery of form” that must be made clear, seeking an intimacy that “would shatter external form.”108 Thus, it is a destruction that must be revealed as the mystery of form, where cause and effect are contained one in the other without separation, save the art object. Here Frenhofer appraises Porbus’s attempts with, “Because you have made something more like a woman than a house, you think that you have set your fingers on the goal.”109 [Yet … elsewhere it is precisely this interplay between woman and house made manifest—or a distinction between shipman/dockworker and Whiteread’s home—that in its intimacy places a finger to this revelation]. In Frenhofer’s words, it is the call of the artist not to copy, but to be a poet, saying, “Otherwise a sculptor might make a plaster cast of a living woman and save himself all further trouble.”110 [Nevertheless, this would be to overlook that nothing that is also everything, implied in Whiteread’s plaster cast of a living house that, instead of simply revealing its copy, strikes it inverted as poetry]. Moreover, it is precisely this distinction, this ability to lay a plaster cast of a house, that made visible the absence—not of a woman—but the disappearance and obscuring of Gale and his life, and a city, and revealed an inversion of the copy as poetry. What Rauschenberg saw with his erasing of de Kooning was not a protest against abstract expressionism, as commonly held; when asked in an interview he replies simply, “It’s poetry.”111 Later, we return to Frenhofer’s studio as he prepares to reveal his masterpiece of ten years. Aspiring toward “leaving no trace of the passage of the brush,”112 Frenhofer is driven in his pursuit of the perfect ­representation, prompting him to determine:

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it needs faith, faith in art, and you must live for long with your work to produce such a creation. What toil some of those shadows have cost me. Look! There is a faint shadow there upon the cheek beneath the eyes—if you saw that on a human face, it would seem to you that you could never render it with paint. Do you think that that effect has not cost unheard of toil?113

We might now briefly turn to Giorgio Agamben’s reading of this story in his The Man without Content, where he observes “But in this quest for absolute meaning, Frenhofer has succeeded only in obscuring his idea and erasing from the canvas any human form, disfiguring” it into what is described as a sort of shapeless fog.114 Frenhofer is lost in the chase of his unknowable masterpiece, but Agamben observes: “On the canvas there is only a confused mass of colors contained inside a jumble of indecipherable lines. All meaning has been dissolved, all content has vanished, except the tip of a foot that stands out from the rest of the canvas.” Seeing in the nothing depicted a “gradual destruction” on canvas, “emerging from the ashes of a ruined town”115 ultimately spurs Porbus and Poussin in their reappraisal of the work: “There,” Porbus continued, as he touched the canvas, “lies the utmost limit of our art on earth.” “Beyond that point it loses itself in the skies” said Poussin.116

Both responses resonate of Jones’s words regarding masterpiece,117 yet it is of the artwork’s final revelation that Jones observes “When he unveils it, there is nothing to see. His efforts at perfection have cancelled out the image as thoroughly as Rauschenberg erased de Kooning’s drawing. Indeed, the parallels between the two are striking.”118 Yet, for Agamben, it becomes a tale of the erasing of form as a conflict amid an inexpressible content. He says of Frenhofer’s results, “In order to leave the evanescent world of forms, he has no other means than form itself, and the more he wants to erase it, the more he has to concentrate on it to render it permeable to the inexpressible content he wants to express.”119 However, with cause and effect “inevitably contained the one in the other,”120 it also becomes a merging, form and content (yet also rhetoric versus meaning for Agamben), which reveals the mystery of form and renders it permeable as an innermost secret of form (and a shattering of external form). Yet, with absence, stories inevitably bleed, one into the other, cause and effect, and old master Frenhofer—having spent a lifetime painting his blank canvas—can only respond with:

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Nothing! nothing! After ten years of work …121

Shattered, he sits down and weeps. And Agamben proposes: So long as no other eye contemplated his masterpiece, he did not doubt his success for one moment; but one look at the canvas through the eyes of his two spectators is enough for him to appropriate Porbus’s and Poussin’s opinion.122

The shattering is exposed when cause and effect are revealed as mingled through Frenhofer’s shift from the cause of the work to the effect he produced before the two witnesses through this intermingling, one contained in the other; as Agamben observes, in “this transition, the integrity of his work dissolves.”123 Thus, we wonder where we are left if not in the lovely front room with its woodwork and moldings. The fascination that draws Picasso to a fictional story of The Unknown Masterpiece also inspired him to make work motivated by it, and led Jones to conclude, “For him, that blank canvas was a modern masterpiece—the ultimate example of lost art.”124 A fictional museum becomes a gallery The Tate’s Gallery of Lost Art125 billed itself as “an immersive online exhibition” and as an opportunity to explore “the stories behind the loss of works of art.”126 The project was positioned as a placeholder, marking what has become disappeared and existing as an online exhibition for one year. Commencing at the beginning of July 2012, the exhibition was symbolically removed after one year, likewise a gesture toward understanding loss and absence.127 The gathering together of an assortment of audio files, photographs, video, announcement cards, newspaper clippings, essays, and accounts of the work forms the shape of this exhibition. The absent works become replaced by their surrounding stories and narrative, commenting obliquely on how art history is constructed and how loss shapes this larger narrative. Curator Jennifer Mundy suggests of the project the following: Art history tends to be the history of what has survived. But loss has shaped our sense of art’s history in ways that we are often not aware of. Museums normally tell stories through the objects they have in their collections. But this exhibition focuses on significant works that cannot be seen.128

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In this sense, the exhibition attempts to resolve a problem of representing what has become lost and destroyed. The Gallery of Lost Art presented a series of tableaus within “an immersive website in the form of a vast warehouse, where visitors can explore the evidence laid out for them.”129 Depicted are clustered chairs, text written on the floor, stray wooden pallets, virtual people (sitting, standing, looking, and frozen), and scattered tables with images, media, and transcripts. The space is divided into sections from above, with scenes collected around words stenciled on an image of grey floor. Alongside the word Unrealised: an image of a blond veneer table beneath depictions of books opened and laying spine down, photographs, invitation cards, a stack of letters, a binder with interviews, newspaper clippings, and a reading lamp—here laid out, evidencing Bas Jan Ader’s disappearance in a capsized boat in In Search of the Miraculous. Through these scenarios, the viewer clicks and scrolls over elements to launch photos, open texts, hear voiceovers, or access the thematic essays assembled around works. Elsewhere in the virtual warehouse are depictions of case studies and documentation for lost works, some of which we have encountered previously. Bordering the word Ephemeral is an image of a white foldout table with materials documenting Eva Hesse’s Sans III—a work that deteriorated because of the instability of latex used.130 Near the lettering Transient, an outline of Rachel Whiteread’s piece House is marked off in tape against the floor like a body at a crime scene, alongside an image of a table supporting snapshots and files.131 The atmosphere throughout is a mix of crime scene investigation and interactive catalog, presenting themes intended to classify the demise of the works included. With Erased is predictably Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, whereas Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain urinal is filed under Discarded, Richard Serra’s famously dismantled Tilted Arc with Rejected, and Lucian Freud’s portrait Francis Bacon marked Stolen, along with his wanted-style reward poster, Missing; Frida Kahlo’s The Wounded Table is set with Destroyed, as is Alexander Calder’s Bent Propeller, which was lost in the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York.132 Next to Attacked is Egon Schiele’s Self-Seer, and also, adjacent to the stenciled outline of the word Destroyed, is Tracey Emin’s tent Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, a piece lost in the Momart warehouse fire that will be discussed in more detail later.133 Bordering Stolen is a text in which Mundy references an intriguing turn of phrase—“a serious crime against the heritage of humanity”134— taken from the Deputy Culture Secretary for the City of Paris. In its

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offhand nature, it implies that through robbing our collective inheritance, these crimes might in their own way constitute a crime against humanity. While alluding to something of the loss experienced, the phrase refers to a theft of five paintings of Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, and Fernand Léger on May 20, 2010 from the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris.135 Caught on CCTV footage, Mundy describes events as a man entered the museum: Masked and wearing black, he cut through a padlock securing a grille and smashed a window to enter the museum in the early hours of the morning. He selected the five works, which were in different galleries, and made his getaway in no more than fifteen minutes.136

In attempting to come to terms with the legacy of lost works (if only in a Sherlock Holmes capacity) it becomes our job as viewer and participator to put these objects back together, to accumulate what might be left behind as remains from the perpetrator, victim, chronicler, or witness of the crime; sifting through effects. In a sense “to bring back to life the artworks that no longer exist” as clues and trace evidence scrutinized from “fire, war, attacks and neglect,” as an “invitation” to examine what no longer exists.137 Yet how do we understand the active element, the destruction or theft that delivers, or likewise what this theft comes to mean in the popular mind? Mundy observes: “The loss in these cases is shared and public, and interest may be piqued by the enormous value of the artworks and by details of exactly how they were taken—particularly if there are echoes of well-known films.”138 Yet the theft or incident becomes an agent in revealing a strategy for which the object appears to choreograph a rehearsal to spectacularly undo itself before an audience; like Balzac’s masterpiece, striving to render its cause and effect indistinguishable. A thief steals the Mona Lisa and something commences Through framing the lost works as a crime scene to be gathered in and exhumed, there is also an assumption that these objects form a “heritage of humanity” and that loss and destruction constitute a theft of what ought to be present. In these matters, however, it may be more accurate to propose something of a Jean Baudrillard fatal strategy, in which “the object is considered more cunning, cynical, talented than the subject, for which it lies in wait.”139 Through loss, what might present is a challenge of the object toward our understanding, where the reversibility of loss,

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like Bataille’s negative miracle, “is not a matter of chance, but would rather be a kind of perfectly inverted and simultaneous determination, or perverse counter determination,” in the words of Baudrillard.140 These capacities to reveal where we might least expect to find are impossible, and yet there it is. In Stealing the Mona Lisa,141 Darian Leader contends that it is in instances such as theft and loss that the absent art objects allow us to see, as if they are otherwise obscuring through their very existence. With the Mona Lisa and its theft, Leader sees this demonstrated in the unlikely reactions to loss, where “Crowds gathered at the Louvre to gaze at the empty space where the picture had once hung,”142 observing in the lost object an ability to draw in through a fascination of absence—in spite of there being no object to view—as in the way that Picasso was fascinated with Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece as Jones likewise observes. Leader recounts how the art thief Vincenzo Peruggia walked out of the Louvre with the Mona Lisa tucked beneath his smock on August 21, 1911. Knowing the Louvre was closed on Mondays, Peruggia apparently hid in the museum the night before and exited the next morning, dressed in a worker’s smock, and hopped on the bus and returned home.143 Once there he kept the painting in his boarding house in Paris, in a recessed panel in a trunk built to house it, for over two years.144 Peruggia claimed that it was something about her eyes that first attracted him to the painting. The  initial theft was not noticed for twenty-four hours; when the museum reopened, it was flooded with crowds who queued, as Leader observes, simply to stare at the empty space where the Mona Lisa had hung. Much of Leader’s account centers on speculations of the painting in its absence, and its unfolding in the media. Yet, ultimately, Leader suggests that the incident changed something about how we see art. “The fact that a painting wasn’t there had made people look at things in a different way. Everything that was once invisible became the object of a look, a fact that makes the theft of the Mona Lisa a work of art in itself.”145 Seeing in this incident many of the preoccupations of Modernism, absence, and what lies beyond the spectacle, Leader considers: “Was the theft of the Mona Lisa, then, the perfect crime of the Modernist era? A painting is stolen, and thousands converge on a museum to see an empty space.”146 Further, if the theft of the Mona Lisa points to an absence on display, then the more recent example of Stéphane Breitwieser likewise links it to destruction.

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After another thief is caught, his mother flushes the remains down a garbage disposal; the marvellous thing people talked about—improvisations in reverse Beginning in 1995 and running up until his arrest in 2001 in Lucerne, Switzerland, art thief Stéphane Breitwieser went on a spree of art thefts across Europe. The man who the Guardian referred to as “arguably the world’s most consistently successful art thief”147 had been walking into museums and collections across Europe and in the process had amassed a collection of old master paintings and objects, including works by Boucher, Breughel, Cranach, Teniers, and Watteau.148 With art hauls initially estimated at well over a billion euros, his eventual arrest sparked considerable sensation in newspapers and the media as details emerged.149 Reacting in the press, a relative of Breitwieser summarized his unlikely success and ability to accomplish something on such a large scale without raising suspicions with, “Who would have thought it? Stéphane is not particularly charismatic or funny. He is shy, introverted, small and fragile.”150 However, it was precisely this shy and perhaps uncharismatic man who was responsible for some of the most extensive thefts in art. Living in France near the Swiss border, Breitwieser worked as a waiter in restaurants, and in favoring out-of-the-way locations for his thefts, he appears to have selected them for their sometimes-lax security. After initially scouting sites, he often simply walked out with the works under his coat. Of his ability to elude detection, Alexandra Smith from the Art Loss Register said: “A lot of people expect works of art to be well protected with alarms and clamps, but he clearly worked out that most are not, so he took what he wanted.”151 Consistently “dressed smartly in a suit and overcoat,”152 Breitwieser appears to have taken a mostly opportunistic approach to art theft and to have just blended in as he went about his business. One prosecutor remarked, “I am amazed at the disconcerting ease and different ways by which he stole from dozens of museums.”153 Upon his arrest, accounts of his unlikely methods began to catch the attention of the public in the press. Smith of the Art Loss Register remarked that a pattern had emerged with one or two objects disappearing from various museums, “But we thought it was the work of a gang. What happened here was simply unimaginable.”154 Describing an instance when Breitwieser found himself alone with girlfriend Anne-Catherine Kleinklauss in a castle in Gruyères, Switzerland, the Guardian recounts how he was entranced by a small painting of a woman by Christian

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Wilhelm Dietrich—by her beauty and her eyes in particular [and again a painting’s eyes]. The reporter muses how another “art lover might have lingered awhile and then turned from the room with a sigh;”155 however, “Instead, with his girlfriend keeping watch, Breitwieser worked out the nails holding the canvas in its frame, slipped the painting under his jacket and left the castle.”156 Through sometimes contradictory reports, what begins to emerge in these accounts is a portrait of an art thief who was both unlikely and yet particular (almost quirky) in his approach. In articles originating from the French media, it was alleged that he simply cut the canvases from their frames, but what surfaces in the telling is perhaps an image of a more refined and complicated art thief. Philip Delves Broughton’s description appears almost chiding in its recount in the Telegraph: He would never cut paintings and drawings out of their frames, as the French police claimed, but carefully undid the frames and removed the entire works. Often, the couple would hit two or three museums in a weekend.157

This almost sounds like a genteel theft with its careful undoings, certainly efficient if two to three were common in a weekend—an afternoon excursion. Articles appear deliberate in their characterization of the thefts of Breitwieser, describing what he did as perhaps different or set apart in his eccentric pursuit. Often portrayed as an art lover in these accounts, Delves Broughton even proposes that “he loved art so much it turned him into a thief,”158 as if revealing consequences of the dark side of art appreciation and viewing as ultimately theft [and again, a story of a love so strong that it turned to crime, to suicide and maybe madness, before being turned into a film].159,160 Most reports fixate on the details of how he accumulated the works for his own personal enjoyment and not for resale, noting: “Apart from the scale of the Frenchman’s ambition and success as a thief, what distinguishes [Breitwieser] from other, common or garden art robbers is his motive: not lucre, but a genuine love of art and antiques.”161 Of the accumulation of works and the manner in which they were displayed, Sergeant von der Mühll offers: “He would rotate his paintings on the walls of his bedroom. There wasn’t enough room for all of them at once. All his objects would be arranged around the room.”162 Peculiar details of his conscientious mode of operation began to surface in the telling, such as how he always stole the display cards and then destroyed them. Swiss police sergeant Alexandre von der Mühll noted: “He always took the descriptive sign from whatever he stole, memorised

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it, destroyed it and then did more research. He knew by heart the dimensions and condition of everything he stole and knew their prices.”163 It is peculiar that Breitwieser took the accompanying information cards along with the art, first internalizing their contents before destroying them. Yet in the art object’s destruction it is precisely this sort of constituent support (textual, price, history, and characteristics) that replaces the absent object—and it is curious to think of how this behavior anticipates as inverted that which Jones and Mundy attempt to reconstitute from what might only remain as an announcement card—to put back together the lost work through a card that remains. Yet, on November 19, 2001 Stéphane Breitwieser was arrested in Lucerne, Switzerland, after returning to a museum where he had stolen an antique bugle only days before. Recognized by a security guard, he was detained on the spot, but his girlfriend managed to escape and alert his mother, Marielle Schwengel, to his arrest. Schwengel, eager to avoid capture and afraid of losing her Swiss work permit, began destroying all of the art her son had stolen,164 allegedly cutting “the paintings into small pieces and [shoving] them down her sink disposal unit with the potato peelings” and dumping what would not fit into a nearby canal or mixed it in with her rubbish in the dustbin for collection.165 Upon his arrest, Breitwieser confessed to all the thefts, giving police a detailed list of everything stolen and where from, telling them that it was all stored at his mother’s house, where he lived. Yet, when the Swiss authorities finally obtained an international search warrant to examine the home in France, everything had been destroyed.166 In this instance theft ultimately led to the object’s destruction; however, seen in reverse, Breitwieser, through accumulation and circumstance, delivers the objects rendered destroyed and superfluous as items for contemplation for the likes of Jones and Mundy—between the two pivots, a palindrome feeding into the other.167 Detail by detail, Breitwieser’s impulse is a gathering of their museums spoken as inverted, as if fated and fatal—with each element not appearing of chance but seen “as a perfectly inverted and simultaneous determination, or perverse counter determination,”168 coming to this point of a duplicitous meeting; this point where destruction congregates and is fomented. Baudrillard notes: “This is exactly what Bataille saw with his concept of expenditure and accursed shares. It is precisely the superfluous, the excessive that is essential. It’s there that all the stakes converge, where the energy of society is fomented.”169 And perhaps these incidents make Bataille’s concepts oddly literal when he warns of an imperative: “The problem

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posed is that of expenditure of the surplus. We need to give away, lose or destroy.”170 Or, as Baudrillard observes elsewhere, “Art does not die because there is no more art, it dies because there is too much.”171 Yet in these circumstances it appears that the very act of accumulation renders in part the work’s destruction (accumulated into galleries, warehouses, by Breitwieser and subsequently lost, and attempts to accumulate again by Jones and Mundy), as if stockpiling reveals a vulnerability. Smith of the Art Loss Register observes in the aftermath, “It is shocking that these canvasses are lost forever,” noting “Destruction of canvasses on this scale is almost unprecedented.”172 It is a sentiment echoed by the Strasbourg police on the finality of the destruction when they announced, “We’ve found the guilty parties, but the works can never be replaced.”173 An homage to lost art In attempting to represent what has been lost, the Gallery of Lost Art with its virtualized warehouse setting is presented as a vacancy, where the ghosts of art might be redeemed and exorcised or, like crime scenes, solved. Scored with an ever-present audio track attending the chalk and tape outlines of the deceased objects depicted, and with intermittent rumbles, creaks, and thumps in service of loss as homage, it sets an atmosphere ready for a séance. The soundscape is unnerving, sometimes new age, decidedly otherworldly, textured, echoes of whirs and orbitals, mysterious, and angular; sometimes expansive and other times rumbling, ­clunking, and menacing. In this atmosphere we are left to wonder at the delinquency witnessed, objects that ought to be, of which we are deprived without consent, a theft in their makeup. Yet, this is to catch something mid-flight and halted, and to overlook the idiosyncratic rendezvous to which Breitwieser’s actions might also point, giving too much emphasis to the wreckage of the ship while overlooking the possibilities of where it lies. As Jean Tinguely told chronicler Calvin Tomkins: Everything transforms itself, everything modifies itself ceaselessly, and to try to stop it, to try to check life in mid-flight and recapture it in the form of a work of art, a sculpture or a painting, seems to me a mockery of the intensity of life.174

Yet what remains of Homage to New York is only impressions—­snapshots, writings, accounts, and old film footage—gathered as attempted replacements into the atmosphere of the Gallery of Lost Art, presented on top

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of a white table with images and texts; what Mundy sees as “an almost archetypal example of ‘lost art.’”175 Constructed from teetering mechanics that dodder and rumble through half-anticipated mechanisms, Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York took place in the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden in March of 1960.176,177 Salvaged from scrapyards in New Jersey and sources across the city, Tinguely cobbled together mechanical bits and pieces into a work designed to spectacularly undo itself before an audience in a one-time event. Bicycle-spoke wheels spin, frantically driving belts and propelling the motions of the machine, tethered to apparatuses with spindling thuds and drones from the overly complicated construction, igniting fires that attempt to consume this amassing of objects as it propels forward. A long strap dangles from above, and elsewhere the contraption paints frantically with a rudimentary reticulating arm attached to what appears to be a cleaning brush across a scrolling background, rolling itself up (revealing a bit then retracting) as a fire crackles below. A plonking melody from a burning piano, driven by wonky belts and carters, wheels within wheels, hammer strikes, thumping tubs and sawing, stomping puppet-like feet across its keyboard. Everywhere smoke, drumming, tandems, wagons staggering and scooting across the floor, and mechanical grinding as the piece teeters in on itself. Tinguely’s sculpture was designed (although who knows how effectively it accomplished this task in the end) to destroy itself before the audience so that the work of art was revealed as the apparatus’s undoing. Of this process, Tinguely said: What was important for me was that afterwards there would be nothing, except what remained in the minds of a few people, continuing to exist in the form of an idea. This was for me very liberating. The next day they just swept up and every trace was gone. It was just a marvellous thing people talked about …178

What Tinguely attempts through spectacle, perhaps Breitwieser accomplished indirectly through clandestine acts—a gathering deed (bicycle wheels, coils, buckets, gears; or Boucher, Breughel, Cranach, and Teniers) that ultimately eliminates evidence (perhaps we should give more credit to Breitwieser’s mother, but their actions become tethered) so that art divulges a theft through an inversion of accumulation with a destruction that fascinates. A loss save the bits remaining in the minds of observers or swept up and disposed with the potato peelings. However, as the Gallery of Lost Art evidences, these objects still attempt to accrue and recoup a loss

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even in their absence. For Tinguely, like Breitwieser, it is an idiosyncratic and peculiar accounting, as Tomkins recalls how events did not go exactly as planned in Tinguely’s piece: straightaway a fuse blew, the paper in the painting machine began rolling the wrong way, and a burning trike rolled toward the audience.179 Tomkins concedes: From that moment on it was clear that the machine would proceed about its destruction in its own way, but the audience, unaware that Tinguely’s machines hardly ever worked as they were supposed to, gave a collective groan.180

Unanticipated objects are shown not to behave as we might hope, and perhaps that is part of their charm. A compulsion distinguishes them from what we intend; takes them beyond our capacities, which characteristic Jones likewise attributes to the masterpiece. Through destruction, objects expose themselves as perhaps more cunning and talented than us, as inverted and confounding our expectations.181,182 And amid a mischievous aptitude to destroy, these objects appear to become undone before our eyes, all for a capacity to confound, making plain an impulse that Tinguely observed of his objects: They could live as long as they liked. At the same time they were placed in a situation that enabled them to be fragile; they had the good fortune to be endowed with the qualities normally found only in an improvisation, while simultaneously being part of a great sculptural machine.183

It is this capacity to be placed in situations that enabled them to be fragile that Breitwieser’s objects likewise divulge, through their (good is perhaps questionable) fortune of being endowed with the qualities normally found only in an improvisation, and to instead find themselves caught up in the lucidity akin to the story of Bataille’s cousin. Destruction reveals a fragile improvisation underscoring the object in which, for Tinguely and Breitwieser, what accumulates is inverted. With each passing instant, Tinguely’s sculpture confiscates itself before the viewer, perhaps pulling a “Breitwieser,” where what gathers (first under a coat) is destroyed to purge evidence from an inspector’s prying eyes (then down the drain). Destruction, like theft pointing to absence on display, implies that it is not we who are in charge of dictating the terms of the object, but something else. Trundled outside our control, perhaps an object’s revenge—what grants masterpiece status might also drive a fatal capacity to confound and resist our expectations and machinations.

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Yet, when Homage to New York began to destroy itself for the audience, there was virtually no differentiation between the actions of gathering it together; the art object being the point where these two forces met. As engineer and assistant Billy Klüver observes, “The end of the construction and the beginning of the destruction were indistinguishable.”184 Like an unknown masterpiece of Balzac, the art constitutes a removal of the separation between cause and effect that houses “the mystery of form” that “would shatter external form,” which is here the habitation of art and the implication of its absence.185 As Homage to New York began its twenty-seven minute process of unravelling in the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art, a fire takes hold. Flames engulf the piano as it plays on and gallerist George Staempfli observed to Tomkins: “There is something very odd about seeing a piano burn … All your ideas about music are somehow involved.”186 And this is what becomes activated through destruction, where all our ideas about art become entangled in these events [likewise a piano playing in a flat below McCarthy’s narrator, and how it sounded, its rhythms]. However, as Tomkins acknowledges: For the museum authorities, a good deal more than ideas about music was involved. They had not anticipated a fire and were understandably sensitive on that subject in view of the museum’s second-floor fire the year before, which had destroyed almost two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of paintings.187

[And yet … if a shipman can resemble Whiteread’s dockworker, then Tinguely’s fire might likewise resemble the 1958 fire, where even Breitwieser’s thefts are somehow involved through their destruction and with what remains.] Of the fire’s advance, Tomkins describes: The concealed fire extinguisher was supposed to go off at the eighteenth minute, but the flames had spread through the whole piano and burned out a vital connection. Black smoke poured from the machine. With a limping, eccentric motion, the small suicide carriage broke away from the main machine, its flag waving. Then it stopped. Tinguely helped it along toward the pool, but its motor was too weak, and it never got there. The Addressograph machine started up, thrashing and clattering. It had been too badly damaged in transit, though, and it fell over after a minute or so, stone dead. Brilliant yellow smoke flashes now began going off all over the machine.188

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It was against this backdrop that Homage to New York was ultimately pulled down [like Whiteread’s House] and extinguished into a steaming lump by the fire department and security. Yet, Tinguely observes: It would be beautiful if every work of art were like that. Perhaps they are, all the same – even the Venus de Milo, with the marvellous aspect it has today, has been modified, time-worn; it is truly more than the artist made it, and we have certainly accepted this modification.189

And perhaps every work of art is like that in its capacity to house a destruction and become more than the artist made it. Yet alongside resides a desire to fix things through the art object, which is here released with the object’s crash, nonetheless giving rise to Jones’s gathering and the ­yearning behind the Gallery of Lost Art. As Tinguely notes: Only the fear of death makes us want to stop life, to “fix” it impossibly forever. The moment life is fixed, it is no longer true; it is dead, and therefore uninteresting. But now it’s as though this monster of stability were pushing me, pushing me toward a certain point in myself where I will have to end all these experiments and experiences—or, rather, where the experiences I’ve had will have to be reconciled as one and the same.190

Perhaps it is this that the art object attempts to reconcile. Where a creative act is always also an act of destruction, in that existing forms are called into doubt and dismembered; Under Destruction Along with the Gallery of Lost Art, recent exhibitions have likewise addressed the overt implications of destruction in art; however, in focusing less on the loss of absent objects, an impulse is engaged where destruction attempts to give form, represent, or posit a gesture in itself. In Under Destruction a dynamic is examined between creation and destruction and how destruction might form a creative act in itself. Likewise, taking many of its influences from Tinguely’s Homage to New York, the exhibition delineates a framework where every creative act is also acknowledged as a destruction in its own manner.191 Similarly, the exhibition Damage Control was an extensive survey organized by the Hirshhorn Museum, in which destruction is presented as a means for making visible the unseen upheavals often understood as stemming from the rise of the atomic age and as a

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response to war. Damage Control was accompanied by essays from Kerry Brougher, examining art’s ability to make the invisible present; Russell Ferguson’s essay, in which he traces a lineage of destruction in art while also looking at parallel impulses that have become housed together in the art object; and Dario Gamboni (author of The Destruction of Art),192 who likewise looks at this ambivalence in art through the work of Gustav Metzger and the ability of art to present an oscillation. Through these endeavors, along with Jones’s writing about destruction in his Museum of Lost Art and the Tate’s Gallery of Lost Art, one might more accurately limn the legacy of destroyed art and begin to understand its implications in contemporary practice. In his introduction for the exhibition Under Destruction, Roland Wetzel charts the continued influence of Tinguely’s Homage to New York on contemporary art practices and its legacy for understanding the works on display. Starting with the city from which Tinguely drew inspiration, he sees it as a system with: Its powerful, strident circulation, pressing human beings and goods through its arteries and producing great quantities of refuse in the process, bodied forth the very pulse of an age which was equally marked by the formation of political blocs, by the nuclear arms race and by the concomitant danger of world destruction.193

Yet curator Gianni Jetzer does not read Homage to New York “as a reaction to the global threat of a nuclear armament and the Cold War,” but as an affirmative act through what was proposed.194 Of its continued appeal and legacy, Jetzer suggests that it “strongly undermines the myth of the creating artist who adds objects to the world to be exhibited, collected, and eventually conserved,” wherein anticipated is an inversion of the system of accumulation where concurrently the “act of creation and destruction became all of sudden simultaneous.” And through it housing an unknown masterpiece ability to present simultaneously an opposition as the mystery of form, while likewise giving form to an “external pattern of creation and destruction that makes up our life.”195 Tracing the influence of Homage to New York through the subsequent years, Wetzel sees that these “destructive tendencies in art gain in importance,”196 developing as methods with the acknowledgment that “Every creative act is always also an act of destruction in that existing forms are called into doubt and dismembered, re-combined or re-thought.”197 In this capacity, the “artist destroys in order to create, but equally creates

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in order to destroy.”198 From here the two gestures become tethered, sketching a Big Bang-like descent where “creation and destruction have been a couple maudit” suggestive of a pairing for Bataille’s Le Part Maudit (Accursed Share).199 However, in this capacity, it likewise becomes a question, that Jetzer asks, of whether destruction might “be considered as merely an additional color or … still a radical gesture” and equally whether destruction still has a meaning in itself “or is it just a mere vehicle”? From this position, Under Destruction envisages the ambivalence between creation and destruction—with the use of destruction as a form-giving force200—that the exhibition used to investigate what destruction in art might mean now. Included among the selection is Jonathan Schipper’s The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle, in which two immaculately gleaming cars enact a car crash in extreme slow motion beneath the showroom display lights of the gallery; what Michael Wilson describes as bringing “the Hollywood action-film fantasy of an impossibly close view of a dangerously destructive event to life, ossifying the spectacle of a real-time collision and transforming it into a subject of sustained, even meditative contemplation.”201 It is this ability to draw out and give form to an instant of impact and destruction, making it an object to be viewed, drawn against the framework of pristine cars that gives the piece its allure. The machinations of The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle propel the two cars together “over a period of anything between three-and-a-half days and several weeks” so that what the viewer witnesses within the gallery is a real time “ultra-slow-motion reenactment of a head-on crash,” where each “vehicle is eventually crushed three feet or so into the other.”202 However, the process of this destruction becomes so protracted as to be almost imperceptible through the action of displaying it in the slowest of increments, like piano players approaching the bit they got wrong—running through it slowly, slowing right down as they approached and reenacted.203 Likewise, Christian Marclay lures art out of destruction with his video work Guitar Drag, on display in the exhibition. Projected and accompanied by “an ear-splitting sound track,” the piece documents the process of a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar being dragged at high speed behind a lorry.204 Connected to an amplifier, the audio is the reverberations emitted as the guitar is destroyed through these actions. Through this, art points as composer to the sound of destruction, which also leads to an inversion of what is before us and what becomes lost in the process of becoming observed or seen. In this way, Guitar Drag might anticipate something implied in a work such as Bruce Nauman’s

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text piece from Art in the Mind: “Drill a hole in the heart of a tree and insert a microphone. Mount the amplifier and speaker in an empty room and adjust the volume to make audible any sound that might come from the tree.”205 And perhaps an upended affinity between these two works emerges, where through amplifying the silence inside a tree, the silence gives form to its own destruction, like a guitar dragged behind a truck, showing ­destruction’s capacity to create, as well as creation’s capacity to destroy. A short one—damage control, an impulse In Kerry Brougher’s introduction for the exhibition Damage Control, he observes that while “destruction as a theme can be traced throughout art history, from the early atomic age it has become a pervasive and contextually rich element of contemporary visual culture.”206 It is from the perspective of the atomic age and as a response to war and destruction that most of the items in this extensive survey are organized, charting a development of works “that offer overt displays of disasters either on a cataclysmic or everyday scale to more symbolic evocations” to address destruction’s place in our contemporary moment.207 Starting with the example of Godzilla in relation to incidents such as that of Lucky Dragon at Bikini Atoll or Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Brougher, in his essay Radiation Made Visible, marks the capacity through which Godzilla was made to represent the threat and dangers of the atomic bomb, while giving form to invisible anxieties through making radiation visible.208 Brougher observes: Godzilla likewise represents the imposition of the new on the old, the inconceivable destructiveness of the new atomic age. But he is a creation of our own making. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s creature, he is our punishment for tampering with nature and defying God. And yet unlike Mary Shelley’s monster, who despite his ungodliness was in fact a mirror of humanity, Godzilla is not human (although clearly a man in a latex suit) … rather, the King of the Monsters is human only in the sense that he symbolizes a dark piece of man’s mind, an unhealthy part, ripped out and expanded to an atomic scale and intent on destroying and killing on an “inhuman” scale. 209

With Godzilla, through representing what was invisible, Brougher sees a physical manifestation of a “fear of that which cannot be seen, the fear of radiation, of the possibility of sickness and death descending unseen.”210

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Brougher charges art with the responsibility to make the invisible visible in these instances, granting through destruction a means for representing and giving form to invisible tensions. In this he approaches works such as Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, as a means of making visible something ever present in the media (airplane and car crashes, electrocutions, riots, and assassinations), but at the same time offering a means for it to dissipate.211 Of this disappearance through Warhol, he notes: Even in his single-image canvases in the series, which in some respects magnify scenes and draw attention to what the viewer is looking at, and with titles like 5 Deaths that bring the harsh reality of the image to the fore, the bright coloration and the degraded sharpness of the original photograph create a distance that allows for detachment.212

In this sense, the ability to give form to the invisible likewise allows the viewer to distance themselves from events. And in this the artwork shelters two impulses: a destruction that draws in the viewer through fascination, as well as an ability to distance and bring the chaos back under control, a damage control. However, far from just a means of playing with absence and presence through representation, destruction in art might also form gestures in response to the destructions of society. Seeds of its own destruction: destroying a Qing Dynasty urn, and a parallel impulse in art emerging Likewise, in his essay accompanying the exhibition The Show is Over, Russell Ferguson traces the legacy of artists using destruction in their work. Starting with Fillipo Marinetti and his Futurist Manifesto—drawn from a speeding car crash outside of Milan213—to Pablo Picasso with his picture as a “sum of destruction”214 and Piet Mondrian with his remarks that “the destructive element is too much neglected in art,” 215 Ferguson begins to sketch a basis for examining destruction in art. Ferguson introduces Walter Benjamin’s thoughts concerning the allure of destruction, in which “destroying rejuvenates in clearing away the traces of our own age.”216 Yet Ferguson sees Benjamin as a foreshadowing, “Benjamin could understand the appeal of such ruthless simplification, and he was prescient in pinpointing how such an appeal could become one of the bases of a mass political movement.”217 However, this ability to clear away through destruction ultimately gave rise to fascism and culminated in the Holocaust, as Ferguson observes:

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The result, of course, was one of the greatest disasters in history, one that resulted in millions of deaths, including Benjamin’s own, by suicide, as he tried to flee the Holocaust.218

With this, Ferguson emphasizes the impossibility of representing this destruction traced through the writing and works of Theodor Adorno, Jean Fautrier, and Gerhard Richter, while simultaneously charting a withdrawal from these themes in America with the rise of McCarthyism.219 From here, Ferguson gathers again as Robert Rauschenberg heaves his unsold sculptures into the Arno River in Florence, eventually proposes to de Kooning that he erases one of his drawings.220 Similarly, he moves on to John Baldessari and his Cremation Project, in which the artist burned all his own work that he owned in 1970—also a clearing away, but similarly a recouping in the form of ash-baked cookies.221 Ferguson then traces the continuation of the postwar frame of mind in Europe, with events such as the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) in London in 1966 under the influence of Gustav Metzger—noting of the event that it “was still strongly inflected with the historical burden of the war’s devastation and the subsequent Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation, even as it was simultaneously a harbinger of future developments.”222 And elsewhere Ferguson returns to sunlit California with Ed Ruscha’s Royal Road Test, in which a typewriter is thrown from a speeding car window and the destruction is documented, an act of destruction amid the desert landscape. The opening moniker of Ed Ruscha’s Royal Road Test proclaims: “It was too directly bound to its own anguish to be anything other than a cry of negation; carrying within itself, the seeds of its own destruction.”223 Within this general framework, Ferguson weaves in contemporary practitioners and artworks such as Ai Weiwei’s Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, in which the artist destroys an ancient ceramic object;224 Jake and Dinos Chapman’s defacing of Goya etchings; and likewise Christian Marclay’s Guitar Drag. This contrast of destruction through gesture is followed again with Pipilotti Rist’s actions of smashing car windows with a flower in Ever Is Over All; Douglas Gordon’s selective burning of portraits from pop culture in the series Self Portrait of You + Me; Gordon Matta-Clark’s Window Blow-Out; Chris Burden’s Samson, in which a jack attached to a turnstile at the entrance to the gallery slowly applies pressure to the walls of the building as each attendee enters the building;225 and Michael Landy’s Break Down, in which over the course of two weeks, the artist destroyed and catalogued every item he owned.226 Yet Ferguson

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wonders what happens after the pause of destruction,227 (after the riot or smash-up) and proposes that one “solution is to separate ourselves from the wreckage and apply a self-consciously distanced, aestheticized approach to destruction that has already taken place”228—and indeed it appears that this marking and distancing is an impulse behind much of the work included in Damage Control. With Thomas Demand’s photograph Landing, a scene is portrayed just after a visitor has stumbled down the stairs at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and smashed into three Qing Dynasty vases on display. The photograph depicts a staircase landing, window as backdrop, with fragments of shattered white and blue ceramics littering the floor. Of the scene, Ferguson muses how the work “suggests an unintentional reprise” of the aftermath of Ai Weiwei’s Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, yet Demand’s photograph is a meticulous reconstruction of a conservator’s photograph taken after the vase incident at the museum. Demand’s image painstakingly recreates the photo taken by the conservator documenting the damage—however, as the conservator attempts to undo the damage to the vase from the accident, Demand aims to reconstruct a perfect model of the image of the accident, which he then photographs. Of this inversion, Ferguson notes: So we have again a kind of destruction in reverse, as Demand begins from the accident and works backwards toward a reconstruction of the scene that is entirely under his control. In Demand’s photograph, we can see brought together in a single image two of the parallel impulses that have always drawn artists to destruction. On the one hand there is a fascination with the moment of destruction itself and its anarchic pleasures; on the other hand, there is a desire to bring this chaos back under the control of the artist.229

Moreover, it is this impulse that Jones and Mundy pursue in their attempts, through the Museum of Lost Art or the Gallery of Lost Art, to recreate works that have been destroyed; and, conversely, it is the fascination and pull of destruction in both Tinguely’s Homage to New York and Breitwieser’s actions. Through a reverse capacity, each instance bleeds into the other, emerging as a single object to house these two parallel impulses in the work of art.

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A manifesto, or if it did not exist it would have to be invented: the duck/rabbit puzzle In Dario Gamboni’s accompanying essay from the exhibition Damage Control—“Sixty Years of Ambivalence”—he traces an ambiguity between iconoclasm and the destruction of art that he began with his The Destruction of Art.230 With it, he aims “at understanding what the close relationship with destruction, including the self-destruction of Homage to New York, revealed about contemporary art within a broader context.”231 From this, Gamboni turns to the ideas and works of Gustav Metzger. In Metzger, Gamboni finds a crucial ambivalence between his attack on capitalism with the drive toward nuclear annihilation and, conversely, the desire to see destruction integrated through science and technology— perhaps akin to the way that Ferguson observes in Demand a desire to bring this chaos back under the control of the artist but also the riot of destruction itself.232 In this manner, Gamboni notes that Metzger “conceived of the relationship between the destruction he advocated in the arts and the destruction he denounced in the military, technical, and economic domains as both mimetic and critical.”233 Through these gestures, as Metzger proposes, “art demonstrates man’s power to accelerate disintegrative processes of nature and to order them.”234 Yet, through this hastening and ordering, at the center of Metzger’s intentions is perhaps a desire to distinguish between a destruction in art and the destruction of art (and also within the culture at large).235 Or, if it appears an iconoclasm in Metzger, then it is perhaps instead toward destroying the image of destruction present in society through the challenge of the destructive gesture. Through this, destruction is seen within the kinetics of the challenge as “something that sets the destructive process in motion,”236 as opposed to what becomes represented (say, as in a painting of a destroyed city or broken vases in a museum). In this sense, Metzger’s gestures attempt to resolve a volatile remainder through art, forming a valve where destruction reveals how cause and effect are contained one in the other (as opposed to trying to preserve or represent this remainder). In his Manifesto Auto-Destructive Art, Metzger proclaims he is “Not interested in ruins (the picturesque),” but instead “Auto-destructive art re-enacts the obsession with destruction, the pummelling to which individuals and masses are subjected.”237 However, with destruction, we see precisely this interest in the picturesqueness of ruins—the impulse of museums and galleries of lost art (of Jones or the Tate), and even the conservationist urge behind Demand’s recreation of the vase accident—to

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preserve and represent the loss of the ruin. Nevertheless, it appears that with the activation of this impulse through auto-destruction that Metzger seeks, it is instead to distinguish and reenact as challenge. Of this turn, Justin Hoffman says, “In the second manifesto, Metzger explains that he does not see destructive art as some sort of picturesque romanticism of ruins. He does not want to preserve something upon which the traces of the past can be seen.”238 Metzger instead attempts to reenact this destruction “to highlight processes that already exist but are too little noticed,”239 contrasting Brougher’s reading of Radiation Made Visible, where the compulsion aims to preserve something upon which the traces of the past can be seen or represented (through Godzilla or Warhol’s Death and Disaster series). Whereas Jones and Mundy (or the conservator) attempt to reconstruct an implied ruin in which we might be able to walk in the present, from the destroyed object, Metzger seeks to point to the destruction in the manner that Whiteread’s destroyed House, through circumstances, did in action. In this sense, Metzger tasks art with the capacity to be both the site and “an instrument for transforming peoples’ thoughts and feelings, not only about art, but … [through destruction] to change peoples’ relation to themselves and society.”240 His approach seeks not to preserve but to reenact destruction as a means for creation, declaring of its necessity, “If auto-destructive art did not exist it would have to be invented.”241 And perhaps, in this sense, it is; every day and in its own manner. Gamboni declares of destruction’s ambivalence: “Destruction appears, therefore, as a Janus-like figure, a duck/rabbit picture puzzle. This ambiguity and oscillation is made visible” through the works.242 It is likewise from the views of the works presented in this investigation into destruction of art—through the news, popular media, and recent exhibitions—that a further oscillation is generated between Jones (or the Tate or Demand or Warhol) and the enactments of art (Metzger, Tinguely, Whiteread, Schipper, and Breitwieser) to which destroyed art continues to point. Destruction emphasizes an ability to be both rabbit and duck—ruin, as well as action—forcing “us to reflect upon what we see, what we expect, and what we desire.”243 It is this capacity to bring together in a single instance two parallel impulses244 emerging through destruction, removing impediments of effect from cause, one inevitably contained in the other245 so that the mystery of form is revealed through the intimacy that would shatter external form246 that we must come to terms with if we want to understand what art and its destruction implies; herein a propensity “where one might

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least expect it”247 to reveal through the negative analogue of the miracle, something we find all the harder to believe.248 Notes 1 Genet, Jean. “A Reading of The Brothers Karamazov.” Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Grand Street, no. 47, 1993. www.grandstreet.com/ gsissues/gs47/gs47b.html (accessed April 17, 2013). 2 Ibid. 3 The idea of the shipwreck implied in the ship will be examined in more detail later, but it takes cues from Virilio’s ideas of the accident and Bataille’s notion of the negative miracle. 4 Kerouac, Jack, and Howard Cunnel. On the Road: The Original Scroll. London: Penguin Classics, 2007. Editorial note on p. 401. 5 Thomas Mann uses a phrase “the solvent of forms of life which are absolutely fixed,” and this tension between a “solvent of forms” and what appears fixed suggested a name for the process examined in this volume, see: Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. London: Penguin Books, 1960. p. 400. 6 Virilio, Paul, and Sylvère Lotringer. “The Accident of Art.” In The Accident of Art. New York, NY; Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e): Distributed by the MIT Press, 2005. p. 64. 7 Ibid., p. 63. 8 Ibid. 9 This is from a forthcoming essay titled “The Show” by Pavel Büchler that will appear in an anthology on group exhibitions set for publication by Kunsthalle Bern. Text was courtesy of the artist. 10 Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share. Volume II, the History of Eroticism. Volume III, Sovereignty. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991, p. 206. Subsequent references: The Accursed Share (vols II and III). 11 Jones, Jonathan. “Stolen, looted, lost and burned.” The Guardian, September 4, 2003. 12 In Italo Calvino’s novel, Invisible Cities, the narrator, Marco Polo, describes and evokes a series of imagined cities to the emperor Kublai Khan. 13 See Brautigan, Richard. The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1971. p. 16; Barnes, Julian. Flaubert’s Parrot. London: Picador, 1985. p. 38. 14 Again, this suggests perhaps a site such as Brautigan’s library of unpublished books, which resides on a nondescript sloping lot overgrown with tall grass and bushes and flowers and wine bottles. See Brautigan, The Abortion, p. 23. 15 Jones, “Stolen, looted, lost and burned.”

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16 Lefebvre, Henri. The Missing Pieces. Translated by David LeHardy Sweet. Whitney Biennial. Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2014. 17 Ibid., p. 22. 18 Ibid., pp. 23–24. 19 Ibid., p. 25. 20 Ibid., p. 26. 21 Ibid., p. 27. 22 Ibid., p. 85. 23 Jones, “Stolen, looted, lost and burned.” 24 Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Edited by Jack Flam. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1996. p. 42. 25 Jones, “Stolen, looted, lost and burned.” 26 Ibid. 27 This relation to Virilio is examined in more detail later. 28 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 205. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., p. 206. 32 This will be examined in more detail in the next chapter. 33 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 206. 34 Ibid. 35 Jones, “Stolen, looted, lost and burned.” 36 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 206. 37 Jones, “Stolen, looted, lost and burned.” 38 Ibid. 39 In this case with regards to his notion of sacrifice. 40 Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991. p. 189. Subsequent references: The Accursed Share (vol. I). 41 Gamboni, Dario. The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution. London: Reaktion Books, 1997. 42 Smith, Timothy R. and Jacquiline Trescott. “Gauguin masterpiece unharmed after attack at National Gallery.” The Washington Post, April 4, 2011. 43 Gamboni, The Destruction of Art, p. 18. 44 It could also be argued that this is what Gamboni does through the collecting and telling of his accounts of destroyed work, which forms his research. 45 This is a reference to a quote at the end of Kenneth Goldsmith’s Soliloquy. Perhaps this desire to make what is invisible tangible is an impulse behind projects such as this, in which every word uttered for a week is transcribed,

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as a gesture toward “If every word spoken in New York City Daily were somehow to materialize as a snowflake, each day there would be a blizzard.” See Goldsmith, Kenneth. Soliloquy. New York, NY. Granary Books, 2001. Postscript. 46 Jones, “Stolen, looted, lost and burned.” 47 McCarthy, Tom. Remainder. London: Alma Books, 2007. p. 5. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., p. 100. 50 Ibid., p. 5. 51 Ibid., p. 14. 52 Ibid., p. 60. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., p. 61. 57 Ibid. 58 Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Edited by Jack Flam. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1996. p. 147. 59 McCarthy, Remainder, p. 105. 60 Ibid., p 173. 61 The knight’s tour is a sequence of moves of a knight on the chessboard such that the knight visits every square only once. This sequence of moves was plotted over an apartment building, and the narrative is revealed through this device. 62 This name combines Herman Melville’s Bartleby and Valery Larbaud’s Barnabooth. 63 Perec, Georges. Life a User’s Manual. London: Harvill, 1996. p. 117. 64 It might also be interesting to think in relation to his half-namesake Bartleby and his desire to not do or abstain as an action, where the character’s efforts form “footnotes commenting on a text that is invisible, which does not mean it does not exist, because this phantom text could very well end up held in suspension in the literature of the next millennium.” See Vila-Matas, Enrique. Bartleby & Co. London: Vintage, 2005. p. 3. 65 Perec, Life a User’s Manual, p. 117. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., pp. 118–119. 69 Ibid., p. 119. 70 Duchamp: “I believe that a picture, a work of art, lives and dies just as we do. That is, it lives from the time it’s conceived and created, for some 50 or

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60 years, it varies, and then the work dies. And that is when it becomes art history. So, art history only begins after the death of the work, but as long as the work lives, or at least in the first 50 years of its life, it communicates with people living in the same period who have accepted it or rejected it and who have talked about it. These people die and the work dies with them. And that is where the history of art begins.” See: Antoine, Jean and Marcel Duchamp. www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/An-interview-withMarcel-Duchamp/29278 (accessed February 14, 2015). 71 McCarthy, Remainder, p. 284. 72 Excerpted from the afterword of the German edition of 53 Days. See: Bellos, David. Georges Perec: A Life in Words. London: Harvill, 1999. p. 704. 73 McCarthy, Remainder, p. 9. 74 This is from a text that Perec wrote as producer for the film Les Jeux de la Comtesse that was directed by Catherine Binet. See: Bellos, Georges Perec, p. 684. 75 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vol. I), p. 10. 76 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vol. I), p. 11. 77 In a discussion following his lecture Tragedy’s Philosophy and Philosophy’s Tragedy in which he remarks on Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, about how contemporary art has become trapped in a circuit of reenacting art and artists that have come before. www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSSJ2RhdCmE (accessed April 17, 2013). 78 Jones, Jonathan. “Lost art comes back to haunt us.” The Guardian, June 6, 2012. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Robert Smithson, p. 146. 82 Jones, “Lost art comes back to haunt us.” 83 Ibid. 84 Graham-Dixon, Andrew. “This is the house that Rachel built.” The Independent, November 2, 1993. 85 The Sunday Times, November 8, 1993. Retrieved from: www.artangel.org. uk//projects/1993/house/press/press_coverage (accessed April 17, 2013). 86 Ibid. 87 Graham-Dixon, “This is the house that Rachel built.” 88 Jones, “Lost art comes back to haunt us.” 89 Roberts, Alison. “Best and worst of art bites the dust.” The Times, January 12, 1994. 90 Ibid.

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91 Jones, “Lost art comes back to haunt us.” 92 Wroe, Nicholas. “Rachel Whiteread: a life in art.” The Guardian, April 6, 2013. 93 Ibid. 94 Jones, “Stolen, looted, lost and burned.” 95 Ibid. 96 Jones, “Lost art comes back to haunt us.” 97 “The Gallery of Lost Art.” The Tate. http://galleryoflostart.com (accessed April 17, 2013). 98 Jones, Jonathan. “Now you see them: the eternal allure of lost art.” The Guardian, July 1, 2012. 99 Ibid. 100 Erased De Kooning Drawing. Traces of drawing on paper with label and gilded frame. 1953. SFMOMA. 101 Jones, “Now you see them.” 102 Balzac, Honoré. The Unknown Masterpiece. Translated by Ellen Marriage. The Macmillan Company, 1901. 103 Jones, “Now you see them.” 104 Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece, p. 9. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid., p. 10. 107 Ibid., p. 8. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid., p. 9. 110 Ibid., p. 7. 111 Robert Rauschenberg: Man at Work. Directed by Chris Granlund. Phaidon Video, 2001. 112 Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece, p. 30. 113 Ibid. 114 Agamben, Gorgio. The Man without Content. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. pp. 7–8. 115 Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece, p. 30. 116 Ibid., p. 31. 117 Jones, “Stolen, looted, lost and burned.” 118 Jones, “Now you see them.” 119 Agamben, The Man without Content, p. 8. 120 Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece, p. 8. 121 Ibid., p. 32. 122 Agamben, The Man without Content, p. 9. 123 Ibid., p. 9.

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124 Jones, “Now you see them.” 125 “The Gallery of Lost Art.” The Tate. http://galleryoflostart.com (accessed April 17, 2013). 126 Ibid. 127 Mundy, Jennifer. Lost Art. London: Tate Publishing, 2013. p. 9. 128 “About the Gallery of Lost Art.” The Tate. http://galleryoflostart.com (accessed April 17, 2013). 129 Ibid. 130 Mundy, Jennifer. “Life Doesn’t Last; Art Doesn’t Last.” The Tate. http:// galleryoflostart.com/#/3,0/essay (accessed April 17, 2013). 131 Mundy, Jennifer. “A House Divided.” The Tate. http://galleryoflostart. com/#/13,0/essay (accessed April 17, 2013). 132 Mundy, Jennifer. “Nine Eleven.” The Tate. http://galleryoflostart. com/#/6,17/essay (accessed April 17, 2013). 133 Mundy, Jennifer. “Burnt Memories.” The Tate. http://galleryoflostart. com/#/2,0/essay (accessed April 17, 2013). 134 Mundy, Lost Art, p. 271. 135 Ibid. 136 Ibid., p. 270. 137 Ibid., p. 9. 138 Ibid., p. 269. 139 Baudrillard, Jean. Fatal Strategies. Translated by Philip Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski. New York, NY; Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e); Distributed by the MIT Press, 2008. p. 219. 140 Ibid., p. 110. 141 Leader, Darian. Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us from Seeing. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. 142 Ibid., p. 2. 143 Leader, Stealing the Mona Lisa, p. 46. 144 Ibid., p. 88. 145 Ibid., p. 164. 146 Ibid., pp. 68–69. 147 Henley, John. “Priceless art haul destroyed by thief’s mother.” The Guardian, May 16, 2002. 148 Broughton, Philip Delves. “Mother of art thief destroys £1bn hoard.” The Telegraph, May 16, 2002. Although the Telegraph later revised this amount to more like £100 million. Broughton, Philip Delves. “Treasures from the deep.” The Telegraph, August 3, 2002. 149 Henley, “Priceless art haul destroyed by thief’s mother.” 150 Broughton, “Treasures from the deep.”

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151 Riding, Alan. “Your stolen art? I threw them away, dear.” The New York Times, May 17, 2002. 152 Broughton, “Treasures from the deep.” 153 Ibid. 154 Riding, “Your stolen art?” 155 Hooper, John. “Connoisseur turned crook who plundered Europe’s galleries for the simple love of art.” The Guardian, February 5, 2003. 156 Ibid. 157 Broughton, “Treasures from the deep.” 158 Ibid. 159 Bellos, Georges Perec, p. 684. 160 Interestingly, at the time of the writing of this book, Tom McCarthy is supposedly writing a screenplay for turning Remainder into a film, and there are rumors that Breitwieser’s story may also become a film. 161 Hooper, “Connoisseur turned crook.” 162 Broughton, “Treasures from the deep.” 163 Ibid. 164 Henley, “Priceless art haul destroyed by thief’s mother.” 165 Broughton, “Mother of art thief destroys £1bn hoard.” 166 Henley, “Priceless art haul destroyed by thief’s mother.” 167 The use of the word palindrome here is indebted to an instance in Dario Gamboni in his essay “Sixty Years of Ambivalence,” in which he applies the term in passing to Dara Friedman’s video Total. Brougher, Kerry, Russell Ferguson, Dario Gamboni, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Musée d’art moderne Grand-Duc Jean, and Kunsthaus Graz. Damage Control: Art and Destruction since 1950. p. 206. 168 Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, p. 110. 169 Ibid., p. 104. 170 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vol. I), p. 69. 171 Baudrillard, Jean, and Sylvère Lotringer. The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays. New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 2005. p. 64. 172 Broughton, “Mother of art thief destroys £1bn hoard.” 173 Henley, “Priceless art haul destroyed by thief’s mother.” 174 Tomkins, Calvin. The Bride and the Bachelors. New York, NY: Viking Press, 1971. p. 150. 175 Mundy, Jennifer. “Like a Falling Star.” The Tate. http://galleryoflostart. com/#/14,0/essay (accessed April 17, 2013). 176 Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors. 177 Mundy, Lost Art, p. 205. 178 Interview conducted by Calvin Tomkins for a 1962 article for The New

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Yorker (courtesy of Calvin Tomkins Papers, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York) and retrieved from www.tate.org.uk/context-com​ ment/articles/homage-destruction (accessed April 17, 2013). 179 Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors, p. 178. 180 Ibid. 181 Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, p. 219 182 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 206. 183 Interview conducted by Calvin Tomkins for a 1962 article for The New Yorker. 184 Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors, p. 177. 185 Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece, p. 8. 186 Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors, p. 179. 187 Ibid. 188 Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors, pp. 179–180. 189 Interview conducted by Calvin Tomkins for a 1962 article for The New Yorker. 190 Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors, p. 186. 191 Jetzer, Gianni and Boris Grojs, New York, NY: Basel, and the Jean Tinguely Museum. Under Destruction: [anlässlich Der Ausstellung “Under Destruction,” Museum Tinguely, Basel, 15. Oktober 2010 – 23. Januar 2011; Swiss Institute Contemporary Art, New York, 6. April – 4. Juni 2011]. Berlin: Distanz-Verl., 2010. p. 24. 192 Gamboni, The Destruction of Art. 193 Jetzer and Grojs, “Under Destruction”, p. 23. 194 Ibid., p. 36. 195 Ibid., p. 24. 196 Ibid., p. 23. 197 Ibid., p. 24. 198 Ibid. 199 Ibid. 200 Ibid. 201 Ibid., p. 103. 202 Ibid. 203 McCarthy, Remainder, p. 61. 204 Jetzer and Grojs, “Under Destruction”, p. 83. 205 Lippard, Lucy R., Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object From 1966 to 1972. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997. pp. 162– 163. 206 Brougher et al., Damage Control, p. 8. 207 Ibid.

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208 Ibid., p. 16. 209 Ibid., p. 21. 210 Ibid., pp. 21–22. 211 Ibid., p. 63. 212 Ibid. 213 Ibid., p. 105. 214 Ibid. 215 Ibid., p. 106. 216 Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York, NY: Schocken, 1986. p. 301. 217 Brougher et al., Damage Control, p. 107. 218 Ibid. 219 Ibid., pp .107–109. 220 Ibid., pp. 109–111. 221 Ibid., pp. 111–113. 222 Ibid., p. 124. 223 Ruscha, Edward, and Mason Williams. Royal Road Test. Self-published, 1967. 224 Brougher et al., Damage Control, p. 117. 225 Ibid., pp. 141–142. 226 Ibid., p. 154. 227 Or perhaps Baudrillard might ask what happens after the orgy? 228 Brougher et al., Damage Control, p. 155. 229 Ibid., p. 169. 230 Gamboni, The Destruction of Art. 231 Brougher et al., Damage Control, p. 177. 232 Ibid., p. 169. 233 Ibid., p. 178. 234 Metzger, Gustav, and Andrew Wilson. Gustav Metzger—Damaged Nature, Auto-destructive Art. London: Coracle, 1996. p. 59. 235 Brougher et al., Damage Control, p. 178. 236 Metzger, Gustav, Sabine Breitwieser, and Generali Foundation Austria. Gustav Metzger: History History. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005. p. 22. 237 Metzger and Wilson, Gustav Metzger, p. 59. 238 Metzger, Breitwieser, and Generali Foundation Austria, Gustav Metzger: History, p. 22. 239 Ibid., p. 28. 240 Metzger and Wilson, Gustav Metzger, p. 27. 241 Ibid., p. 25.

54 242 Brougher et al., Damage Control, p. 206. 243 Ibid., p. 206. 244 Ibid., p. 169. 245 Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece, p. 8. 246 Ibid. 247 This will be examined in more detail in the next chapter. 248 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 206.

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2

Art and permeable moments

It is key to step back and look at this impulse within art and its relation to destruction—which triggers a volatility in the art object—and also what it might entail, to better understand the deed of art. Art is a slippery thing, and when we begin looking at what exactly it “does” or is for, it becomes increasingly more so—as Virilio says of the “image” or the “visual,” it appears as “a portmanteau word: they put into it whatever they wanted.”1 In this sense, looking for a definition, art devolves into the indistinct and overeager collective activity, taking on the flavor of whatever it is cooked with, as well as the projections of the inquirer. Similarly, in pinpointing the allure of the lost work of art, Jones notes that it “never disappoints” as it is “completed and transfigured by your own imagination”2 as it has become untethered, a kite string cut from the anchoring of a physical art object and thus losing what made it distinct—but perhaps this also gives insight into something of the artwork in more general terms, which needs to be examined in further detail if we want to again understand what art is and can be in our time. With destroyed or lost art objects, as well as in our definition of art, there is a sleight of hand, and perhaps it is time that we begin again here with how we talk about art. To catch a bit of this, we may first look to the accustomed function of the portrait, but perhaps in its most general terms—as an ability to hold a likeness, a portrait of a landscape, a person, or, through abstraction, an emotional state or concept—in this sense, the image itself. The portrait attempts to represent an affinity, to coax or draw it out, yet the sparring between portrait and what it portrays is at the center of the act. In The Ground of the Image, Jean-Luc Nancy describes its function as follows:

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Every image is in some way a “portrait,” not in that it would reproduce the traits of a person, but in that it pulls and draws (this is the semantic and etymological sense of the word), in that it extracts something, an intimacy, a force.3

The portrait draws out a trait; pulls or attracts across a touching or affinity between what is represented and that which it also removes and sets aside and detaches (like Jones’s masterpiece, but also Warhol’s disasters). Nancy continues: And, to extract it, it subtracts or removes it from homogeneity, it distracts it from it, distinguishes it, detaches it and casts it forth. It throws it in front of us, and this throwing [jet], this projection, makes its mark, its very trait and its stigma: its tracing, its line, its style, its incision, its scar, its signature, all of this at once.4

Therefore, in the portrait and image one finds an operation through which it attracts with an affinity that likewise removes it from the mundane and homogeneity, draws it apart and marks it as distinct and isolated. To observe this process, we might look to Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), where, similarly, a dichotomy is presented between the deteriorating and decaying world of everyday life in the flatlands below and an attempted escape into the rarefied atmosphere of the Berghof sanatorium high up in the Swiss Alps. [For what is a portrait if not an image detained or set aside that we might continue to observe from behind glass?] In The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp is set to begin a predictable life in which he does not much yearn to be a shipbuilder [and again … Whiteread’s dockworker, Balzac’s shipman, Bataille’s shipwreck, all so nautical, yet here Castorp’s story starts with him fated to be the one to engineer these ships that launch tales], but before embarking on this pursuit, he visits a cousin [again a cousin] staying at the resort-like alpine sanatorium where he is taking the rest cure for tuberculosis. While on what was to be only a brief visit, Castorp becomes one of the residents at the resort and ends up remaining there for seven years, obsessed but never quite able to isolate and put his finger on the source of the rot. The novel’s accounts are resplendent with recordings of daily temperature taking, thermometers; methodically lying on balconies in the frozen alpine air, wrapped in blankets for hours at night; monitoring, x-ray portraits, and endless scrutinization; attempting, through forced idleness and lofty altitudes, to stave off and differentiate or somehow trick the influences of illness or decay into desisting. In this it attempts an interlude apart

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from the strife and rot below and eventual outbreak of war—and in this it presents a dichotomy between the mundane and what is set aside and removed from the daily flow. Early in the novel, there is a scene in which Hans Castorp reflects at some length on a particular portrait of his grandfather, Senator Hans Lorenz Castorp. Senator Castorp stood at full length on a red-tiled floor, in a perspective of column and pointed arch. His chin was dropped, his mouth drawn down, his blue, musing eyes, with the tear ducts plain beneath them, directed toward the distant view.5

In both life and portrait, the man drops his chin slightly and touches it to his neckcloth, which in later years becomes a manner for steadying a slight shake in his neck. This quirk is a mannerism that expresses him, yet in Nancy’s terms it is not that the portraits “reproduce the traits of a person,” but that they extract an intimacy—in this case the affinity of the dropping of his chin and the impulse they share. It is through this mannerism that the forceful man in the portrait continues to touch in some capacity the elderly man that young Castorp remembers, in spite of the way that age changes him. In later years: The years had bent his back and neck, but he tried to counteract the curvature by pressure in another direction; drawing down his mouth with sedulous dignity, though the lips were shrunken against the bare gums, for he had lost all his teeth, and put in the false ones only to eat. It was this posture also which helped to steady an incipient shaking of the head, gave him his look of being sternly reined up, and caused him to support his chin on his neckcloth in the manner so congenial to little Hans Castorp’s taste.6

Brought “into such close proximity,” the portrait and the man share this gesture and therein they touch.7 Nancy asserts: This is what all portraits do, in an exemplary manner. Portraits are the image of the image in general. A portrait touches, or else it is only an identification photo, a descriptive record, not an image. What touches is something that is borne to the surface from out of an intimacy.8

Yet, while simultaneously presenting this touch through an affinity or intimacy, there is more at stake in the portrait than an ability to present

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something; in fact, the portrait (or the image in general) might be seen as more of a wrestling match between the subject and representation. The portrait is a placeholder, but through its ability to distinguish it appears to exert itself as somehow truer for Hans Castorp. Looking to the portrait of his grandfather, he observes: But the old man’s everyday appearance was not his real and authentic one, either to the seven-year-old child, or to the memory of the grown man in after years. That was different, far finer and truer; it was Grandfather as he appeared in a life-size portrait which had once hung in the house of Hans Castorp’s own parents, had moved over with him to the Esplanade on their death, and now hung above the great red satin sofa in the reception-room.9

The portrait challenges through an attempt to hold a likeness or intimacy that persists, and, in holding it, seeks through representation to remove it from the decay and change of the everyday, trying to persuade this moment that passes to remain just a little bit longer. In presenting an image of continuity, to keep the past alive in the present, the image appears to wrest itself from what is portrayed, which behind its allure simply recedes. As Hans Castorp sees: The painting showed Hans Lorenz Castorp in his official garb as Councillor: the sober, even godly, civilian habit of a bygone century, which a commonwealth both self-assertive and enterprising had brought with it down the years and retained in ceremonial use in order to make present the past and make past the present, to bear witness to the perpetual continuity of things, and the ­perfect soundness of its business signature.10

Yet, in presenting this image of continuity and affinity (in much the same way the Gallery of Lost Art attempts, in spite of a loss presented), the portrait also exerts its own violence through its assertion of vitality that distinguishes it from its prototype and likewise displaces. Hans Castorp observes this deviation that the portrait presents and through which it also distinguishes: Only once—and then only for a moment—had he ever seen Grandfather as he was here represented, on the occasion of a procession to the Rathaus. But he could not help feeling that this presentment was the genuine, the authentic grandfather, and the everyday one merely subsidiary, not entirely comfortable—a sort of interim grandfather, as it were. For it was clear that the

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deviations and idiosyncrasies presented by his everyday appearance were due to incomplete, perhaps even unsuccessful adaptation; they were the not quite eradicable vestiges of Grandfather’s pure and genuine form.11

It is, then, in this perceived genuine presentation that the portrait recoups, in contrast to the grandfather’s resemblance through an assertion (between his everyday appearance and again later when he is laying in his coffin). It presents a battle in which one hardly knows whether he has won or lost; yet, upon seeing his grandfather in his coffin, Hans Castorp observes of the persistence of the image: Thus he was glad from his heart that it should be the authentic, the perfect grandfather who lay there resplendent on that day when he came to take leave of him. It was in the room where so often they had sat facing each other at table; and now, in the centre, Hans Lorenze Castorp was lying in a silver-mounted coffin, upon a begarlanded bier. He had fought out the attack on his lungs, fought long and stoutly, despite his air of being at home in the life of the day only by dint of his powers of adaptability. One hardly knew whether he had won or lost in the struggle; but in any case there he lay, with a stern yet satisfied expression, on his bed of state.12

In death, what the portrait presents is a triumph of the representation over the subsidiary or interim aspect that passes away—the apparent triumph the image exerts over what changes: what Hans Castorp sees as its genuine form. As he observes: What he gathered as he stood now by the bier in the dining-room, was that Grandfather had finally and formally surmounted his interim aspect and assumed for all time his true and adequate shape.13

The grandfather in a sense passes into the image in his death, becomes represented by it; and, if this was a battle, then perhaps the image or timeless portrait has won and, if not, then through it something inevitable is revealed. Forgetting art: what counts Fires, floods, wars, and unfolding events that obscure or destroy, affect how we think about art, offering art as pure availability through its physical unavailability, as noted by Jones earlier,14 and it is perhaps this very

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conception that clarifies what we in fact mean when we talk about art. For Bataille, the art object is a play between the moment and what is presented through it, but also what falls away or is other. Bataille pinpoints art as an interaction, eschewing a focus on the produced object, and, in terms of a miraculous moment, asking, “What is the meaning of art, architecture, music, painting or poetry if not the anticipation of a suspended, wonder-struck moment, a miraculous moment?”15 In this he charges art with: the power to capture and endlessly recapture the moment that counts, the moment of rupture, of fissure. As if we were trying to arrest the moment and freeze it in the constantly renewed gasps of our laughter or our sobs.16

Bataille relates the moment of art to the experience of happy tears, discussed earlier, and to the charmed interplay of collapsing expectation between what is and is not—like the discovery that someone you thought had perished on a ship was instead alive and well or conversely something you thought would last has indeed perished.17 Through this capturing and endless recapturing, art presents an attempt to make the moment permeable, to entangle the moment and reveal it as something other that might be returned to and which engulfs us in the renewed experience where conceptions fall away. But in these terms, what is art if not an ensnaring in the cascading of this moment, an attempted prolonging of what passes away, an intimate glitch in what is before us? It is an ability to not be here, yet it is something within art that gives distinction, and takes strength from an undoing capacity deep at its core. In a literal sense, that is the interplay of works such as Tinguely’s Homage to New York,18 in which the movement, collapse, and burning of the sculpture fascinates and ensnares our minds, if only briefly, to this moment of rupture that the art object entails. However, to focus purely on the spectacle of Homage to New York turns art into some parlor trick; whereas Homage is perhaps tailor-made for illustrating the operation of art in Bataille’s terms, to capture this ruptured moment, returning and making it permeable through its extravagant enactment. It is also essential to see how painting or sculpture, more inert seeming art objects, enact this ensnaring and recapture of the moment of fissure in an attempt to make it permeable—like the portrait that attracts yet likewise extracts.

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When moments are permeable: Martin and perception as the primary experience For Nancy, art offers a moment of contact between Self and Other. He observes, “In Art, the form that is created” does not pass its value from itself, but “in the extent that it opens beyond itself.”19 Referencing Maurice Blanchot, Nancy continues, “It is open beyond and open to an otherness.” 20 In these terms art is about making space through which the other might become perceived, as a vitality of the moment. For Maurice Blanchot: Art requires that he who practices it should be immolated to art, should become other, not another, not transformed from the human being he was into an artist with artistic duties, satisfactions and interests, but into nobody, the empty, animated space where art’s summons is heard. 21

Looking at the work of a painter such as Agnes Martin, with austere coal-lined grids repeatedly painted against a chalky or pale background, there is an emphasis on drawing out and experiencing the moment of contact and finding a truth or intimacy through an emptying; giving weight to perceiving the moment and making it permeable (in the sense that it becomes marked but not fixed, but also joined like Agamben’s notion, an oscillation in ambiguity rendering it “permeable” and discernible amid an “evanescent world of forms”),22 and in this Martin’s paintings attempt to mark and experience the moment in making. Each line locates, as a touching of the particular moment, capturing exactly this moment but allowing it to open and be permeable in our experience of it. This approach attempts a practice of ensnaring something about perception and the moment, to lose the self in this otherness. Likewise, Martin’s paintings present a concern with perceiving and presenting the moment as a primary experience and, underscoring this emphasis, Martin notes: Perception is the primary experience. Thinking; we consider that which we have perceived. It is a secondary experience. Thinking compares everything that we have perceived with everything that we are perceiving at the moment.23

Art in these terms becomes about engagement and perception of the moment in a primary sense. It draws back to the moment of perception, not in its ability to compare or fix in logic, but in its ensnaring of the moment that counts (for Bataille) or as an emptying engagement for Blanchot.

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In Martin’s attempt to inhabit the moment, to carefully set down with markers the exact intimacy of the moment, she places each instant within a primacy of simple lines, as if, just so, she would have touched something of that moment while the secondary falls away. In a moment’s exactitude, it becomes this moment in which we brush against it again, as well as distinctly the moment of its inception. By leaving evidence of the moment’s mark on her canvases, it is something to be returned to—perceived as this moment and through the contact of a later moment of the viewer’s perception; connecting the moment to the canvas in the immediacy of mark making and the line inscribing it as action, and to be exactly that moment, yet permeable, as something that might be returned to. On perceiving the moment and her use of line, Martin states, “I just drew this horizontal line” and then “I found out about all the other lines.”24 With moment laid down as an intimate line, it becomes other lines, becomes the peculiar grid in perceiving moments, but also an undoing of the line’s authority (an immolating), drawing us back to the primacy of perception in this particular moment and revealing it as permeable. Of this tension and dissonance between composition and perception, Martin notes: My formats are square, but the grids never are absolutely square; they are rectangles, a little bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance, though I didn’t set out to do it that way. When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.25

Square and line, as markers in time, are lightened, opened up, and made permeable, and in these terms art’s ability to be about the moment and a capturing and recapturing of it—in Bataille’s words—is also an attempt to evaporate the thing before us in a perception of the moment. Much as Tinguely’s Homage to New York undoes itself physically in fire and collapse, drawing us back to the moment of this unfolding and the current moment as a tension, Martin’s work also attempts this, yet perhaps in a more retiring form befitting austerely constructed painting. The work reenacts a fissure with form as undoing that lightens or dissolves, making this moment permeable, lightened, opened—the state that Blanchot sought through the emptying out where art’s summons is heard. And that is a maneuver of art, an attempt to evaporate the thing before us, to let it disappear into what it is and undo and dissolve its weight and power through what surpasses, and to return us to the moment of perception. We see it again in Jim Lambie’s Zobop—a flat work constructed from

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concentric bands of multicolored electrical tape applied to the floor that follow the contours of the room’s outline, starting at the room’s perimeter and proceeding until they reach the center. Installed, it disrupts the ground we walk on into geometric bands of color and abstraction. Zobop draws focus to form’s ability to enact a sort of dissolution. Lambie describes the piece: For me something like Zobop, the floor piece, it is creating so many edges that they all dissolve. Is the room expanding or contracting? … Covering an object somehow evaporates the hard edge off the thing, and pulls you towards more of a dreamscape.26

Art in these terms can be seen as an attempt to evaporate the thing before us, to undo and dissolve what is presented through what surpasses, and to return us to and ensnare us in the reverie of the moment when this occurs. It attempts to make or reveal the thing before us as somehow more than it is, or perhaps less, while drawing our attention to this moment of fissure. Not only is this impulse near to Tinguely’s work (or Martin and Lambie), but also that of Jan Brueghel or an altar painting, the return to loss of a Pietà but also a Donald Judd; again for Bataille it is art’s ability to draw us, like a portrait with its ability to detach and cast it forth,27 into the “miraculous moment when anticipation dissolves into NOTHING, detaching us from the ground on which we were groveling, in the concatenation of useful activity.”28 Moreover, perhaps it is this very same ground from which we become detached that Nancy speaks of when he examines the operation of art and the image (keeping in mind again that for Nancy and Bataille the image refers not only to painting or sculpture, but also to music and literature). According to Nancy: “One can thus say that it appears as what it is by disappearing. Disappearing as ground, it passes entirely into the image.”29 Thus, in a primary mode, for both Bataille and Nancy, what is central to art is a disappearance or collapsing of the thing into something other, which detaches and reveals an intimacy as a permeable moment, ­appearing as what it is through this action of disappearing. Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? As an attempt at evaporating the thing before us, it is crucial to our understanding of the image and art in general to recognize this capacity to appear as what it is by disappearing30 and its relation to the moment

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when anticipation dissolves into NOTHING, detaching us from the ground on which we were groveling, in the concatenation of useful activity.31 Within the image resides a challenge of representation, in the manner that destruction implies the revelation of something thought lost; similarly, representation itself implies an obscuring or hiding of something behind the image through which it appears as what it is by disappearing. In Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Baudrillard observes, “Behind every image, something has disappeared. And that is the source of its fascination.”32 In this sense it is through the image that a loss is made visible, and that is the source of our fascination. With the portrait of Castorp’s grandfather, we find therein that an “old man’s everyday appearance was not his real and authentic one,” but instead recedes behind the authority of the portrait (the imperative of POIDH).33 Through it, everyday life appears as merely an interim version, receding behind, subsumed into, an authority of the representation that persists, and into which it disappears. Leader noted something similar with the theft of the Mona Lisa and the absence it revealed. But there is still enough of this empty space present when art fails to disappear: it is the special, sacred space that the artwork inhabits, the space that makes us ask the question, “Is this art?” The problem, and the power, of this space is that we can’t see it. Art can evoke it for us, but it remains invisible. It is both what art invites us to see and what art stops us from seeing.34

Like the lost works Jones chronicles for his Museum of Lost Art, its fascination is the fascination of loss, this disappearance that is “the source of its fascination”35 which likewise exerts as the disappearance of Sid Gale, the elderly dockworker’s experience, into Whiteread’s House and draws us in. And with the mark something contrary emerges, “By representing things to ourselves, by naming them, human beings call them into existence and at the same time hasten their doom, subtly detach them from their brute reality.”36 Through representation, what is called into existence simultaneously detaches (or in Nancy’s terms, is a throwing in front of us that, distracts it from it, through a projection in the image that extracts from homogeneity).37 The motion of this disappearance into representation might be understood in its relationship to knowledge, as Baudrillard points out: “‘to analyse’ means literally ‘to dissolve.’”38 Through this act of representation a withdrawal is marked, where particulars of a grandfather of whom “though the lips were shrunken against the bare gums, for he had lost

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all his teeth” recedes and disappears into the correction of a “chin was dropped, his mouth drawn down” of the portrait. This is the disappearance that distracts as something lost in making the monument; where “lovely woodwork and mouldings” and the “lovely front room” in which Sid Gale spent his life are displaced and disappear into a “monument to the house that refused to become a park.”39 Baudrillard continues: “The moment a thing is named, the moment representation and concepts take hold of it, is the moment when it begins to lose its energy—with the risk that it will become a truth or impose itself as ideology.”40 It is this moment that something becomes truer than what is, when representation and concept take hold, detaching and ceasing to be as it is, and instead imposing an idea behind which something discretely recedes like a grandfather’s portrait. This is the image’s capacity to distance, of Warhol’s Death and Disaster series and the impulse for Damage Control, to bring the unseen under control through the seen and to disappear into plain sight. Through making visible and representing something ever present in the media (airplane and car crashes, electrocutions, riots, and assassinations), through naming it and giving it form, it allows the viewer to distance themselves from the events to allow them to dissipate or disappear into their representation. This is what Leader observed as the obscuring into the art object; this disappearance, which was only revealed in absence through the theft of the Mona Lisa. Yet Baudrillard contends that it is only when a thing is beginning to disappear that the concept appears: “Thus the real vanishes into the concept. But what is even more paradoxical is exactly the opposite movement by which concepts and ideas (but also phantasies, utopias, dreams and desires) vanish into their very fulfilment.”41 In this disappearance emerges “a contradictory twofold postulate,”42 in which across representation something vanishes into concept, but also through which concepts and intangibles likewise disappear into their very fulfillment. This is perhaps also what Metzger attempts. In representing the destructions he sees in the world, in a way he endeavors to make it disappeared and displaced through actions that he challenges with an affinity of the destruction in the language of the “military, technical, and economic domains”43 and “to highlight processes that already exist but are too little noticed.”44 He pulls a destruction he sees in the world through representing an affinity and intimacy (his actions resemble the actions in the world), which he reenacts and extracts (distracts it from it, distinguishes it, detaches it and casts it forth)45 so that we might see its operation in the

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world, forming a portrait in its own manner through his actions. With auto-destruction he plays with the auto-disappearance inherent to image making and, like the portrait of the grandfather, he perhaps hopes that the destruction in the world will likewise recede behind the image he presents through his actions and gestures. Thus, here is where we might start if we want to observe something of art that likewise might lend itself to these destructions. Where an image throws in my face an intimacy, a distinction If, through naming and representation, the image causes a disappearance, then art must be seen as housing a tension between what disappears and what is distinct: a permeability between these two capacities, and the attempted crossing of art. Yet through what disappears there is a touching of what remains distinct (the touching of the portrait), even if only paradoxically, and that is rather of art or where these two impulses touch. Nancy sees this in terms of what remains apart, what he intones through the distinct (or what Bataille might term the sacred). Nancy observes: The sacred is what, of itself, remains set apart, at a distance, and with which one forms no bond (or only a very paradoxical one). It is what one cannot touch (or only by a touch without contact). To avoid this confusion, I will call it the distinct.46

It is through distinction that an intimacy draws us into the image across the interplay of distinct and resemblance. Yet, in this manner, the summons of art is in the drawing out of this moment like a portrait in its disappearance, a simultaneous gathering and collapsing of this moment of intimacy in concatenation, unlinking and revealing it to be undone. Art lies (in the sense both to lay and to deceive) in its attempt to extend this unfolding moment in dissolution—appearing as what it is by disappearing. Thus one is reminded of the classical distinctions of art as a deception, as a contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasios, in which Zeuxis paints a picture of grapes that draws down the birds from the sky to peck at them, but when Zeuxis cries out for his rival to draw back his linen curtain and reveal his own work, the curtain itself is revealed as painting. From this Zeuxis admits that he had deceived the birds, but Parrhasios had deceived him, and art’s prize becomes a situating, as well as a deception.47 Yet something distinct might be revealed through this action of

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disappearance as a straddle between what disappears and what remains distinct. Nancy sees it in terms of intimacy: “The image throws in my face an intimacy [sovereign] that reaches me in the midst of intimacy—through sight, through hearing, or through the very meaning of words.”48 For Nancy, art throws in one’s face in the midst, whereas for Bataille it captures and endlessly recaptures—this capacity of art and the image to present a fissure or rupture that reveals an intimacy and otherness. What gives art this knack, for Bataille, is entangled with what he calls the miraculous moment to which the negative miracle points, in which we become ensnared in the impossibility of what is before us and yet set apart through what falls away. Likewise, for Nancy, the image gathers its strength through attempting a crossing of what is apart or distinct and what cannot be crossed. In this manner “its tension is that of a setting apart and keeping separate which at the same time is a crossing of this separation.”49 Further, perhaps what destroyed or lost art objects are most keenly capable of presenting as negative portraits is this distinct and impalpable aspect in art, this miraculous moment in its dissolution. Hinting at this trait in the image, Nancy looks to an impalpable within it, and perhaps in it finds the matter of art: One cannot touch it: not because one does not have the right to do so, nor because one lacks the means, but rather because the distinctive line or trait separates something that is no longer of the order of touch; not exactly an untouchable, then, but rather an impalpable. But this impalpable is given in the trait and in the line that separates it, it is given by this distraction that removes it. (Consequently, my first and last question will be: is such a distinctive trait not always a matter of art?)50

So perhaps absent or destroyed objects likewise reenact and trace this distinction or rupture, “the distinctive line or trait” that marks art and gives the image its drive. However, simultaneously, it presents a distraction through which it disappears, the fascination of art and the fascination of what is lost behind every image; art instead hovers in this interplay or attempted crossing of what disappears and what remains distinct or ­separate. In both the lost art object, as well as in the workings of the image and art in more general terms (for both Bataille and Nancy), it is an impalpability that separates, as well as an attempt to cross this rift; as Nancy notes, is “such a distinctive trait not always a matter of art?” It

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is this distinction or intangible aspect, through intimacy, that is at the center of art (which the theft of the Mona Lisa likewise revealed). This is the matter of art, the moment that counts and which the destroyed art object echoes. Further, here we reach an accord with Bataille on what art entails between a “a setting apart and keeping separate which at the same time is a crossing of this separation” and an ability to “capture and endlessly recapture the moment that counts, the moment of rupture, of fissure,” which remains.51 In this, art becomes about an extension and attempt to cross this fissure into otherness through what disappears and falls away, examining the moment that counts through making it permeable (an attempted crossing). In this sense, it is a rift of the thing in the moment that is essential to understanding what is at stake in art, which is ultimately an unbinding that leads to the metaphorical undoings that give art its energy and perhaps lend themselves more aptly to the physical undoings that the art objects seem so keen on reenacting. Art attempts a tethering of what is outside the object into what is inside, or of the object, into a delicate impalpability. This is the accident art courts with every moment. Yet to lose sight of art as a gathering or recapturing of the distinct moment that counts—and more importantly this ensnaring in which the moment is made permeable as something that can be returned to and experienced—is to, in a sense, lose art. Amid this, art becomes lost in a wash of art objects as opposed to the action capable of marking them as art, where what in Nancy’s terms is distinct and becomes misplaced, and eyes only focus on a disappearance implied as ruins in the making; the potential thefts or warehouse fires of art. It is to lose sight of what is distinct or miraculous in their disappearance or reemergence, with the capacity to confound our assumptions, and instead to render art inert. Unbinding Art, through a tethering and unbinding, renders as permeable, yet perhaps this is likewise why there are so many holes in art history (as noted by both Jones and Mundy with their gathering of lost works), where something about the impulse of art and this fragile link between what is here and what is absent emerges. This is what the portrait attempts to preserve, conjoined in the fragility of the art object itself, yet at the same time revealing something of what art is and ultimately does. Conversely, a history might be about creating an appearance of cohesion, a glossing over and crossing of something that is ultimately other, which, for Jones, for

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the absent art object allows it to grow in its influence. Yet art (for Bataille) is a capturing of a schism and the moment that counts, along with Nancy’s notion of distinction exposing an unbinding and endless flourish of what is irreconcilable, a fissure, between this object that rots, burns, falls away, and that which remains distinct. Art and the image (or portrait) are this weaving together of the two impulses, like Gamboni’s Janus head, as well as this ensnaring and attempted capture of this fissure in an endeavor to make it permeable as a crossing. To be art is to reach toward a sometimes impossible and changing intimacy, and as Nancy says: That is why there is a history of art, and so many jolts and upheavals in this history: because art cannot be a religious observance (not of itself or anything else), and because it is always taken back up into the distinction of what remains separate and irreconcilable, in the tireless exposure of an always unbound intimacy. Its unbinding [de ́liaison], its endless flourish [de ́lie ́], are what the precision of the image weaves together and disentangles in each case.52

Moreover, this is precisely what art weaves together and disentangles. It is a capacity that Martin traces with her works, to be caught up in “the primary experience” of “perceiving at the moment,” and through its intimacy shipwrecked, if only for a moment, beyond the secondary of expectations and thought and an implied continuity of conceptions.53 Thus, it may prove vital, if we seek to understand art, to see the impulse and interaction as Bataille does: not simply as the fixed objects it attempts to produce in series, but instead as the distinct object, that which “bears within it the negation of that which defines it as an object,”54 where through an intimacy of distinction they are ultimately unbound and “destroyed as objects.”55,56 Yet this is in part also why history and art are not the same. In as much as history is ultimately about a suspension of a moment to connect and create a cohesive narrative (like the Gallery of Lost Art in the face of apparent gaps), as Bataille notes, art is a suspending, as well as an unbinding, of the moment in its intimacy. It is an attempt to freeze and capture or draw out what is inherently distinct and other, and that is the charm, as well as the power, of art. Through it, a drive toward memorializing lost art and the spark that gives art its initial energy are intricately tied to this touching between what is present and that which is not, and art itself is a drawing out, returning, and an extension of this rift in the moment that counts.

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The shipwreck of art; when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck—the negative miracle and the miracle in reverse Further, with this tangling interplay within art, we must begin to understand that with the creation of art comes a destruction, one inevitably contained in the other, like Balzac’s unknown masterpiece revealing a mystery of form. It is in part this accident that is implied with its very inception. In The Accident of Art, Virilio proposes, “When you invent a concept, an art, a sculpture, a film that is truly revolutionary, or when you sail the first ship, fly the first plane or launch the first space capsule, you invent the crash.”57 With each invention of art you likewise invent its destruction from the same impulse, perhaps only distanced in time; as Virilio phrases it elsewhere, when you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck. With this, implied in the ship is also the wreck, like Bataille’s negative miracle that through shipwreck reveals the miraculous “moment when anticipation dissolves into NOTHING,” and likewise the operation of “an authentic work of art,” where the impossible reveals itself tangible through the shipwreck.58 This is the operation of art that breaks an illusion of concatenation, instead stranding us and ensnaring in the collapse into this moment.59 Art is not simply the ship launched but an ability to capture and endlessly recapture this moment that counts as if “we were trying to arrest the moment and freeze it in the constantly renewed gasps of our laughter or our sobs.”60 Art is an attempt to touch this moment of rupture to make it permeable in a primary sense, this accident: of technology, of death, of war (to which Damage Control responds)—but also an accident of beauty, an accident of intimacy. Moreover, because there does not exist any clever wordplay as a solvency for this precise “artwreck,” we must instead refer to these activities as shipwreck or more simply by the portmanteau of art. Virilio cautions with art, “As soon as there is invention, there is accident. The contrary emerges. Not simply in the field of transportation and transmission, but in the field of the transmission of meaning, in the work.”61 Further, like Bataille’s negative miracle of the destruction of art, implying within it the positive miracle, art hovers and draws out in this point of touch and fissure: a Whiteread House evanescently suspended between a dockworker’s home and the house pulled down by a council; or again in the coal-like lines of Martin on canvas, marking specifically this moment here before us, exactly. As Virilio says: “You can’t create the

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positive without creating the negative,”62 and that is what the destruction of art, the shipwreck, or the portmanteau “art” implies. Perhaps this is the mystery of form that shatters and yet, as Virilio concedes, “Granted, the accident, in a certain way, is a miracle in reverse. It reveals something absolutely necessary to knowledge.”63 Like an image that obscures through disappearance, accident lies in wait, uncovering as this miracle in reverse, an analogue to Bataille’s negative miracle, which collapses and reveals something absolutely necessary and unanticipated, tracing back and bleeding into the moment of art. Through it, the thefts and destructions of Breitwieser reveal a perfectly inverted and simultaneous determination, or perverse counter determination64 as the actions of art trace into the basin from which Jones and Mundy hew loss into contemplation, and Demand’s photograph draws back to a photo that captures the destruction of Qing Dynasty vases in a museum, and Tinguely’s Homage to New York lurches and spindles toward its undoing before an audience. It is this reverse or negative miracle that is revealed between two pivots, which, in extension, is the habitation where art resides. Further, in inhabiting and drawing out this moment of fissure, art through its “unbinding, its endless flourish,” is “what the precision of the image weaves together and disentangles in each case.”65 Notes  1 Lotringer, Sylvère, and Paul Virilio. The Accident of Art. New York, NY; Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e); Distributed by the MIT Press, 2005. p. 69.  2 Jones, Jonathan. “Stolen, looted, lost and burned.” The Guardian, September 4, 2003.  3 Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Ground of the Image. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2005. p. 4.  4 Ibid.  5 Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. London: Penguin Books, 1960. p. 24.  6 Ibid.  7 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 4.  8 Ibid.  9 Mann, The Magic Mountain, p. 24. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., p. 25. 12 Ibid., p. 26. 13 Ibid. 14 Jones, “Stolen, looted, lost and burned.”

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15 Bataille, Georges, The Accursed Share. Volume II, the History of Eroticism. Volume III, Sovereignty. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991, p. 200. Subsequent references: The Accursed Share (vols II and III). 16 Ibid., p. 203. 17 Ibid., pp. 204–208. 18 Homage to Jean Tinguely’s “Homage to New York.” Directed by Robert Breer. 1960. 19 Nancy, Jean-Luc. Jean-Luc Nancy. Art and Politics. Lecture given at European Graduate School. August 1, 2010. www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-luc-nancy/ videos/art-and-politics/ (accessed August 6, 2013). 20 Ibid. 21 Blanchot, Maurice, and Gabriel Josipovici, The Sirens’ Song: Selected Essays of Maurice Blanchot. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982. 22 Agamben, Giorgio. The Man without Content. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press (1999). p. 8. 23 Martin, Agnes, and Dieter Schwarz. Agnes Martin: Writings. OstfildernRuit; Portchester: Hatje Cantz; Art Books International [distributor], 2005. p. 89. 24 Ibid., p. 38. 25 Ibid., p. 29. 26 www.pearllam.com/artist/jim-lambie/ (accessed March 10, 2013). 27 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 4. 28 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 203. 29 Nancy, The Ground of the Image. p. 7. 30 Ibid. 31 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 203. 32 Baudrillard, Jean, and Alain Willaume. Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? London; New York, NY: Seagull Books, 2009. p. 32. 33 “Pics or it didn’t happen” the internet catchphrase and aphorism of the image’s authority. 34 Leader, Darian. Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us from Seeing. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. pp. 176–177. 35 Baudrillard and Willaume. Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, p. 32. 36 Ibid., p. 11. 37 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 4. 38 Baudrillard and Willaume, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, p. 11. 39 The Sunday Times, November 8, 1993. Retrieved from: www.artangel.org. uk//projects/1993/house/press/press_coverage (accessed April 17, 2013).

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40 Baudrillard and Willaume, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, p. 12. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Brougher, Kerry, Russell Ferguson, Dario Gamboni, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Musée d’art moderne Grand-Duc Jean, and Kunsthaus Graz. Damage Control: Art and Destruction since 1950. p. 178. 44 Metzger, Gustav, and Sabine Breitwieser. Gustav Metzger: History History. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005. p. 28. 45 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 4. 46 Ibid, p. 1. 47 Pliny the Elder. The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art. Translated by K. Jex-Blake, with commentary and historical introduction by E. Sellers, and additional notes contributed by Heinrich Ludwig Urlichs. Macmillan and Company, Limited, 1896. 48 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 4. 49 Ibid., p. 3. 50 Ibid., p. 2. 51 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 203. 52 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, pp. 13–14. 53 Martin and Schwarz, Agnes Martin, p. 89. 54 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 244. 55 Ibid., p. 243. 56 This will be explored in more detail in Chapter 4. 57 Lotringer and Virilio, The Accident of Art, p. 88. 58 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 207. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., p. 203. 61 Lotringer and Virilio, The Accident of Art, p. 87. 62 Ibid., p. 88. 63 Ibid., p. 63. 64 Baudrillard, Jean. Fatal Strategies. Translated by Philip Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski. New York, NY; Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e); Distributed by the MIT Press, 2008. p. 110. 65 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, pp. 13–14.

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Trying to make the moment permeable, the art impulse yields forms that are likewise solvent. It is this intersection of permeability that the destroyed object prompts most overtly. Crossing an expansive moment when form is most solvent, to be here and yet not, solvent in terms of capable of undoing (dissolving) yet also in the sense of solvency, to make secure and firm. Therefore, in this an art object points to itself, as well as to what is imperceptible and distinct, ensnaring us both in the cascading of the moment and in prolonging this attempted crossing and touching. To recognize the instability of the art object, we can return again to its solvent form, or to an ability of art to posit something that at the same time is an undoing, as both Bataille and Nancy suggest. In art’s occasion, there is a struggle to make (or if not make then reveal) the moment permeable—something capable of being returned to, as well as set apart. If we approach this understanding with solvency, as an operation, akin to the object that Scheherazade attempts to hew with her stories in One Thousand and One Nights—as a method for forestalling a verdict1 and extending her moments against foreclosure and maintaining their permeability—or likewise as Sarah Winchester’s task of attempting to build a metaphorical house that never ceased, with her construction of the Winchester House,2 we might better perceive this conjunctive impulse that behaves in peculiar ways, finding it again in the large melting wax candle sculptures of Urs Fischer. Scheherazade tells a story; a king’s edict However, first, to understand a work of art and its capacity to recapture the moment that counts—making the moment permeable, as something that can be returned to and evading the foreclosure of what appears

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set—we can begin with the attempts of Scheherazade. One in a long line of brides, each sentenced to death after her wedding night to the same king, Scheherazade steps forward, attempting something other with her dispelling of conclusions. Misstep and her moments end, but she walks nimbly, and art hovers and erupts from this impulse, stretches out and yawns. She constructs her nest in the moment of Bataille’s fissure, playing with the rupture between its passing and the moment itself. Caressing and crossing between the finality where the cut takes hold and everything becomes fixed (the king’s death edict) and the fissure of that moment when it is made permeable, assumptions regarding outcomes collapse in an extension of the moment that counts. She is attempting to suspend while renewing constantly, to give form but also reach intimacy in something that cannot truly be made fixed in its changeability (passing moments). With the forms she posits, she ruptures a foreclosure, recapturing the moment and expanding this rift, inhabiting it and unfixing it and creating something permeable that might be returned to night after night, taking us each evening back into its midst—and this is what art attempts. If an image is worth one thousand words, as the cliché goes, then the action of Scheherazade is about what exceeds in its one thousand and one-ness, through this act of fissure and breaking of an existing pattern or expectation to return us to here. From the first night, a king lays awake and hears Scheherazade’s story, which enlarges and draws out until it meets the morning where it leaves him each night, again in the middle. Thus the king spares her that first night, undoing an edict (in which dawn equals death, but also dawn and the next day) if only temporarily; yet each night the story expands until it is a second story, other stories, each capturing and recapturing the moment in the rupture between the concluding edict (her death sentence) and its setting aside in this collapsing of the moment. Night after night her story continues, and each night a foreclosure is forestalled, set apart, put aside, unfolded into new shape, yet is also a crossing of this separation— of that which falls away in the action of the storytelling. The moment is expanded in the midst of falling away and stepping forward, and this is perhaps what art attempts through its solvency in form to consummate: to capture and endlessly recapture in the middle or midst of its otherness and intimacy, returning us again to the moment that counts. Bataille shed happy tears for a cousin he does not know, whom he thought dead on a ship sinking, only to discover he still lives, to be here yet not, impossible yet there it is, in that moment when what we know collapses yet we are still here.3 What art attempts, beyond the device of a

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cliff hanger (for to see it as cliff hanger misses its subtlety), is this ability to catch us unawares in the moment that counts, here yet other, never finished but always caught up somehow here; and that is the trick of art even in its destruction. Halfway through, at dawn, the ability to carry forward into the dawning moment; there is art to this forestalling, and with its tallying, sparring amid the permeability of the moment. Scheherazade practiced an art of deferral, attempting a maneuver to postpone closures and undo what appeared fixed. Hewing in order to unwrap (like Perec’s sentences that read both ways as palindromes),4 she implemented a process of undoing through creation—in a manner that appeared inescapable—and in the process uncovered creation in the form of deferral of its final architecture (against form and through form). For each of the One Thousand and One Nights, she gathers sinews from a previous night’s tale—creating an undoing in what was foregone—unraveling its apparent resolution, and thus folding the king’s edict, expanding the moment and space of her life. The distinct bounds toward the indistinct, leaps into it—an other of form And here is the rub: how is something that posits and is aimed towards assertion (the statements of art and the image), at the same time solvent? Nancy describes the operation of the image that sets apart in its attempt to cross, which exposes a dual nature. It simultaneously houses “a withdrawal and a passage that, however, does not pass”5 and which causes the distinct or otherness to come forward. With the image: The distinct bounds toward the indistinct and leaps into it, but it is not interlinked with it. The image offers itself to me, but it offers itself as an image (once again there is ambivalence: only an image / a true image …). An intimacy is thus exposed to me: exposed, but for what it is, with its force that is dense and tight, not relaxed, reserved, not readily given.6

Thus, what exerts a solvency in ambivalence, as Nancy notes, with its status as “only an image/a true image,” also exposes an intimacy, which Bataille might term the intimacy encountered in his moment that counts. It is this operation of putting forth, and yet also what is withdrawn, which undoes through the moment of intimacy. In another register, if we consider the term solvency in light of what is currently underway in Greece, with the Eurozone crisis and Germany’s desire for Greece to impose solvency at any cost, it presents in both forms with an unfolding dissolution.

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It is tied intrinsically to the rhetoric of collapse, solvent in the face of the solvency of social and economic breakdown. We see it in the observations and framing in the news, “There is mass unemployment. There is the collapse of mainstream parties. The press and broadcast media are struggling to remain independent, indeed solvent.”7 Solvency is seen as a solution and antidote for dissolution, yet the two are intricately joined in solvent. To think in terms of an antidote is to make things other to how they are. In this sense fixing (making fixed) undoes, which again draws attention to the doubling in this word solvency. Something hides in this word solvent, where solvency means further layoffs, selling off cultural artefacts, privatization, austerity, and extracting finances from individuals where none exists for the sake of imposing a formal idea of solvency as an image of solvent State. Perhaps this is the legacy of treating people like an image. However, art and the image also house this tension which, while giving form, likewise undoes through its ability to draw out, focus, and collapse. This solvency in the form exerts as a force, which Nancy sees as other to form: “It is what does not show itself but rather gathers itself into itself, the taut force on this side of forms or beyond them, but not as another obscure form: rather as the other of forms.”8 In this, art and the operation of the image become the cohabitation of form with its other, and this gives insight into its instability, as well as into its force and tendencies. This gathering, taut force is akin to what Scheherazade hones through her ability to capture and recapture us with the moment that counts, this fissure between the thing before us and something other, which, for Nancy, draws its tension through “a setting apart and keeping separate which at the same time is a crossing of this separation.”9 Solvent form is art’s facility to reveal an Other of form through this attempted crossing. Further, this is the moment that counts for Scheherazade, the gathering and ability to set apart the foreclosure of a king’s death edict, putting what appears fixed and foregone aside, and instead expanding the moment and crossing what is beyond with what is here. Moreover, this is what solvent form does, this Scheherazade-like deed that plays with the moment and its ability to be here, attempting to posit it and reveal it in its solvency, while drawing us back into this moment of intimacy. Useless and dangerous; a potato sack in a vitrine Perhaps here is also the danger of art: it reveals the moment in its solvency, and while proposing one approach, at the same time it collapses.

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It pulls back from utility with its aversion to conclusions and outcomes through its return to the moment. Louise Bourgeois took inspiration from the story of Scheherazade but observes, “Scheherazade talked to ward off castration (assassination). She talks as a last defense. It is a pretty ­miserable motive, useless and dangerous, silence is wonderful.”10 Yet to step out of silence is to act, to give something impalpable form; however, it is perhaps to mistake the impalpable,11 in Nancy’s words, for silence. For in absolute silence there is no attempt toward the crossing of this thing before us, with the otherness or impalpability that is distinct yet somehow hovers around, clings to, and inhabits form. Feasibly, Bourgeois doth protest too much in an attempt to distance (it is common to find faults in the traits of others that we also possess), and instead mistakes silence for art’s ability to discretely tuck an activity behind the apparent silence of the thing itself and make the moment of experience permeable. Therefore, in this sense, art is miserable in that it is inadequate and always an attempt, never concluded or foregone even in its putting forth, that must constantly be returned to and permeable to the present moment or fall into an edict of what is foregone and passes away. It might be more accurate to say the impalpability in art is wonderful, useless, and dangerous, and that is what is at stake in art and for Scheherazade. In attempting to allow us access or to cross into the impalpable, art is dangerous in that it achieves its gravity through what is not exactly there or is other (impossible, yet there it is). We hear murmurs of it with works like Bourgeois’s Couple II,12 as an attempted crossing between the intangible and what is presented in the moment before us; contact in an attempted consummation. An object grapples with its own inertness and attempts to cross over this to something else. Gaining its influence through a claim to be more than just the tactile thing before us, gathering itself into itself, in Nancy’s words, or housing something that captures and recaptures, in Bataille’s, it draws our focus to the taut force on this side of forms and strives to reveal something encased within that is rather the other of form. Couple II consists of simple things: a glass and wood vitrine encasing two horizontal figures, pillow-like stuffed—a man and woman (or perhaps genderless)—disinterestedly embraced, one atop the other (Figure 3.1). Their cushioned, potato sack construction in dark fabric emphasizing a childlike perspective on copulation, while the vitrine sets the piece as an object to be studied like a taxidermy specimen more at home in a natural history museum. Objects such as these attempt to capture and vitrify the moment (both literally and figuratively), making it an object to pass light through, a window of sorts; to extend this moment

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3.1  Louise Bourgeois (American, born France, 1911–2010), Couple II, 1996. Fabric, kneed brace, glass, and wood; couple (overall): 27 × 60 × 32 inches (68.58 × 152.4 × 81.28 cm); vitrine (overall): 65 × 79 × 47 inches (165.1 × 200.66 × 119.38 cm). Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Sarah Norton Goodyear Fund, 1999 (1999:12). © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York/DACS, London 2017. Photograph by Tom Loonan.

of contact, approach from all angles, and rupture inert through touching what is other and not directly housed in the physical objects. What is it that is not the potato-like construction, the dark fabric or stitching, yet is here? Silently whispering to prevent its own demise and reverting back to simple piles of fabric, stuffing, and a glass case. Art introduces the object with something else, something it is not truly capable of housing, and, like Nancy’s image, it attempts to become a crossing site for the impalpable or what is distinct from the thing itself. Like much work from Bourgeois, often playful or naive in its construction, this sculptural object revels in what can only be hinted at or pointed

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to, with often-ominous results. Stressing this is the gasp that the two horizontal objects are indeed headless, and the one underneath (the woman?) has her leg bracketed in a metal brace, and that the feet are connected and contiguous into the other’s, so that each polyp figure is instead another portion of the same mass bent over itself—not two figures but a damaged whole, folded. While plush, there is something densely smothering about these figures, like over-stuffed pillows pressed to a sleeper’s face, drawing out this moment that counts that is here before us. As if through depriving it of enough oxygen, without ultimately killing it, we might in fact be able to draw this moment out, perhaps forever, put it in a box; but forever is a very long time. Bourgeois sets aside the forgone conclusion of the object itself through the crossing into something that is other to it, returning and capturing our attention in the vitrified moment, which the art object expands and attempts to defer. Is the silence Bourgeois invokes a charm against the foregone and closure, instead simply a muffling of the chatter of this permeable moment of rupture in which the object exerts its influence? Thus in silence one sidesteps—yet still this wind blows, while overlooking something inherent in the creative act—with the tendency to undo and circumvent what might appear fixed; fixed yet not. Less of a last defense than an expanding of presence; it is useless in a manner of speaking, perhaps, in that the method draws needless emphasis away from conclusions and the utility of closure. However, through creation an attempt is made to inhabit the space of what may be foregone, the seductive and worthwhile space of extension. These methods are dangerous indeed, having the ability to both challenge and be contested: a cat and mouse with termination. And herein lies its mystery. We spin yarns to exercise our virility, explain away the inevitable, fill space to distance ourselves from demise, but this is only apparent. Presented with knots, we disentangle to undo and make, attempting to circumvent what looms. These are attempted gestures of forming in perpetuity, but perhaps in this they fail if not for the untangling and retangling of the moment that gives art its form. This is what Bourgeois’s objects say in their silence. Sarah Winchester builds her house around the clock When Sarah Winchester (Figure 3.2) commenced her Mystery House in the United States, she may have believed she was haunted by the weight of those massacred by the Winchester rifles in the clearing of the American frontier (and from which she received her fortune through

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3.2  Sarah Winchester.

her deceased husband).13 In a struggle to stave death’s call, she adopted a method of forestalling that required endeavoring to build around the clock, hiring crews to construct perpetually on her mansion, tearing down what was nearly constructed to continue erecting—rooms within rooms, windows looking into other parts of the house, hallways leading into walls (like Roland Barthes revising and preparing for a novel he never

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3.3  Winchester House.

ultimately writes).14 Sarah Winchester was building a house that never ceases: in an endless loop of construction, she continued to build and unfold, and in the process gave form to something that undoes—namely her haunting (Figure 3.3). A notion: if we construct enough we can somehow trick this otherness into revealing itself; catch it in the act (or through the act). Impossible in this mass of form, yet there it is. However, the other of form and its solvency is more than that which Scheherazade and Sarah Winchester invite (what Bourgeois attempts through silence and Scheherazade through words)—it is an attempt to touch the impalpable through form. Taking the Winchester House and its surrounding material as source, Jeremy Blake began constructing a consideration with his Winchester Trilogy videos.15 Watching the pieces, they trigger with the oddity of the Winchester house exterior: video trawls through, faded and bleeding, black inky outlines and palm trees to the side, shifts to blue, a dark shape melts from behind, one moment painterly and the next fading gauze. Saturated, it shifts from flank to margin, seeking some form that might attempt a cohesion, but it sinks back in and moves on. A shot of the house facade over-washed in blue, bay windows, exterior, slowly pulses and transitions into an under-fade of brightly colored blotches bleeding in and replacing it. The images are limpid, morphic, ink hemorrhaging into watery space, and strangely luminous. The audio is otherworldly, slight

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echo, perhaps the click of a film projector, construction. It lapses briefly into a cowboy movie refrain, hum, images on scrim, paints as stirred, nearly swirled as if manipulated in a transparent glass pan in a sixties psychedelic light show, forming Rorschach traces. Some symmetrical, kaleidoscope, and others deposited happenstance across a field, sunsets and portraiture, relapses, suspect then hollow. Floral, poppies, necrotic streaks, and halos, insect-like then expansive on horizons. Shadowy forms, a narrative, then amoebic, men with rifles, splotches; an inkblot fades into the vast estate, glimpses of the cinematic, a boxy room, interior, too-bright eyes. Then images are turned to the side as a labyrinth constructed from rainwater, images, memories, and a face on the door. Blake attempts an invocation, steam and tasseomancy, with a haunted progress of details and dispersion, in which nothing can be directly shown but must instead be inferred, pointed toward, and touched in a place without direct contact to words. Thus, as Nancy observes, “The essence of such a crossing lies in its not establishing a continuity: it does not suppress the distinction. It maintains it while also making contact.”16 Floral or internal organs linger, revealed in a strange transparency of layers, solvent, changes back into a painterly reduction, watercolors on a white sheet, pulsing in and out of focus, orange, green, fuchsia, brown, and yellow. Windows, turrets, panning down decaying sprawl, and the image fades again into something other—what hides behind an image, and what hides behind Winchester’s actions. This is perhaps what Bataille invokes in his description of art, this ability to capture and return to this moment, the unsuppressed astonishment of sobs and happy tears, but without the need for all these pesky words of description to intervene in its intimacy (and perhaps that is simply Bourgeois’s silence). Blake’s video loops entice into a haunted snag that invites us into this moment that reveals itself, yet which we already inhabit. On his process and the Winchester project, Blake noted: As an artist in a site like that, I would rather try to draw some sort of meaning … In other words, what interests me was the neurosis of this person and the poetic powers of what they build, rather than the history in a more straightforward way. Sort of like the alchemist expression of the prose, where you’re trying to show the motivation and psychic of the character by interpreting the surroundings.17

Beyond the story or physical site, the work of art draws in its surroundings, what is outside, as well as its crossing. It harbors an appeal to

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linger with what is beyond the thing itself, where the play of image does not “show itself but rather gathers itself into itself,”18 drawing something from the site and expanding with it. By attracting what is tacit and lurking in what is built, Blake’s Winchester reveals this solvency (to be with the house, yet its undoing and solvency, not her house but his house, and this permeable moment of fissure) along with the ability to shift form, which Sarah Winchester’s process of building also reveals. In its simultaneity, Blake’s work draws this moment out as fingers touching, catching in the moment that counts, which for Bataille is the aim of art. Yet, beyond all this sprawl of the image, which Sarah Winchester endeavored toward and Jeremy Blake’s work points to most overtly, is something made more unconcealed in a series of pieces by Urs Fischer which further tells us about art’s relationship to this moment—that which Bataille finds so vital. Watching a candle melt; the imago—when what appears fixed is undone Whereas Blake attempts an invocation with his Winchester Trilogy, Fischer undertakes to reveal this permeable moment of undoing through melting away surplus form to leave something stranded in the instant. With the three untitled works on display at the 54th Venice Biennale,19 Fischer presented a series of full-scale replicas as candles. Lit at inception, they cast dribbling stalactites, where wax pools down protrusions in each object’s form; shoulders become enmeshed in a shawl-like surplus of wax as it drips toward the floor; a face drops to the ground as a torso sags into a guttering abscess of molten light, and fronds from a dissipated chair back arch away (Figures 3.4 and 3.5). Each object caught in the process of dissolution as wicks and wax slowly sputter down. What Winchester conducted through advancing, Fischer realizes through redaction, yet both arrive at this moment of solvency. With inverted tactics to solvency—one positing and the other undoing—each discloses “the moment that counts, the moment of rupture, of fissure”20 and holds it extended before us. The largest of Fischer’s three works on display was the monumental reproduction of Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women, which highlights one of the founding myths of Rome, but here it is slowly consumed by fire/enlightenment/passions. Tucked to the side is an ordinary looking wax office chair, yet it too burns. Both kindled objects are watched over by the life-size candle of Fischer’s artist friend, and together they collapse over the course of the exhibition as the wicks burn down and the flame consumes the wax from which they

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3.4  Urs Fischer, Untitled.

are molded. Fischer’s pieces manage to straddle a space that allows them to function as both a votive and slowly burning effigy at the same time. Nancy: “The word imago designated the effigy of the absent, the dead, and, more precisely, the ancestors: the dead from whom we come, the links of the lineage in which each of us is a stitch.”21 Art enacts the wish

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3.5  Urs Fischer, Untitled (after more time has passed).

(yearning) and the absence together—the unresolved consummation of this fissure, which is again the moment of art in its loss. Further, perhaps it is this fissure that Bataille intones as the operation of art; the moment of solvency that Winchester courts through the profusion of form and that Urs Fischer finds through its erasure. Yet Fischer .

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manages to make this operation appear somehow explicit through its disappearance, demonstrating how these two acts of solvency are already rolled intrinsically into one action. The simple operations of the candle remind us that to create light, something is destroyed, yet something intangible presents as classical and contemporary forms are expended and drip into almost nothing tangible, the disfigurement of wax on the gallery floor. However, these objects are not only about passing (or time or solvency), but also about a sort of alterity, a third approximation that steps in and is not the original object nor the object’s absence, but some other frisson created between. Perhaps these burning objects trigger something akin to the works lost in the Momart fire (which will be examined in the next chapter)—like a test sample or inoculation—exploring the destruction of art to touch its meaning, but in such a way that one does not at first realize how similar one idea might be to another. Significance can sneak up in a manner particular to art, away from lists and intellectual thread pulling. The dexterity of art is its ability to open a new way of thinking about experience that captures perception in modes that deliberate cognation, or fact stacking, sometimes does not have access to; it has the means of destroying something to create something anew, and that is this moment. Yet, expansion of the moment can only ever be attempted (Scheherazade, Bourgeois, Winchester, and Fischer), and solvency continues whether desired or unbeckoned, for if we continue following the tale of Scheherazade, it feasibly becomes another’s tale. “But thereby hangs another tale, which may depend on but hasn’t the same smell as the black ruler I’m going to use to draw the line under this one,”22 as Francis Ponge describes the cycle of decay and undoing of autumn. However, in this way the Winchester Mansion, far from being a building that never ceased, has become a tourist attraction in San Jose; Bourgeois’s vitrine may crack and stuffing mildew; Blake may die in a bizarre suicide; and Fischer’s candles go out in a sputter of wax on the floor. Their work is solvent; it changes phase and focus and continues if only in decline and beyond—it may depend on, but does not have the same smell in, its change and otherness. This solvency offers a disorderly sorting, as Ponge continues: “All the doors of the polling booths bang open and shut. Into the bin! Into the bin! Nature shreds her manuscripts, demolishes her library, furiously knocks down her final fruits.”23 Yet here is what Scheherazade, Winchester, and the art object recognizes: with the act of creation, what appears fixed is ultimately undone.

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Notes  1 In One Thousand and One Nights, each day a king marries a new virgin only to behead her the following morning for being unfaithful. Scheherazade was able to stay her execution by stretching a story each night and ending in the middle so that it had to be continued into the next night’s installment, thus extending her own life.  2 The Winchester Mystery House is located in San Jose, California, USA. It was under constant around-the-clock construction by Sarah Winchester for thirty-eight years, beginning in 1884 and until her death in 1922.  3 Bataille, Georges, The Accursed Share. Volume II, the History of Eroticism. Volume III, Sovereignty. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991. p. 205. Subsequent references: Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III).  4 Perec, Georges, Le Grand Palindrome. 1969. http://homepage.urbanet.ch/ cruci.com/lexique/palindrome.htm (accessed March 13, 2015).  5 Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Ground of the Image. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2005. p. 3.  6 Ibid.  7 Mason, Paul. “Love or nothing: The real Greek parallel with Weimar.” www. bbc.co.uk/news/world-20105881 (accessed July 15, 2013).  8 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 3.  9 Ibid. 10 Bourgeois, Louise, Marie-Laure Bernadac, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923–1997. London: Violette, 1998. 11 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 2. 12 Bourgeois, Louise. Couple II. Wood and glass vitrine, fabric, stuffing, leg brace. 1996. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. 13 Sarah Winchester began building her mansion as an attempt at a house that never ceased. 14 Barthes, Roland. The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the College De France (1978–1979 and 1979–1980). New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2010. 15 Blake, Jeremy. Winchester Trilogy. Video and sound on continuous loop and consists of: Winchester (2002), 1906 (2003), and Century 21 (2004). Feigen Contemporary. 16 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 3. 17 Olander, Torben. “The Winchester Trilogy – Interview with Jeremy Blake.” www.artificial.dk/articles/jeremyblake.htm (accessed July 9, 2013). 18 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 3.

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19 The three pieces were installed as part of ILLUMInations at the 54th Venice Biennale. 20 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 203. 21 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 67. 22 Ponge, Francis. Unfinished Ode to Mud: Poems. London: CB Editions, 2008, p. 4. 23 Ibid.

4

The thing that is not a thing

To understand the destroyed art object, or any object, we need to learn what is portended. The art object burns with its own fire, self-­ immolating—strikes match, held to vestures, negating the action that seeks to make a changing world seem fixed. From inception revealing an architectural flaw: to be fixed and yet change with the moment. We wonder when art is destroyed, as if through some tethering of flux into fixed object—a thing becomes undone … or rather is shown to never be “done.” Thus, what we see in the destruction of art is a circumventing of an action that attempts to make fixed. Thereby, the art object houses a negation in striving to be something it is incapable of—to leap outside of time and still inhabit the moment, while unable to sidestep the attempt. The compulsion is a human bid to inoculate and make fixed the moment yet to be outside, and through this it ravages. Here is the legacy of the destroyed art object, to be a thing that is not a thing, to be both house, ruin, and fire. Art makes and undoes, and yet we must wonder at what point the thing becomes destroyed? During the early hours of May 24, 2004, in Leyton, East London, a warehouse caught fire [again a fire]. Situated within the rented warehouse space on an industrial estate in which the art storage company Momart housed work, a fire erupted when a thief broke into one of the thirty-four adjacent units in the converted factory [again a thief].1 The burglar, apparently after watches and inexpensive consumer electronics stored in a unit, set fire to the space, which because of the mixed nature of the site and the materials stored therein (including: “carpenter’s shop, a car workshop, a cleaning business, a steel fabrication outfit”),2 erupted rapidly into intense flames. Housed within Momart was a cache of high-profile work from Charles Saatchi’s collection that included key works from Young British Artists,

The thing that is not a thing91 alongside extensive private and individual collections. Early accounts in the press tended to focus on Sensation3 works lost from his collection, only later focusing on objects destroyed from other holdings. Yet what emerged from the ongoing coverage of the incident was that a vast store of significant twentieth-century British art by high-profile names Saatchi had championed—such as Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman (Figure 4.1), and Chris Ofili—had been destroyed.4 Alongside Saatchi’s collection were important works such as Patrick Heron’s estate,5 early work by Gillian Ayres, and sculpture by Barry Flanagan6—likewise destroyed in the incident. Additionally lost were works by artist Michael Craig-Martin, who had taught a number of those associated with YBA at Goldsmiths, and who became something of a spokesperson in the aftermath of the fire. Of the loss, he observes, “I think there are very few cultural equivalents of fire damaging quite so many artworks. There are famous library fires but this isn’t quite the same. I never remember anything in my lifetime that is the equivalent.”7 However, with the coverage of the event in the media, vast amounts of vitriol also emerged, portraying the destruction as perhaps comeuppance for the gallerist and artists involved. Tabloids such as the Daily Mirror asked: Can a fire ever be funny? Only if all the overpriced, over-discussed trash that we have had rammed down our throats in recent years by these ageing enfant terribles is consumed by the fire. Then the fire is not merely funny … it is bloody hilarious.8

Similarly, the Daily Mail posed, “Didn’t millions cheer as this ‘rubbish’ went up in flames?”9 Whereas in the Guardian it was referred to as a “nation united, pissing on the flames,”10 with letters from the public admonishing that you “can’t beat a good bonfire to get rid of your rubbish,”11 with another headline pondering, “Is this Britart’s ground zero?”12 Yet what becomes clear in the public’s response is that through the events something thought fixed as a certain version of history had emerged as shifted with the destruction of the art objects—and amid it something continues to assert its solvency. Perhaps with the fire and its destruction, what had been hidden behind the object itself (or perhaps not so hidden, like the Mona Lisa and her theft nearly one hundred years before) is once again revealed. Attitudes already present or dormant come forward and displace as remainder, yet in the process something also emerges about

4.1  Jake and Dinos Chapman, Fucking Hell. After the work Hell was destroyed in the Momart fire, Jake and Dinos Chapman responded by remaking it into a bigger and better version called Fucking Hell.

The thing that is not a thing93 art that is not timeless—as art often purports—but is in fact perpetually changing in the instant, calling it into question. Moreover, this is the problem of falling into an art capable of only proposing things where the art object is rendered simply as the contents of a box to be stowed away and passed forward and not this aspect that lingers and changes with the moment. In a world of things, art becomes packed into a warehouse, and obligingly behaves as such, a portmanteau reverting to its material qualities and adapted simply to the useful purpose of thing accruing value and commodity, waiting. It is perhaps this role that critic David Aaronovitch touches on in his response to the Momart fire, noting, “And it has something to do with why all this art was in a warehouse in Leyton in the first place.”13 As he observed in the days following: Now, there will always be valuable things in storage as their owners move from one house to another, or awaiting shipment for an exhibition. But a Guardian reporter who visited Momart in Leyton eight years ago reported seeing, ‘work by almost every major artist on the contemporary art scene racked against the walls, packed, labelled and kept in a climate-controlled environment (a steady 20C)’. The suggestion is that quite a lot of artwork rarely if ever makes it out of storage. It’s too big, too valuable, too friable to be left where people can see it.14

Thus, art in this sense is about storage—of the tenuous, breakable, and tending to leach away—yet accumulated and cordoned as things racked against walls, packed, labeled, deferred as future utility; and perhaps we are overly comfortable with an art relegated simply to its role as thing, or to things in general. Yet how much separates an absentee object in a warehouse waiting for fire (as effect from the cause) and its lost counterparts in Jones’s Museum of Lost Art—as if in understanding this readying for their final close-up, perhaps we might lastly set our fingers on art amid the portmanteau (that shatters external form).15 This is what incidents such as Momart bring most into focus, an object’s ability to refute itself as such, like events surrounding Breitwieser that leap from a mother’s arms into a nearby canal, down a disposal; or likewise Winchester’s actions [again a mother] to reveal as inverted not as nihilism, but through a solvency. What we find in instances such as these are instead an instability in our very conception of things that, through it, becomes apparent in its shipwreck with the moment.

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Thing as negation Part 1: the warehouse Jones built as well as the warehouse that Kane built—a safekeeping To understand the destruction of art (that is, a propensity for the thing to become destroyed or undone) it is necessary to understand the thing that is the destroyed art object itself, as we have already attempted. However, aside from thinking of the destroyed object as becoming nothing in its absence, and in terms of what was inherent to the object that enabled it to become dissolved or destroyed, significantly there is an active (potential) element in the thing that causes it to be undone through the accident implied in its creation. Bataille was enamored with the instant when what appeared fixed becomes undone, this moment of fissure that is the habitation of art and gives it its drive; where “we are thrust from our subordinating anticipation of the future into the presence of the moment.”16 Similarly with the art object, it is this instant in which the creation of art and the destruction of the object or thing can also be best understood. Shifting the emphasis from the void left in the dissolution of the object onto the aspects that determined the dissolution and its solvency, ­underscores something deeper for considering an instability and perhaps something self-adversarial inherent to the thing. Bataille cautions: “Consequently, we shall stop speaking of the NOTHING into which the object dissolves; we shall speak rather of what the dissolved object was, and of what determined the dissolution.”17 From this vantage, what becomes apparent is not what the object (or in this case the objects in the Momart blaze) dissolves into—namely nothing or a void in a physical sense, but rather what was inherent in the object that determined the dissolution from onset, its solvency. Untangling whether it is some fault or accident that reigns in its destruction—which might otherwise render it impervious—what instead emerges is a tendency to make things appear fixed (to coerce it to disappear into the thing and to attempt to negate the solvent that dissolves behind a fixed image of the solvent that appears secured and firm) that is at the core of the operation of the thing. For, far from a given, the thing is perhaps a desire to set an imprint onto the world in opposition to a temporal unravelling of what changes. As Jean-Luc Nancy notes, an “… imprint is at once the receptivity of an unformed support and the activity of a form: its force is the mixing and resistance of the two.”18 Likewise, the imprint of the thing involves this unformed support, as well as an activity of a form to hew a thing. The thing uses the imprint of making fixed through the action of negation to give the appearance of permanency. As Nancy asserts, the

The thing that is not a thing95 imprint is both an action of a form and the unformed support that produces, which in turn gives the thing its force. Therefore, it is not a question of a defect in material or substance per se, but a mixing and resistance in the conception of the thing by design.19 Thus the original impulse to make the work is conflicted: in other words being a resistance implied in its permanency (stored away in warehouses for future), as a contrary housed within invention. Conversely, while giving the appearance of stabilization—as accumulation might attest to veracity—the action of producing the thing in fact destabilizes at a basic level and, further, is intensified through accumulation (in the case of Momart or Saatchi’s accumulation). In this manner, stemming from a shipwreck implied in the original work of art, and carried forward through an impulse resembling the actions of Remainder, in which things are formed as the compulsive reenactments of accumulation in striving to freeze and fix in the face of loss, art in its own way is a loss in itself. The thing and the art object, in this sense, strive to be a negation of what might change, which we find in the very action of accumulating in a warehouse to present an image of permanency. With objects stacked in Momart, racked against the walls, packed, labelled and kept in a climate-controlled environment, resembling the actions of a protagonist fashioning a crack in plaster in a bathroom from which something lost might be fixed and stowed away for future safekeeping, arresting and filling a gap, this story and practice of art in assembling an apartment building in remainder London. It hires architects, constructors, electricians, plumbers, site managers, and security guards in the anticipation of catching and halting cats that laze or fall from a neighbor’s roof, the scent of liver frying in a flat below, a person tinkering with a motorbike, the sounds of piano playing two floors down, and the story of art in a Leyton warehouse. Caught in the actions of turning back, then turning out. Then turning back again. The clothes it dons approaching images we know well: the epilogue of Raiders of the Lost Ark; camera pans out and the incitement is revealed as one more thing stacked and sealed in a wooden crate—­contained and deferred within an immense government warehouse filled with countless similar crates—or likewise the vast assemblage of things stored in Citizen Kane; now camera from above panning through seemingly endless collections of boxes and crates amassed and containing things.20 Citizen Kane (in a newsreel early on): the narrator lists contents of the estate—“from other Kane houses, warehouses, where they moldered for years”21—these things, “… paintings, pictures, statues, the very stones of many another palace—a collection of everything so big

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it can never be cataloged or appraised; enough for ten museums; the loot of the world.” Yet as scenes draw toward a conclusion, journalists, photographers, assistants, and crew all strain through the displacement of Kane’s remaining things. One assistant gazes at a statue, partially obscured. Mid-conversation. Assistant 6: “What’s that?” Assistant 7: “Another Venus, twenty-five thousand bucks. That’s a lot of money to pay for a dame without a head.” [again a Venus] Dialogue. A man walks forward and surveys. Camera shifts. Thompson: “We’re supposed to get everything, junk as well as art.” Assistant 10: “He sure liked to collect things, didn’t he?” Thompson: “Anything and everything.” Raymond: “A regular crow, huh?”22

Yet it is these same compulsions rendered as boxes in a warehouse where McCarthy meets Momart and shakes hands with Winchester and Kane—seen as an impulse to make fixed what is otherwise. Things in fortifications, as fortifications, an action striving to undo or negate something akin to the inherited weight of a particular brand of rifles (Winchester), likewise a remainder, endeavoring to build, around the clock, hiring crews to construct perpetually, tearing down what was nearly constructed in order to continue erecting—unraveled through the forestalling, and laid out before us as rooms within rooms, windows looking into other parts of the house, hallways leading into walls, a warehouse accommodating things by almost every major artist on the contemporary art scene racked against partitions, packed, labelled. And this is the scene that might greet one from inside the warehouse of art, rendering all surveyed as things. Someone opens a box and idly plays with a handful of little pieces of cardboard. More dialogue. Assistant 11: “Hey, look. A jigsaw puzzle.” Assistant 12: “We got a lot of those.” Assistant 10: “Burmese temple and three Spanish ceilings down the hall.” Raymond laughs. Assistant 1: “Yeah, all in crates.” Assistant 13: “There’s part of a Scotch castle over there we haven’t bothered to unwrap yet.”23

The thing that is not a thing97 The camera tracks each character as they walk through the amassed objects, sometimes only the words are heard from behind the objects as it pans through. Each on their way to somewhere else; brisk and then: Newspaperman 1: “I wonder … you put all this stuff together, the palaces, paintings, toys, and everything. What would it spell?”24

A camera pulls away, the missing pieces, the group files out from the space, dwarfed by the scale of Kane’s things amassed. Thompson: “Well, come on, everybody. We’ll miss the train.”25

Crates, lamps, statues, paintings, urns, antiquities; the camera above, a crossfade as camera pans deeper; tables, upholstery, busts, exotics, vases, figurines, objects, candelabras, boxes, bundles, portraits. And carries forward. DISSOLVE:   INT. CELLAR – XANADU – NIGHT –  A large furnace, with an open door, dominates the scene. Two laborers, with shovels, are shoveling things into the furnace. Raymond is about ten feet away. Raymond’s voice gives the order: “Throw that junk.”26

The last words uttered as a thing is pitched onto the fire and flames start to devour it. Perhaps it is this impulse to make the world fixed or somehow impervious that counter-drives, like Bartlebooth’s desire to paint his watercolors to be undone over the next twenty years as something cancelled (something he ultimately fails at) but also carried forward. Instilled, we might see it with Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass),27 which was famously shattered in transit during shipping after only being exhibited once,28 but was designed to be a more impervious object. Of its creation, Duchamp notes: After a short while, paintings always get dirty, yellow, or old because of oxidation. Now, my own colors were completely protected, the glass being a means

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for keeping them both sufficiently pure and unchanged for rather a long time. I immediately applied this glass idea to The Bride.29

Something crucial links this action of seeking to ward against change (fading and oxidation of the object or stacking away in a warehouse for safekeeping), but which in its inception determined the thing’s dissolution and led to the destruction as an object.30 With the Large Glass, Duchamp sought to create a thing, which would remain sufficiently pure and unchanged by hermetically sealing his thing from the temporal elements of change. However, what was intended to help keep the materials of The Large Glass fresh and unchanging, inadvertently led to their undoing, or in other words: as soon as there is invention, there is accident. The contrary emerges. Here we find a destruction or negation of an art object, where something produced to make an object that was more stabilized (pigments and oxidation in glass) was in fact a destabilization. The work posited a disruption, which later obliged a mending in which the artist attempted to recover what was in danger of being lost through the destruction. Whereas Duchamp meticulously repaired the piece between new glass, reassembling shards and fragments,31 into the different form as seen today—recouped, but fundamentally changed. No longer a thing resistant to change but a thing changed through destruction (what Tinguely notes of the Venus de Milo).32 Yet, as art historian Mark Pohlad notes, Duchamp has a perhaps simplified reputation for disregarding his art objects as evidenced in the ephemeral or nontraditional materials he implements. Pohlad observes that Duchamp went to great lengths to ensure that his objects were conserved, repaired, and looked after or replaced for posterity.33 At odds is the idea of producing something that strives to remain unchanged, but which instead renders the art thing more susceptible, like crates in a warehouse that burns, disclosed ultimately as more unstable. However, it is necessary to understand the impulse toward creating the thing as destabilizing, and in which it is already a negation at its inception in attempting to keep fixed what could never be frozen in time. Thing as negation Part 2: the thing that is not a thing and Victorians bequeathed their dead Bataille observes: “The action that produces things is what negates that which is (the natural given), and the thing is the negation.”34 In these terms, the thing is both an action and that which is produced, in effect fabricating an act of negation. The thing must be seen, not as natural

The thing that is not a thing99 (that which is), but as an action producing an eventual destruction implied in its inception. Like Virilio’s shipwreck residing in ship, ship is not the natural given but something surplus and imposed that likewise negates. Whereas Bataille becomes ingrained in a discourse concerning the sacrifice of this thing (a surplus) as that which is capable of revealing the sacred and intimacy—being that most opposed to the thing and capable of destroying its thinghood35—what is demonstrated is an antipathy inherent within the thing: what we might term its solvency or what Gamboni might see as its Janus-head capacity. Yet what emerges through this antipathy is that perhaps a thing does not occur but is instead an influence in its absence or enclosing, so that what underlies much of the discussion is better situated through an understanding of the divergence that is housed in the thing (or in this case the art object). If the image is an opening up to something other through a permeability of the moment, then the thing is a closing of this same capacity. Likewise, if art is about a moment ensnaring in its intimacy, then the thing concerns a levelling and closing of all moments into a homogeneity of calculating utility. From this overview, let us start with the thing and develop upon Bataille’s remarks as he begins to define it and the problematic it represents, alongside an interrogation of a similar idea put forward by Nancy. The divergence in the thing is what gives it its vitality (the appeal of something to be kept in a warehouse for future), as well as what undoes it. In considering the divergence between the thing and the image, Nancy examines the distinct (sacred), as that which gives the image its energy, pressure, or intensity, but also that through which the thing becomes detached from itself.36 Nancy writes of the image: It is neither the thing nor the imitation of the thing … It is the resemblance of the thing, which is different. In its resemblance, the thing is detached from itself. It is not the “thing itself” (or the thing “in itself”), but the “sameness” of the present thing as such.37

Conversely, with the destruction of the art object (the thing “in itself”) is perhaps an inversion of this interplay between the thing and its image (a resemblance, which is different) that becomes apparent in the thing that has ceased to be self-same. Nancy states: “The image is a thing that is not the thing: it distinguishes itself from it, essentially.”38 Whereas Nancy examines the image as distinguishing from the thing it resembles (a thing that is not the thing), in the destruction of art it is a thing’s ability to likewise contest and become distinguished from itself as a fixed thing or object

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(the thing that is not a thing) that is revealed. In the case of the object that becomes destroyed (in the case of Momart), it is this thing that becomes detached from itself and shown to not be a thing—or conversely, a thing that is fixed, yet also changes (which will be explored later). With this understanding it is necessary, while considering the image, to return to the thing itself that in its occurrence is a positing of a negation, as Bataille noted. In this way the art object might be understood as a strategy toward considering and proposing a thing that attempts to not be a thing—a provisional negotiation of this divergence. However, first it is necessary to understand the thing, as Bataille suggests, not as a given but as an action—the action of negation. The thing is not what is, but rather an action of foreclosure and putting away in a crate within a warehouse (a difference between what is and what is posited), closing off a commons and purging access for the sake of advancing what it insinuates through an imprint. This foreclosure is the reenactment of the thing’s initial negation and the persistent divestment of what is, to maintain an ongoing image of the thing as fixed (again think Remainder).39 Perhaps it is this foreclosure that Nancy invokes as the image’s collusion when “a thing presents itself only inasmuch as it resembles itself and says (mutely) of itself: I am this thing.”40 Through foreclosure, the thing attempts to recoup veracity from what is, like Duchamp’s reassembled Large Glass or Jones’s lost art or even McCarthy’s repetitions through reenactment, struggling to recover itself from the destruction—but it succeeds only as the thing changed through destruction. The thing must therefore be calculated in terms that are separate from what it strives to enclose, for it is not the materiality of its constituent components that are negating, but the action that is placed around these elements that in turn act as a negation of them through subjugation. A thing is built in undoing what is. This thing is not some sequestered entity traveling unaffected through time—closed off from everything by an impermeable shell—but the foreclosing action of the thing enervates and strives to make it appear so. Yet, in this manner, the things stowed away at Momart were indeed not static, but stacked away like a Winchester Mansion in waiting; boxes, crates, stairways leading nowhere as work by almost every major artist on the contemporary art scene racked against the walls, packed, labelled and kept—yet likewise implying the readying of a Tinguely sculpture arranged for improvisation and ignition wherein its undoing is indecipherable from its mode of assembling. A crowd waits and ponders as what remains in the minds of a few people. Thus the thing negates to appear fixed, to keep constant, and to

The thing that is not a thing101 perpetuate an image of authenticity through enacting this foreclosure. However, in addition to this negating action, we must also understand what exactly Bataille means by the thing and what is implied. For Bataille, it is an act of extricating what is from itself through a sleight of hand to produce utility, in effect, through considering “duration first, to employ the present time for the sake of the future.”41 It presents these objects as things to be stowed in a warehouse for future use or as they continue to accrue. A primary method for doing this is through an invention of continuity, a story of duration, and the idea of the negation (like the portrait) that lives on after a natural given has fallen away. It is perhaps this story of duration to which artist Michael Craig-Martin responds on the objects destroyed in the Momart fire. He observes, “That’s why I think it’s to do with the fabric of a culture and that’s why I think the fire’s [sic] so important, is because it’s on a scale where there’s a bit of the story that’s been damaged.”42 Things that were meant to stay fixed and hold their place in the durational tale of art history or even the story of lives had suddenly become lost, damaging the implied continuity of the thing. Craig-Martin might not see the event as something inherent, but instead as an act that interrupts the narrative of longevity and fixity, the point at which the fabric of culture has ceased to be a thing (the portrait of history). Moreover, this is also what Aaronovitch senses when he wonders about how all this art came to reside in Leyton in the first place, with the suggestion that quite a lot of work never makes it out of storage, and that in fact this storage of things has become its habitation. Enclosed in climate-controlled environments, art reclines in packing crates as a surplus of things stored in the anticipation of future utility in accruing value. Further, behaving as a thing, it attempts an invention of continuity, a story of duration through accumulation, and the idea of the negation of the moment—a box that sits and waits. Aaronovitch continues: And nothing, the occasional Leyton aside, is ever allowed to be subtracted. The Victorians bequeathed us their dead, lying in vaults and under stucco memorials, but failed to pass on any money for their upkeep. The Edwardians demanded an art gallery in every municipality, no matter what the demand.43

In part, that is what a fire in a warehouse reveals: that art has become this thing (one thing among a world of things), inherited and stowed away for safe keeping, and not distinct, but simply for its material qualities organized in the hope of some anticipated useful purpose.

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The tent that burnt versus the same only better: the thing as identical in time—a palindrome For this suspension into the narrative of longevity to appear plausible, the thing becomes defined in opposition to what is living (again a negation); that is, things are fixed and unchanging in time and, as such, endure; whereas humans die and pass away. The action of the thing endeavors to place what is outside (like a portrait of a grandfather) the realm of cessations, which is seen to change. In a sense it strives to make inanimate. Things are created with the guise of fixity, Victorians residing in vaults under stucco memorials. Moreover, in this action the thing attempts a reprieve of sorts; as Bataille observes, “A thing is identical in time, but man dies and decomposes and this man who is dead and decomposes is not the same thing as the man who lived.”44 Thus the thing attempts to set outside of what changes, like Edwardians demanding an art gallery in every municipality. Whereas people change—and the one who lives is fundamentally different from the one who died—a thing is supposed to remain identical throughout time through this action. Things are seen to endure in contrast to what lives, which passes away, and the difference between what ought to continue, the living entity, and the deceased counterpart, belies what is. Through this, the thing becomes what is fixed and set outside of time through an imprint; regardless of the effects of time it ought to remain identical to itself, changeless and unsubtracted. This perceived consistency allows one to calculate on things,45 whereas humans change, die, and decompose, so that the woman who was alive is somehow inherently different than the one who died. Yet perhaps it is a blending of living alongside this thing that persists (or ought to), in which one might understand what is or was alive, and, likewise, its ceasing. This joining together reveals something other. One of the more publicized works lost in the Momart blaze was Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, often simply referred to as the Tent. The sculpture was constructed from a blue store-bought dome tent with the names of 102 people the artist had slept with stitched onto the interior, and played on the ambiguity of the word “slept.” After its loss in the fire, the Daily Mail reportedly commissioned a woman to remake Emin’s tent, running the headline: “Bad news, Mr. Saatchi: Tracey Emin’s £40,000 tent has gone up in flames. But the good news is the Mail had made you another (and it’ll only cost you £67.50!)”46 Similarly, in a letter to the Guardian, John Callaghan from Milton Keynes wrote, “What’s the problem with Charles Saatchi ‘losing’ his Tracey

The thing that is not a thing103 Emin tent? He can always pop down to Millet’s and buy another. Better yet, get a caravan.”47 Showing the manner in which the work was rendered merely as a thing purchased at any outdoor store in the public’s imagination, with glib suggestions that as a thing it was interchangeable for any other (or improved upon, as one might have a caravan for the same money or even an entirely new, never “slept” in tent—a bargain), is to perhaps intentionally miss the point. Yet it is in this manner that Emin’s tent (as thing) is revealed as somehow fundamentally different from what might remain, and this is what incidents like the fire expose. In preparing for her 2008 retrospective in Edinburgh, Emin reflects on these ideas of remaking the tent, “To recreate it would have been morally wrong. I recreated small pieces [for this show] but that work really lends itself to being recreated. But to remake the tent would just be silly. It wouldn’t have that emotional input to it.”48 Emin continues, “Had I made the tent, the insurance company would have paid out the insurance money to the Saatchi Gallery and then the gallery would have paid the money to me to make the tent.”49 Through a desire to recoup, the work becomes reduced to a thing of transaction; however, as Emin notes of the work, “It wasn’t simply the names of everyone I’d ever slept with. It was about intimacy.”50 Thus, herein something is lost in remaking the thing, likewise revealed in these instances. The art object is not only the thing’s capacity to fix in time, but also a capacity to capture and reenact that moment (the moment that counts) in her apartment. She observes: It was that moment and that time in my life. It’s me sitting in my flat in Waterloo sewing all the names on. It took me six months to make. It just fitted inside my living room, which was 10ft by 12ft, and the TV just fitted inside the tent. I couldn’t remake that time in my life again any more than I could remake the piece.51

Further, this is what we find with the destruction of the art object. With death and destruction, we tempt continuity to project this deceased entity forward in the form of a ghost or double, to give it the utility or consistency of things. It is this fixity that the creation of the thing attempts, perhaps compensating for our own change and noticeable dissolution and divergence (the loss of a time in a flat at Waterloo or a lovely front room with moldings in east London), and likewise the loss of this moment that displaces. In this, there is something conceivably undead in the desire to create the thing, and yet the thing strives to project forth, self-same (a tent

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through all time), presenting an appearance of continuity. Moreover, the cessation of an entity (whether thing or living) destroys what was perceived to be fixed through duration (a past, present, and a future), ­obliterating consistency through what ceases to be. Bataille notes: Like other things he had a past, a present and a future—and an identity through that past, present and future. Death destroys what was to be, what has become a present in ceasing to be. The obliteration of what was supposed to continue being leads to the error that consists in believing that what no longer exists nonetheless is, in some other form (that of a ghost, a double, a soul …). No one believes in the pure and simple disappearance of the one who was there. But this error does not carry the conviction that prevails in the world of consistent things.52

Thus the human assumption is that while people die and moments are lost, the thing might project onward beyond the instant (living on in some warehouse elsewhere or repurchased in a shop alongside fresh hiking boots and a backpack, interchangeable and recouped in continuity). The burning of Emin’s tent destroys this illusion of consistent things (an ambivalence: only a thing/a true thing)53 through what has become a present in ceasing to be. But, the assumption of the thing is that it is somehow capable of remaining identical to itself through time, excused from the changing influence of the moment; however, the constituency of the thing (even those that survive) also changes (perhaps on a different scale), so it is indeed only the action that produces things that remains identical (as the negation or subjugation of what is), this thing we make of it. Although the thing may be projected outward temporally, through these instances it is revealed to be changed with the time-lapse event that separates a pine cabinet from the mounding of dross on the floor or even the longevity of the cellophane parcel on a shelf from the clotting of a Pacific Trash Vortex. Much in the same way that death destroys what was supposed to be of the person, what would have made the individual continue and remain identical through time (removed or out of time), like things, it is an action that likewise destroys. To subjugate what is through the utility of “duration first, to employ the present time for the sake of the future”54 is to anticipate incorrectly something that has ceased to be consistent (as thing). Thus the thing, through being defined in opposition to “life,” is seen to live indefinitely, to remain self-same through an absenteeism; whereas a dead person can only project as an altered presence or a stand-in for what was there.

The thing that is not a thing105 In this, the action that produces the thing is a death of sorts that forecloses against what is—for unlike the thing, the components of what would become the thing are in fact fatal; they break down, erode, fall away, continue to change (a past, a present, and a future), and are in fact a wresting of this substance into a death through avoidance (like Castorp’s m ­ ountain— yet likewise this was only an interlude—objects stored in Momart or the contents of Citizen Kane’s estate). It is anticipated that people might disappear, in contrast to things—a misconception that things might stand in our stead after we fall away. For just as nobody believes in a pure and simple disappearance of the one who was there, the thing likewise is an attempt to keep a world in motion fixed, consistent, and utilizable throughout time. The creation of things is an unstable attempt to project stability. In this way, the thing becomes a remedy or inoculation against a ghost tale in which people die and things change, and this is the site that the art object in particular seeks to inhabit. In this way, things seek to ward against a world that changes, in which what is cannot remain identical through time and be calculated, where the materials of life change and decompose and people expire. What lived and becomes dead is not the same as what lives; but this also misunderstands the thing. For even without anthropomorphizing through death, the substance of the thing also changes or is destroyed in what was to be (as with Duchamp or a Venus de Milo), what has become a present in ceasing to be (the Momart blaze), much as death. Just as the person who died is not the same as the one who lived, the thing that was is not the same as the thing that is, or the thing that becomes destroyed. It is this degree of change that can only be revealed through persistence in time, which also destroys and negates the illusion of the thing. And yet, enter a new tent. In late 2014, the Chapman Brothers, as part of their exhibition In the Realm of the Unmentionable, exhibited a fully reconstructed copy of Emin’s tent that they had produced, called The Same Only Better at Jerwood Gallery (Figure 4.2). Their version, likewise with 1963–1995 embroidered on the outside of a blue tent with the names of everyone Tracey Emin had slept with stitched onto the interior, formed an exact replica of Emin’s original piece. Critic Mark Brown observes that perhaps it ought not to be taken merely as a “cheap shot at Emin,”55 and he quotes Jake Chapman saying: “It’s not really about Tracey, it is about making something which is so thoroughly recognisable and so fixed and so absent.”56 Perhaps there is no better definition for the thing than this action—where conceivably there is something delineated through its capacity to make

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4.2  Jake and Dinos Chapman, Same Thing Only Better.

fixed as reenactment of something that passes or had passed. With it, the tent reappears fresh as the day it first entered the showroom floor, and as thing resurrected, presents an image of indestructibility as what might endure (yet also a loss of its intimacy). Dinos Chapman observes, “It’s about reanimating something which actually wants to be dead.”57 Moreover, in this action there is again something conceivably undead amid a desire to recreate or reanimate the thing that is lost or that passes away, a negation masquerading as affirmation. Dinos Chapman adds, “in remaking Tracey’s tent you allow something to happen you are not in control of.”58 Perhaps this is likewise its displacement. Nevertheless, whatever we perceive as fixed in the action of the thing is repudiated through what changes. Things that should be self-same and identical through time proceed to wander beyond their posterns: the itinerant asbestos of a parking-break may yet be the lump in a technician’s lungs; worn grooves in a stone pavement silt an adjacent canal; submerged ships gradually blossom into reefs; tents stowed away in warehouses burn or are carried off by French thieves with mothers (or worse yet remade); or a fracture in glass occurring while shipping Duchamp’s The Large Glass may come to be just as indispensable as pigments and dust pressed between its clear panels. Through time a thing is shown to be the action

The thing that is not a thing107 that seeks to enclose what is but cannot, and is instead only the action itself. While the thing seeks to make fixed, what is continues to pool forward into the ever changing moment of the present. Here perhaps the action of negating, and what it can be made to appear to produce, is all that can be known of the thing, because trying to know only accumulates the portion that negates. Again, Bataille notes: A thing is what we know from without, what is given to us as a physical reality (verging on a utility, available without reserve). We cannot penetrate a thing, and it has no meaning other than its material qualities, adapted or not to some useful purpose, in the productive sense of the word.59

We cannot penetrate a thing, because it does not necessarily correspond to what is; being an action of negating what is through an imprint to make it operational, and in favor of the act of producing things—a Chapman tent “saying (mutely) of itself: I am this thing.”60 Its action is external, the replacement with another tent purchased at a shop or on display, that attempts to enclose into what might appear as physical reality. The thing becomes, not what is, but what its qualities can be made to do (utility). What might reside within or beyond the thing is impenetrable and negated, so that instead its thingness might be seen as a hovering of utility surrounding an absent or divesting core (so “thoroughly recognizable and so fixed and so absent”).61 Then a thing is what we can only know from without, in that the thing is instead a shell or crate attempting to foreclose what is not fixed, and which very well may have vacated or no longer correspond to what it attempts to cling to. If we look at a stone step leading into a building, over time steps wear it thin and it becomes grooved from the grinding of the moment (from each direction, Whiteread’s House, a palindrome). Yet in this it is both the stone and a step, even as what constitutes it shifts, as sand and dust that silt into a neighboring pavement and onto my shoe, yet the action of the thing keeps it a stairway if not a tread until the moment it ultimately concedes that it is no longer a thing and is destroyed or reveals an otherness (or likewise Sydney Gale’s front room). In this sense, things break or are destroyed because they are focusing on the utility of lines without recognizing the sand they are drawn into. It is subjugated to the aspect that is out of time, the fixed notion of the stone step that preferences the step over what is, which can only ever be perceived in transit. It is through this that the thing must be alienated from itself, removed from time in an artificial fixing of what is. For it is this fixing that alienates, as Bataille observes:

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A thing is alienated, it always exists in relation to something else, but if it is connected with all that is possible, it is no longer determinant, nor alienated; it is not any more a thing than would be what I imagine before me, which I could not name, and which, being neither a table nor a stream, could be a stream, a table—or whatever one wanted …62

Further, to be determinant, the thing must always have an appendage out of time from which to gauge and corral the moment, so that it can never really be in the instant. Yet if it is truly in the instant, the thing can never be determinant because the instant has only its shifting self as intimacy, which is likewise the pull between Martin’s lines as primary in perceiving the moment (as opposed to thinking, which is secondary and outside). The conflict of being in the moment and out of the moment; that a thing be essentially the opposite of a thing Thus, a thing is the action of negating what is to attempt to make fixed (the divergence in the thing), and in so doing must perpetually negotiate the unfolding moment with what is known, so that it can never really be in the instant. The thing attempts to master the moment from without for the sake of continuity and utility. In this, the thing is always conflicted and split between the moment and attempting to be outside, so that the thing (which, by definition, is a fixed entity) can ultimately never be so. With a nod toward Hegel, Bataille states, “… knowledge is never given to us except by unfolding in time. It is not given in a sudden illumination of the mind, but in discourse, which is necessarily deployed in duration.”63 It is this unfolding in time that renders undone that which seeks to make fixed and frozen in the form of the thing.64 As Bataille suggests, knowledge is never in the moment (like Martin), but rather it attempts to reveal and make fixed through duration (binding through time). For just as knowing (in the sense of knowledge) is never from inside the moment, neither is the thing fixed within it. Thus, in attempting to know and fix, we uncover a preoccupied thing—that which can never bind temporally what it indicates without the encouragement of “what no longer exists (a ghost, a double, a soul).”65 This is the conflict inherent in the thing’s creation—an inability to fully inhabit the moment while stepping outside of it, which would be necessary to fix and negotiate unfolding time (the thing). For to make what is in the moment into a thing, it must be regarded from a vantage outside the moment in that a

The thing that is not a thing109 “thing is what we know from without;”66 in other words, it is only outside of the moment when things can appear fixed or known in duration. This is where the instability of the thing as an action reveals something inherently self-adversarial and begins to unravel. This process, the action of managing and fixing a thing, neglects the moment and ultimately causes its dissolution (the accident of knowledge), which was already inherent from inception. Again, Bataille notes: But the moment remains outside, short of or beyond, all knowledge. We know regular sequences in time, constants; we know nothing, absolutely, of what is not in the image of an operation, a servile modality of being, subordinate to the future, to its concatenation in time. We know nothing absolutely, of the moment. In short, we know nothing about what ultimately concerns us, what is supremely [souverainement] important to us.67

The moment always remains outside and evades becoming fixed through knowledge, thus perpetually eluding the thing and its appeal for consistency. It is the moment that undoes the illusion of the thing, where nothing may be known or fixed—for the changing of the moment enduringly negates the thing and eludes sudden illumination. For the thing to appear fixed or known, it must be accessed from without (projecting an unreliable image of duration caught mid-flight to maintain the thing and colluding with what is not present in the moment: a ghost, a double, a soul),68 whereas the moment is all that can ever be directly accessed. Conversely, the moment continuously presents what is in opposition to the thing’s negation of same, undoing what might appear consistent and self-same through time. Again, this undoing continues to become evident in the moment with the Momart objects through “what has become a present in ceasing to be,”69 or similarly, through “appearing as what it is by disappearing.”70 The destruction and the subsequent loss of these works in the present moment disrupts the foreclosure of the thing and unsettles its ability to accumulate outside of the moment (ceasing to be things). Moreover, in this the duration and cohesion of the art object is perpetually disrupted by the moment. Bataille reiterates that we can never truly know the moment, but we are seemingly aware of nothing else. we are in fact conscious of the moment. (Indeed, we are conscious of nothing but the moment.) But this consciousness is at the same time a slipping-away of the moment, insofar as it might be clear and distinct, insofar as it is not a vague knowledge of an object: knowledge of an object needs to apprehend that object

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caught up in duration, beyond the present moment … Only by cancelling, or at least neutralising, every operation of knowledge within ourselves are we in the moment, without fleeing it.71

The moment is always a letting go and neutralizing of what appears fixed. To go outside and flee the moment is to know it from without and make it into a thing (to attempt to make time a thing), yet we can be conscious of nothing but the moment and are made undone by it. Herein lies the problem: it is this leap from inside of the present moment to something conceived as outside (a thing is what we know from without),72 which makes the thing appear fixed in duration. However, this also breaks what seeks to be known—the thing—and causes the thing to become undone. The perception of the thing as permanent is an illusion of the production of knowledge of the moment, a desire toward endurance and utility of time. In this, the action of the negating thing is deceptively prevalent, whereas the thing is spuriously friable through this conflicted inception. It houses an opposition to what is understood as changing and passing away, which is inherent in the thing and unavoidable in ourselves. This unfolding moment is perpetually catastrophic to the thing and responsible for its destruction and demise, so that when we produce and calculate (consider utility) with things, we are only accommodating the place they vacate, a shell in the form of an action—a false image of consistency—and this is why things break. Baudrillard observes, “catastrophe is a sudden instantaneity of time.”73 Thus, it is the contact or collision of the instant that is catastrophic. Knowledge and the thing must forever be constructed from what is absent in the moment, and in this they are fragile. It is this divergence in the thing (between what is present in the moment and a fixity from outside), which shatters, but which also reaches intimacy in the moment. As Nancy directs, “But at the same time each thing, in the distance in which its self-coincidence is separated in order to coincide with itself, leaves behind its status as a thing and becomes an intimacy.”74 Things are undone through the distance in which they coincide or are self-same (or reach intimacy—and leave behind the status of thing). Perhaps here is what the destroyed object portends: that the thing is not fixed and must instead reconcile the unfolding moment or be destroyed. For the thing to be as it is (to reach intimacy), it would require one impossible thing. As Bataille notes, “that this thing be essentially the opposite of a thing.”75 It would need to be a thing capable of subverting what comprises thing; a thing at once, instantaneously, from its creation and eventual demise, all within the moment as it is, and opposing a temporal

The thing that is not a thing111 trajectory. The thing would need to be both fixed and fundamentally change with the moment—or in other words, the thing that is not a thing. Thus, like a piano burning, there is something very odd about seeing a warehouse of art burn. Within it, all of your ideas about art are likewise somehow involved.76 Notes  1 Meek, James. “Art into ashes.” The Guardian, September 23, 2004.  2 Ibid.  3 Searle, Adrian. “Is this Britart’s ground zero?” The Guardian, May 27, 2004.  4 Ibid.  5 Higgins, Charlotte and Vikram Dodd. “50 years of British art lies in ashes.” The Guardian, May 27, 2004.  6 Ibid.  7 Meek, James. “The story has been damaged.’” The Guardian, September 23, 2004.  8 Tony Parsons in the Daily Mirror. Quoted in Meek, James. “Art into ashes (Part 2).” The Guardian, September 23, 2004.  9 Aaronovitch, David. “Ashes to ashes.” The Observer, May 30, 2004. 10 Peretti, Jacques. “Burning shame.” The Guardian, June 5, 2004. 11 “Letters: The art of schadenfreude.” The Guardian, May 28, 2004. 12 Searle, “Is this Britart’s ground zero?”. 13 Aaronovitch, “Ashes to ashes.” 14 Ibid. 15 Balzac, Honoré. The Unknown Masterpiece. Translated by Ellen Marriage. New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1901. p. 8. 16 Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share. Volume II, the History of Eroticism. Volume III, Sovereignty. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991, p. 207. Subsequent references: Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III). 17 Ibid., p. 204. 18 Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Ground of the Image. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2005. p. 7. 19 Ibid. 20 Citizen Kane. Directed by Orson Welles. RKO Radio Pictures, 1941. Script retrieved from: www.aellea.com/script/citizenkane_transcript.txt (accessed April 24, 2018). 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid.

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24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Duchamp, Marcel. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) 1915–23. Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass panels (277.5 × 177.8 × 8.6 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art. 28 As the damage occurred when the work was crated for transit, it is unclear at what point it shattered. The destruction was only discovered later after it was removed from a storage crate in 1931, following the exhibition of the work at the Brooklyn Museum in 1927. 29 Cabanne, Pierre. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. New York, NY: Viking Press, 1977. p. 41. 30 Perhaps in contrast would be a Helen Frankenthaler painting, executed on raw canvas, that would change over time. See: Frankenthaler, Helen. Mountains and Sea. 1952, thinned oil paint on unprimed canvas, which changes and rots over time, 220 × 297.8 cm. 1952, on extended loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. 31 Pohlad, Mark B. “Macaroni Repaired Is Ready for Thursday. …’ Marcel Duchamp as Conservator.” tout-fait 1, no. 3 (2000). 32 Interview conducted by Calvin Tomkins for a 1962 article for The New Yorker (courtesy Calvin Tomkins Papers, II.A.5. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York). Retrieved from www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/ articles/homage-destruction (accessed April 17, 2013). 33 Pohlad, “Macaroni Repaired Is Ready for Thursday.” 34 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 214. 35 Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991, p. 189. Subsequent references: Bataille, The Accursed Share (vol. I). 36 Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Image—the Distinct.” In The Ground of the Image. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2005. 37 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 8. 38 Ibid., p. 2. 39 Perhaps this is the site where the distinction that Nancy discusses has become displaced into the thing itself. 40 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, pp. 8–9. 41 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 198. 42 Meek, “The story has been damaged.” 43 Aaronovitch, “Ashes to ashes.” 44 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 213. 45 Calculate in a manner in which humans cannot be, barring in that capacity

The thing that is not a thing113 that they become like things. See: Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 218. 46 Mundy, Jennifer. Lost Art. London: Tate Publishing, 2013. p. 160. 47 “Letters: Art out of the ashes.” The Guardian, May 27, 2004. 48 Wade, Mike. “Tracey Emin tells Edinburgh she rejected £1m offer to recreate tent.” The Times, August 2, 2008. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Burns, Gordon. “Burned into the memory.” The Guardian, May 27, 2004. 52 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 216. 53 A play on words of Nancy’s “there is an ambivalence: only an image/a true image” see: Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 3. 54 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 198. 55 Brown, Mark. “Tracey Emin’s tent rises up like a phoenix in Chapman Brothers homage.” The Guardian, October 24, 2014. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vol. I), p. 132. 60 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, pp. 8–9. 61 Brown, “Tracey Emin’s tent rises up like a phoenix.” 62 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 302. 63 Ibid., p. 202. 64 Fixed in a manner that the Momart objects were incapable of and Duchamp’s The Large Glass attempted through its repair. 65 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 216. 66 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vol. I), p. 132. 67 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), pp. 202–203. 68 Ibid., p. 198. 69 Ibid., p. 216. 70 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 7. 71 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 203. 72 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vol. I), p. 132. 73 Baudrillard, Jean. Fatal Strategies. Translated by Philip Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski. New York, NY; Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e); Distributed by the MIT Press, 2008. p. 198. 74 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 10. 75 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vol. I), p. 132. 76 Tomkins, Calvin. The Bride and the Bachelors. New York, NY: Viking Press, 1971. p. 179.

5

Things lie 

Three lies and a truth One. In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, high up in the Swiss Alps and sequestered with the invalids in a sanatorium there resides a device called a silent sister, used for detecting the deceptions (a measureless tool for measuring) of those that wish to remain in storage just a bit longer. This device consists simply of a thermometer for taking one’s temperature that has no lines of measurement, so that the patients cannot present themselves as still ill even when they are not (and thus remain). This happens sometimes, that an inhabitant becomes convinced that they might continue outside of life amid the rarefied atmosphere of the Berghof; they are perhaps too comfortable, in spite of being past their time (to linger in its seductive withdrawal and accumulate outside the rot and change below). Settembrini warns Hans Castorp: There was Fräulein Kneifer, Ottilie Kneifer, last year. She came of a good family—the daughter of an important government official. She was here some year and a half and had grown to feel so much at home that when her health was quite restored—it does happen, up here; people do sometimes get well—she couldn’t bear to leave. She implored the Hofrat to let her stop; she could not and would not go; this was her home, she was happy here. But the place was full, they wanted her room, and so all her prayers were in vain; they stood out for discharging her cured.1

Therefore, Ottilie resorts to a deception:

Things lie 

115

Ottilie was taken with high fever, her curve went well up. But they found her out by exchanging her regular thermometer for a “silent sister.” You aren’t acquainted as yet with the term; it is a thermometer without figures, which the physician measures with a little rule, and plots the curve himself.2

Caught out, she begins bathing in an alpine lake in the hopes of falling ill again. Maybe only a thing might understand what Ottilie is going through in her attempts to stay, “She remained some time in the water, trying to contract some illness or other—alas, she was, and remained, quite sound. She departed in anguish and despair, deaf to all the consolations her ­parents could give.”3 Despite the efforts of Ottilie (or the thing), who negates and puts herself at risk instead to sojourn in the insulated world of the sanatorium (like the thing), it is through operations such as a silent sister (a thief in the museum, a fire in a warehouse, and Tinguely’s Homage) that a deception is revealed as ultimately not fixed and halted (and ultimately not a thing, but something else entirely). In events we find ourselves in this moment without a trace of an inner time-organ, and as Hans Castorp did, “absolutely incapable of fixing it even with an approach to accuracy by ourselves, without any outward fixed points as guides” (these determinants of things and moments), in which we are likewise rendered as shipwreck—these conceptions and markers.4 Hans Castorp observes as he comes to see (of time): “… it proved to be nothing more or less than a ‘silent sister,’ a mercury column without degrees, to be used by those who wanted to cheat.”5 In this sense, perhaps this book (as well as these actions) is nothing more than a series of silent sisters—a method of shipwrecks for examining the destruction of art—that reveals in the middle of forestalling the interplay between what is lost yet still here in this moment. The accident of the thing is catastrophic in its instantaneity, where the implements for measuring are removed from thermometers. Yet of their allure, Castorp muses, “… I could almost wish to keep my fever, and stop up here with you indefinitely. They would have to give me a ‘silent sister’ to measure with.”6 Two. Thomas Hirschhorn’s installations are congested with matters and things, cobbled from cardboard and parcel tape, poor materials littered with constructed rocks, soda cans, forms out of elementary school science projects, magazines (pinned up on wall, in racks, in plastic sleeves), philosophy

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textbooks, manifestos, mannequins, or cast-off exercise equipment wrapped in aluminum foil. His pieces sprawl in objects, things, and material, gathering surplus into space and from which their logic emerges amid the clutter to which they point. With Crystal of Resistance,7 Hirschhorn examines a motif of the crystal as a means for touching something other to form, around which it coalesces. He observes: As a motif, “crystal” is the dynamic which links and which puts light – a new light – on everything. It sheds light on its own meaning, its own time and its own raison d’être. The “crystal” motif helps me point out one or several facets, because it’s only as facets – as a partial vision – that truth can be touched.8

This is the capacity for crystallization, vitrification, to pass light through these things like a window (vitrine) and make it visible. From this motif Hirschhorn wraps a site in things, cobbling logic as obsession: geometric crystal forms covered in tinfoil and piled in stacks, six-sided wooden frames terminating into pyramids and enfolded with transparent dropcloth PVC (like quartz crystal formations or some transparent ore), pilasters of outdated television monitors hacked together with scrap palettes and broadcasting what appears as catastrophes of war and human conflict, with fingers swiping through images like low-rent iPads, bordering silver walls inlaid with vaguely spheroid recesses made from packing tape and cotton swabs (geodes of lavatory hygiene); fields of pop and beer cans bent and cut into crystalline structures, matted together; rows of mannequins likewise bundled with these same materials (tape, foil, clear plastic sheets, and suspending images cut from magazines); cardboard light wells and stalactites from ceilings; bales of rolled carpets suspended from above with baskets loaded in assorted crystals and mineral specimens—half punching bag and half hot air balloon in structure; rock crystals parcel taped to walls and mounded; stalagmite heaps of photo cut-outs and media images rising in deposits from floors and terminating in mannequin points; cracked atriums packed with this stuff, glass display cases with books: George Sand—Laura. Voyage dans le Cristal, Les Minéraux, où les trouver, comment les collectionner, Giorgio Agamben—Profanations, and the general books one might likewise acquire stranded at a flea market. From it a resistance within contemporary life emerges, is made tangible, as rock formations accruing caverns in which to wander, crystallized and hand hewn in the sediment of cultural castoffs as one gets lost in the accumulation of cranked assemblages that Hirschhorn gathers (Figures 5.1 and 5.2).

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5.1  Thomas Hirschhorn, Crystal of Resistance (install view).

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5.2  Thomas Hirschhorn, Crystal of Resistance (install view).

He declares, “There will be many elements to see, there will be ‘too much.’ It has to be ‘too much,’ not because it is important to get to see everything or spend a lot of time looking, but ‘too much’ so that the things do not lie.”9 Perhaps this is the crux of the matter, this acknowledgment that things lie, yet through these endeavors might somehow be made or coerced or tricked into speaking (or touching) a truth from amid the surplus. In this, art lays a trap for a deception, so that in gathering together (like the objects in Jones’s museum or Sarah Winchester’s mansion) it might somehow be tricked into revealing a truth, but also an undoing in tempting a Momart or a Tinguely through its actions. Saying (mutely) I am this thing, to which Bataille might reply, “But the past did not lie in the way he believed: in truth, it lied only insofar as, in its ponderousness, it represented as a thing that which in principle could not be one.”10 Further, this is the truth of the lie; like a Winchester House, undoing to remake, art attempts to outmaneuver or spend something, to open and leave it shipwrecked amid all this form. Yet of these actions of ­accumulation and their capacity to undo, Baudrillard retorts: It’s accumulation, the series, that helps develop the fantasy of infinity, but what you do not see is the threshold of critical mass. At some point, too much is too

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much. The process is the equivalent of the abolition of all these qualities. It’s a black hole.11

Three. When the nameless character in Remainder first begins looking for the precise building from which to reconstruct what he perceived in the crack on a bathroom wall, he starts searching for a method to trick his building into revealing itself from amid all the other buildings in London. Using funds inherited from the accident, he begins scouring the city for the building resembling the one that had appeared as an apparition. To this end he hires a team of assistants, all searching and reporting back their findings, dividing London up into grids and analyzing; but what he begins to grasp is that it will not be from these people’s systemizations—although he lets them proceed—that his building will be found. He does not call off their search, but allows them to continue their efforts while pursuing his own clandestine methods. Meanwhile, they continue consulting their mobile phones, calling in observations and data, wandering up and down streets across the city, mapping their search and progress, pins placed on maps, marking and calculations, phoning in inquiries, and caught up in this ­process of looking. He understands: Their burrowing would get inside the city’s block and loosen it, start chiselling away at surplus matter: it would scare my building out, like beaters scaring pheasants out of bushes for a Lord to shoot – six beaters advancing in formation, beating to the same rhythms, their movements duplicating one another.12

Thus, a method is uncovered, as a maneuver implemented to loosen something from amid all this surplus matter, trick the thing into revealing the rather that hides amid. Further, this is how he proceeds: I could start somewhere, anywhere, and walk down the street the yellow van went down, then wait beside a yellow shop front till a woman wearing yellow trousers went by and I’d follow her. It was completely arbitrary – but it might prompt something, get me looking at things in a way I wouldn’t normally, open chinks up in the camouflage behind which my place was hiding.13

Like the theft of the Mona Lisa that revealed something that had become hidden behind the image itself, its disappearance, these events and devices prompt a narrator to look at things in a different way. Opening

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chinks in the camouflage of the thing, it resembles the accumulation of things in Hirschhorn, with their ability to expel. Further, placing these objects (with tape, crates, and plastic sheets), like a Tinguely in reversal, a silent sister, or a Momart fire—in such a manner, so that: giving Ottilie a start, she bounds from the lake and reveals her hiding spot among the invalids (or likewise from a mother’s arms and into a canal)—is a device to trick the thing from lying through the improvisation it enacts. And this operation is to understand, as Bataille concedes, “… I have tried to say how clumsy (but inevitable) it was to make a thing of it.” Further, “I refer now to the opening of art, which always lies but without deceiving those whom it seduces.”14 Like a device of Zeuxis and Parrhasios in which an image of grapes or a curtain shows us a thing to reveal something else, likewise Hirschhorn finds art through his gathering of objects into a Crystal of Resistance. He asserts: Art – because it is art – is resistance. But art is not resistance to something, art is resistance as such. Art is resistant because it resists everything that has already existed and been known. Art, as a resistance, is assertion, movement, belief, intensity, art is “positive.”15

Further, “Resistance is always connected with friction, confrontation, even destruction – but also, always with creativity. Resistance is conflict between creativity and destruction.”16 Thus we find the site of art, this point of resistance between creativity and destruction, where its solvency dwells. It is in this action of giving form as “an envelope”17 for making it tangible. Hirschhorn notes, “I’m thinking of a skin, a shell or a geode.”18 Thus these things become a skin in which art might dwell beside a resistance to what it fixes. However, if art resides as thing, enclosed in climate-controlled environments, convalescing in packing crates as a retreat from what changes, a withdrawal racked against the walls, packed, labeled, and kept in a climate-controlled environment (a steady 20C), it is also the opposite of this thing: its resistance. Yet the operation of art might instead be revealed as a device for tricking what passes from out of the thing, somehow enticing it to reveal itself as an Other of form, here within this moment that counts— and that this thing be essentially the opposite of a thing. For this is the interplay of art, this revealing and obscuring that renders the thing undone (and through this bit that attempts to linger, likewise, this remainder).

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In looking for something amid the destruction of art, among the disarray, we begin gathering together these objects that become lost into sites from which they might be viewed: Rembrandt • Cézanne • Manet • Braque • Vermeer • Serra • Kerouac • Holzer • Apelles • Duchamp • Van Gogh • Rembrandt • (continuing amid an ellipsis of implied future as a rudimentary Morse code of absence) … Suspended into museums of lost art, documented, written about, and when that does not work, simply concentrated into lists as poems or homage to the missing pieces. Through this we attempt to perceive an absence to which these destroyed objects point, to understand—as they continue accruing into newspapers, in books, articles, on the news—so that amid the destruction of shipwrecks, we begin to discern survivors within the debris, tugging our eyes to remainders that displace. Seized in a compulsion to reenact these accidents of art objects, like Remainder, as an invisible force carrying forward an engine of negative miracles accruing and giving art and poetry form, and likewise destroying and undoing, so that life appears as a puzzle endlessly destroying its own solutions. Amid the gradual disappearance and reappearance of Spiral Jetty or Rachel Whiteread’s House as Sid Gale’s front room is destroyed making way for a concrete object—and likewise again in the shipwreck pivot of its pulling down. Yet somehow through this our notion of art is entangled with a propensity to be destroyed or lost (might impossibly become its measure in fact), but also divulging that in the midst of destruction and shipwrecks there is this capacity to find something more of art. We attempt to accumulate it in a site rendered as art, a resistance concerning content and form in what is lost. Straddling separations that Erased de Kooning Drawing and The Unknown Masterpiece of Balzac attempt—in which no painter nor poet nor sculptor may separate the effect from the cause, which are inevitably contained the one in the other, the mystery of form that would shatter external form. In this, destruction is revealed as a site grinding, as Agamben notes in The Man without Content, where all meaning has been dissolved, all content has vanished, the one into the other, in the erasing of form as a conflict amid an inexpressible content.19 Yet this is perhaps the mystery of form as it becomes permeable. Thus, it is collected into virtual exhibitions that haunt our national museums, to see something that has become invisible through a destruction and as a ­reenactment of its loss. Further, with it a thief wanders into a museum, stealing moments that we thought safely stowed from the flow of daily life (they even wrote a book about it) and talked about on the news. Yet in absconding, a loss

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of intimacy is put on display through disappearance, was hung upon a wall, and crowds gathered to see what lost art might show, and, in the process, we began to look differently through the device of silent sisters, fire, or theft. This looking remains with destruction, as a mother seeking to dispose of evidence of a disappearance dumps them into a canal and down a sink disposal. It entangles in an improvisation, as an object’s perfectly inverted and simultaneous counter determination resembling a theft as Tinguely nudges a homage that destroys. And yet, to try to stop it, to try to check life in midflight and recapture it in the form of a work of art is a mockery of an intimacy and intensity and likewise a destruction. Therefore we attempt to employ this destruction, to make of it a thing that might produce. Desiring in art a device, and taking cues from Tinguely or Metzger, art attempts to harness this destruction to make meaning. Reconsidering with it a relation between creation and destruction, undermining a myth of the creating artist who adds objects to the world to be exhibited. In turn it slows down, is reversed, amplified, viewed from different angles as this moment ossified, like Schipper’s The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle, Marclay’s Guitar Drag, Ruscha’s Royal Road Test, or Demand’s Landing. Yet in the process something continues to become distanced and to disappear like a Warhol Death and Disaster, and we are left to wonder whether this resistance might instead be simply considered as merely an additional color or if it is it still a radical gesture or instead is now a mere vehicle. Moreover, in this act of representing destruction (so that it might disappear into its image, and appear rendered under our control), it emerges as a Janus-like figure, a duck/rabbit picture puzzle, where an ambiguity and oscillation is likewise made visible as a solvency within the work. However, through these destructions, we begin to understand something more of art. Attempting to represent an affinity—to coax or draw it out—it forms a portrait of sorts, extracting and subtracting, as Nancy observes, from a homogeneity that likewise distinguishes it. Like a portrait of a grandfather into which it disappears, it becomes a stand-in through an absence in what it displaces through what remains. Bataille asks: “What is the meaning of art, architecture, music, painting or poetry if not the anticipation of a suspended, wonder-struck moment, a miraculous moment with the power to capture and endlessly recapture the moment that counts, the moment of rupture, of fissure?” Yet Blanchot asserts that “art requires that he who practices it should be immolated to art,” and in this the moment is made permeable, so that “one can thus say that it appears as what it is by disappearing,” as Nancy observes. Within

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the image resides a challenge of representation, in that destruction implies the revelation of something thought lost through a clearing away, yet also a tension between what disappears and what is distinct through a permeability between these two capacities. Art, therefore, relies on both a suspending and an unbinding of the moment in its intimacy, and through it (according to Bataille), an object “bears within it the negation of that which defines it as object” and in a sense is destroyed as object. Similarly, Virilio observes, when you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck. Moreover, through this interplay that art presents is this miraculous moment in which conceptions and ­anticipation are collapsed. Virilio continues: “Granted, the accident, in a certain way, is a miracle in reverse. It reveals something absolutely necessary to knowledge.”20 With a miracle in reverse, and perhaps as an analog to Bataille’s negative miracle of the shipwreck, something about art (as well as knowledge) emerges in these actions—and yet there is no precise term for this “artwreck” we perceive, and instead we refer to these activities by the portmanteau of art, which is likewise the fascination of art and its destruction. Through this, the art object, like the moment, is rendered permeable. Something capable of being returned to, as well as set apart. Perhaps this is what Scheherazade attempts through a recapturing of the moment that counts, making it permeable, as something that can be returned to and evading the foreclosure of what appears set through an activation of its solvency. Likewise, this is what Sarah Winchester attempts in her method of forestalling that requires endeavoring to build around the clock, hiring crews to construct perpetually on her mansion, tearing down what was nearly constructed to continue erecting: to give form to a haunting but also undo its closure. Yet what we begin to notice through all these improvisations is instead a destruction perhaps tethered in an impulse to make the art object or thing appear fixed or impervious—like Duchamp’s Large Glass or the practice of storing art away in warehouses. In this, the thing is shown undone or destroyed through a tendency to make things appear fixed, in other words a resistance implied in its permanency and as negation implied in the thing. Bataille observes: “The action that produces things is what negates that which is (the natural given),” and, in this sense, the destruction of this thing is an assertion of an ability to likewise contest and become distinguished from itself as a fixed thing. When Nancy observes of the image that it is a thing that is not the thing and that it distinguishes itself from it, essentially, then the destruction of the thing might present an understanding for

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considering and proposing a thing that likewise attempts to not be a thing (a negation of that which defines it as object born within). However, for the thing to appear plausible, it must present an image of continuity—the thing as enduring and attempting to remain self-same through time, like Emin’s tent before the fire or the objects stowed away in Citizen Kane (again before the fire). Yet through the actions of presenting the thing as enduring, it is alienated. The thing attempts to master the moment from without for the sake of continuity and utility and, thus, the thing is always conflicted and split between the moment and attempting to be outside—yet the unfolding moment is perpetually catastrophic to the thing and responsible for its destruction and demise. For the thing to be as it is (to reach intimacy), it would require one impossible thing: to be both fixed and fundamentally change with the moment—or in other words the thing that is not a thing. Thus the thing presents a lie, saying (mutely, perhaps in honor of Louise Bourgeois), I am this thing, so that what we actually perceive in the destruction of art is a device for revealing this moment not as fixed but instead rendered through the shipwreck of this moment. Thus, art presents a trick for revealing an otherness within form, like a silent sister alerting to deceptions by Ottilie as she seeks to remain outside of life’s flow, or Hirschhorn’s installations that through their profusion of things attempt to coerce the thing into divulging, or McCarthy’s method to scare from amid the surplus something that has become hidden as he wanders through the city of things searching for a crack in plaster. Yet, where does all this wandering leave us if not shipwrecked in this very moment? The house ravaged by fire If we are to understand form in its solvency, it is through an unformed support and the activity of form that draws its force in the mixing and resistance between content and form. It is what Agamben saw in The Unknown Masterpiece, where to leave the evanescent world of forms, Frenhofer has no other means than form itself, so that the more he attempts to erase it, the more he has to concentrate on it to render it permeable to the inexpressible content he wants to express.21 Perceived through a resistance amid content and form as it grinds away on this pivot of our moment, a Rachel Whiteread House containing both Gale’s front room and the concrete it pours into, which is to walk in this contemporary moment amid its destruction, Agamben asserts:

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And if it is true that the fundamental architectural problem becomes visible only in the house ravaged by fire, then perhaps we are today in a privileged position to understand the authentic significance of the Western aesthetic project.22

This is what we begin to perceive through the destruction of art, in which something becomes visible through its ravaging. He proposes: Perhaps nothing is more urgent—if we really want to engage the problem of art in our time—than a destruction of aesthetics that would, by clearing away what is usually taken for granted, allow us to bring into question the very meaning of aesthetics as the science of the work of art. The question, however, is whether the time is ripe for such a destruction, or whether instead the consequence of such an act would not be the loss of any possible horizon for the understanding of the work of art and the creation of an abyss in front of it that could only be crossed with a radical leap. But perhaps just such a loss and such an abyss are what we most need if we want the work of art to reacquire its original stature.23

And here we find ourselves, attempting to leap but troubled by what lies on the other side, as the moment is upon us and we are heedless that through the shipwreck we are already there. As we walk out amid this shipwreck of the miracle in reverse, we perhaps understand something of both destruction and the moment. It is exactly this Agamben considers concerning inhabiting this contemporary moment, or the manner in which people appear to wear it upon their back like an implement of fashion, as if the moment was simply an outfit of form that one dons. Perceiving it as “the form of an ungraspable threshold between a ‘not yet’ and a ‘no more’” that “constitutively anticipates itself and consequently is also always too late.”24 In What is Contemporary?, Agamben takes a brief theological turn for considering this by way of the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from paradise, in which this moment becomes mortal and marked through the donning of skins. He sees in this moment a clothing, “made from animals’ skin” as a signature given, “to our progenitors as a tangible symbol of sin and death in the moment” as they are expelled from paradise.25 In this sense it is the mortal moment, as the moment signified becomes tethered to something external and dead, that must be carried forward in the moment upon its back through history as a carcass—a dead and fixed past that is constantly dragged forward with each passing moment. However, perhaps this misses some of the subtleties in the original language.

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In her lecture Content into Form,26 writer Rachel Pollack examines this same passage, in which she translates, “God made them garments of skin to protect them” and instead reads it as a metaphor for understanding something immaterial (an inexpressible content) impossibly being given form, and perhaps an origin for understanding how form comes to be, but also how it is not something fixed, and instead is something permeable that likewise gives form. Agamben resorts to the Latin phrase tunicae pelliceae as “the clothes made from animals’ skin.”27 However, Pollack turns to the original Hebrew, with the words ‫`( עור‬owr) or skin and ‫( כתנת‬kĕthoneth) or garments, which is not animal skin but our own, and she perceives “thus, the garments of skin would be their own skins, the organ that contains us and separates us from the world all around us.”28 Therefore, instead of a story about how this moment comes to carry the corpse of the past upon its back—an external garment—it becomes the skin in which we walk. In this sense, it is a joining of content into form in a second origin—that then must walk with every step within this moment before us. Like Hirschhorn’s conception of form in Crystal of Resistance, it emerges from the moment as an envelope for making something tangible like “a skin, a shell or a geode,”29 as content and form intertwine the one contained in the other, which no artist or poet can separate, and yet through the shipwreck of destruction or the signature of this moment are revealed as one and the same through the mystery of form, the shattering of external form. What might art look like from across the leap, as who is to say there might not be a form of landscape painting capable of ravaging itself through these fires? This burning is not a proscription, and, similarly, it would be a misstep to read these proceedings as an affirmation of a purely conceptual or immaterial bent in art or likewise an art only capable of attempting to represent this destruction. Instead it might simply be the radical leap that each step implies as this moment of destruction from which we walk enskinned. And what might this all look like—I have no idea, but I see it and it is burning. It is not important to get caught up in detecting the lie (that a cousin is not in fact on the ship as we had thought), but instead to look at what may hide in its confines— for that is where the shipwreck points. Moreover, this is the moment we inhabit (in fact the only one we can), through a solvency, and yet, Bataille observes, “on all sides and in every way, a world in motion wants to be changed.”30

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Notes  1 Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. London: Penguin Books, 1960. p. 87.  2 Ibid.  3 Ibid.  4 Ibid., p. 543.  5 Ibid., p. 92.  6 Ibid., p. 202.  7 Crystal of Resistance. Mixed media, dimensions variable. The Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2011.  8 Hirschhorn, Thomas. Crystal of Resistance (pamphlet). Swiss Pavilion. Biennale di Venezia, Padiglione Svizzero: Federal Office of Culture, Swiss Confederation, June 1, 2011. p. 4.  9 Hirschhorn, Crystal of Resistance, p. 5. 10 Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share. Volume II, the History of Eroticism. Volume III, Sovereignty. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991. p. 255. Subsequent references: Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III). 11 Baudrillard, Jean, and Sylvère Lotringer. The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays. New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 2005. p. 168. 12 McCarthy, Tom. Remainder. London: Alma Books, 2007. p. 91. 13 Ibid., p. 95. 14 Bataille, The Accursed Share (vols II and III), p. 256. 15 Hirschhorn, Crystal of Resistance, p. 4. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., p. 6. 18 Ibid. 19 Agamben, Giorgio. The Man without Content. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. p. 8. 20 Lotringer, Sylvère, and Paul Virilio. The Accident of Art. New York, NY;  Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e); Distributed by the MIT Press, 2005. p. 63. 21 Agamben, The Man without Content, p. 8. 22 Ibid., p. 6. 23 Ibid. 24 Agamben, Giorgio, D. Kishik, and S. Pedatella. What Is an Apparatus? Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. p. 48. 25 Ibid., p. 49. 26 Pollack, Rachel. “Content into Form.” Keynote lecture at Goddard College for MFA in Writing at Goddard College, January 2008. 27 Agamben et al., What Is an Apparatus?, p. 49.

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28 Pollack, “Content into Form.” 29 Hirschhorn, Crystal of Resistance, p. 6. 30 Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991. p. 168.

Epilogue

“These things hardly existed at all,” remarked Robert Irwin of his untitled columns, begun in 1969.1 In Blink and You’ll Miss It, Irwin described how his transparent cast-acrylic sculptures inhabit a gallery space austerely, how they appear to “sit on a delicate edge” between absence and presence.2 As objects, they were nearly visible, what the Ace Gallery described as “so limpid that even while looking directly at it, the column or anything behind it could disappear with one movement of the visitor.”3 When first encountered, Irwin observed how a visitor does “an instant check, you know—you just want to make sure there’s no hole you’re going to fall into, there’s nothing you’re going to bump into, so you do that very quickly, we’re not even aware of it—it’s instant.” So that “You’re forced to stop for a second, to recheck, because something’s not right.”4 He continues: “So you freeze, and in that moment of freezing, in a way, you become a first-time perceiver.”5 Irwin had stipulated that no separation devices, or velvet ropes, as such, were to be placed around the sculpture, which might distract from its ability to bend light and virtually disappear into the site. However, it appears as if one of the clear slender pillars may have succeeded all too well. At a retrospective for the artist in 2008, a visitor walked into a sixteen-foot-tall transparent acrylic column on display and knocked it over, damaging the sculpture beyond repair. Perhaps the sculpture’s capacity to disappear into a space had indirectly become responsible for its destruction, but Irwin biographer, Lawrence Weschler, recounted in a joint lecture with Irwin in 2009, that one of Irwin’s patrons had walked into the gallery without seeing it and knocked it over.6 The image reappears from half-recollection—sitting in an auditorium— attending artist talks after a long day of museum panel discussions and presentations. Recast. Perhaps. Lawrence Weschler is on the left in a

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gray-brown suit with a multicolored tie; Robert Irwin is to the right, in faded blue jeans, black tee, mesh-back cap, and sturdy shoes. Talking, they convene behind a small table with incidentals, a laptop, pen, plastic cup of Coca-Cola for Irwin, and bottles of water for each. Between the two men is a smaller wooden side table on top of which sits a tasteful decoration. Clustered on a sizable Persian-style carpet, perhaps red or brown, they sit at the midmost section of a stage, positioned to make the large auditorium seem more intimate, a conversation set in a domestic space as opposed to an institution. From the audience, people ask polite questions to be smart, good-­ natured, and civilized. Maybe Weschler catches, midresponse, a glitch of a reply or is distracted by something said and looks briefly to the left with an observation such as, “or your acrylic column that broke at the show in San Diego.” There could be a particular way that he says this, and Irwin might chuckle and take a mouthful of his drink, or Weschler might continue, saying something offhand; perhaps, “They walked into the room and didn’t see it was there and broke it.” Possible fragments said in passing, throwaway remarks, but remaining as an imprint of their conversation or ones similar, and yet at the same time that which cannot be placed absolutely, likely a composite of other fragmentary chats reconstituted or an article read in passing. Instead, it could be an admirer of Irwin’s work, not just a museum goer, variations and a phrase catching in mind—or even Irwin’s biggest admirer or his number one fan, a snatch into puzzle-place (with whatever that implies), so that conceivably this admirer, en route from a toilet, stepped out into the gallery and, not seeing the untitled work in an otherwise empty gallery, walked directly into and shattered something. Replay the fragments of half-remembered conversation, build a house from it, run through again, sped up and slowed down, revealing operations as forms carried forward like obsessive piano recitals practicing variations unrecalled, to somehow reenact a cohesion and in it perceive an origin among a scree of events. For the sake of convenience (or utility), tracing an origin back to these instances, but when observed it sidesteps, slots in from somewhere else, a vague recollection that displaces an initial image. As an attempt to anchor or fix these events as more concrete, it is no longer there, just a resemblance to some place once been before. Not certain that these are even the things said, or in the aftermath maybe the acrylic sculpture only received a light ghosting or shadow as a fracture visible from a specific angle like struck quartz crystal, or else its clear surface rending cracked and crazed like Marcel Duchamp’s The

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Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). Thus, Irwin’s admirer had exited the lavatory that day, and without seeing the translucent object had walked directly into it, knocked it over—and what of it? Yet, indeed, it made a loud crack and startled everyone, made them cautious and made them look at art differently, more carefully, but ultimately it rendered the work as still intact. Or, conversely, the work of art was damaged beyond repair. It ended up in a skip somewhere, like so many other works before: Anish Kapoor’s Hole And Vessel II, a bulky red polystyrene and cement sculpture that is believed to have been dumped with rubbish by mistake during renovations to a building where it was stored,7 or the untitled lacquer and Plexiglas wall relief by Craig Kauffman that appears to have simply fallen from the wall at the Pompidou and shattered, or likewise Peter Alexander’s untitled resin piece that suffered a similar fate (also falling from the wall at the Pompidou in 2006).8 Yet, to understand these incidents as an attempted cohesion, the urge to stack fragments as recollection, with metaphorical and literal bits of bone, ­concrete, lint, twigs, sounds, and twine, through an obsessive logic and operation, piecing, mounded in corners of a room for observers to walk around, forming an attempt to see something perhaps overlooked and in the hope that it might return to life or in a manner become more real or more. However, returning to Irwin’s broken acrylic column, of its passing not much appears to remain or to mark it. On the Internet, a few brief references to an accident, nothing factual; but perhaps this also undermines a commonly held idea that incidents and things—everything—breathe on and will forever haunt us from the web, and as such it carries forward as a conversation with absence. Bleeding to another incident, on January 13, 2015, as a masked vandal destroys a public sculpture by Michael Asher with a sledgehammer at a university in California. Asher’s conceptual piece, which was in the form of a fully functioning drinking fountain made from polished granite, had been installed outdoors on campus as part of the Stuart Collection at the University of California San Diego. As institutional critique, the fountain had marked the site on campus that had previously been a Marine Corps training ground before being turned over to the university in 1964—­suggesting perhaps a complicity between institutions of defense and education and a reminder of the site’s previous use.9 On the night of the incident, the vandal also smashed eight surveillance cameras and painted “private property” on the library before spray painting on a wall in gold the epitaph “YOU CAN PAINT OVER ME YOU CAN CATCH ME YOU CAN EXPELL ME I WILL STILL BE HERE [sic].”10

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Index

Index

Ader, Bas Jan 22, 26 Agamben, Giorgio 24, 124–126 Ai Weiwei 41–42 Alexander, Peter 131 André, Carl 7 Asher, Michael 131 Ayres, Gillian 91 Baldessar, John 41 Bartlebooth 15–16, 97 Benjamin, Walter 40–41 Blanchot, Maurice 61 Borges, Jorge Luis 8 Bourgeois, Louise 78–80, 82–83, 87–88 Braque, Georges 5, 27 Breitwieser, Stéphane 28–35, 42, 44, 71 Büchler, Pavel 5 Burden, Chris 41 Calder, Alexander 26 Calle, Sophie 7 Calvino, Italo 5 Castorp, Hans 56–59, 64, 114–115 Chapman, Jake and Dinos 41, 91, 105–107 Citizen Kane 95–97 Craig-Martin, Michael 91, 118, 131, 101 Critchley, Simon 17

Demand, Thomas 42 Destruction in Art Symposium 41 distinct, the 66–69, 76, 99 Duchamp, Marcel 7, 16, 97–98, 106, 130 Emin, Tracey see Tent Erased de Kooning Drawing 22–24, 26, 41 Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 see Tent failure 4 fatal strategy 27 Fischer, Urs 84–87 Flanagan, Barry 91 Freud, Lucien 18, 26 Gale, Sid 20–21, 65 Gallery of Lost Art 22, 25–27, 32–33 Gamboni, Dario 10–11, 37, 43–44 Genet, Jean 2 genius 10 Godzilla 39 Gordon, Douglas 41 Graham, Dan 7 Heron, Patrick 91 Hesse, Eva 26 Hirschhorn, Thomas 115–118, 120

146 Holzer, Jenny 7 Homage to New York 32–37, 43, 60 iconoclasm 11 imago 85 Irwin, Robert 129–131 Janus head 44, 69 Kapoor, Anish 131 Kauffman, Craig 131 Kerouac, Jack 2–3, 6 Kneifer, Ottilie 114–115 Lambie, Jim 63 Landy, Michael 2–3, 41 Lefebvre, Henri 6–7 Léger, Fernand 27 Life a User’s Manual 15–16 Lotringer, Sylvère 4 Mallarmé, Stéphane 5 Manifesto Auto-Destructive Art 43–44 Marclay, Christian 38, 41 Marinetti, Fillipo 40 Martin, Agnes 61–63, 69 masterpiece 9–11, 34, 37 Matisse, Henri 27 Matta-Clark, Gordon 41 Messager, Annette 7 Metzger, Gustav 37, 43–44 Missing Pieces, The 6–7 Modigliani, Amedeo 27 Momart fire 90–93, 95, 101–102 Mona Lisa 27–28, 64–65 Mondrian, Piet 40 Museum of Lost Art 5–8 Nauman, Bruce 38–39 negative miracle 8–9, 70–71

Index Ofili, Chris 91 Peruggia, Vincenzo 28 Picasso, Pablo 22, 27, 40 Pompidou accidents 131 Ponge, Francis 87 Raiders of the Lost Ark 95 Rauschenberg, Robert 22–24, 26, 41 Remainder 12–17, 119 reverse miracle see negative miracle Rist, Pipilotti 41 Ruscha, Ed 41 Scheherazade 74–77, 123 Schiele, Egon 26 Serra, Richard 26 shipwreck 3–4, 8–11, 20, 70–71, 115 silent sister 114–115 Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle, The 38 Smithson, Robert 7, 14, 18 Tent 22, 102–105 Tilted Arc 6, 26 Tinguely, Jean 32–37, 43 Unknown Masterpiece, The 22–25 Venus de Milo 36, 96 Vermeer, Johannes 7–8 Warhol, Andy 40, 56, 65 Whiteread, Rachel (House) 18–21, 26 Winchester, Sarah 80–82 Winchester Trilogy and Jeremy Blake 82–84 Zeuxis and Parrhasios 66