Endless Andness: The Politics of Abstraction According to Ann Veronica Janssens 1472521749, 9781472521743

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Endless Andness The Politics of Abstraction According to Ann Veronica Janssens

Mieke Bal

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Mieke Bal, 2013 Mieke Bal has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978-1-4725-2174-3 978-1-4725-2818-6 978-1-4725-3472-9 978-1-4725-2480-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Prologue

ix xvii 1

Introduction Looking Performing Reading Acting Spacing Traversing

7 8 13 15 19 22 26

1 How to Do Things with Clouds Playing Body Deixis Representing the Body? Swerving Visual Deixis Recoiling

31 35 39 43 51 57 63

2 Light Matters Deictic Looking Stirring Solid Light Light Theater Wavering Cutting Mist Leaving

69 71 76 86 94 99 106 114

ENDLESS ANDNESS

3 Inside the Polis Abstract Bodily Transgressive Empowering Modest Political Baroque Imagination

117 124 136 142 147 156 160 166

4 Serendipity Gift Making Making Useful Accidental Abstraction Spacetime By Accident The Politics of Accidental Discovery

173 178 181 189 198 210 213 215

5 And-ness Scrub Art and Philosophy Color Speak Mixing Meaning Accidental Colors Color Democracy Color for Democratic Space On Being in the Mood

221 223 230 234 239 246 256 263 275

Epilogue: Ten Ways of Sharing Space

279

References Index of Names Index of Subjects

viii

293 301 307

List of Figures

Ann Veronica Janssens, Horror Vacui, 1999. Artificial mist and natural light, dimensions variable. Belgian pavilion, 48th Venice Biennale. Courtesy of the artist. 2 P.2. Ann Veronica Janssens, Blue, Red and Yellow, 2001. Pavilion with colored sides filled with artificial mist. Steel, polycarbonate, colored filters, artificial mist, and natural light, approx. 8.8 x 4.3 x 3.5 m. “Light Games,” Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Courtesy of the artist. 5 1.1. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 1600. Oil on canvas, 230 x 175 cm. Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome. 33 1.2. Ann Veronica Janssens, Tunnel, 1999. F-100 fog generator producing a cloud in a pedestrian tunnel every five minutes. Artificial mist, dimensions variable. “Super Space,” 14th Festival a/d Werf, Utrecht. Photograph by Philippe De Gobert. 44–45 1.3. Ann Veronica Janssens, Corps noir, 1994. Black Perspex hemisphere, 50 cm diameter, 25 cm depth. Photograph by Philippe De Gobert. 47 1.4. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Head of Medusa, ca. 1596–98. Oil on convex wood, 60 x 55 cm. Uffizi Gallery, Florence. 50 1.5. Parmigianino, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, ca. 1524. Oil on convex panel, 22.4 cm diameter. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. 52 1.6a–d. Mona Hatoum, Corps étranger, 1994. Video installation with cylindrical wooden structure, video projector, video player, amplifier, and four speakers, approx. 350 x 300 x 300 cm. Musée d’Art Moderne,

P.1.

ix

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Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Courtesy of the artist. 54–55 2.1. Ann Veronica Janssens, Casa Frollo, 1988. 18 glass sheets, 20 x 20 cm each. Casa Frollo, Venice. Photograph by Michel François. 72–73 2.2. Ann Veronica Janssens, Grand disque, 1996. Engraved aluminum, 100 cm diameter. Photograph by Marie-Puck Broodthaers. 77 2.3. Ann Veronica Janssens, Tropical Paradise, 2006. Sheet of corrugated aluminum and 23¾ carat gold leaf, 4 x 110 x 127 cm, minimum installation height 240 cm. Frieze Art Fair, London. Photograph by Dimitri Reimis. 80 2.4. Ann Veronica Janssens, Pavillon doré, 2007. Corrugated aluminum and 23¾ carat gold leaf, 200 x 135 x 120 cm. “An den Frühling,” Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen. Photograph by Philippe De Gobert. 82 2.5. Ann Veronica Janssens, Représentation d’un corps rond, 1996. Cyberlight projector and artificial mist, 3c projection (looped), dimensions variable. “Work for Space,” Kunstverein München, Munich (2001). Photograph by Wilfried Petzi. 87 2.6. Anthony McCall, Line Describing a Cone, 1973. 16 mm film, black-and-white, silent. 30c projection, overall display dimensions variable. “Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964–1977,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002). Photograph by Hank Graber. 90 2.7. Michel François, Planning, 1999. Neon lights, Plexiglas, screen-print, aluminum, paper, and steel. Belgian pavilion, 48th Venice Biennale. Courtesy of the artist. 110 2.8a–b. Ann Veronica Janssens, Aquarium, 1992–2006. Aquarium, silicone oil, water, and alcohol, 50 x 50 x 50 cm. “Avril,” Air de Paris (2006). Photographs by Hans Theys (a) and Marc Domage (b). 112 x

LIST OF FIGURES

Ann Veronica Janssens, Aquarium, 1992. Aquarium, silicone oil, water, and alcohol, 50 x 50 x 50 cm. Galerie One Five, Antwerp. Courtesy of the artist. 2.9a–b. Ann Veronica Janssens, Liquid Crystal, 1999. Benches with thermochromatic coating. Belgian pavilion, 48th Venice Biennale. Photographs by BenoÎt Platéus. 3.1a. Morsbroich Castle, Leverkusen (Germany). Photograph by Philippe De Gobert. 3.1b. Ann Veronica Janssens, Bikes, 2000. Bikes with engraved aluminum hubcaps. Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2007). Photograph by Philippe De Gobert. 3.1c. Ann Veronica Janssens, Untitled, 2007. Artificial mist, colored filter, and natural light, dimensions variable. Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen. Photograph by Philippe De Gobert. 3.2a–b. Ann Veronica Janssens, Aerogel, 2000. Aerogel, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist. 3.2c. Ann Veronica Janssens, Aerogel, 2000. Aerogel, dimensions variable. “An den Frühling,” Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2007). Photograph by Brian Butler. 3.3. Ann Veronica Janssens, Bluette, 2006. Installation with seven beams of light. LED beamers and artificial mist, 140 cm diameter, 120 cm depth. “Avril,” Air de Paris. Photograph by D.R. Courtesy of Air de Paris. 3.4. Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Oil on canvas, 130.5 x 190 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. 3.5. Ann Veronica Janssens, Yellow Rose, 2006. Installation with six beams of light. Projectors, dichroic filters, and artificial mist, dimensions variable (min. 360 cm diameter, min. 250 cm depth). Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen. Photograph by Philippe De Gobert. 3.6. Ann Veronica Janssens, Freak Star, 2004. Installation with eight beams of light. Theater projectors with shutters and artificial mist, ca. 350 cm diameter. Galeria Toni Tàpies, Barcelona. Photograph by Gasull.

2.8c.

113

115 121

122

123 126

126

132 133

139

140 xi

ENDLESS ANDNESS

Ann Veronica Janssens, 100,000 lire, 1999. Thousand engraved 100-lire coins. Distributed from the Scuola Grande di San Rocco during the exhibition “En attendant l’année dernière,” 48th Venice Biennale. Courtesy of the artist. 144 3.8. Ann Veronica Janssens, Espace infini, 1999. Wood and white plaster, 1082 x 1070 x 600 cm. Musée de la Guerre, Ypres (Belgium). Courtesy of the artist. 147 3.9. Ann Veronica Janssens, Ciel, 2003. Video installation. Live recording video camera, video projector, and projection screen, dimensions variable. Belgacom Towers, Brussels. Photograph by Philippe De Gobert. 150–51 3.10. Ann Veronica Janssens, Yellow White Study, 2005. Two light projectors with shutters, two gobos in dichroic glass, and artificial mist. Dimensions variable. Galerie Esther Schipper, Berlin. Courtesy of Esther Schipper. 154 3.11. Ann Veronica Janssens, X, 2005. Theater projector with shutters, gobo in dichroic glass, and artificial mist. Galerie Esther Schipper, Berlin. Courtesy of Esther Schipper. 155 4.1a–d. Ann Veronica Janssens, Sans titre (Martin MAC 2000 Performance), 2009. Martin MAC 2000 Performance projector and projection screen, dimensions variable, approx. 9c (looped). Programming assistance by Stéphane De Ridder. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels. Photographs by Philippe De Gobert. 182–83 4.2. Ann Veronica Janssens, IPE 535, 2009. Steel, 535 x 20 x 9 cm. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels. Photograph by Philippe De Gobert. 184 4.3a–b. Ann Veronica Janssens, Chambre anéchoïque, 2009. Chamber insulated with polymeric foam, wood, and sand. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels. Photographs by Philippe De Gobert. 192–93 3.7.

xii

LIST OF FIGURES

Ann Veronica Janssens, Sinus / Résonances, 2009. Sound installation. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels. Photograph by Philippe De Gobert. 194 4.5a–b. Ann Veronica Janssens, Rouge 106 / bleu 132, 2003–09. Halogen lights, colored filters, retroscreen Barrisol, and white light-absorbing matte finishing paint, dimensions variable. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2009). Photographs by Philippe De Gobert. 196–97 4.6. Ann Veronica Janssens, Eclipses, 2006–09. Video installation. Several films, tube screens or projectors, dimensions variable. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2009). Photograph by Philippe De Gobert. 199 4.7. Ann Veronica Janssens, Boule, 2007. Video. DVD, tube screen or projector, dimensions variable, 10c27s (looped). “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2009). Photograph by Guillaume Bléret. 203 4.8. Ann Veronica Janssens, Untitled (Golden Section), 2009. Polyester reflecting film and 1000-watt spot. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels. Photograph by Philippe De Gobert. 205 4.9a–e. Ann Veronica Janssens, Jupiter, 2009. Video, 11s (looped). “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels. Photographs by Guillaume Bléret. 208–09 4.10. Ann Veronica Janssens, Odeillo, 2008. Video, 2c4s (looped). “Les Riffs,” Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp. Courtesy of the artist. 216–17 5.1a. Ann Veronica Janssens, Scrub, 2002. Video, 5c (looped), dimensions variable. Galerie Esther Schipper, Berlin (2008). Courtesy of Esther Schipper. 226 5.1b–d. Ann Veronica Janssens, Scrub, 2002. Video, 5c (looped), dimensions variable. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2009). 4.4.

xiii

ENDLESS ANDNESS

Photographs by Philippe Rolle, Laurence Godart, and Guillaume Bléret. 226–27 5.2a–b. Ann Veronica Janssens, Donut, 2003. Programmed light projection, dimensions variable. “Capp Street Project 20th Anniversary Exhibition,” CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco. Photographs by Florian Holzerr. Courtesy of Capp Street Project. 228–29 5.3. Ann Veronica Janssens, Blue, Red and Yellow (photo collage), 2001. Pavilion with colored sides filled with artificial mist. Steel, colored filters on PVC, and artificial mist, 350 x 900 x 450 cm. “Light Games,” Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Courtesy of the artist. 236 5.4a. Ann Veronica Janssens, Cocktail Sculpture, 2008. Glass, distilled water, and paraffin oil, 120 x 60 x 60 cm. Galeria Toni Tàpies, Barcelona. Photograph by Gasull. 248 5.4b. Ann Veronica Janssens, Cocktail Sculpture, 2008. Glass, distilled water, and paraffin oil, 120 x 60 x 60 cm. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2009). Photograph by Philippe De Gobert. 249 5.5a–c. Ann Veronica Janssens, Edelweiss, 1999–2001. Color photocopies of photographs of oil stains on roads. Posted up throughout the city during the exhibition “In the Absence of Light It’s Possible to Create the Brightest Images within Oneself,” October 26– December 10, 2000, Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg. Courtesy of the artist. 250–51 5.6. Ann Veronica Janssens, La nuit, 2009. Video, 4c8s (looped). Photograph by Guillaume Bléret. 252 5.7a. Ann Veronica Janssens, Incandescent glass bar, 2009. Bar made of incandescent Anla glass. Kijkduin Biennale, The Hague (2011). Photograph by Angela Vandenburght. 254 5.7b–c. Ann Veronica Janssens, Incandescent glass bar, 2009. Bar made of incandescent Anla glass. Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp. Courtesy of Micheline Szwajcer. 255 xiv

LIST OF FIGURES

Ann Veronica Janssens, Medium Pink Turquoise, 2007. Light projector, halogen, and dichroic filters, dimensions variable. Collection Sénat, Brussels. Photograph by Marc Domage. 257 5.9. Ann Veronica Janssens, Medium Pink Turquoise, 2007. Light projector, halogen, and dichroic filters, dimensions variable. Collection Sénat, Brussels. Photograph by Guy Goossens. 262 5.10. Ann Veronica Janssens, Blue, Red and Yellow, 2001. Pavilion with colored sides filled with artificial mist. Steel, colored filters on PVC, and artificial mist, 350 x 900 x 450 cm. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2009). Photograph by Philippe De Gobert. 263 5.11a–d. Ann Veronica Janssens, Blue, Red and Yellow, 2001. Pavilion with colored sides filled with artificial mist. Steel, colored filters on PVC, and artificial mist, 350 x 900 x 450 cm. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2009). Photographs by Pascual Mercé (a, c) and Philippe De Gobert (b, d). 266–67 5.12. Ann Veronica Janssens, Scarlet, Sweet Blue, and Orange (installation shot), 2010. Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp. Photograph by Peter Lemmens. 270–71 5.13. Ann Veronica Janssens, Orange, 2010. Glass tank, paraffin oil, colored screen-print, and wooden base, 50 x 50 x 115 cm. Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp. Photograph by Peter Lemmens. 272 5.14. Ann Veronica Janssens, Sweet Blue, 2010. Glass tank, paraffin oil, colored screen-print, and wooden base, 50 x 50 x 115 cm. Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp. Photograph by Peter Lemmens. 273 5.15. Ann Veronica Janssens, Scarlet, 2010. Glass tank, paraffin oil, distillated water, red pigments, and wooden base, 60 x 60 x 120 cm. Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp. Photograph by Peter Lemmens. 274 E.1. Ann Veronica Janssens, IPE 600, 2009. Steel, 600 x 20 x 9 cm. “unExhibit,” Generali Foundation, Vienna (2011). Photograph by Margherita Spiluttini. 282 5.8.

xv

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E.2.

E.3.

E.4.

xvi

Ann Veronica Janssens, Berlin–Barcelona, Part 2 (installation shot), 1999. Video, 14cs (looped), dimensions variable. “unExhibit,” Generali Foundation, Vienna (2011). Photograph by Margherita Spiluttini. 285 “unExhibit,” Generali Foundation, Vienna (2011). Installation shot showing various works by Ann Veronica Janssens. Photograph by Margherita Spiluttini. 288–89 “unExhibit,” Generali Foundation, Vienna (2011). Installation shot showing various works by Ann Veronica Janssens. Photograph by Margherita Spiluttini. 290

Acknowledgements

This book is part of a trilogy of three books on the political power of art. I cannot begin to enumerate the many people with whom I have had stimulating and inspiring conversations on this topic. I thank them all. I wish to thank in particular just a few people who have had a decisive impact on the result. To begin with, the artist Ann Veronica Janssens, whose brilliant work and conversations have been so decisive for my thinking on art. I also thank Miguel Á. Hernández Navarro, with whom I have had the pleasure of collaborating on the international exhibition 2MOVE (2007–08), a hands-on as well as intellectual-artistic job during which we had many conversations on the topic of this trilogy. This book was edited twice, first by Machteld Harmsen and then by Stefan van der Lecq; both have kept my prose in line, and have meticulously checked draft after draft with great expertise and good cheer. I gratefully acknowledge the Rockefeller Foundation for a residency at the heavenly Bellagio Center, and the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences for the “Academy Professorship” it awarded me, which greatly helped in finding the time to write and the means to travel. The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) remains an intellectual context that nurtures thought.

xvii

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Prologue

What makes the visual intelligible is itself unseen. John Rajchman1

The time was a dog-day afternoon in 1998. The place was Lisbon, near the River Tagus. The door opened easily and closed quickly. Failing to read the small letters that identified the room, I found myself totally immersed in a piece that, in order to be experienced and understood, required precisely such thoughtless, total submersion. The space that surrounded me was blissful, bright, and totally opaque; in it, all sound was subdued. The word “space” may even be too worldly. The world, after all, was on the other side of the door. Where was I? In a strong, literal sense, I was nowhere. With my eyes wide open I saw nothing, despite the fact that the room was not dark in the least. The dense, impenetrable mist packed into the space whose limits I could not even guess was so bright it almost seemed a kitsch fantasy of heaven. Imagine the kind of clouds angels sit on: those little fat putti with eggshell skin. Such clouds would resemble those of Renaissance and Baroque painting, except that the latter have shapes while this mist did not. Whatever shape it might have had was invisible to me. Since shapes can only be seen from the outside and I found myself inside the cloud, I felt I was enclosed in nothingness. After a while, ever so slowly it seemed—but time was arrested as much as sound—vague lines came through. The event of their becoming visible was just that: an occurrence in time. The change in the space consisted of a gradual, partial receding of the absolute opacity of the white that had surrounded me completely, clinging to

1

Rajchman 1988, 92. 1

ENDLESS ANDNESS

P.1. Ann Veronica Janssens, Horror Vacui, 1999. Artificial mist and natural light, dimensions variable. Belgian pavilion, 48th Venice Biennale.

my skin and challenging my sense of my own boundaries—something that could induce fear. As this receding took place I became aware of my own dissolution. Thus, the after-effect of the event retrospectively turned the initial experience into an unsettling one. Next, another event occurred, one that was deeply narrative in that it had the retroversive capacity to change the state of what, before, I would have called “my mind.” Now, I could not call it that any longer. The anxiety that was created by contrast and after the fact was an anxiety “of the heart,” to allude to Baroque philosopher Blaise Pascal. He famously wrote: “The heart has its reasons which reason itself does not know” (1995, 158). This was what I discovered: the heart as the seat of a domain of reason that reason either does not know or actively ignores. The mind-body, or the body-mind, acts on its own, which is what happened when I felt the earlier possibility of fear was a retroversion. Retroversion is a narrative device that requires a narrative agent, a narrator, to manipulate the linearity of time. Readers are given access to a universe of events that run through time in different directions and 2

PROLOGUE

crisscross where time thickens. We know such devices from novels— not from visual art, be it figurative, abstract or conceptual. Yet, as this instance shows, retroversion empowers not only readers, but also viewers. It gives access to unknown worlds. It opens up our lives to manifold possibilities that console us in our grief of being bound, hand and foot, by time’s tyranny. I was without sight and blissfully coming into sight at the same time. The accession to the visibility of the still-vague lines was also constituted by the emergence of the ceiling, plinths, and corners of the room through the seemingly limitless cloud. Lines and things became as one. It was an emergence barely identifiable as well as fragile, in permanent danger of annihilation. Only now could I begin to see that I was indeed in something as ordinary as a room. I could see its square form and its proportions. The earlier sensation, however, of no other space being present for me than the absolute was still lingering on my retina and my skin. What was happening with and within me was an experience of duration as a crucially important element of visual perception. Not only were the boundaries of my body—my skin as protection and site of both vulnerability and access—less obvious than I had always assumed them to be. Not only was being inside the cloud incompatible with seeing its shape. Not only was vision a slowly granted and slowly developed privilege. In addition, the duration of perception was uneven in its rhythm, unstable in its linearity, dense and pervasive in its impact, and wavering in its location, siding alternately with the subject (me) and the object—the unstable sight that I was beginning to see. But then again, those notions—subject, object—and the distinction they proclaimed, had themselves lost their boundaries, their separate identities. They had become as vague and blurred as the mist I was immersed in. All this time I could not walk. I was nailed to the floor, fearful even of shuffling forward, as the blind might feel when suddenly deprived of their aids. Walking, even when it is expected to be safe, is impossible without the help of perception. Pondering this, I heard a hissing sound. It seemed close by, but I could not gauge its distance from me. I could not see its source, nor interpret its meaning. Perhaps it was a part of the installation. However, it might as well have been arbitrary; a noise made by the air-conditioning system of 3

ENDLESS ANDNESS

the building, perhaps. Who was to say where the work began and ended, where its seams stitched it to its environment, how it was framed? The sound was not loud, but in the total silence of the fogcushioned space it constituted an unsettling interruption. Like the emergence of the lines, the hissing constructed the preceding silence at the very moment it broke that silence. Yet, it was only potentially frightening for a moment. As the mist was brightened up by its rigorous whiteness, so the sound’s contrast to silence was its only affective burden. Just as the lines coming into visibility, it allowed nothing to distract from the purity of its retroversive effect. How long had I been standing there? Duration was there; it was a presence, an embodied sensible “thing.” It became sensual, slowly accumulating metaphors, associations, and personal memories of space, smell, and matter. Duration was made so intense, so bodily, that it was impossible to measure it with a clock. In a futile attempt to document this sensation of being in time, I tried to take a picture of the moment when the slow-down waged a victorious battle against the inexorability of time. Duration became an ally in my desperate resistance to the gliding slope of life at whose bottom “the end” is written. My camera refused: its automatic calculation of time versus distance and light could not deal with the situation, just as it cannot capture dreams. One minute, ten minutes? I had now become used to the hissing sound that came on at intervals that may have been either regular or arbitrary. It ceased to interrupt my being-there. The mist had not disappeared, not even lessened; it had become more transparent, and in that respect at least it ceased to hinder. I could walk now; slowly, carefully, alert, one small step at a time. I could see the edges of a few steps and guess the rest of the stairs. The room became a part of a building. I could outline the end of the room and guess a hallway. I could make out the sound came from at least three different directions. At this point in my narrative, a bifurcation is mapped out before me. In one direction, I continue the narrative discourse and introduce the next episode. From the mist emerges a creature barely identifiable; I do not know whether it is male or female, victim or threat. But there seems to be an air of murder about this figure. Here we go down the path of fiction, where I engage the mist room as a setting for a mystery plot. This mist becomes the marsh into which the 4

PROLOGUE

P.2. Ann Veronica Janssens, Blue, Red and Yellow, 2001. Pavilion with colored sides filled with artificial mist. Steel, polycarbonate, colored filters, artificial mist, and natural light, approx. 8.8 x 4.3 x 3.5 m. “Light Games,” Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

villain flees at dawn; in which the child gets lost and might drown or suffer more unspeakable things; in which the heroine perseveres to find the missing abductee. The unlimited worlds of fiction open up when time and visibility lose their self-evidence. I imagine myself sitting in this room of mist watching other visitors come in, seeing their deceleration, interpreting their bewilderment, and writing stories that take their starting points in their body-minds. The other direction, more appropriate for the occasion of an art experience, opens up the field of the philosophy of perception, of art practice and its role in the contemporary world. This path leads to a world that is just as unlimited, subject not to rigid structure but to the proliferation of human imagination. It is my good fortune that I was ready to “have seen” this space as a stage, a theater, a work of art, an experiment in the bond between perception and sensation which makes all aesthetic standards falter and dissolve. I experienced perception’s irreducible bond with duration—the unity of perception 5

ENDLESS ANDNESS

and sensation that undermines the distinction between subject and object that the visual arts have always considered to be the basis of their specificity, or “nature.” This installation articulates a thought that has become thinkable only now, in the time of virtual reality—a thought that transforms what was there before. The world as we knew it, art as we knew it, the limits and concepts and distinctions by which we lived: they all are transformed by the brief sensation of losing clarity.

6

Introduction

Voyage in place: that is the name of all intensities . . . Deleuze and Guattari1

The room of mist I accidentally entered that day in Lisbon was my first encounter with Belgian sculptor Ann Veronica Janssens’ work with mist. Near a small door in the left-hand corner of a large exhibition room in which Rubens had been juxtaposed to Broodthaers, “high art” to utensils, religious art to worldly art, I embarked upon a voyage in place. Retrospectively, I see that room as a stage on which I played a role I had not played before. What kind of visuality was at stake there? As a result of previous visual experiences—of art in different mediums (paintings, installations of paintings, paintings in spite of their installations), but also of the world around our bodies and around the visual objects that we see and perceive as “works of art”—I realized that the body mobilized, conjured into participation qua body, is the same body whose eyes are doing the looking.2 Hence, in contrast to the disembodied gaze that we have learned to cast on images, the gaze that is atemporal and does not even know it has a body—let alone a body involved in looking—the mode of looking solicited here and its relevance for contemporary art in society is what I seek to understand. The many reasons why I chose Janssens’ work for this inquiry will become clear in the course of this book. Here, I will state one: Janssens makes few objects. Instead, 1

2

The quote is from the chapter “1440: The Smooth and the Striated” in A Thousand Plateaus. The sentence continues with “even if they also develop in extension” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 482). Ann Veronica Janssens (b. 1956) lives and works in Brussels. The mist room was part of an art exhibition of visual art from Flanders through the ages (Vanderlinden and Judong 1998). 7

ENDLESS ANDNESS

she attempts to elude “the tyranny of objects” and their “overbearing materiality” (2004, 113). This helps to avoid the distraction of objects contemplated for their own sake. Instead, she works with what escapes her, not to grasp it, but rather to experiment with its “ungraspability.” In this respect, she is an artist with the attitude of a scientist—in the best of cases of scientific practice. She travels the world in order to attend events such as eclipses; historic and contemporary attempts to capture sunlight and warmth; natural phenomena that increase the difficulty of seeing or, on the contrary, enhance what seeing is (such as the mist of volcanic Iceland); and artificial, experimental situations such as tests in laboratories. She seeks to push back the limits of perception, to multiply the participation of the senses in events of perception, and to turn the routine of drab, everyday life into an adventure of dazzlement. She does not resort to representation. Instead, in her work, Janssens creates the conditions for a passage from one reality to another. If any description of what “art” is and does has validity, these experiments, in ways I will explore, are just that. I aim to analyze and understand how such experiments in passing from one reality to another constitute the conditions of possibility for political effectiveness.

Looking Take, once more, the mist installation and my experience in it; the way it made me look. Whatever it was, this was a mode of looking not only desirable for this work but also the only one that could lead to seeing in spite of the opaque mist. The slowly unfolding access to seeing described in my prefatory narrative stands as an instance of such looking and the seeing it yields. It is a participatory look that is different from “participatory observation”—the long-standing ideal of anthropology (although it too is based on coevalness). The difference between participatory observation and participatory seeing is, I argue in this book, the difference that art can make. To put it bluntly, the former remains objectifying, the participation disingenuous; the latter is self-risking. It is, most fundamentally, art’s contribution to the 8

INTRODUCTION

space we share—which I call “the political.” And if I perform this examination in dialogue with the art of Ann Veronica Janssens, it is because I see in her work a search for a maximization of that difference.3 In contrast to common opinions held about this approach, the basic feature of participatory observation is not friendly dialogue and recognition of the informant as a subject. At its core is condescending semblance of democratism, which bows down before “the other” but rarely questions the latter term in itself. Both “observation” and “the other” are concepts grounded in dichotomies, and, as a result, have an effect that is both distancing and objectifying. However, the real but frequently overlooked situation of participatory observation is what Johannes Fabian (1983) has termed coevalness. This idea must be amended to include space: the existence of two people, or one person and an object, in the same space and time whose position regarding power/knowledge is unequal. Both parties recognize this inequality, so that the ground on which they stand together can shift and yield differentials in power relations. In the encounter with art, the scientific verb to observe is bracketed, and replaced with to look as the verb whose implications are unpacked, challenged, and modified. Locked in Janssens’ mist, coevalness becomes a necessity and accedes into awareness. During my experience, I gradually came to see that there were other people present too. As they were roaming around, or nailed to the floor, I wondered what they were thinking. As blurred as the vision was, it was clear that they were there at the same time, in coevalness. I was there with them, and to a limited extent I was along for the ride in their possible worlds. In a situation like this, the word “other” no longer makes sense.4

3

4

I have justified the use of “the political” as a shorthand term in Bal 2010, 9–11. For this harsh-sounding account of participatory observation I rely on the work of critical anthropologists such as Johannes Fabian. The debate on anthropological knowledge is indispensible to understand the power relationships knowledge itself entails. On power/knowledge, see Spivak 1993. For a detailed analysis of the way Spivak uses the Foucauldian phrase power/knowledge, see Aroch Fugellie 2010. On the theory of possible worlds to which my formulation alludes, see Ronen 1994. 9

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Thus, the work of art drives the point home that the debate on how to gain knowledge is not over. Moreover, it makes us aware of the fact that “looking” is not always the same kind of act. The embodied look the mist compels as an intellectual posture is not only epistemologically indispensable, as participatory observation was for modernist, self-conscious anthropological knowledge; it is also ontological. Hence, it engages not simply our endeavor to know and understand, but also our wondering about who and what we are and how we live. Taking into account the deceptiveness and other drawbacks of participatory observation as an epistemological mode, the (qualified) notion of performance seems most appropriate for characterizing it. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a performance can be defined as: 1. the execution of an action; something accomplished; a deed, feat; 2. the fulfillment of a claim or promise; 3. the presentation to an audience of a (character in a) play or of a piece of music. The first meaning, equivalent to action, is not exactly fitting here, for my action—if there was one—was severely qualified by the possibilities that the mist seemed to offer or preclude. The “fulfillment of a promise” was not relevant, since my entrance into the room was arbitrary. That leaves the third definition, except that there was no audience; to all intents and purposes, I was the audience. Perhaps I should look at the definition of performativity, then: “an expression that serves to effect a transaction or that constitutes the performance of the specified act by virtue of its utterance” (Merriam Webster Online English Dictionary). If we go by this definition it becomes clear that both performance and performativity (concepts that academics labor to distinguish) appear in this event. The act is done, as in performance, and the event takes place because it is uttered. Performance—say, the unique execution of a work—is of a different order than performativity, the latter being an aspect of a word that does what it says. Hence, as I have argued in Travelling Concepts, performance is not to performativity what matter is to materiality, the 10

INTRODUCTION

concrete to the abstract, or the object term to the theoretical term. Although both are derived from the verb to perform, this connection is severed the moment these words become concepts. The most succinct way to tell them apart is that performance is doing something for the sake of doing it, while performativity brings about a change. When I am on the stage of Janssens’ mist, this concept thickens, on the waves of the bizarrely intensified and messy duration. I no longer know who is the subject of doing. I am looking; but the “work” makes me do it. Hence, the work is performative.5 Most often the word performance is used to indicate ontological dynamism. In theater, we speak of performance when a play becomes a play; without performance, it remains a text. In reception-oriented theories of reading, the same notion of performance is used to define the specific ontological status of textuality. Without reading, the book remains a mere object, existing only as a thing in space. In this respect, text and image are in the same ontological domain, for neither one exists as object. Moreover, neither one is “pure”; neither exists independently from or “untainted” by the other. Being in that mist room, then, made me a performer, and what I did, a performance. However, this performance was directed by the work’s performativity. In this way, the two concepts are related after all. But the subject–object distinction that implies that the work’s performativity consists in making me perform is no longer tenable. I argue in the analyses below that Janssens’ artworks purposefully confuse these roles, and that their primary political impact lies precisely in that strategy.6 Performance has been frequently put at the center of contemporary studies of art and culture. Originating in a branch of theater studies, performance has come to reach a broad, almost encompassing meaning that makes the different art forms or disciplines that constitute the humanities—art, literature, music, media, theater, film—comparable again. I will have occasions to return to performance throughout

5

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I have extensively argued both the convergence and the distinction between the two concepts in the chapter “Performance and Performativity” (Bal 2002, 174–212). Fabian’s later study is an account of just such an endeavor (1990). Not coincidentally, his case study is a play, but one without script. 11

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this book. In the first two chapters I probe one particular aspect of performance, namely deixis. I interpret this originally linguistic term to refer to the relationship between viewer and space—and, by extension, to other people in that (shared) space—as well. My goal is to articulate deixis as a useful concept to understand visual art, and specifically, art that is not figurative in the traditional sense, yet cannot be termed “abstract” in any traditional way either. This opposition falls flat in the face of the obvious concrete quality of Janssens’ work. Concrete abstraction: is this a contradiction, a truism, or Janssens’ way to reconsider what both terms mean and what their stakes are? Throughout this study I continuously show how Janssens’ art qualifies, extends, and enriches the idea of abstraction by means of her concrete event-works. Thus, her work “theorizes” abstraction, and can be used to understand the work of many other contemporary artists as well. In the first chapter I build my argument by going back and forth between two sets of key works from Janssens’ oeuvre: her mist installations and her sculpture Corps noir (1994). Of both, many different versions exist. These two works—or genres, within the artist’s output—are each other’s systemic opposites. One is bright, in its first installment, white; the other dark, mostly black. One is soft or even below the tactile threshold; the other is hard, a solid object. One is ephemeral, the other durable. One is so large it fills an entire room, the other of modest (although variable) dimensions. Most crucially, one allows the viewer to see others, albeit slowly, vaguely, and tenuously; the other shows only the self, in reflection—and in space. In spite of all these opposed features, they are bound together by light: light in space, and the way the subject is caught in that light. Light is Janssens’ primary material, tool, and medium.7

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Corps noir is the first work by Janssens I ever saw. It has made an indelible impression on me. Corps noir exists in several sizes, one of which is the scale of the adult human body (“life size”). There is also a red version (Ral 3002, from 2002). Some related works have square shapes.

INTRODUCTION

Performing Performance cannot be thought in isolation from the notion of performativity. Both words yield the same adjective, “performative.” In the analytical philosophy of language, J.L. Austin has articulated the notion of performativity most prominently. In his famous and aptly titled book How to Do Things with Words (1962) he broke with the referential theory of meaning. To be sure, his thesis has had predecessors, followers, contestants, and amenders, thus in itself demonstrating the cross-historical process that Janssens’ embodied retroversion opens up for our sensate understanding.8 Most of the contemporary studies focusing on performance— with Fabian’s as a rather rare exception—pay little attention to the temporality of performance. Yet, it is that temporality that most crucially defines the concept. It takes place in time, it occupies duration, and its effect—its performativity—necessarily occurs in the wake of that duration. But there is more. Time affects ontology. It defines existence, and life, as impermanent. Not only is a performance something Austin aptly compares to fire, because both hover between thing and event, but their inevitable ontological indeterminacy takes time as well. The performative work, then, is ontologically anchored in time even if the “thing” that constitutes its dead letter exists in space. Austin’s felicitous comparison with fire also foregrounds the materiality of performance, and its temporality. Fire is substantial enough to help us produce as well as destroy. In its brief encounters with human life, everything can happen: the risks and the potential of life are intensified. Although, in this sense, the comparison is slightly hyperbolic, let us take it as a conceptual metaphor and see if

8

I venture to name Émile Benveniste (1971) as a predecessor of sorts. Not because he wrote and published earlier than Austin, but because his views on language took hold right away, while Austin’s took a bit more time. The later fortunes of the performative are traced in Jonathan Culler’s utterly useful overview article (2007). Culler traces these fortunes through Jacques Derrida’s revision (1988), and then sketches how the concept is further amended by Judith Butler in relation to sex and gender (1990; 1993), and in a larger political sense (1997). 13

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perception shares that risk and potential with fire. What happened in that mist room in Lisbon is an exploration of the ramifications of the notion that perception is always—before all else—a performance. The history of art would have accustomed us more consistently to this had it paid more attention to what art does rather than to what it “says.”9 Fire, in Janssens’ hands, becomes light. Light can also blind, as her works with eclipses remind us. Thus it can destroy, just like fire. But it can also enable enhanced experiences of seeing within the space that is Janssens’ primary “interlocutor.” Her work explores the materiality of light. This tenuous, volatile materiality liberates us from the heavier kind that inheres in objects. It is in contact with her works where light becomes (almost) tangible that viewers are enabled to experience seeing as a kind of performing—with the meaning of that word transformed. Seeing performing, the more usual use of the word, suggests that the viewer watches someone else performing, like play-acting on a stage. If the performance is successful, it exerts performativity on the viewer. Here, however, seeing becomes the action that through “uttering”—performing—does what it “says.” This empowering experience makes contact with others in space both easier and more limited. The difficulty of seeing others, in turn, embodies the difficulty of seeing others in political space—a difficulty we fail to be aware of in that sphere. Choosing light as her primary material, Janssens literalizes the idea that art can illuminate us. But this is only possible—art’s performativity depends on it—if the concretization of the work is a true collaboration. This is why the experience-oriented beginning of this book cannot be translated in any simple sense into a phenomenological position.

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Clearly, though, that discipline is focusing more and more on performativity. See, for example, Soussloff (1999). The idea that art is performative in that it prescribes—in the temporal sense of predicting—the responses that will later be perceived as art-historical finesse has been elaborated by Michael Ann Holly (1996).

INTRODUCTION

Reading Instead of focusing on art’s performativity, art history—like other disciplines in the humanities—has traditionally developed modes of “reading” art that omit (and therefore fail to do justice to) the performative aspect of any medium, communicative system, or (visual) language. In spite of notable exceptions, in literary scholarship, reading for meaning seems an ineradicable temptation, so much so that a certain “lingua-phobia” seems predominant: an avoidance of the materiality and performativity of language. The alternative to reading for meaning is not reading for form, as a tenacious form–content binary would have it. To clarify what that alternative can be, let me cite a notable exception. In the ominous year 1939, French poet Paul Valéry held the prestigious Zaharoff Lecture at Oxford University. His subject was “Poetry and Abstract Thought.” His opting for this topic at such a time made me curious to see how the poet would deal with the political moment. Surprisingly, he refrained from saying a word about the political situation in Europe—at least, explicitly. Instead, his plea was entirely devoted to setting up and then undermining an opposition between thought and art; between “work of the intellect, voluntary and precise efforts which occupy the mind” and what he describes with a certain lyrical effusiveness as the “naturalness of source, that superabundance of expression, that grace and fantasy, which distinguishes poetry” (1954, 208). When he then proceeds to elaborate both poles of the opposition, he cannot help himself bringing them closer to each other. Valéry’s bridge is language. But language is not a simple and innocent tool. Rather than shaping itself to suit our needs, he asserts, language alters us. In this respect, language is like the scientific experiments on which Janssens bases her work. On intellectual labor Valéry says: “A new question is first in an infant state in us; it stammers: it finds only strange terms all full of accidental values and associations; and it must borrow those terms. But in so doing, it insensibly alters our true need” (209–10). We will see later that “stammering” (or “stuttering”) is an adequate verb to point to contemporary abstraction’s political potential. The poet then compares this to the programs of political parties, to conclude: “If we choose one of them, we gradually become the man necessary to that program and party” (210). How is this 15

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possible? This imperceptible but irreversible alteration of our minds occurs “thanks to the swiftness of our passage through words” (211; emphasis in text). The remedy—the possibility to resist this dangerous power of contamination by language—is, then, slow-down. Slowdown is one of the devices Janssens deploys in her work. This is why her work with duration is such an apt example of what art can do in the political. The French poet continues his analysis of thought while slowly moving toward the other pole of his opposition, considering the subject’s role in relation to this power of language in passing. First, he says that “there is no theory that is not a carefully prepared fragment of some autobiography” (213). This would retrospectively explain and justify my endeavor to start this book with a personal experience. But then he says, in what he calls a paradox, that “if every man were not able to live a number of other lives than his own, he would not be able to live his own life” (213). This capacity for alter-identification is the crux that allows him to cross over to the other side. His me “becomes abstractor or poet by successive specializations, each deviating from the condition . . . of our outer surroundings, which is the mean state of our being, the state of indifference to changes” (213–14). For anyone who works with art—as maker or viewer—it is necessary both to remain loyal to oneself and to dare living the lives of others—temporarily, briefly—so that change is no longer bracketed by indifference but felt as necessary. Janssens’ mist room all but enforces such feelings of necessity. Daring briefly to live the lives of others and alter oneself in the process is, I contend, the thrust of her work. To describe what kind of state is nonindifferent to change, Valéry invokes music, dreams, and chance; phenomena which must be further developed with the help of value, form, and duration (216). The closest he comes to a definition of poetry is when he describes it as “the harmonious change between the expression and the impression” (226). The poem is defined as “a kind of machine for producing the poetic state by means of words” (231). The former statement seems a rather adequate description of art; one that, in the word “impression,” shifts the stake from the individual artist to the work’s impact. In the latter, the word “machine” appears suitable for an art that is machine-made; that does not dwell on the autobiographic “I” and leaves no signature, but instead offers access 16

INTRODUCTION

to the lives, experiences, and fantasies of others as a move against the indifference to change.10 Clearly, then, reading is a double-edged sword. It can be used to communicate and to enrich, as well as to manipulate and reduce; to sort out chaos and to eliminate disturbance. By reading motifs “off the page” (as Sigmund Freud warned us not to do [1900]) the methodology of iconography has all but closed itself off from nonfigurative art. What is more, it has all but closed off the long history of art, with its emphasis on figuration, from the kind of art that is presented here as contemporary.11 In spite of all this, reading as deciphering remains tempting. In Past Looking (1996), Michael Ann Holly explains how Erwin Panofsky introduces the idea of “disguised symbolism” (1953), which has been taken up as an enticement to endeavor to unlock the mysteries of paintings (Holly 1996, 151). This enticement was particularly strong in the case of paintings on religious mystery. Through the conflation of mystery and religion it seemed as if understanding the mystery would make the viewer a better person. This conflation of (religious) morality, figuration, and reading has stayed with us long after the onset of secularization and the development of abstract art. It renders the understanding of the political force of art outside of the realm of established religion and equally established politics extremely difficult. What can I say, then, about Janssens’ work with mist, to demonstrate its relevance? That is, what can I convey beyond telling my experience of it, as I have tried to do in the prologue, without “reading” it in the sense of deciphering, since strictly speaking there is nothing to 10 This use of the word “indifference” invokes a similar idea developed as an “ethics of nonindifference” (Bal 2008, 185–208). 11 The inventor of iconography, Erwin Panofsky, was much less reductive than many of his followers. See, for example, his famous presentation of the method (1953). For a commentary on Panofsky, see Holly 1984. For a critical discussion of the possibilities of iconography beyond “reading off the page,” see Bal 1991, 177–215. For an example of a performative reading of images that deploys but does not reduce the reading to iconography, see Powell 2010. The argument is further elaborated in Powell 2012. Perhaps not coincidentally, Powell’s analysis is especially attentive to what the author calls “blurs.” For the concept of the contemporary, see Ruby 2007, or Smith, Enwezor, and Condee 2008. 17

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decipher? This is the subject of the first chapter. For this, I turn to Venice, where Janssens set up a mist work in the Belgian pavilion at the Biennale in 1999 that offered an experience similar to the one I had in Lisbon. Venice stands as the center of representational painting and sculpture in its most prestigious tradition; bound to church and state, religious and worldly power, money and market. Its seemingly eternal art, a monument to human accomplishment, constantly needs to be safeguarded against the devastation of both nature and time— something the entire world takes an interest in.12 Here, water rather than fire would be the emblem of performance— of the potential to enrich, of the potential to destroy. It is in this museumized city by the relentless sea that Janssens offered the experience and insight that the perception of art is performance, therefore temporal, and hence, potentially performative in the sense that fire is for Austin. Janssens shows that no event of art can be reiterated, because time goes on. Her work, which is both serial and performative, suggests that repetition is always a citation in differentiation—it is an intervention that transforms both original and copy and destroys the foundation of that distinction. Thus it says with the relentless logic of the micropolitics of experience to back the affirmation up, that change is possible, indeed, inevitable, and that we can be there when it happens—not as observers but as participants. This insight makes repetition a key to understanding, precisely because it is not a reiteration. Repetition occurs in time, and time is an unstoppable transformer. This is why, along with the solicitation to perform, duration—which is made tangible in the slow-down I experienced in the mist room—is also crucial to understanding. But duration is only one aspect of time. Another is sequentiality, better known as chronology: the sense, or illusion, that time is linear. Together, repetition, duration, and chronology constitute time, alternately in antagonistic or collaborative relation to each other. Using spatial metaphors to make his point, Søren Kierkegaard wrote the following about repetition, thereby modifying the concept in a decisive way:

12 On the exhibition as a whole, see Janssens 1999. 18

INTRODUCTION

[Repetition] is a crucial expression for what “recollection” was to the Greeks. Just as they taught that all knowing is recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is repetition . . . Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward. (1983, 131)13 The opposite direction—so obvious, yet so forgotten—between recollection and repetition is central in my understanding of “abstract” art as political.14 Contemporary philosophy has developed the paradoxes of repetition in depth. No concept accounts more adequately for the intricacies of repetition and its bond with difference than the deobjectifying concept of performance. Performance is not; it occurs. It takes time; it has a past, a future, and hence a present. In ways to be specified, it is mostly based on repetition. The deceleration Janssens’ mist room installation imposes on perception offers an alternative to the fetishistic, objectifying preservation habit that informs our interaction with art. But this piece is not generically classified as “performance art.” There are good reasons for that. Performance art presents a performance to an audience. That performance represents an act or a role. The primary reason to reject that label for Janssens’ work is that it does not perform to viewers; it makes its viewers do the performing.15

Acting It is for these reasons that in this volume on the political of art I have chosen Janssens as the hub at the center of the issues I wish to broach. In an earlier study, I put the work of Colombian artist Doris Salcedo at the heart of the discussion (2010). Her oeuvre is clearly and explicitly political, although never “loudly” so—it never becomes propaganda for

13 For in-depth elaboration of this idea, see Deleuze 1994. 14 Until I have qualified the notion of abstraction and abstract I will use these words in quotation marks to distinguish it from the conventional meaning of abstraction. 15 On the specific art form that is performance art, see, e.g., Schneider 1997. 19

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a particular cause. Salcedo refrains from narrowing her work down to such statements. If her work is political, it is due to the intensity with which she creates objects in environments that changes our affective relationship to world-political issues such as violence, exclusion, and the ways in which even mourning becomes impossible. Even when a singular event, such as a political murder, inspires one of her works, Salcedo will never accept nor address the narrow interpretation of such an occurrence. Paradoxically, it is the way Salcedo makes art objects out of used objects that prevents any escapist interpretations. The used furniture she transforms and reworks into sculptures are traces—indexes of lives that have been destroyed. The materiality of those lives creates spaces from which no one can easily withdraw. In the absence of figurative representation, it is the lines from one area of horror to another that together form a web around the viewing subject. This inspired me to probe the potential of political art in more general terms through figurative and abstract art respectively. I wondered if figuration hinders for being too explicit, and abstraction for shunning content; and in what ways alternative strategies can work. Again I have selected one artist for each, in order to be able to develop my thoughts through the art, rather than “about” it. This has led to the two companion volumes I am now publishing. They can be read either separately or together. In the other volume, figuration is central. There, I explore the work of Finnish cinematographer Eija-Liisa Ahtila to deepen our understanding of figurative art. Nothing is easier than resorting to figurative art to depict political causes, and many have done so, sometimes to great effect. One only needs to recall Goya and his horror-impregnated Los desastres de la guerra (1810–15) to realize the possibilities. In the contemporary world, however, too many images of horror make horror invisible. The plentiful everyday depictions of it make us indifferent to the experience of horror, or other politicsdriven affects. It takes the performativity out of figuration. Excess “naturalizes” horror and obscures the mechanisms by which it does so. As Theodor Adorno famously wrote after the Second World War, art “after” horror even risks turning horror into pleasurable experience. This makes the brief of art to achieve political impact nearly impossible. I chose Ahtila because of the restraint with which she manages to move us deeply on a political level without ever resorting to propaganda. Her 20

INTRODUCTION

oeuvre demonstrates that the political impact of art is not dependent on political statements, but, on the contrary, must stay away from the rhetoric of politics. To put it bluntly: the political of art must stay aloof of politics in order to be effective. Ahtila’s work, devoted to the micropolitics of the everyday, is lucidly and limpidly figurative. It is why we are drawn to it, and attune to its subliminal messages, or rather, to its affective impact. Much of modern and contemporary art is not figurative in the traditional sense, which usually equates figurativity with representation. Hence, such nonfigurative art cannot even be suspected of the propagandistic endeavors that Ahtila so carefully avoids. It is my contention that art as such can be political. Whatever the forms it takes, whatever the discourse surrounding it, or within which it intervenes, art can have a social impact that answers to the political. To make that case, I have selected art that is without figuration and without objects for this third volume; it is even almost without materiality. What is left corresponds to Valéry’s vision of works of art: “I have the habit or mania of appreciating works only as actions” (222; emphasis added). No body of art is more fit to explore this than one that is exclusively “abstract” in the sense of being nonrepresentational, yet is also “concrete” in its strong appeal to viewer participation as well as its insistence on the materiality of even the most fugitive of things, light—a body of work that, at the same time, never ceases to be “political.” This is the case with Ann Veronica Janssens. The two characterizations of her work come together in the notion of “action,” in that the limits, concepts, and distinctions by which we live are transformed by a brief loss of clarity. The aim of this volume is to demonstrate the political value of that loss. I explore what makes us lose clarity, what the loss entails, and how that helps us to live in the political, with all the tensions and contradictions that environment holds. I argue that this art proposes performing in the sense of playing (as in ludic) as its task, which in turn overdetermines its eminent suitability to stay away from propagandistic notions of political art, with its self-righteous rhetoric and empty, condescending commiseration. From the verb “acting” as a synonym of performing, then, the meaning of play, the Dutch equivalent of acting, must not be excised from the performativity, lest the serious impact of art become invisible. 21

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Spacing Loss of clarity—the loss of all kinds of control—need not be seen as negative. It enables our senses to perceive that which normally remains unseen. One example is space itself. Janssens’ art is spatial in many ways: it is made of space, as its primary material; it works in space, as its setting; and it engages space, as its interlocutor. This brings me closer to what makes this art political. Before equating the phrase “the space we share” with “the political” as a space, let me first reason from the other end, and make more specific what in my view matters most politically today. The primary reason Janssens’ art is so relevant for my inquiry into (allegedly abstract) art as effective in the political is that it explores and greatly expands the possibilities of that space. With the help of temporality and in particular coevalness, the artist makes space mobile and mobility a key feature of space. I use the verb to space and the derived ambiguous term spacing to point at ways she purposefully turns common space into an area for spacing— as an activity.16 This activity comprises many things we normally would not even assume to be possible, such as the extension and pluralization of perception, the grafting of experiences onto concrete spaces, visual access to the invisible, and standing on “the threshold where the image reabsorbs itself ” (Janssens 2004, 113). But in all cases—and this is key to the connection between this art and the political—the will to return to a (modified) reality remains unscathed. This is no flight into transcendence. Here lies a first decisive difference between this art and the abstract art from the early twentieth century. Let me explain the connection between political reality and art’s potential impact on it by addressing my own interest in spacing. Surprisingly perhaps, it results from my longstanding reflection on contemporary culture as “migratory.” How can that very specific interest relate to Janssens’ rigorously nonfigurative, nonthematic art? It is just one example of the kind of connection I think this art enables.

16 This mobility is the key aspect that binds Janssens’ work to the discussion of the “Bergsonian image” in the twin volume (2013; see especially the Introduction). 22

INTRODUCTION

Ultimately, movement is what binds migratory culture to spacing as I address it here. Migratory culture is a culture of movement; in an important sense, it is one of “spacing.” The enticement to extend experience, with the will to return “home” to one’s place in that culture, motivates my attempt to articulate what this art has to offer to our thinking about spacing in migratory culture. French philosopher Alain Badiou’s essay “Anabasis” (2007) offers a helpful link between Janssens’ abstract art and this culture. The beauty of the Greek verb anabasein is its ambiguity—its double meaning of embarking and returning. This comprises the entire story of a person who finds herself in a situation of “migrancy,” the key situation of our time. Of the three meanings of anabasis Badiou mentions at the beginning of his essay, the first one, “lostness” (in a foreign place), constitutes the beginning of anabasis as process. Once lost, one is, as a consequence, left to one’s own devices (Badiou’s second meaning). This draws attention to the practical aspect of the solitude of “lostness.” One can be lost in actual migrancy, on one’s way to an unknown place, away from home. One can also be lost in the world itself, having lost the social bonds that are the primary condition of living. The latter would be the case, for example, with people we consider “mad”: different, alien, estranged, or estranging; people who are mad, act mad, or (only) appear mad (to those who think of themselves as “sane”). One can also be lost in an encounter with art. The experience of “lostness” is accessible, and Janssens’ art entices us to have it. The first moment inside her mist installations yields an experience of lostness. Such an experience can simultaneously function as a social experiment. This voluntary and felicitous lostness brings into our purview the potentially positive consequence of the condition of unmoored existence that migrants and “mad” people have in common. It is this productive potential for lostness from routine, habitual places of settlement, and confined structure that Janssens’ art opens up, without ever visually referencing migratory culture. This opening up is not an idealization. With the loss of clarity I described earlier, multiple possibilities become visible, some of which we can connect to the lives of others in unmoored situations. This perspective is important to get us out of the discourse of 23

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victimization—a political dead-end that can only further disempower the people who are living “in lostness.” The potential to see beyond clarity and the limits it sets enlarges our lived space. It addresses the need and also the capacity to develop a specific capability: a “streetsmartness” or, rather, “migrancy-smartness” that makes “spacing” something positive and enriching. In his third meaning, Badiou fleshes this potential out in terms of freedom: the free invention of a path of wandering that “will have been a return” (2007, 82). Like Janssens’ experiments, Badiou’s formulation implicates temporality—the undermining of linear time that results when the freedom of leaving and wandering can only be cast retrospectively as empowering. People leaving their homes to embark on a precarious journey without known outcome can hardly dream of returning until they end their quest and gain formal, legal residency in a new country. For subjects “in lostness” this jubilant sense of arrival that implies the possibility of return is still a far-away prospect. Yet it is the sole goal of what Badiou calls “pure movement . . . against an indifferent background” (2007, 85). His terms invoke abstraction and its link to an “ethics of vision.” Developing how art can design such pure movement is the primary thrust of this book.17 Goals imply subjects who pursue them. If I am allowed to personify Badiou’s terms, that is—assign subject positions to them—I would say that the subject of “pure movement” is not only the migrant, but also the inhabitant of any-place-whatever whose sense of space has been enlarged as well as thickened. The subjects of indifference are the settled people who, at best, accept the arrival of newcomers and proceed with their business as usual, and at worst, resist those arrivals. Indifference: a negative word, pointing to a lack of difference, a tendency to sameness that yields no space for difference. Indifference is an act that requires a verb, say, “indiffering.” It has subjects who “do” or perform it, objects who “suffer” or “undergo” it, and a temporality—indeed, a tense. That tense is by definition the present, in which performance is lodged and spacing takes place. Indifference is predicated upon individualism in its most austere version—one can call it social autism. Indifference is so strongly 17 On the idea of an “ethics of vision” I have been strongly influenced by Kaja Silverman’s seminal study (1996). 24

INTRODUCTION

opposed to sociality that we can consider it unethical. Hence the need for an ethics of nonindifference—an ethical imperative to shed indifference’s coldness in favor of a need, a passion to engage, below the threshold of thematic specification or political partisanship. In terms of what Deleuze calls an “immanent ethics”: I hate or I love, rather than I judge (1989, 141). It is immanent to the extent that its subjects are implicated in the subjectivity of others. Judgment loses its relevance, even its possibility. Such an ethics I seek to make specific, but neither thematic nor personal, through Janssens’ art, which embodies and enacts it. In my analyses, I frequently return to Janssens’ refusal to pronounce on political issues. If I have invoked my interest in migratory culture as an example, it is not to suggest that the artist privileges that particular and concrete inflection of the notion of “the space we share.” At the outcome of many of the experiences people have with her experiments in perception, something altogether different may occur to each of them. This restraint, this refusal to direct, and the tenacious commitment to a freedom of interpretation, even follow-up action, is crucial to understand the relationship between art and the political— indeed, to understand the political itself. Why is freedom so crucial? Not because of some liberal ideology that values freedom above, say, food, shelter, health care, or education. That would put freedom on the level of political themes, and thus turn the art advocating it into propaganda. It would also be an abuse of social power. In fact, art does the opposite. Instead of advocating freedom, art creates it. It is in the act of empowerment combined with the opening up of an endless amount of choices that the political strength of the work resides. It is in that freedom that people are restored in their position of agents, and no longer “prevented from becoming who they are,” as the streamlining of consensus politics and its mechanisms of propaganda have done. I show how Janssens’ works take up issues pertaining to the political that, instead of thematizing, she demonstrates in some materially literal way. This is what I try to indicate with my use of spacing. The title of this book foregrounds this conception of concrete, non-restrictiveness; an endless andness.18 18 For the phrase “prevented from becoming who they are,” see the relevant discussion of epistemic injustice in Fricker 2007, 5. 25

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Traversing Janssens’ oeuvre, then, is not so much a body of work one wishes to see, but a range of events one is eager to traverse. This verb is to be taken in both its spatial and temporal meaning. But while space is unpredictably wavering, time is durational rather than linear. I aspire to make something similar happen in this book through offering an accumulative rather than a linear argument. In the first chapter, in order to undermine any possible polemical relationship one might assume between figurative and abstract art, I return to the history of art to see how contemporary art such as Janssens’ conducts a dialogue with some of its premises and topoi. For example, the place of acting in images we tend to see as representations of stories is scrutinized in the acting-oriented abstract mist room. Acting as playing requires the performance of the viewer—henceforth, better thought of as a participant. And through this radical version of it, the acting-orientedness in even the most prestigious religious paintings from the past becomes visible in a way that re-empowers the social meanings of the latter. Moreover, the tenuous materiality of mist, far from being an arbitrary topos, responds to the abundant use of clouds in old-master painting. Rather than being the material signifier of a separation of domains—the earthly from the heavenly, or the knowable from the unknowable—Janssens’ mist room brings unknowability down to earth, making it subject to both ecstatic access and modest restraint. Also, the baroque perspective Deleuze has theorized as “the fold” is equally subject to radical revision. Here, the artist takes up the tenets of what the philosopher calls “correlativism” in a concrete, literal, and bodily way. In addition to the mist room works, another series of Janssens’ sculptures will be considered in order to achieve understanding of what makes the work politically powerful in nonthematic ways. These are much easier to recognize as sculptures: black bowls, semi-spheres with shiny surfaces hung on walls. Simple as this description sounds, it covers all there is to say about these works’ formal properties. I discuss the way these works respond to old-master works that are works of portraiture rather than narrative pieces. Since the bowls are highly reflective, it is first of all self-portraiture that is brought in. But the reflection is starkly 26

INTRODUCTION

distorted. This makes the self-portraits they allude to “allo-portraits”— self-portraits in which the self is presented as other. And since Janssens’ “portrait” is spatial, this “othered” self comes into a space that itself is “othered”—it does not belong to the familiarity of the self. I propose the word recoiling as a concept to grasp what happens in interaction with these works. This double discussion will be continued in the second chapter. The “deictic” mode of looking developed in the first chapter will be brought to bear on the deictic existence of light itself—Janssens’ primary material. But this mode of looking is only a tool to gain access to a form of thinking-as-acting that I articulate with reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s exploration of a philosophy of action. For this analysis, rather than invoking old-master painting, I look to earlier forms of light-based art. In particular, the older work that seems closest to Janssens’ work will be examined in order better to assess Janssens’ contribution to the political force of such work. Central concepts, here, are form and formlessness on the one hand, and theatricality on the other. In this chapter, the relation of this work as sculptural and the allusions to architectural space lead to the concept of wavering. The words I use as provisional concepts are primarily meant to get us away from certain concepts that have been used so much they are at risk of becoming dogmatic. The confusion between concavity and convexity a work such as Corps noir effectuates, I submit, entails first of all a withdrawal from and alternative to an incorporating relationship to space. I deploy considerations of temporality to make the case. Time helps us to counter the tendency to fixate categories and relationships. After these close engagements with, basically, only two (serial) works, and putting forward the conceptions of space, body, and light that underlie them, I articulate in more specific terms where the political force of Janssens’ work resides in the third chapter. I take a single exhibition as my starting point and traverse its major junctures in order to bring several aspects together under the rubric of the political. In order to draw attention to the qualifying rather than the oppositional tenets of Janssens’ work, I do this through a number of adjectives. Although the topics may be traversed in any order, in line with Janssens’ abstraction, I also made them accumulative. The chapter begins with a brief view of the kind of modified abstraction Janssens deploys. Then, through seemingly disparate but in fact tightly 27

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connected issues—bodily, transgressive, empowering, modest—I reach a summary statement on how this art works politically. Because this chapter discusses an exhibition—the art in practice, so to speak—I discuss more of Janssens’ works in this chapter than in the two previous ones. Yet, there is again one key work—or rather, a key nonwork, a found nonobject. Fugitive, fragile, and porous, it is as hard to grasp as it is to qualify. Through this Aerogel (2000), the qualifiers I use to characterize the oeuvre all come together. In the last two chapters, the political force of Janssens’ work is further qualified through two new aspects, both central to its effectivity. Chapter 4 develops an aspect of the connection now established between a renewed, contemporary abstraction and the political through an aspect so far only allusively brought in. This felicitous work of and with chance connects the work once more to an earlier period in the history of art as well as philosophy. This chapter focuses on a specific exhibition as well, and traverses it through the aspects of the meaning of the exhibition’s title: “Serendipity.” In line with the crucial participation of the viewer in the events of this art, and the loss of clarity that is a precondition for the experiments with deictic looking, serendipity is a central concept that leads to an understanding of the way abstraction is “made” by chance occurrences. The loss, here, concerns mastery. “Accidental abstraction,” then, is the inflection this chapter brings to the work’s increased political force. In the final chapter, the definition of abstraction in Deleuze’s work, referred to several times as “stuttering” or “stammering,” is understood in terms of an endless extension of possibility—the “endless andness” after which the book as a whole is named. Instead of either/or as the regulating structure of thought, where abstraction is defined in a negative relationship to figuration, narrative, or illusionism, the fundamental paratactic structure based on the conjunction and makes for an almost endless potential for inclusion. The aspect most characteristically representative of this “and-ness” is color. In the face of modernist interest in pure, primary colors, Janssens’ use of color is remarkably different. Her colors are sometimes barely visible, appearing only through light, angle, and the viewer’s body. At other times, they are endlessly varied so that distinctions between colors can no longer be made. In still other cases, they appear to 28

INTRODUCTION

have a volume that is deceptive and only an effect of optical illusion. Both the deployment of endless nuances and the creation of color exclusively through the viewer’s acts of looking indicate a rejection of color symbolism as cultural and scientific history has developed it. I explain this through a discussion of Peirce’s much-abused concept of iconicity—a term which has frequently been used gratuitously or erroneously, but which has also been dismissed too soon. I argue that Peirce’s categories are important because they are, precisely, not categories. They cannot be used, that is, to categorize things, artworks among them. Instead, his concepts refer to the grounds of meaning making, which in turn, because they are never “pure,” become aspects of acts of meaning making that are always integrative mergers. Thus, Peirce’s ideas offer an alternative to reading-for-meaning without ruling out the semiotic attitude that reading fundamentally is. This last chapter, then, makes concrete what the title of this study programmatically calls “endless andness”: the political power of the centrifugal potential of choice in the face of the centripetal consensus culture of politics. Each chapter offers a provisional concept derived directly from the art. Through this conceptual play I aim to convey the sense in which art cannot be subjected to preestablished theories, histories, and concepts, even if some of those can be usefully brought to bear on it. Instead, deriving provisional concepts from the art itself opens it up in its innovative potential. Traversing the artworks with such concepts is not an attempt to reduce them to these but rather, in line with the artworks, to open up endless possibilities of understanding, experiencing, and “feeling” them.

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1

How to Do Things with Clouds

A few of the thousands of movements around us are slowed down, so that we can observe them. Hans Theys1

What kind of art is this, then, and what does it do to earn the importance—the capacity to theorize—I am attributing to it here? To all intents and purposes, it is a work of abstract art. However, the specific way in which this work is abstract changes the concept of abstraction to the point that this term, drawing us toward its old meanings, becomes a hindrance to understanding the concept. The theatrical aspect of the space in which it occurs makes it highly figurative, as the images in the prologue demonstrate. Yet here, the viewers are the actors. I can only explain this crucial difference through a comparison that is, at first sight, quite unlikely. I contend that Janssens’ work radicalizes rather than opposes figurative painting. In fact, so do most artists who distance themselves from old-master art; in their attempt to move beyond it, they must willy-nilly engage with the art-historical canon. Janssens pushes figurative painting’s limits in the same way a painter like, for example, Caravaggio makes use of play-acting and performance to enhance the difficulty of seeing. In his Crucifixion of Saint Peter, the apostle being nailed to the cross looks weary. But is it from pain and martyrdom, as the biblical story has it? Pain would make him look as if in agony, martyrdom perhaps jubilant. Weariness seems out of place in this dramatic situation. Might it be caused by boredom at the length of

1

Theys is describing how he sees the political force of Janssens’ work (2003, 56). 31

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the posing session then? The nail supposedly driven through his hand does not even touch the wood; he is probably holding it to prevent it from falling down [fig. 1.1]. Another play-acting performance has made us aware of this ambiguity: in Derek Jarman’s film Caravaggio (1986), the neighborhood friend posing as Peter for Michele cannot hold the nail straight for so long. Jarman teaches us some crucial things about Caravaggio’s paintings as records of performance; specifically, the film emphasizes their durational aspect and the fine line between moving and still images. Performance and the theatricality it puts forward cross with the myth that is being narrated, as if to demonstrate that deciphering yields only half the story. Henceforth, this painting is strictly unreadable.2 Janssens takes it from there, and goes further. By making the viewer the actor, she takes the represented body out of the performance altogether. This art is theatrical and stages performances, but it does not represent. As a result, all the illusionism she can muster can never lure the performer into the illusion of third-person narrative, “out there,” into a different space and time, and thereby allow indifference. Instead, the viewer is nailed to the here and now. Because of that, we can see something essential to figurative art that reading it (in the sense of deciphering the mystery) can only obscure. Janssens’ mist room suggests that Caravaggio’s foregrounding of theatricality was an indispensable tool for effectively “destroying painting,” while simultaneously explaining what that phrase means (Marin 1995). This phrase expresses the indictment Caravaggio received from his contemporary critics, who meant something like “destroying [third-person] painting,” or representation. They were more right than they could possibly have known. Because the ambiguity between playing and “being”—between performance and story—remains unresolved, the second person (the addressed viewer) is unable to fall for the illusion yet equally unable to resist it. Thus, she has but one possibility: to take up the role and perform, in all of the many senses—epistemological, ontological, erotic, theatrical, ludic, 2

32

This point is discussed at length in Bal 1999, albeit through different examples. Here, I mean to develop it into a theory of certain kinds of allegedly abstract art.

1.1. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 1600. Oil on canvas, 230 x 175 cm. Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome.

ENDLESS ANDNESS

and narrative—that this richly overdetermined term has now acquired. Just as Janssens’ work is almost impossible to document, it is equally impossible to analyze or describe. This is one reason why I have presented it first through a first-person narrative; through the story of my entrance into it. All the while I am aware of the poverty of narrative, due to its allegiance with representation. This narrative is a poor substitute for—but also an indispensable supplement to— the experience each visitor to the Belgian pavilion will have had that summer of 1999. The only discourse available that can offer something that would indicate how this work works, is a discourse on the side—a para-discourse that accounts for the performance in a nondescriptive way. Description is a problematic discourse here, for it would turn the work into an object. A performative work cannot be an object; hence, it cannot be subjected to description. Michael Baxandall proposed “pointing” as a mode for talking about painting (1991). As mentioned above, J.L. Austin came up with the adequate metaphor of fire. Like fire, performance hovers between thing and event. The only “object” that can be described in relation to it is the experience of it, and that is by definition a partial, inadequate, nongeneralizable event. This problem of description is inevitable, and a logical consequence of the work’s ontology. Although Janssens’ work counts as visual art, it cannot be seen, strictly speaking, without (someone) performing it. Paradoxically, in order to do justice to the work’s striking force, in my prologue I felt compelled to bring myself into the account of it. This paradox shows us the performative appeal of this installation: it entices you to make the work. Imagine a room filled with mist and no one in it. The work on its own is too modest; it needs you. But beware: this is strictly reciprocal. By making it, allow it to make you; you will be a different person afterward, as Valéry warned. The world, your world, will be different from what it was before. This reciprocity is the work’s point, and my point in bringing it into this discussion. Janssens’ installation is one element in an ongoing project that can be conceived of as a laboratory in which everything that happens when we perceive (art, but also everything we do not consider art) becomes an object of experiments, or rather, a partner in an experiment in which 34

HOW TO DO THINGS WITH CLOUDS

we too are involved. Perception loses its moorings: its automatism, its routine, its self-evidence. Duration is an integral element in that loss. All the experiments the artist conducts have as a common element the performance of duration that my story of the mist room tried to convey. Here, duration is an environmental aspect to which we are subjected; at the same time, it is subjected to our willingness to undergo it. Deceleration might be another key word through which to approach Janssens’ works. They entrap the viewer, body and soul, in an experience so unsettling that something shifts in one’s physical being in the world. This is how her art performs—by requiring us to perform it. I mentioned my failure to photograph this work from within. It is impossible to document, catalogue, survey, or archive. Not only is each piece an intervention that does not last; the work as a whole is an ongoing project that cannot be stopped in arbitrarily selected moments of objectification. Yet, these selected objectifications are all that is left. All I can do to convey a sense of it is present a small number of these interventions, or aspects of them. In the end, then, the Venice installation of 1999—titled Horror Vacui—will have been an entrance into the work of which it is, in a sense, a detail. While the notion of “the work of art” makes little sense here, the word work taken as a verb, like Valéry’s action, makes all the sense in the world. That working, or the production of an effect through performance, brings the concepts of performance and performativity together again. They are not synonyms. Not every performance exerts performativity, but it may do so. Not all performativity is brought about by performance, but it may be. In the absence of matter, to inflect a phrase from a work by Janssens that will appear later, “it is possible to make the brightest images within oneself.” When that happens, something has “worked.” Moreover, while each “work” I discuss is but a detail of a larger and time-bound endeavor, it is also a tentacle that brings in other art, other histories, and other moments in time.

Playing Playing games with clouds is a recurring element in Janssens’ work since the 1990s. It has many ramifications. Here, I limit myself to its historical position, in view of an alternative approach to deciphering 35

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without falling into the opposite error, which is to consider it abstract in a negative sense. I mentioned Caravaggio before. What sense does it make to bring this old master into a discussion of Janssens’ work? As I have briefly suggested above, his theatricality receives a new light, updated as a kind of virtual reality, when seen again “after” or “through” Janssens’ performative piece. This reference is not meant to suggest a privileged link between the two artists. Janssens’ work contains many different aspects that each bear on older art in ways iconographic analysis would be unable to articulate. If I mark a few of these links, it is not to imply comprehensiveness in my analysis. Rather, I want to begin sketching a way in which Janssens’ work relates to history, not as its outcome but as a new, retroversive or “preposterous” narrative of what came before her work but now, also, comes after it. Others have called it, with a more general term, anachronism.3 In addition to theatricality, for example, in Horror Vacui there is the defining element of mist. This mist envelops us so that it is invisible, making the space itself invisible only to allow it to emerge slowly. This gives space a temporality of its own. Temporality is also a feature of clouds, appearances of mist at a distance. In the history of painting, clouds play an important role. There, clouds divide domains of existence; here, through their fuzziness that suspends boundaries and their simultaneous appeal to hearing, seeing, and feeling, they unite domains of sensation. For anyone who enters Janssens’ cloud, the clouds in painting cannot remain the same. The sense of being inside those clouds links her installation to the entire tradition of Italian religious art, say, from Raphael onward. All clouds that decorate Italian churches and palaces gain additional strength. In 1999 one could just walk from the Belgian pavilion to the Santa Maria della Pietà, where Tiepolo’s ceiling paintings with their strangely distorted clouds beckon you. There, freshness rather than mist envelops you, a

3

36

On anachronism, see Didi-Huberman 2003 and Nagel and Wood 2010. Nagel specifically connects relics with installation art (2010). Anachronism as a conception of visual art has been first theorized by Hubert Damisch, as recalled in an interview in a special issue of the Oxford Art Journal devoted to him (Bird 2005; Damisch and Bann 2005). Looking for a more informative and less pejoratively tainted term, I have called this historical perspective based on retroversion “preposterous” (Bal 1999).

HOW TO DO THINGS WITH CLOUDS

freshness that feels different, more intense, after having experienced Janssens’ work.4 The role of clouds in art history was powerfully interpreted by Hubert Damisch in 1972 (2002). For Damisch, the cloud is the defining signifier in Renaissance and Baroque art. But Damisch’s is not a study of a motif; his /cloud/ is a sign. In a later publication he makes a similar argument about abstraction (2009). By doing so, he establishes a bond between clouds and abstraction. For /cloud/ to be a sign, each occurrence of a cloud must be a repetition that instates difference. Only its semiotic work is similar, not the result thereof. Whereas in each occurrence it can have a different meaning, the sign /cloud/ works as a shifter. In a pictorial system that suppresses the surface of the painting in favor of illusionistic depth, the sign /cloud/ demarcates heaven from earth, here from yonder, a world subjected to its own rules and regulations from the unknowable world of the beyond (2002, 146).5 Ernst van Alphen explains this principle in an illuminating essay on Damisch’s work, using a few examples drawn from the latter’s study. Importantly, in each case, there is a cloud, but the meaning of the sign /cloud/ is different: In Mantegna’s painting The Resurrection of Christ the clouds indicate the miraculous event of the resurrection, whereas the clouds in Giotto’s fresco in the basilica of Assisi show that the Holy Franciscus has been represented in divine rapture. (1997, 105) The former cloud as the sign /cloud/ “means,” then, the supernatural status of the event represented, whereas the latter clouds qualify the state of the figure as beyond ken. Van Alphen insists on the diversity, not only of the meanings of the signifier /cloud/, but also of the epistemic domain in which that meaning operates: 4 5

My views on theatricality throughout this book have been profoundly shaped by the ideas put forward by Maaike Bleeker (2008a; 2008b). Regarding the notation of /cloud/, Ernst van Alphen writes: “Damisch puts the signifier /cloud/ between slashes to indicate that he deals with clouds as signs that have different meanings in different pictorial contexts rather than clouds as realistic elements” (2005, 5). 37

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The “key” function of clouds in Mantegna’s ceiling painting in the palace of the duke in Mantua, or in Correggio’s dome painting The Vision of St. John on Patmos in the church of San Giovanni Evangelista in Parma, does not fall in the domain of the symbolic or theoretical, but must be seen as pictorial. Both ceiling paintings provide views of heaven: an endless space which is filled by clouds. The illusion of endlessness has been established here by means of a dal sotto in sù perspective, that is without the depiction of a horizon. We look straight upwards in the air. How is it possible that clouds which block the view onto the open sky are able to evoke the illusion of endlessness? (105–06; emphasis added) This question can be understood, not only in terms of Damisch’s theory of the pictorial tradition, but now also through Janssens’ mist; and this understanding retrospectively reorients the history of painting toward a renewed actuality. I retain the notion of endlessness from this description. The answer to the question of the meaning of the sign /cloud/ that Janssens’ work proposes, it seems to me, is the mutually intricate articulation of space and time as flip sides of each other, both bound to the body. This intricacy is embodied—let us call it “performed”—in the simultaneous experience of deceleration and “despatializing”—being inside the cloud that, in the paintings, beckoned us with altered understanding. The endlessness of the domain beyond the clouds is now brought back to include, rather than delimit, the figures looking: here, the viewers inside the installation; there, Saint Francis. Rather than being limited to epistemology, then, this reorientation also engages ontology. What is more, it suggests that these two domains cannot be separated as neatly as has sometimes been assumed. In the clouds, they play together.6

6

38

This complicates perhaps Richard Rorty’s indictment of epistemology as necessarily bound up with mirrorring (1979). In an illuminating study of literature, Brian McHale uses the distinction between epistemology and ontology to differentiate modernism from postmodernism (1987). It is at the moments that the former flips over into the latter, however, that McHale’s analysis shows the inseparability of the two domains—as well as, by implication, the two movements his study endeavors to distinguish.

HOW TO DO THINGS WITH CLOUDS

Body Deixis In Janssens’ installation, the infinitude represented by what blocks the view becomes inflected by the exceeding slowness of perception. The deceleration of time, the thickening of duration that results from the mist, intensifies the moment in which perception cannot just happen in an instant; instead, it must emerge. But there is more. In the intensification, the moment opens itself up in space, as if slowly mapping the endless possibilities for the next moment to engage, or to not engage, the viewer. If one moment is measurably succeeded by the next—in seconds, minutes, or hours, for example—the linearity of time becomes inevitable. Sequentiality is time’s straitjacket. But where deceleration is enforced in extreme intensity, as it was in Lisbon or in Venice, the moment itself can be savored. Like lungs opening to inhale more oxygen in a deep breath, the moment fills with infinite possibilities for what comes after. The Renaissance heavens are not necessarily the only possibility for that “after.” Nor is the world in which possibility occurs necessarily an “other” world. In a discussion of Kierkegaard’s conception of time, Christine Battersby formulates how such a sense of the world here-now instead of beyond-later can be envisaged: The move ‘outside time’ does not take us into a ‘beyond’; it does not take us into a Kantian realm of the noumenal. Instead, it takes us towards a different ordering of phenomena; in which depth is given to surfaces by temporal folds which are established via the jostling of competing narratives. ‘Reality’ becomes a multifaceted folding of surfaces. There is no ‘beyond’; but there is more than a synchronic play of surface appearances. (1998, 167) Again, there is a phrase here I retain for further exploration through Janssens’ work: “‘Reality’ becomes a multifaceted folding of surfaces.” This is the alternative “endlessness” to a transcendental afterlife. At pains to articulate in temporal terms what is, in her rendering, situated “outside of time,” Battersby cannot help using spatial terms here. The clouds in painting are sites of that outsideness that is at the same time an access to something else; below I will call it a threshold. Or, if we follow Deleuze in his articulation of the fold, these terms become 39

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spatio-temporal. The Deleuzian-Leibnizian fold is comparable to Damisch’s clouds, or rather, an inside-out version of them. It is worth returning to the philosopher’s formulation because of its layered, enfolded syntax. Indeed, Deleuze’s formulation of Leibnizian perspectivism—a spatial concept—offers a formulation that folds into itself both the object—as in other kinds of perspectivism—and the subject—Deleuze, a subject itself enfolded, as it engages Deleuze’s Leibniz: If the status of the object is profoundly changed, so also is that of the subject. We move from inflection or from variable curvature to vectors of curvature that go in the direction of concavity. (1993, 19) Concave or convex—that is the question. Deleuze’s articulation, here, demonstrates the epistemological weight of baroque curves and folds, which are far from being purely decorative. This was only his ostensible topic of examination. Deleuze continues with a rather mathematical presentation of Leibniz’s “folds in the soul” that I propose to read for the temporality of its own syntax: Moving from a branching of inflection, we distinguish a point that is no longer what runs along inflection, nor is it the point of inflection itself; it is the one in which the lines perpendicular to tangents meet in a state of variation. It is not exactly a point but a place, a position, a site, a ‘linear focus,’ a line emanating from lines. To the degree it represents variation or inflection, it can be called point of view. (19; emphases added) I have emphasized words that imply movement and, hence, time. But the convoluted syntax of the first sentence of this passage also lengthens reading time. And so does the enumeration of near-synonymous alternatives (“a place, a position, a site”), while “branching” implies the kind of near-standstill before choice I have described in the prologue. Variation or inflection: point of view is placed in the object, not, as is customary, in the subject. This point of view is emphatically not a case of subjectivist relativism, which would be a compromised position. Subjectivism only appears as the sole alternative to universalism if one stays bound to a binary structure 40

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of thought; one that remains profoundly implicated in historical projects of reconstruction “at a distance.” This point of view is best characterized as “baroque.”7 In this study, I show how Janssens’ art is invested in challenging precisely that binary, and how, in the process, it also challenges the commonsense assumptions concerning subjectivity. Subjectivism, overestimating the power of the subject and thereby undermining the participation of the object, is every bit as arrogant as universalism. As an alternative, Deleuze argues that this point of view is precisely not dependent on a pregiven, autonomous subject: Such is the basis of perspectivism, which does not mean a dependence in respect to a pregiven or defined subject; to the contrary, a subject will be what comes to the point of view, or rather what remains in the point of view. That is why the transformation of the object refers to a correlative transformation of the subject . . . (19–20) Again, the sentence is hesitant, almost stuttering—and stuttering, we will see, is a central term for contemporary nonfigurative art. Here, the key word is “correlative”: it sums up the baroque historicism I am referring to. It is the correlation that entails the transformation of both subject and object that characterizes a baroque point of view. This point of view is responsive to the cloud, of which it can perhaps be considered a counterpoint; one that, I contend, characterizes us as we are folded within it. The subject is not pregiven in the world. Every experience in the world changes the subject, as Valéry said with respect to language. No stability can be derived from “being.” The fold emblematizes the point of view in which the subject must give up its autonomy in order to earn access to the “beyond” that the clouds harbor. This is what happened in Janssens’ mist room. Indeed, Janssens’ installation unpacks the temporality Deleuze could only iconically express in his lengthening, stuttering syntax, and Battersby was at pains to include in her spatializing account. Janssens probes this multifaceted folding that constitutes reality 7

It is clear that contemporary historiography itself also challenges such attempts at reconstructionist history-writing. For a representative account, see Ankersmit 1994. Ankersmit also presents his alternative vision (2001). 41

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in the postmetaphysical era in order to liberate time from both the epistemological opacity of Renaissance clouds, and from the ontological fixity of the subject whose sensations define temporality. A few pages later, Battersby describes that supposed fixity in the following terms: The mind imposes space/time form on the multiplicity of sensations. This multiplicity is situated in a single, serial order of moments via three modes of time: duration (or persistence), causal sequence and coexistence (simultaneity). Indeed, these three time modes can only be distinguished one from the other by supposing a backdrop of substances or permanent bodies in space. (1998, 172) Janssens’ primary “medium” of temporality—deceleration—changes the nature of that after-image, whose backdrop, the subject, is now in flux, neither substantially self-identical nor permanent. When the plinths, doors, and walls of the lateral rooms finally come into visibility, they have been stripped of their self-evident banality. As a counterpoint to the new Renaissance cosmology that was represented by, say, Correggio’s depictions of limitless heavens, at a time when Galileo’s scientific argument for that same cosmology was condemned, Janssens’ Venice mist reopens our disenchanted eyes to the non-self-evidence of what we see, not in the imaginary beyond, but on this earth, in that particular city. An earthy, worldly version of Renaissance clouds turned inside out reimmerses the viewer in what secular culture had safely relegated to the domain of a once banal and self-evident, now exotic, religious history. Janssens does not in any way lapse into nostalgia for the religious meaning of clouds. With a keen sense of the continued dialogue with the past that the present requires, she offers instead a continued signification through /cloud/ that affects contemporary life in all its physical fibers.8

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Here, I would like to stress once more that, because of the very reasons stated above, Janssens cannot be appropriated by the so-called “postsecularism” that has been developing as a hip term for a return of religion.

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Shortly before the 1999 Biennale, Janssens developed a dozen interventions, together entitled “Super Space,” during an art festival in the Dutch city of Utrecht. One of these interventions (Tunnel) was the mysterious passage of a cloud through a tunnel. Every five minutes, stunned Utrechters walking through the somewhat shabby tunnel near the Central Station that connects the city center to the northern neighborhoods were surrounded, ever so briefly, by an impossible cloud. Wrought by twentieth-century technology it ran not through a metaphysical sky but through the most earthly space, literally inside the earth; a space where clouds do not belong. Similarly, in Venice, the cloud was inside the building, sharing the architectural space with the visitor’s body [fig. 1.2]. Is this so utterly strange, though? Many of us know about traversing clouds when seated inside an airplane. When the plane flies above the clouds, they look like the clouds in Italian paintings; except, instead of looking up into heaven, we look down to the earth, which we cannot see because of the clouds that cover it. When the plane traverses a cloud, we briefly see nothing. There is no room that will slowly emerge into visibility. Form has disappeared. Inside the cloud, our mind’s eye will be able to give it shape, remembering how solid clouds appear from a distance. Such shapes look tactile, soft, and elastic; shapes to sit putti on and to begin the creation of our possible worlds, be they fictions or philosophies.

Representing the Body? The body and its activity in the performance of perception can be seen as Janssens’ discourse. In it, she emphatically engages the history and philosophy of art from a situated present. Her mist as the sign /cloud/ is one example, a very powerful and encompassing one. The ephemeral quality of the mist works stands in systemic counterpoint to the allegedly eternal quality of old-master art. Like other contemporary artists, she thus foregrounds the obvious but oftforgotten fact that such venerable paintings were also, at a certain point in history, contemporary. In order to suggest that her vocabulary, while rigorously nonfigurative, is extensive, subtle and rich, I develop 43

1.2. Ann Veronica Janssens, Tunnel, 1999. F-100 fog generator producing a cloud in a pedestrian tunnel every five minutes. Artificial mist, dimensions variable. “Super Space,” 14th Festival a/d Werf, Utrecht.

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some thoughts about another medium through which she positions her work in and out of the history of art.9 In her sculpture Corps noir Janssens reworks a figurative emblem from Baroque art: the mirror. I take the /mirror/ as another sign that is fundamental for the self-experience of the body in space. Light and the mirror go together. Corps noir is a deep black, perfectly round, hemispheric Perspex bowl, hung on a wall [fig. 1.3]. The shiny material mirrors the viewer; the spherical form inverses the mirror image. It is an unsettling mirror to look into. In Janssens’ work, the mirror is not simply a device for self-reflection, for which this motif has so often been deployed . More direct, in relation to bodily perception, the ordinary mirror is also the flat surface that enables self-perception in space. But this mirror—and this is its only material difference—is concave.10 Thus, as the cloud wavers between space and time, this mirror wavers between two- and three-dimensionality. Again, Caravaggio offers a useful counterpoint. The Italian painter made one work on a rotund support. This work, The Head of Medusa, now in Florence, is known for its ambiguity between two- and three-dimensionality. Janssens addresses the wavering between two- and three-dimensionality that Caravaggio’s Head of Medusa—painted on a wooden shield or rotella—emblematizes. It is through another traversal of historical time in the reverse direction that we can grasp how this work performs its preposterous-historical work. Corps noir uses the mythical trope of mirroring as a literal incorporation of space, and explores what combining illusionism and the rotella shape can do. In it Janssens also probes the implications of Louis Marin’s model of the arcane: the idea that Caravaggio’s successful

For a treatise on the mirror, see Heyne 1996. Corps noir exists in various dimensions, as of 1994. I first saw a version of Corps noir in the exhibition “Inside the Visible” (curated by Catherine De Zegher) at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (1996). Elsewhere, I have written about Jeannette Christensen, an artist working from a comparable engagement with old masters in an emphatic contemporaneity (Bal 2009b). 10 On self-reflection, see Bal 1991, 247–85. This remark must suffice, here, to evoke Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage and its subsequent uses in visual theory (see in particular Lacan 1977). For an illuminating interpretation of this theory for visual analysis, see Silverman 1996.

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1.3. Ann Veronica Janssens, Corps noir, 1994. Black Perspex hemisphere, 50 cm diameter, 25 cm depth.

rendering of three-dimensional space in two-dimensional painting is based on the viewing situation inside a tomb, the absolute darkness of the absolute inside. After Damisch’s /clouds/ and Deleuze’s fold, we now encounter, with the closed tomb, a third, related conception of point of view. Janssens’ mist room already offered an alternative, bright version of Marin’s arcane. In Corps noir she brings her work in closer formal proximity to a particular old-master work. For my attempt to articulate the relationship between contemporary art and the history of visual art, this work is key. When referring to Deleuze’s articulation of the fold as an alternative to linear perspective, I could not avoid bringing in the concept of baroque. Without reducing the baroque to an exclusively philosophical 47

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or artistic endeavor, there are reasons for qualifying Janssens’ work as such. Of course, I do not mean to define her style as baroque. Nothing could be more opposed to the cheerful, decorative neobaroque than these deceptively austere, almost obsessively bare works. Instead, if we keep in mind the Renaissance obsession with linear perspective and the difficulty of simultaneously depicting the vanishing point and the “window on the world,” then the Baroque interest in the “infinitely tiny” (Pascal 1995, 68) acquires a fascinating actuality. The mirrored image of the viewer is rigorously miniatured. Thus, the diminutive subject mirrored in Corps noir invokes the Baroque philosopher’s reflections on scale.11 In an entirely different context (that of developing negative dialectics), German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno updated the Pascalian reflection on scale. Quoting him, Battersby explains his views as follows: As metaphysical truth is made subordinate to the ‘subject’ of knowledge, it moves from the centre of philosophical debate, becoming ‘smaller and smaller’ as it recedes (but never completely attains) complete insignificance. Negative dialectics emerges as ‘metaphysics immigrates into micrology. Micrology is the place where metaphysics finds a haven from totality.’ (Battersby 1998, 126–27)12 This passage helps us to understand how and why the viewer sees her reflection not only reversed but also in miniature when looking at Corps noir. Micrology implies detailed, focused attention; it entails shedding the laziness of routine looking and the arrogance of overseeing, surveying modes of looking. In mirroring, the subject, always eager to see herself, can be enticed to do just that. Again, due to the difficulty of

11 On contemporary baroque art, see Bal 1999. An incisive probing of the idea of perspective is offered in Damisch 1991. The consequences for gender appear in Damisch 2007. The work of Baroque philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62) significantly complicates the thin vulgarization of Descartes in contemporary thought about baroque space. See especially his Pensées (1995). 12 On negative dialectics, see also Buck-Morss 1977. 48

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seeing the tiny and upside-down self-image and in confrontation with the innate narcissism of subjectivity, time slows down, in an enfolding of the subject into something outside that is larger. Janssens’ shrewdly constructed impediments to vision help us unlearn what routine has inflicted upon us in the form of visual handicap, so that looking provides renewed access to the microscopic world of the infinitely small. This, I contend, is the way in which this work is baroque. Corps noir is certainly not to be reduced to its affiliation with baroque. At first sight, the work comes across as an abstract, modernist, “pure” object. It is austere in form and devoid of any baroque curls, folds, waves, and coloristic tricks; it seems rather minimalist. Both affiliations are equally important, qualify each other, and their apparent opposition is the bridge à la Valéry. Janssens links baroque matter with semiosis, conceived as an embodied process. This work engages the body in a way that is congenial to the mist installation, yet different in its specific activation of bodily coordinates. In the mist installation, sight and its deceleration inflicted slowness on the body’s movement. In Corps noir, it seems that sight attempts but does not manage to colonize touch. Slowness affects looking even if the body is not moving and is not compelled to move.13 Here, walking is not the movement first solicited and then frustrated, as it was in Horror Vacui. Yet, the desire to see up close, to see what is going on inside that relatively small bowl—to see whether it is in fact a bowl or a convex hemisphere—entices the viewer to move her upper body toward the bowl. Is it concave or convex? This calls into question the reliability of sight and its vexed relationship to touch. It is also in concordance with Deleuze’s description of baroque perspectivism and its folds. The only light inhering in Corps noir comes from the outside. It is the absence of light in the object itself that precludes a firm distinction between convex and concave. The same visual problem can be seen in Caravaggio’s Medusa [fig. 1.4]. Corps noir engages us in a questioning of the semiotic practice of space and the spatial dimension of semiosis, without divorcing either from time. This

13 For a more extensive argument regarding this and the following ideas, see Bal 1999, 40–42. The term “theoretical object” has been coined and defined by Hubert Damisch. See Bois et al. 1998. 49

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1.4. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Head of Medusa, ca. 1596–98. Oil on convex wood, 60 x 55 cm. Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

feature of spatial ambiguity becomes the sole focus of what would otherwise be an abstract sculpture. For that reason alone, taking it as a theoretical object, I consider Corps noir a response to the Medusa and the problem that object-painting poses—the reflection it proposes. Through Janssens’ work we are enabled to understand how and why Caravaggio, as a contemporary reproached him, “destroyed painting.” Because, as an “abstract” artist of today, she does not include any representational signs and hence does not overtly refer to painting, Janssens makes the “pure” sculpture into a theoretical object. This 50

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object “theorizes” that, visually, concavity and convexity can be very close, alternating and wavering—performatively, as between thing and event, like fire. Hence, purity—of meaning, of effect, of experience— turns into its opposite—a messy, time-bound ambiguity that cannot be disentangled. Binding time to space, its theoretical point lies in this hovering on the edge for a certain duration.

Swerving In Caravaggio’s other paintings, a similar ambiguity can be seen in the tomb-like closed spaces of darkness that have often gone noticed. Janssens turns this darkness into total black. Also, the shiny surface of that black body paradoxically creates light. This produces another spatial ambiguity. Marie-Ange Brayer used the verb “to swerve” in her description of Janssens’ work in general: All of her works swerve, meaningfully, to the edge, but an edge that is not a limit or delimitation—rather an easily crossed threshold of perception, an opening toward a dialectic between the opaque and the transparent, interior and exterior, and the center and its edges. (1996, 445) The verb to swerve recalls Deleuze’s convoluted sentence. Here, I propose it as a theoretical term to describe the experiment with spatial ambiguity as a performativity that inscribes itself in time. Through swerving, then, Janssens’ Corps noir aligns itself with Caravagio’s shield, “explains” it, and pre-posterously remakes it. Through the lens of her work, the snakes that surround Medusa’s head come to life, as we viewers realize that the ambiguity itself takes time. These snakes are at the same time her hair, which is part of her. Yet, they are what terrifies her to death. In that sense, they are her absolute other. This alterity-within, I contend, is inherent in the self-portrait as a genre. Corps noir positions what has been called, after Parmigianino, the “self-portrait in a convex mirror.” Through the bare, “abstract” allusion to Caravaggio’s convex Medusa, Corps noir demonstrates that there may be something baroque in this exploration, where spatial ambiguity, swerving through time, 51

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1.5 . Parmigianino, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, ca. 1524. Oil on convex panel, 22.4 cm diameter. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

posits the self at the threshold of exteriorized fear and incorporated space . Thus, the sculpture is also a self-portrait—of the kind I have termed allo-portrait [fig. 1.5].1 4

14 For the implications of that generic allegiance, see Bal 1994. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror is the title retrospectively given to Parmigianino’s famous distorted self-portrait. The term allo-portrait was first used by Philippe LacoueLabarthe (Hirsch 1997, 83). The subgenre of the self-portrait that foregrounds self-alienation is the object of a career-long obsession by Dutch painter Philip Akkerman. For an analysis of Akkerman’s work, see Van Alphen 2003. 52

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Theorizing its medium, this work is self-reflective indeed. Hence, it is also a self-portrait of Janssens-as-artist. Janssens works in the medium of sculpture. This is a three-dimensional spatial medium the temporal dimension of which is allegedly still. But when it comes to visual experience—as what John Berger has famously proposed to be an activity, not a passive consumption (1982)—this stillness is undermined in the act of seeing. This implies the relationship of the seeing subject to space. Thus, the sculpture modifies our sense of looking, including our perception of Caravaggio’s painted monster. To understand the full impact of this swerving, and simultaneously to complicate the pre-posterously historical relation, I have elsewhere proposed a complementarity of a very different kind: between Janssens’ sculpture and Mona Hatoum’s 1994 video installation Corps étranger (Bal 1999, 142). The relationship between these two contemporary works concerns interiority. This video installation was shown at the 1995 Venice Biennale and is now in the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. It consists of a small cylindrical space. In order to see the images, the viewer must enter the cylinder. Inside, a loud booming sound that resonates in the tiny chamber makes the experience a bit claustrophobic. The video image is projected onto the center of the floor; the viewer can move around or across it. The images show the inside of the artist’s own body in such detail that visibility is at risk. The images are very clear and suggest forms, but they are also hard to read and seem abstract. This is another play with scale that probes the limits of the visible, which renders the work profoundly baroque [fig. 1.6a–d]. The relationship between Janssens’ Perspex sculpture and Hatoum’s video sculpture is first of all one of systemic opposites. Janssens’ work strictly shows nothing of the artist; Hatoum’s shows the artist’s body at its most detailed and inner visibility. But this relationship acquires new depth—or rather, thickness, since depth is precisely what is avoided—when confronted with baroque aesthetic—based, as the latter is, on the sciences of mathematics and cosmology. This is a reversal of another limit involved in baroque folds, the reversal of inside and outside. As in baroque representation, on Hatoum’s floor no depth can be seen from outside the space of representation. At the same time, the images on the floor seem convex, although they 53

1.6a–d. Mona Hatoum, Corps étranger, 1994. Video installation with cylindrical wooden structure, video projector, video player, amplifier, and four speakers, approx. 350 x 300 x 300 cm. Musée d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

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are materially flat. Symbolically, to see the image, the viewer must penetrate the small space. And that space represents the body—a “foreign body.” But foreign as it is, this body is the artist’s own. This is wavering scale taken to the extreme: the body of the viewer in its entirety stands inside what is merely the visual detail of another body. Here, Peirce’s definition of the sign is transformed into a physical experience, in what thus becomes an extreme example of a theoretical object: some thing (the image) stands to some body (the viewer’s) for some thing (the body’s inside). In an ironic sense, this is indeed the representation of a body; one that equates representation with signification. According to Peirce’s definition, this counts as a sign. “Standing for,” however, is not representation—at least, not in all meanings of that noun. The complementary relationship is itself a theoretical object: in their radical differences, these two works are only theoretically compatible because each contributes something elementary to the readability of the other. They each comment on the idea of “deciphering” as a mode of access to art. They join forces because they both alert us to an essential aspect of art from the past— in this case, Caravaggio’s Medusa, but more generally, the idea of iconographic reading. Hatoum’s work makes the viewer enter the body at a metaphorical level: the cylindrical space is like a body, metaphorically. The uncanny feeling of being locked up comes from being inside what seems to be like an intrauterine existence. The loud heartbeat one hears upon entering the cylinder contributes this; and with sound comes time. But Hatoum’s work enforces the metaphor by infusing the representation with real time and illusionistic imagery. As a result, that space seems just as real. Yet, importantly, we see nothing we can recognize and read off the page; we cannot decipher the images.15 Janssens, instead, creates real space. It is from that space that the temporality of the process is derived. Here, nothing can be deciphered either because there are no images, other than those we bring in through our reflections. What binds these two practices is the centrality of the index, the privileged type of sign that frames the wavering in question. In both works, the ground of 15 On sound, see Bal 2013 and Pinheiro 2012. 56

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signification of the index is real ground: existential contiguity. Both works, in complementary ways, suspend the opposition between figuration and abstraction. Although there strictly is no image— no representation of the body—both, in their respective swerving, establish a firm link between the body and what we see. That firm link is called “index.”

Visual Deixis The index does not need to operate in “real” space to foreground the kind of bodily semiosis it promotes. Moreover, the relentless wavering between positions within this space is not only an issue of power, but also of scale, and of interiority bound to exteriority. Unlike in Hegelian dialectic, this wavering never stops to fade away in resolution. The wavering makes for a much riskier spatial existence than any simple reversal or even suspension of the opposition between subject and object could achieve. This wavering, which the mist installation had forcefully brought home to the viewer-performer, also characterizes Janssens’ Corps noir. While both works are centered in the self, they fundamentally concern relationship. In order to understand relationships, we are well advised to withhold judgment, suspend categories, and endorse confusion and contamination. In other words, we must swerve toward the edge. Janssens uses the index to point out the direction in which those judgments may be going; Hatoum and Janssens explore the syntax of the remedial acts of swerving. As I have argued in Quoting Caravaggio (1999, 152), this interpretation of the index opens up the possibility for a bodily and spatially grounded semiotics . Here, I wish to theorize this bodily semiotics further. The key concept that Corps noir deploys to this end is deixis. This concept is a more specific case of the group of signs called index. Its specificity resides in the fact that it is anchored in the body, hence, in the here and now. Not every index is a case of deixis. Smoke is an index of fire; it is concretely and existentially related to fire, emanating from it. In such a case the relation is causal, but not deictic. The smoke has no real relationship to the person seeing it, and perhaps mentioning it. The observation “over there, I see smoke” is 57

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deictic. However, “hence, there must be a fire there” is not, although it is equally indexical.16 Deixis is best known as a term for those linguistic markers (such as I/you, here/there, yesterday/today/tomorrow) that only acquire meaning within a specific situation of utterance. They require the subject’s presence. After performing (in) the mist installation, the viewer will not be surprised by the centrality of the body—in other words, the attention to the subject of indexical signification. Precisely because of the vital role played by the subject, I contend that deixis can become a key term for a semiotic analysis of the visual and literary domains without a reductive detour via language, even though the concept has been developed in linguistics.17 According to cognitive linguist Stephen C. Levinson, deixis is pervasive in language use and crucial for language acquisition because the latter depends on ostensive definition, or pointing, which is deictic (2004, 97). Levinson argues that deixis is simply coextensive with indexicality, which he considers to be a larger category, and refers the different terminology to different traditions (Bühler and Peirce, respectively). He uses indexicality for “the broader phenomena of contextual dependency” and reserves deixis for linguistic aspects of indexicality (97). Levinson’s treatment of the two concepts is in accordance with most usages. This hands-on view may make sense for linguists, but from the perspective of cultural analysis it entails a loss of analytical potential. Two further analytically useful distinctions can be made that help to understand how works like the ones under consideration can have political impact. The first is to establish the center from which deixis emanates. The second concerns time, or rather, tense. The latter distinction will enable us to consider the idea of visual tense. As for the former distinction, the key point of extending the concept of deixis beyond the domain of language alone is to understand that deixis is a form of indexicality that is locked

16 I wrote “group of signs” to avoid the idea of a category. Peirce’s terms are not taxonomical; they cannot be used to establish categorization. More on this in Chapter 5. 17 See also Teresa De Lauretis’ attempt to ground semiotics in the body (1984). 58

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into (keyed to) the subject (Bal 1999, 152). The example of smoke and fire clearly demonstrates the distinction between a broader indexicality and a specific one that is deictic. In its shortest formulation, deixis is bodily—it is anchored in the (speaking) body. This bodily-spatial form of deixis is an orientational index. It provides greater insight into forms of indexicality based on the postural function of the subject—its shaping “from within” the self-experience. From this postural function the self returns the images that enter it from the outside. But these images “returned to sender” are now thickened and specified by affective “commentary” or “feeling.” Such bodily-spatial deixis can be set apart from a more referential, outward-moving form of deixis. Such indexes mediate between deixis (“there is smoke”) and another kind of index, here causal (“hence, there must be a fire there, but I cannot see it or even know it for sure”). The point of such a distinction for the present investigation is the possibility it offers to theorize alternative forms of perspective. Here, the bodily conception of deixis can further clarify the theory of color perspective, where black and white create threedimensionality in the flat plane. Caravaggio suspended the predominance of linear perspective through the creation of spaces so narrow—and so dark—that perspective was not so much ignored or transgressed as made futile. Scale and color worked together to achieve this alternative form of perspective. The cropping of space, so utterly symbolic in paintings in which there is really no need for cropping, seems to prefigure photography and cinema. For the present discussion, it is useful to see that cropping as an emphatic suspension of linear perspective and the illusion of spatial wholeness and possessiveness it entails. Instead of that scientifically sanctioned tool, the painter used color to make threedimensionality within the narrow spaces.18 This dimensionality is not so much depth, seen as receding, as it is volume, seen as advancing. Instead of delivering space for the encompassing eye, it prods objects for the touch. In this view, white

18 Marin formulated this color perspective in his analysis of black in Caravaggio (1995, 169). 59

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pushes forward, black draws backward. As a result, perspective in Caravaggio becomes an inflection and emulation of linear perspective, transforming its meaning from possession to relationality. Specifically in Medusa, a work that was painted on a support that already had forward-pushing volume, depth does not lead the eye away to the vanishing point, but forward—to the viewer herself. Caravaggio’s work thus offers an alternative vision of seeing in space—a different philosophy of the seeing subject. Janssens engages this, and questions it on its own terms—terms that concern the reliability of vision. By construing Medusa as a theoretical object, I do not mean to suggest that art thinks—a widespread misunderstanding that surrounds the concept. Artworks cannot think, and neither are they recipes or prescriptions. The artworks I consider theoretical objects–-not only the objects but their conditions of making, of exhibition, and of becomingpublic—are able to offer opportunities for, even enticements to, visual thoughts that, as a critic, I seek to articulate. To see how this is possible we need to eliminate the figure of personification, which can only sneak in the artist’s intention through the back door. The artwork does not think like a person, nor is the artist the thinker behind it. Instead, the artwork in situ, in process, inspires thoughts that pertain to the social collective that in turn inspired it. The artwork responds to, as much as it initiates, thought. It participates in a dialogic relationship that can, in principle, remain entirely without words. The case of Medusa can clarify this. The work functions as a theoretical object, in the first place because it helped Louis Marin articulate a theory of color perspective. But typically for such objects, the thinking it stimulates does not stop there. Thinking through that Marinian-Caravaggist theory in the after-effect of my experience with Janssens’ Corps noir, my turn came to thicken the theoretical concept through the integration of deixis, and using it, in turn, to rethink the distinction between deixis and index. With respect to this process, the artwork does not perform the theorizing, but enables theorizing in the later moment, when terms such as index and deixis have already started circulating. Specifically, the subject-centeredness of deixis becomes more and more important as it suggests the next theoretical question. That next question binds semiotic theory to the social domain where the political of art works, and in which excessive subject-centeredness is a liability. 60

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Thanks to the miniaturizing of the self-reflection in the sculpture, deixis anchors semiosis in the subject but not in narcissism. For, what can subject-centeredness be when the subject by definition is a wavering double I/you subject that cannot be pinned down at any single moment in any particular spatial position, as Corps noir intimates? This question brings my search for a political relevance beyond representation to the next stage, by giving a new turn to the “dialogic” relation to space. The anchoring of deixis in the body of the subject, together with the I/you wavering, binds the subject irremediably to her “other,” in this case the artwork. The relevance becomes greater rather than lesser. Through the swerving and the experienced or felt process of it, the subjectivity of the self-assured mastery of the free individual is challenged. The viewer is enticed willfully to accept and endorse the limitation of the self in the awareness of her dependency on others, and this enticement is clothed in a pleasurable experience rather than a moralizing lesson. Instead of being a solitary and strictly private experience, viewing becomes an exciting interaction in face of artworks like Medusa or Corps noir. This interaction transforms our sense of self and makes us more social. In terms of narrative theory, viewing becomes similar to free indirect discourse.19 Mary Ann Doane has put forward the second distinction within the larger category of the index (2007). Doane returns to the old distinction that few authors have seriously taken up, between the index referring to the past—a trace of things long gone—and the index in the present, which would then be deixis in the proper sense, the here-and-now of semiosis. This distinction is mobilized and its two temporalities are brought in touch with each other whenever the experience in the present is activated by means of reminiscences of the past. When, for example, we feel compelled to interrogate the dilemma between convexity and concavity in front of Janssens’ Corps noir, it is not only because of our present situatedness in front of a work we cannot visually grasp. It is also because a trace from our memory of 19 This view of I/you as the site of subjectivity and meaning is derived from the linguistic theory of Émile Benveniste (1971). On free indirect discourse and other terms from narrative theory, see Bal 2009a. 61

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Caravaggio’s Medusa—or any other experiment with this dilemma from the history of art, or, just as easily, an experience in our own past with such deceptive visions—infringes upon the present moment of looking. This temporal deixis refers to a time with which we have some sort of continuity; or rather, a moment of which pops up again—some would say “survives”—in the present. It is a visual “tense”; a past tense, a verb form in the dynamic of viewing.20 But pastness is not the final word on the trace as tense. In Derrida’s view, famously exposed in Of Grammatology (1976), the trace is less a reference to the past than a forward-moving index. The footprint confronts us in the here and now, referring to a possible encounter in the future. Written signs may be written down in the past, but only in the present do we see them, and become desirous to read them in the (near) future. With this complication of past tense, we may well be invited to rethink the system of tenses as a whole, and consider the deictic tenses—distinct from the referential ones—to be by definition points where past and future meet as they traverse the present in opposite directions. Deictic past tenses are best understood through analogy with languages where imperfect and preterite are formally distinct, such as French and Spanish. The aptly named “imperfect” tense points to a past either durative or not yet over. Like the present tense, such tenses are deictic.21 Here, I am primarily interested in the former distinction; let us call it the spatial form of deixis, but keep in mind that we have already established that space and time cannot be separated. Such spatial deixis shapes deictic space. Deictic space, I contend, defies the incorporation of space that mastery and linear perspective (as its primary epistemic tool and metaphor) promoted. Spatial deixis counters the tendency to incorporation and encourages a more “generous,” adventurous 20 With the verb “to survive” I allude to Aby Warburg’s theory of the survival of forms. While my concept of pre-posterous history seems close to the Warburgian concept, I do not assume continuity but (transformed) recurrence. For Warburg’s view, see Didi-Huberman 2002 and Careri 2005. On the continuous presence of the past in the present, see my account of the Bergsonian image in the Introduction to Bal 2013. 21 Nanna Verhoeff develops the future-orientedness of deixis in much greater detail, in the context of interactive screen technologies and what she calls a “visual regime of navigation” (2012). 62

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relationship to space. My purpose here is to articulate a specific concretization of abstract space that visual artists propose, but that an aesthetic of meaningless beauty has prevented us from understanding. Especially sculptors, as professional researchers of and experimenters with space, are involved in this endeavor. To this effect, Janssens’ Corps noir seems a typical theoretical object: a place with or from which to pursue these reflections, especially since it works on and with reflection. Reflection puts the self out there. This moving out from the self-enclosed individuality of the proprioceptive skin (Anzieu 1989) maintains a deictic relationship to the viewing subject (“that is me over there”) but transforms the hitherto self-same nature of subjectivity itself (“I am upside-down, tiny, near that window”). Yet, it does so through the trace; aware of the history of art within which it inserts itself, it quotes the work— the active nature, the performativity—of Caravaggio’s work. Rather than quoting the painting, it quotes—is a trace of—the wavering between representational space, the convexity of the rotella, and the represented space, itself wavering between convexity and concavity as a site of interrogation through swerving. In the Caravaggio from the past this wavering “took place.” Our association with it, thanks to Corps noir’s allusion to it, establishes the past tense of the trace in the meeting ground of the present. In doing so, it appeals to our cultural memory—the acts of which happen in the present—which may or may not be actualized in every viewer. If we have not seen (a reproduction of ) the Caravaggio, we still may have had experiences, in the past of which the present instant is a trace, of a similar deceptive vision where we lose our moorings and are no longer certain of what we see. As a result, the tense, through the gearshift of the present, projects a future in which the trace becomes a new directive.22

Recoiling This seems the right moment to position this kind of quotation—which is allusive and specific, interdiscursive and theoretical—in terms of the 22 For the concept of “acts of memory,” see the Introduction in Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer 1999. 63

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critical project that Janssens’ work engages in. Above, I mentioned the word abstract in connection with Janssens’ art. It can perhaps also be called conceptual. It surely is nonfigurative, and thus we look for other ways of defining and categorizing it. But terms like conceptual or abstract sound wrong. Conceptual art, as a historically specific aesthetic that goes back to the 1960s, was used to describe a range of anti-retinal, dematerializing practices. But for all the anti-aesthetic in conceptual art, the issue at stake was precisely a rethinking of what aesthetic can be. Janssens’ work may not be invested in traditional aesthetics at all; it is highly aesthetic, but always on its own terms. To the extent that it addresses art, calls it on the carpet, and probes how it can be made more social, the term meta-art, if taken not in a historical but in a theoretical sense, seems more plausible. Janssens’ work also lacks the dematerializing feature that binds conceptual art to a certain idea of abstraction. It is insistently material, even if the choice of materials (mist, shiny fiberglass, sound, glass, mirrors; in short, light) questions the adequacy of our conceptions of materiality. The materiality she focuses on is both highly unusual—the materiality of light is and remains her primary interest—and unfit for individual signature art. But it is, indeed, meta-art—which is why I can call on it for the present exploration of the political of art in a more general sense. Above, I called Janssens’ works theoretical objects—a term I find clearer than meta-art—referring primarily to the way they “theorize” (in the sense of putting forward) their own status in space and thus solicit the viewer’s reflection.23 In To Destroy Painting, Marin also uses the term meta-art. He begins his analysis of Caravaggio’s Medusa with a “poetics” of what he calls self-critical or meta-painting: “A painting is self-critical if the fundamental characteristic of the representational system in question is self-referentiality, self-designation, or self-regulation” (1995, 97). For him, this is what the rotella or shield-painting is, or does, for, “in the work of Caravaggio, representation or mimesis is turned inside out like a glove” (100). Medusa resonates with Janssens’ art when the baroque work demonstrates that the latter contains a trace of the

23 The standard definition of conceptual art came from Joseph Kosuth, one of this art’s major practitioners (1969). For the term “meta-art,” see Piper 1973. 64

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former. Thus, deictically it makes us experience it now. This tells us what the trace does to the present in which it appears. Caravaggio’s work turns representation inside out by making it so perfect that it can no longer work; this is the grievance expressed in Marin’s title. Hatoum’s use of a refined microtechnology of registration makes such illusionism literal. The perfection of the medium makes art redundant because it undermines the boundary between inside and outside. This engages space. Space is the site where the political can play itself out, for that is the space we share. Janssens’ artwork helps us understand novel ways of being in that space and sharing it—starting us off with our own reflection: tiny, upside-down, and fleeting. Many artists have taken up this challenge to space, but I consider Janssens’ Corps noir a particularly radical, paradigmatically effective case in point. However, this is not exclusively the result of (overly) perfect representation, which is the focus of Marin’s discussion. It is also due to the trace this face of Medusa constitutes. For this face and the story it cannot help but carry along suffer from being too well known. We have become acquainted with the figure of Medusa as the quintessential dangerous woman—a man-eating monster. But what Caravaggio tells us through his “destroyed representation” is that she is as afraid of the viewer—and rightly so, since her first viewer Perseus beheaded her—as we are of her. Tongue-in-cheek, then, the painter who displayed such an indifference to the investment in women as bearers of both beauty and monstrosity as was usual in his time, redresses the ideology of binary opposition as a guideline for the political. That his Medusa is also an allo-portrait, resembling the painter’s face from other paintings, surely helps this undermining of binary opposition. This is the address, the shock that enforces awareness of itself in our bodies; an address that is situated at the threshold of vision and touch. With the word threshold I introduce liminality as yet another concept that can join the others in my effort to get a more adequate grip on visual deixis and the subsequent relationships among Janssens’ work, its viewer, and its history without resorting to deciphering. I take liminality literally, as the event occurring on the limen, or threshold. In the hands of Janssens and other contemporary artists interested in challenging the divisions and binaries that all but ruin the political, this is not a linear transitional ritual with an irreversible outcome, as Van Gennep (1960) and later Turner (1969) had it. It 65

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is the boundary between inside and outside, but not as a border or a line. Instead, it is a space where insiderness and outsiderness can be negotiated, transformed, and swapped (Boer 2006). It is the threshold where an encounter is about to take place. This encounter is the specific event in which negotiation can entail the loss of a meaningful sense of belonging in favor of sharing. This happens in space (on the threshold) and in time (the time between events), which is liminal. For this to be negotiable, time itself, in all its thickness, duration, and experience, must be taken out of its unreflective neglect and brought into the limelight of the threshold. This is why the temporal deixis of the trace, brought forward in Doane’s analysis, is so important. With Corps noir, the self-portrait is not painted, not posited in a trompe l’œil that defies painting while remaining within it, but thrust into the object by the viewer’s performance only. Jacques Lacan’s jubilant mirror experience of self-recognition meets Medusa’s terror as estrangement of the self. The black body uses light to make this meeting possible. The encounter is based on a bodily presence that takes deixis beyond its formal linguistic use. It brings back deixis’ primacy to space, in a swerving relation of moving outward and drawing back, identification and distancing. This constant movement and uncertainty helps against the temptation to idealize what happens on the threshold and by means of spatio-temporal deixis. I qualify this wavering as recoiling. Recoiling is an experience and act that, willy-nilly, has weighty consequences for the political as the space we share, but unequally so. To experience recoiling without the seemingly self-evident repulsion of alterity so common in everyday public life is a useful apprenticeship for the political subjects we all are. Outside of any potential moralism or propaganda, this work makes us go through what we barely want to acknowledge: the alter-phobia that continues to rule political space— and in which we now recognize ourselves. There is a detail in this uniformly smooth and shiny bowl—a detail one can see but not touch, although it compels one to try. In front of the invisible “bottom” of the bowl floats a disk of semi-opaque light— an optical effect of the work itself. One desires to grasp it, to check it out. The hand goes inside the bowl. Once “behind” the immaterial disk, the latter seems even more substantial, its edge dividing the hand into a clear and a semi-opaque part. There is strictly nothing there, but that nothing is visible nevertheless. 66

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This calls for a caveat to the readers of this book. The uncanny experience of viewing a space that threatens to envelop the viewer cannot be repeated in a printed, flat reproduction. Instead, the photograph only offers signs of this experience. Are these signs traces or blueprints? It is tempting to make an allegory of the project of Janssens’ work based on this ambiguity between forward and backward temporality, and thus bring the two distinct kinds of deixis together again. Just as Caravaggio can both be illuminated by contemporary art and illuminate it in return, so can the incongruous, impossible wavering between incorporating and being incorporated occur before and after the fact. “I must therefore submit to this law: I cannot penetrate, cannot reach into the Photograph. I can only sweep it with my glance, like a smooth surface. The Photograph is flat, platitudinous, in the true sense of the word, that is what I must acknowledge,” Roland Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida (1984, 106; emphasis in text). This is, ultimately, also the case with Corps noir. This work may not be flat or photographic, but it is a body; and one cannot reach inside a body any more than one can reach inside a flat photograph— even if Hatoum’s images suggest one can come close enough to see. But then, precisely when it is so detailed, seeing becomes abstract. Janssens answers Barthes’ anxious experience with something like a reassurance. Offering an experience where vision is unable to decide, and touching does not help either, she gives access to an experience of a different kind. This comes closer to the experience of Valéry’s intellectual-turned-poet described in his 1939 lecture, because from the autobiographical fragment—which was also Barthes’ hub—this imaginary person was able to live the lives of countless others. Distance precludes seeing. As for Gaston Bachelard (1927), closeup vision, however, far from closing the gap between the image and the viewer’s subjectivity, rather has the effect of widening it. The need to touch and the subsequent frustration make clear that seeing cannot decide between incorporating space and being incorporated into it. But the viewer happily colludes with this cannibalism, compelled as she is to check out what a touch might contribute. A certain modesty emanates from this experience, a modesty that makes room for others—within ourselves.

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2

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The shadow of the door vanishing under the door. These abstract moments, all form and scale, the carpet pattern, the grain of the floorboards, binding him to total alertness . . . Don DeLillo1

Janssens’ work invites us to theorize the wider implications of deictic looking. Both the mist installations and the reflecting sculptures compelled me to do so. In particular, Horror Vacui and Corps noir worked on me to theorize the relevance of deictic looking for a political domain. In that domain, when we look deictically, others are different but not distinct from selves, time traverses the present so that past and future can meet up, and space is not incorporated but visited. One is encouraged not to visit it as a tourist, but rather as an engaged subject eager to partake in the sharing of that space. It is, first and foremost, a space that is not empty—it is not simply for the taking. Presenting a space that is inhabited rather than empty, open for entering but not for occupying, for coinhabiting but not for appropriating—a space within which the viewing subject is welcomed while simultaneously being transformed by it—is perhaps the most central aspect of the political force of this art. It is not a coincidence that the formulation in the previous sentence can be applied to situations created by politics in different (geographical) areas just as well. The space, however, does not reference any such situations specifically. Rather than making propaganda for policy changes 1

The passage is part of an extensive account of a man spending days on end in Douglas Gordon’s video installation 24 Hour Psycho from 1993 (DeLillo 2010, 89). 69

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in particular regions, the works sensitize us, so that we become nonindifferent to politically fraught situations and open up to the possibility of change. Deictic looking implies that the space surrounding the work becomes part of the work itself as well as the subject of looking, so that the wavering of subjectivity between I- and you-positions can continue. One such spatial environment fit for deictic looking is the city of Venice—a space frequently endangered by water, overrun with tourists, severely polluted, and yet considered eternally beautiful. It is a space with a long history and a treasure house of art. Here, I am tempted to say, past art and present light meet more intensely than anywhere else. In Venice, a work such as the mist installation, which uses light as medium, received additional environmental input from the unique light in this city of water. Although a lot more can be said about the “contextual dependency” of art exhibited at the Venice Biennale, including the nationalist aspect of the ordering by country and the hierarchy among the participating countries that the architecture implies, I limit myself here to the context of light and reflection to probe the concept of deictic looking in more depth.2 In order to avoid the misunderstanding that immersive works are more conducive to deictic looking than flat ones, I begin with a few supposedly flat works. What binds these works together is the utter simplicity of their appearance and making. Fitting with what I will call “a politics of modesty” in the next chapter, these works compel deictic looking by means of light. Although they are themselves not immaterial—they consist, in fact, of durable objects and can thus be properly called sculptures—they work with light. Indeed, when light is lacking, they remain dead matter without any interest. Thus, they challenge the notion that light itself is immaterial. This discussion will lead to a new assessment of the political of this art.

2

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“Contextual dependency” is Levinson’s characterization of deixis (2004, 97). Maria H. Loh’s Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art (2007) is the most captivating book I know about Venetian painting. In spite of the title’s suggestion that it is a monograph, it offers many insights into the relationship between different times, including between the past of classical Venetian painting and today.

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Later in the chapter I return to immersive mist installations, now in order further to probe how close light comes to materiality. Deictic looking takes on a demonstrative bodily appearance. There, I further examine the implications of deictic looking through a comparison that also helps along the pre-posterously historical perspective. I discuss this through the difference-in-repetition between some comparable art from the 1970s—also abstract, and also working with light—in an attempt to grasp the contemporary aspect of Janssens’ art.

Deictic Looking Janssens has worked with Venetian light before coming to the Biennale in 1999. For her 1988 work Casa Frollo, she piled up 18 panes of glass on a windowsill of one of the palazzi, Casa Frollo. The old stone of the sill belonged to that Venice the world must preserve in the interest of history’s present, its tense being the “imperfect.” The stone was old, cracked, and uneven, having a color only Venetian sunlight can paint. Totally flat and crack-free, the smooth, shiny surface of the pile of glass panes contrasted strikingly with that stone. But this contrast was neither a binary opposition nor a competitive emulation. Instead, the contrast worked to enhance the effect of light, its materiality, and its color [fig. 2.1]. It is well known that glass, which is supposedly colorless, gains color with thickness: its green, blue, or purple is visible only on the side where it has been cut. These are, in principle, transparent, invisible colors. Transparency as a topos belongs to the illusionary realms of realism. It pertains to the window-on-the-world of Renaissance art theory, which we never quite managed to get rid of. Stacking glass plates on the sill of a window that opened onto the city of Venice and its canals was an overt allusion to that theory. The photograph, moreover, shows the glass “in perspective.” The line perpendicular to the picture plane is longer than the line that delimits the plates at the back, closer to an imaginary vanishing point.3

3

Damisch has written suggestively about the topos of the “window” as a key metaphor in the theory of representation, but also about its move towards abstraction (2009b). For transparency, see Chapter 4 in Bal 2013. 71

2.1. Ann Veronica Janssens, Casa Frollo, 1988. 18 glass sheets, 20 x 20 cm each. Casa Frollo, Venice.

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Glass as material recalls the presence of transparency in our ideological world of ideas. To “give” glass a color—not by intervening in its transparency but by putting forward its thickness and its reflective surface—is an entrance into a nuanced discussion of what transparency means and does. Piling up 18 sheets of transparency brings the invisible color into sight while preserving the colorless thinness of each plate that makes glass delicate and fragile. The sides of these thin panes were not polished. As a result, the rough edges sculpted the blue into various tones, hues, and scintillations that echoed the infinite variation of the waves of water beyond it. However, whereas water moves and thus possesses a degree of variability unrivaled by any hard material, the grain of the edges was tiny, modest, and mute. At the same time, the rough edges were double-edged, so to speak. They were also responsive to the beauty of the old, rough stone on which the panes were stacked. Here, too, the edges were too modest to engage in a fully-fledged competition between the stone that hosted them and their own tiny grains. Rather than competing, the mission of these plates in their stacked form and location on stone above water was one of mediation. In terms of temporality, these unpolished edges of the glass panes mediate between the durability of the stone and the ephemerality of the waves. This in-betweenness turns them into a threshold of sorts. And that liminality—again, in the literal sense—immediately complicates the effect. Glass is hard, and materially speaking extremely durable—more so than stone. But in practice, due to usage, glass objects break and do not last that long. And if they last, they tend to lose their luster, as ancient Roman glass objects in antiquity museums demonstrate. Stone, in this sense, is more durable in practice; when used for larger and thicker building blocks, it does not break. This contrasts material properties with usage, bringing the mineral in touch with the human. Thus, between geology, history, and the present, heterotemporality is instated. Meanwhile, the sun intensified the blue while also casting a shadow, like a carpet that extends the surface. The materials of this flat painting/drawing were light, shadow, and the underlying old stone. Looking deictically from the inside out produces a temporal sequence: the rough side of the pile announces the waves beyond it. Which is repeating which? The water, now, appears as a product of Janssens’ pile 74

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of glass; for the rough sides first drew attention to the nuances of color produced by irregularity, so that the waves could only repeat the glass’ work. Repeating, as an after-effect, is a form of citation. This entails an unexpected “politics of citation.” The modesty of the glass pile is a courteous, polite way of making a point. It stipulates that temporal priority is not the same as primacy in importance. And in the wake of this immoderate claim, it immediately qualifies it by stipulating the dependence of each participant on a support, environment, and “other.”4 Here, the artist is disenchanting the light in an endeavor to make it more deeply available for people. Venetian light is appropriated, inflected, deprived of its immutable magic. Yet it is also enriched with a changeability that gives it back to the present time, in a deployment of deictic visual tense. Can light be seen as a trace? The very same glass is also the tool for making light shine; not coincidentally, glass is one of Venice’s star products. I submit that it is through glass, that material of transparency, that this work “theorizes” its present tense. In this, it engages a discussion with the history of Venice, of art, and of the materiality of light. Transparency, the primary property of glass, is also the primary feature traditionally attributed to Renaissance painting, of which Venetian art offers some eminent examples. What glass is to ordinary vision—its representation and its primary tool—linear perspective is to visual art. It is a taken-for-granted, supposedly “natural” dispositif. We believe in it even if we do not. And if this photograph is any indication, we are right in that commonsense belief. Linear perspective is not rejected; its “truth” is not denied. It is just put in its place, with enriching consequences: an openness to other possible views on the world; “andness” rather than the privileging of one predominating view that dominates its vista. After the intervention on Casa Frollo’s window sill, all paintings that we assumed to have captured the light in a successful work of transparency, now turn out to have modified it. This brings the effect of

4

In this context, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1994) is again highly relevant. Of course, repetition is also an important element in citation, which can be seen as the performance of it. See Butler 1993 for the important consequences of these notions in the theory of sexual practices. The phrase “politics of citation” also refers to a discussion in Bal 1996. 75

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light into our orbit; it makes our relationship to it deictic. The Venice we see, walking through the streets or riding the vaporetti, has not lost its ancient glow; on the contrary, that glow has been actualized and updated by this retroversive, pre-posterous intervention. Janssens’ work with light is not limited to shades or nuances, nor does she “create” or “represent” light. She engages it as a material to make deictic looking possible, attractive, and socially productive. In her work, light becomes a primary material whose materiality— its status as matter—has important consequences for our sense of being in space, as well as for our commonplace notions of possession and objecthood, which we can now distinguish and set apart from engagement and interaction.

Stirring Many other works by Janssens deploy light to raise the issue of our relationship to space and sense perception in different but complementary ways. As an object, the 1996 Grand disque, for example, remains rigorously two-dimensional and nonfigurative. At first sight it is utterly simple: a flat piece of metal, a perfect circle, with circular lines engraved on it. The only element that “engraves” the plaque with design, volume, and depth is light. That light, however, challenges our sense of what the “work” is, and what light is as well. In this work, light takes on weight, dimension, form, and movement. The light emanates from the center, in rays that grow wider as they move away from it. They also grow thicker, shaping three-dimensional spaces around the center of the circle. Each ray becomes a sculpture. Yet, this disk is rigorously flat [fig. 2.2]. At the same time, the rays move. As in Corps noir, no stable position is offered from which one can view the rays at leisure. Any attempt to stay still, which already makes the viewer aware of the body’s involvement in looking, invariably fails. The tiniest movement of the eye—the pulse of blood in it or the need to blink—already changes the rays. Because of the simplicity of the object, one becomes curious about whether there is not a secret somewhere—and thus one starts to move in relation to it. The very simplicity of the object’s form, its flatness—which concentrates the perceptual problem on the 76

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2.2. Ann Veronica Janssens, Grand disque, 1996. Engraved aluminum, 100 cm diameter.

light alone—sharply disturbs the act of looking and unsettles the selfevidence with which the viewer occupies space. The viewer is not in control; the work of art “speaks back.” This movement of the rays was further foregrounded in 2001, when Janssens had a large and much talked-about exhibition in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. On the bright, transparent ground floor she exhibited disks in the style of Grand disque, along with bicycles whose wheels were embellished with similar ray-producing disks. Visitors were invited to mount a bicycle and ride around the space. The floor offered enough space to actually ride a bike, and many did indeed do so. The space, light-filled in itself, lent itself to such transgression of the stillness of artworks. The movement of riding the bicycle overdetermined the movement already inherent in the disks’ play with light. Janssens’ experiment with light exceeds the question of mirroring alone. As we have seen, Corps noir was not a simple mirror in any way. These disks, and the hubcaps of the bicycle wheels, did not mirror, although they reflected light. Instead of figurative reflection, it is three77

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dimensionality that takes part in the challenge. Whereas in Grand disque there is no question of concavity or convexity of the object itself, as there was with Corps noir, this question does arise in relation to the light. Some rays look convex, some concave. The concave rays disappear in the photograph. But something else happens by letting the accidental take place and working through chance or serendipity, capturing the sculpture in a single photograph. In the picture the disk as a whole looks like an implausible round version of corrugated iron, of the kind used to build shantytowns. The form we see here could never be made in such a thick sheet of metal. As this work demonstrates anew, Janssens’ works with glass and mirrors, but also those with only light reflection, invoke transparency not as a self-evident illusion but, on the contrary, as that which makes perception lose its apparent naturalness. All these works make the body feel the need to perceive in order to be, act, and perform. In 1987, Janssens lined the Altenloh room of the Museum of Modern Art in Brussels with a plinth of mirrors. The mirrors were placed slightly obliquely, but the angle was narrow, barely visible in itself. They did, however, greatly affect visibility. The viewer walking on the floor of the room saw her feet separate from her body. Immediately, walking became something to be learned anew: an effort, not a “natural” movement. Again, then, the body was affected by perception. Perception was no longer an aid but a performance that took all one’s energy and concentration. The time it took to adjust and walk again was part of the work. In the case of Grand disque, due to the light effects, the boundary between two- and three-dimensional space is posited as both absolute and untenable. The work-as-object is clearly flat; the work-as-interaction is, equally clearly, not imprisoned in that physical existence. The rays of light grow onto the viewer from split second to split second. Again, time is light’s companion, the viewer is the work’s companion, and together they perform a silent, empowering, deictic dance. The movements of the eyes, invisible to an outsider, and the rays of light that change constantly either do or do not move together. The allusion to corrugated iron in my description of this particular photograph may seem far-fetched in that, in contrast to my interpretations of Janssens’ art as political so far, it brings in a specific political issue. It is precisely to nuance and undermine such a reading 78

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that I bring it up. After all, such an interpretation would indeed be a reading in the reductive sense of deciphering meaning rather than a deictic engagement with the work. The fact that millions of people do not live in houses as we know them but in what we would call huts built of just such cast-away iron sheets may or may not have been an association that came to the artist’s mind; and it may or may not come to the viewer’s. If it did come to mine, this is not in the punitive sense of a moralizing indictment of economic divisions. To explain how this work alludes to a specific political issue without falling into the trap of propaganda for a cause, I need to develop several strands of thought at this juncture. In this context, the fact that Janssens’ works are always formally perfect and mostly pleasurable, always intense to engage with, becomes a political issue in itself. Through that formal beauty she counters the tendency to read artworks as pamphlets: the vulgar notion of political art must first be discarded before the political force of this art can be processed. This is visible in the formal perfection of the flat circle of Grand disque. It is more emphatically at stake in a work that is in fact made of corrugated iron, perhaps ironically called Tropical Paradise (2006). A plate of corrugated iron of about one square meter is fixed to a wall, tilted and slightly detached. Between the wall and the piece is a narrow opening that lets in the light. This slit is inevitable given the waves of the iron. At the same time, it works, in this light work, to nuance and position light. What defines the political work of this allusion to bus shelters and other shaded places is the layer of gold leaf on the iron. Instead of critiquing economic divisions, the work brings them to mind in a modest way, enticing us to think of people in such situations. The piece offers “them” a brief and imaginary moment of “paradise,” of shelter under the luxurious gold and the bright light this shiny material emanates. But this is not done, of course, under the illusion that actual homeless people will come into the museum and take comfort in this work. Nor is it meant to suggest that in tropical climates, sojourning under iron plates is a joyful mode of living. The sheer contrast between precious gold and corrugated iron raises the question what a “home” is, but refrains from answering it [fig. 2.3]. As the artwork itself draws attention to it, the specific association with shantytowns cannot be gratuitous, subjective, or no one’s concern. One year later, Janssens made a work called Pavillon doré (2007), which 79

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2.3. Ann Veronica Janssens, Tropical Paradise, 2006. Sheet of corrugated aluminum and 23¾ carat gold leaf, 4 x 110 x 127 cm, minimum installation height 240 cm. Frieze Art Fair, London.

alluded even more overtly to such habitats, again embellishing them for no other reason than to bring light to them. This time, she made a habitat, a shelter built entirely from sheets of aluminum shaped like corrugated iron. Covering such a hut with 23¾ carat gold leaf is an act. It has many possible meanings, none of which can simply be deciphered. Because of the work’s scale (200 x 135 x 120 cm), it requires quite a lot of gold. Also, the scale makes the structure unfit to live in. It is high enough to stand in but too small to sleep in as one cannot stretch out on the ground. As usual, reductive reading will not do. The gold leaf makes the structure “beautiful”—as if that word meant anything at all, in the face of such structures as they are littered throughout metropoles around the world. Yet, the gold is a gift, a kind of validation through light of the people “touched” by the allusion. Moreover, the structure is carefully built as if it really had the mission to shelter. Again, there is a narrow slit, inevitable given the waving shape of the panels, but this opening is covered by a slightly larger roof, and similarly, the rain cannot get 80

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inside due to the awning on the top front. These slightly overlapping surfaces also make the structure visually attractive. In addition, this awning simultaneously foregrounds the shape of the structure (high in front, lower in back) as architectural: not just a building, but building as (an) art. Even such a simple structure has architectural qualities, thought through to integrate visual harmony with optimal comfort. But due to scale and shape, this is not a realistic representation of a habitat [fig. 2.4]. What is it then, or more importantly, what does it do, as the “action” Valéry required of artworks? On an immediate level, due to the corrugated iron the panels evoke, the golden pavilion embodies the radical divisions of the world. Rich—the gold leaf—and poor—the corrugated iron—are both alluded to. But the allusion is such that they are bound together; the gold sticks to the iron, like a leech. It cannot be taken away or stolen. The inseparability of the two layers not only harks back to Hegel’s master–slave dialectic. It also turns them into a sign according to Ferdinand de Saussure’s definition: two sides of a single leaf. The signifier and signified are indivisibly glued to each other. This makes the pavilion itself a sign; hence, according to Damisch, it is abstract. Rather than a moralizing indictment of the unequal divisions of the world, then, although it does not allow us to forget these, the work brings light—including illumination, enlightenment—to that abstraction itself. It brings insight to the viewer, which is all art can do—but it does so powerfully, by addressing both the senses and the intellect. Although it is entirely different in terms of aesthetics, form, materiality, and scale, in its multiple meanings Pavillon doré comes close to Doris Salcedo’s work Shibboleth (2007) in the Tate Modern. There, too, beauty (in the qualified sense I have used it above) was deployed in a sculpture that embodied the division of humanity into those with livable lives and those without. And there, too, the beauty, hidden inside the walls of the crevice in the Tate’s floor, walls that were incrusted with wire fence but beautifully polished, seemed incongruous and yet indispensable as well as impossible to separate from the crevice. Salcedo’s crack was not a representation of division but an instance of it. It did divide the Turbine Hall. Similarly, Janssens’ gold on the waves of metal does not represent division, but 81

2.4. Ann Veronica Janssens, Pavillon doré, 2007. Corrugated aluminum and 23¾ carat gold leaf, 200 x 135 x 120 cm. “An den Frühling,” Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen.

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embodies it. This is how the works manage to remain abstract, while also bringing the political very, very close.5 In view of what I consider to be political art, I must resist the notion that these works directly plead the specific political cause to which, nevertheless, I have alluded above and which they do engage. The connection is much less direct, and passes through philosophy. Instead of proposing that we think of people living in shantytowns, these works polemically address Deleuze and Guattari’s division of the work of science, art, and philosophy, as they expose it in What Is Philosophy? (1994). To summarize: Deleuze and Guattari claim that science produces precepts, art produces percepts and affects, and philosophy produces concepts. So far, so good. They further claim that philosophy is inherently political (Patton 2010, 138). If we can see why, and furthermore understand what concepts are and do, then we can see how Janssens’ gold-leaf works are “philosophical” and therefore political.6 In an essay on the political nature of Deleuze’s thought, Paul Patton phrases the inherently political nature of philosophy as follows: Philosophical concepts . . . fulfill their intrinsically political vocation by counter-effectuating existing states of affairs and referring them back to the virtual realm of becoming. (2010, 139) I read this as stating that concepts have the power to actually act because they make alternative states of affairs thinkable and thus promote their becoming. A concept can be seen as a point of coincidence, a condensation, an accumulation of its own components. Hence, a concept is both absolute (ontologically) and relative (“pedagogically,” in its power to demonstrate possibility). Furthermore, while it is syntactic, according to Deleuze and Guattari, a concept is not discursive, for it does not link up propositions (1994, 22). This may be precisely why concepts maintain the flexibility and multiplicity of meaning that fully-fledged theories, discursively elaborated, inevitably lose. To understand, then, what the “actions” that these works are consist of, I invoke the philosophers’ statement that concepts are centers of 5 6

For an analysis of Salcedo’s Shibboleth, see the Introduction to Bal 2010. For an extensive discussion of what concepts are and do, see my book on the subject (2002). 83

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vibrations, each in itself and every one in relation to all the others (23): they resonate rather than cohere. Resonance is in sound what shining is in visuality, and vibrancy in touch. Thus, all three senses are involved here. The gold leaf vibrates like such a synesthetic concept. The waves of the metal help it along, giving the gold more reflection and more light. These works, I contend, behave like concepts. Simply by visually resonating and scintillating, they demonstrate that poor and rich, iron and gold, cling to one another in an unbreakable bond. However, where a concept gives off its message in words, or rather, in a single, denotative word, this work does not denote. Instead, it brings forth the vibrancy in deixis. Therefore, the deictic center cannot remain aloof of its effect. This is not a loud message but a subtle nudge, a directive of what Deleuze and Guattari would call “micropolitics” (1987). Micropolitics consists of the subterranean movements and resistances of individuals through affect, sensibility, and relationality. Deictic looking enables, and indeed solicits, such micropolitical stirring. In an attempt to avoid the hierarchical association of the binary “macropolitics” (for institutional politics) versus “micropolitics” (for the agency of people) I simply call it the political. The point, here, is to understand how Janssens’ corrugated gold works touch their viewers with such vibrations. If they succeed, then either Janssens’ two works are instances of philosophy, or the philosophers were wrong in creating their division among the three domains. Of course, both statements are true, and hence it does not matter to which of the two views one leans. In view of the poverty of categorical thinking, in my opinion it is a mistake to pin domains of thought and action down to specific tasks, even though Deleuze and Guattari did so in an attempt to articulate the inherent political nature of philosophy, not art. But what if we do attribute similar work to art? I must also add that since philosophy is thought, and it is political, the kind of thought-inducing artworks I have called “theoretical objects” participate in such a practice of philosophy. The question remains if the political agency thus at work does something more specific—without becoming thematic—than what Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus recommend to the individual who seeks to construct “a body without organs”:

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. . . you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. (1987, 160) This recommendation appears effectively as a practical philosophy, but not one that drives us into the arms of politicians. Rather, these are conditions for the empowerment required for the creation of the new, not yet thinkable, but already imaginable. Deleuze would call it “becoming.” Perhaps he would also call it “becoming democratic” (Patton 2010, 2). I see the stammering, not-yet-possible inventiveness in the making that Valéry talked about, and which Deleuze and Guattari seem to seek in concepts, emerge more fully in art—art that does not lead to, but is, action. Yet, the nature of that action cannot reside in the work alone, pace Valéry. Nevertheless, even Deleuze, reluctant as he was—and more and more so in the course of his career—to impose or even recommend specific causes and positions, could not help a certain normativity. For example, he was not against human rights as such, but resisted their generality. This is not to say that he favored a relativistic position. He did, however, prefer rights to be the subject of jurisprudence, so that singularities rather than generalities would be decisive, and the issue would remain an ongoing process rather than a matter fixed once and for all in laws (1995, 153). I share this preference for singularity. It is what makes art such a suitable domain to engage with, even in a normative—but not a moralizing—manner. Valéry wanted artworks to be actions; in other words, he wanted them to work (as a verb). But he wisely did not stipulate what it is they were to do. This makes artists such as Janssens effective in their restraint, as their focus on making art that works strictly prevents them from becoming overly directive. And if, in spite of that discursive restraint, the work is jubilant, funny, cheerful, and—dare I say it?—beautiful, that positivity is part of the work, including in that verbal sense of exerting agency in the political. What makes these works perhaps more rather than less political than philosophical concepts is the mutuality of the “becoming” they enact in their solicitation of deictic looking. Let me call the action they perform, then, stirring. 85

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Solid Light Janssens’ installation Représentation d’un corps rond (1996) is a key work in this regard. Like the works discussed so far, it concerns the democratic availability of light, and the potential it offers us to engage with space—the way it stirs us. But compared to both Grand disque and Tropical Paradise, it questions the relationship between viewer and space in a much more dramatic—but equally pleasurable—way. It brings performance into a visibility that is eminently theatrical. Like Grand disque and the Venice mist installation, this work is even more difficult to reproduce in a photograph than Corps noir. Représentation, Janssens’ first work with mist, consists of a conic projection of light starting at a center that was a mere 10 centimeters in diameter and gradually extending across a misty gallery space that was 30 meters wide. Visitors could not help walking into the work; the gallery barely left enough space outside of it. Again, walking lost its innocence right away. Where do you put your feet inside a cone consisting of misty light? On a floor, of course, but that was no longer visible. The cone turned for three minutes, then stopped. The work only had light to sustain its existence. There was no physical object, although its title contained the words representation and body [fig. 2.5]. Janssens is not the first artist to use light and deploy its power to make it come close to materiality, even if she does so in an exceptionally consistent and original manner. A brief positioning in relation to the light and space movement of the twentieth century may illuminate her work. Among the most renowned artists of this movement are Robert Irwin (b. 1928) and James Turrell (b. 1943). Irwin made installations where light changes perception. Turrell makes light installations, often in natural settings. Doubtlessly his most famous work is the “naked eye” observatory Roden Crater, outside of Flagstaff, Arizona. There, people are invited to observe celestial phenomena.7 In a useful overview, Annelie Lütgens (2004) discusses light and space art, a type of art to which Janssens’ work might be said to belong, but to which it cannot be reduced. According to Lütgens, this movement deploys four fundamental tenets of the intersection between light and space (visible as early as in László Moholy-Nagy’s 7 86

For a short introduction to Turrell’s work, see Marmer 1981.

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2.5. Ann Veronica Janssens, Représentation d’un corps rond, 1996. Cyberlight projector and artificial mist, 3c projection (looped), dimensions variable. “Work for Space,” Kunstverein München, Munich (2001).

light sculptures from the 1930s). Freely adapting Lütgens’ list of these tenets to the case of Janssens, I can see that her art makes space a coordinate of movement; it compels perception to realize space’s dynamic nature; it theatrically stages this realization by means of machinery; and it activates the viewer’s participation beyond the mere act of viewing. Hence, the answer to the question if Janssens fits the profile, so to speak, of light and space art can only be affirmative. As before, however, I seek to understand the relation of this contemporary art to its historical kin pre-posterously and critically, as a new way of recasting the earlier art. When we add time to Lütgens’ list, more related antecedents pop up. Janssens’ cone of light restages these, and thus transforms and acts upon them. In addition to space and light art, this work resonates with early modernist attempts to capture time in images, the structural films of the 1970s, and the historical Baroque to which the two former currents also hark back. Looking at the most visually obvious of these antecedents allows me to assess the position of Janssens’ art as a visual philosophy of 87

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space more precisely. Here, space is what the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) called a “natural feeling” (2002, 58). It is not the space of Renaissance perspective: geometrical, measurable, and identical for everyone who perceives it. Instead, this “natural feeling” is deictic (although Bergson does not use that term, since it was not yet around as a concept). Therefore, it is heterogeneous, different for everyone depending on their position. This heterogeneity resists fusion while being the more forceful as it is strictly haptic. This gives yet another slant to the deictic sense of space I have been elaborating.8 It is in this respect that I would like briefly to bring in experiments with light in structural film, exemplified by Anglo-American artist Anthony McCall. McCall’s works of this group are called “solid light films”—an apt and programmatic title. It is precisely because they appear to have so much in common that the most important differences between Janssens’ and McCall’s work can be seen. The most obvious case at hand is Janssens’ Représentation d’un corps rond as compared to McCall’s work Line Describing a Cone from 1973 (released anew in the early 2000s): both consist of cones produced by light.9 From the 1970s onward, McCall’s gripping experimental films drew planes and lines with light, in relation to which the viewer had to find a way of being. According to Branden W. Joseph, McCall drew inspiration from home movie aesthetic and its embeddedness in “real” experience (2005a, 40). Like Robert Morris, McCall wished to highlight the “actuality” of light in relation to surface (42). Congenial to what has been termed “structural film” defined by predictability (Sitney in Joseph 2005a, 44), McCall’s Line Describing a Cone compares most readily with Janssens’ Representation d’un corps rond, if comparison serves to highlight difference as much as affinity and benefits both terms of the comparison. Both use light to construct a cone—an ephemeral (non)substance to make a form.

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Haptic looking, an idea put forward by Alois Riegl in 1901 and developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987, 414 and following) primarily in relation to impressionism, suffers from its popularity, through which it has become supposedly self-evident and hence vague. For a definition, see below. On McCall’s Cone, see the in-depth analysis by Branden W. Joseph (2005a; 2005b).

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McCall moved away from cinema to start working with light; two decades later, Janssens comes to light from sculpture. They meet in the light, so to speak, both attempting, in their own way and time, to unsettle spectatorial routine. In both works, every viewing position drastically transforms what one sees. As per the work’s title, McCall called his work a description, and the light by implication is labeled the pencil that draws the line doing the describing of the emerging cone. The circle on the wall that results from the rotating projector is drawn indeed with a thin line, like a drawing; the resulting “walls” of the cone are sharp and thin, like an enormous rolled-up sheet of paper. In comparison, Janssens’ cone is thick, and if its title is to be believed, it offers a “representation” rather than a “description.” What can that word mean, as a title of a nonrepresentational, nonfigurative work? Since people had to walk through Janssens’ cone work, the transgression became pleasurable once the initial uncertainty had made way for an excitement that mounted as the light became more concrete, almost palpable. On the video recording made after the opening of the installation, viewers can be seen trying to touch the wall of light, lean against it, or catch it in a wine glass. These are all actions predicated on the visual solidity of the light walls. Not that the visitors were fooled; instead, they were addressed and enticed to comply. They accepted the invitation to play the game; they performed, as in a performance on stage. Light was given body by the viewers, whose bodies turned into light. As with Corps noir, these attempts were frustrated, but in the process, perception had fleetingly passed through the sense of touch. The boundary between seeing and touching became a frontier area of wild, unforeseeable sensation. Visitors clearly had trouble walking, tried to find support in the wall of light; some even fell and crawled further. Here, too, the very invitation to occupy space came with the experience of being eaten up, incorporated, by it. This, I argue, is Janssens’ inflection of haptic looking as synesthetic.10 Haptic looking is much discussed today, especially in film studies (much in the wake of Marks 2000). The two cone works are haptic, literalized or embodied in ways that make both works theoretical 10 For a useful summary of the term “haptic” in Deleuze’s work, see Buydens 2005. 89

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2.6. Anthony McCall, Line Describing a Cone, 1973. 16 mm film, black-and-white, silent. 30c projection, overall display dimensions variable. “Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964–1977,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002).

objects. Haptic, from the Greek aptô (“touching”) is characterized by three related primary features. To sum these up briefly: the haptic solicits proximity, inviting viewers to caress the image with the eyes; it is ultimately formless; and in consequence, lines change their function. Janssens and McCall specify all of these features, each in their own way, while both maintain them in full force. Proximity in these works does not lead to the impressionist fusion of foreground and background. Instead, the works hinder that fusion, maintaining the intense experience of the appeal to touch. This appeal is characteristic of both McCall’s and Janssens’ cone works. As opposed to most artworks, these works ask to be touched, and the viewer can do so freely. Touching is in fact an essential part of these works, even though there is nothing to touch—the walls of the cone dissolve into light as soon as one attempts to touch them [fig. 2.6]. 90

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In both cases this touch entails transgressing the boundary of the work; indeed, traversing it. In McCall’s work, this traversal is instant and sharp; one is—or one’s body parts are—either outside or inside. In Janssens’ work, one can actually remain “inside” the wall itself. This difference points to a different conception of spatial boundaries. Where McCall’s primary interest is in “describing” a cone by means of a line, as his title has it, Janssens’ title suggests representation. However, this is not a representation of anything other than the space itself, the cone. The cone is a body, and according to the title, it is round. This makes being inside it ambiguous: one can be inside the cone or inside the body that the cone is: inside its thick, organic, and exceedingly porous skin. This difference can be assessed in relation to the concept of boundary itself. In accordance with Inge E. Boer’s conception of borders as spaces rather than lines (2006), Janssens makes the walls themselves available for negotiation between inside and outside. Rather than a sharp delineation, the cone’s wall is an in-between space. Proximity is modified, then. Rather than an entrapment inside, it offers the possibility to stay somewhere one can ordinarily not be: neither inside nor outside. This makes the wall itself haptic; nothing is more proximate than this sojourn inside the boundary itself. Being, if ever so briefly, inside a boundary triggers a sensation of sense politics. Formlessness, similarly, shifts as well, dependent as it is on the proximity of the viewer who must put herself at risk of participating in form’s dissolution. The result of McCall’s delineation is, instead, an avoidance of formlessness. His cone is partial, evolving slowly (the film takes 30 minutes to describe the cone). The point of this slowness, as of the immaterial “pencil” that does the drawing and of the absence of a screen, is to disorient any facile tendency to assume a retinal, disembodied gaze. As Joseph writes about a similar work by McCall: Long Film thus amplifies the manner in which the very apprehension of the world is inherently tied to the body, forcefully undermining any identification with an abstract or transcendent point of view. (2005a, 49)

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Joseph uses the term “abstract” in a more traditional sense than the one I use to characterize Janssens’ work. The implication of his statement is, however, congenial to my view of both artists’ works: with “tied to the body” the deictic is implied. The clear and sharply delineated cone that viewers can only see if they take the time and dare to touch, suggests that form is bound to the act of seeing; it is not “just there.” For McCall, light itself has, or produces, form. In Janssens’ cone work, this situation is complicated by the thick and fuzzy quality of the cone’s wall, which looks like a blanket or a down comforter. We might even call it a cloud, but one with a distinct shape. Here, formlessness is at stake, not in isolation— as in the brand of surrealism Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss put forward in their path-breaking exhibition and in the book that accompanied it (1997)—but in a live and dynamic relationship with form. To understand this, let us look at what Georges Bataille theorized—but refused to define—as formlessness, to which he assigned a critical thrust. In Bois and Krauss’ rendering of it, Bataille’s interest in formlessness stems neither from “form” nor from “content” but from “the operation that displaces both of these terms” (1997, 15). By “operation,” write the authors, Bataille means “neither a theme, nor a substance, nor a concept” and thus they list three possibilities we had better not attribute to the aspect of the cone’s “look.” Bataille nevertheless launches the word informe with an instructive qualification: Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down (déclasser) in the world . . . (1985, 31; emphasis in text) This seems close to, and a specific version of, Deleuze and Guattari’s micropolitics. Bois and Krauss continue: [It] is not so much a stable motif to which we can refer, a symbolizable theme, a given quality, as it is a term allowing one to operate a declassification, in the double sense of lowering and of taxonomic disorder. Nothing in and of itself, the formless has only an operational existence; it is a performative . . . (1997, 18)

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From these remarks, I store “bringing down” for the next chapter, in order to connect it to Janssens’ “politics of modesty” there. This phrase points to a consistent attempt to bring a certain modesty into our interaction with space. The fact that formlessness is nothing in itself becomes obvious in the very act of approaching the work; but, adds Janssens, neither is form. At a distance—a distance barely manageable, given the scale of the work—there seems to be a form. Upon coming closer, the form disappears into formlessness, but the light starts to offer its cheerful contribution. In terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s view of the haptic on which I drew above, this dialectic between form and formlessness enhances the haptic quality. At the same time, in view of Bois and Krauss’ rendering of Bataille’s formlessness, the performative nature of the latter is also enhanced, precisely in its entanglement with form. Finally, the third aspect of the haptic concerns lines. The walls in Janssens’ cone work are neither lines nor developments from lines (as they are in McCall’s work). Hence, there is no work with line at all; there are no points that can be connected by lines. Yet, like haptic lines, these walls keep moving between points—the projector and the wide ending of the tunnel—as haptic lines do. Instead of forming a circle, their movement precludes access to any point whatsoever. Again, then, this work as a theoretical object modifies and radicalizes the notion of the haptic through a challenge with such art-historical hot topics as form, line, and representation. Both McCall’s and Janssens’ cones can either be seen from a distance or up close, or in form and surface simultaneously. Both artists are careful, however, to see to it that their works fill the space, so that distant viewing becomes impossible. Yet, such Bergsonian space can be neither divided nor measured. In this sense, too, Janssens’ work is different from McCall’s. There, due to the fine, thin line drawing the circle, measurement is not impossible. Janssens’ cone, in contrast, cannot be measured because the mist through which the light pierces keeps the walls unstable and, indeed, formless. Only the subject, precariously situated in ever-changing forms, can intuitively “define” the space, but such an act of defining is already a participation in what it defines; it is a deictic defining. This is the kind of space Bergson calls “extensity” (1991). Emanating from 93

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the subject, it extends outward. In fact, extensity is foreshortening considered in reverse. Coming from the philosopher of duration, it is likely that this concept can be refracted temporally, as I have attempted to do elsewhere.11 Coming from cinema, the art of making forms with light, McCall is interested in using light as a pencil—as a concretization of the word photography—to make form in a way that precludes distancing. One can only see the form when one participates in it, deictically. Janssens, coming from sculpture, the art of space, maintains the spatiality of light more than the forms it can create. Her work, thus, is more materializing than shaping; matter primes form. In both works, light is solid, and its solidity is performative. And while both are invested in a politics of deictic looking, conforming her investment in the political redistribution of sharable space, Janssens’ focus is more on the sharing of space, including the space of the very boundary that supposedly separates inside from outside.

Light Theater There are yet more consequences to the specifically haptic aspect of this work. As a Bergsonian, “extensible” space made concrete and embodied, Représentation’s theatricality remains relevant. In the gallery, we are facing a visually full, seemingly enclosed space in which one can hardly keep one’s distance. Once one “enters” it, everything is possible and time shifts gears. Here, we do not have a film of a certain duration but a mechanism with a three-minute, ongoing cycle; just enough to make us aware of change, but not enough to make us feel there is a beginning and an end. Here, as a consequence, the imagination rules. In the previous chapter, we have seen how Corps noir deploys reflection in the same way Horror Vacui deploys its bright white mist. Between support and light, solid and liquid, two and three dimensions, vision and touch, the reflections recall the difficulty and the fulfilling result of giving up the certainty of distinctions. In the

11 On foreshortening, including its temporal version, see Bal 2010, 151–64. 94

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case of Represéntation, it is not mist or reflection alone but rather light qualified by a gentle mist that offers viewers a stage on which to practice deictic looking. It comes as no surprise, then, that Janssens has endeavored to work with actual stages. In an ongoing collaboration with choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker she offered her light work as a contribution to the performance Keeping Still Part 1 (2008)—not as stage design but, boldly, as a full participant, another dancer and choreographer of sorts. I can only convey what I mean by providing a description of the first few minutes of the performance.12 Upon entering the theater, a fine mist allows enough light to find one’s seat, but otherwise the view of the theater is infinite. A child’s voice utters incomprehensible sentences; footsteps signify dark figures approaching. A very long period of sitting in the dark is terminated only when the singing begins. When the light comes on, there is enough of it to see silhouettes. In what looks like a cone of light, a hand becomes visible quite clearly, while the rest of the body disappears in mist. Then, the figure stands in the light, and a black cone is juxtaposed to a bright one. The figure leans against the wall of light. This is performing as I tried to situate it in the introduction, between performance and performativity. One has to be a pretty good dancer to bend one’s body to a curved wall that is not actually a wall. That is the performance. This was done so precisely that in spite of knowing it was “just” mist, the viewer had to believe the fiction. That is the performativity. Together, dancer and viewer perform that fiction, so that the theatricality can continue. The dancer begins to interact with the light, almost fighting it, as if she finds it confining. When the light also starts to dance, the figure disappears in it. The figure is more visible on the dark part of the stage than in the light section. Another figure approaches. Each of the two figures seem locked up in a cone, or ray. The light separates them. For a brief moment they come together, then each flees back into their own ray. They join again, embrace, but when they come into the light 12 Janssens’ collaboration with De Keersmaeker is ongoing. At the time of writing, for example, she was preparing her participation in the spectacle Cesena, for the Avignon Festival at the Popes’ Palace, July 2011. Here, I give an account of the 2008 performance. 95

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they are invisible again. Is this a “representation”—for lack of a better word—of sex or of violence? The ambiguity remains embodied as a sculpture, giving performance its performativity. Theatricality is a term that refers to one of many contested concepts. For some authors, it is “wrong art”: art that rhetorically addresses the viewer (Fried 1980). For others, it is artificial, as opposed to “sincere.” As Dutch theater scholar Maaike Bleeker has cogently argued, this negative view of theatricality is disastrous in itself. Not only does it do an injustice to an art form that has traditionally been rather “democratic” (2008b), it also sheds a falsely positive light on its opposite, allegedly sincere public acts and speeches such as those of politicians.13 Instead, Bleeker comments in an analysis of political theater, the performance she is analyzing . . . deploys theater and theatricality as a “critical vision machine” to point to the relationship between political actors, their performances, and their point of view. Theater here is not a matter of spectacle, exaggeration, or make-believe, but a matter of becoming aware of how we are implicated . . . in the performance of others addressing us. (2008b, 259)14 Bleeker formulates quite precisely how performance and performativity meet in the viewer’s participation, without which the performance would not be able to achieve performativity. She calls this kind of theatricality a “critical vision machine.” This concept seems to characterize quite precisely Janssens’ work with light in interaction with anthropomorphic figures in sculptures otherwise mute. In Keeping Still Part 1 no vision is self-evident; the lazy eye is at no time allowed to fall

13 Bleeker’s view is briefly exposed in an article from 2008(b); it is further elaborated in her book (2008a). Especially political theater can be seen in continuity with the late-medieval “theater of fools” where political resistance was enacted by actors who pretended to be “mad” in order to escape censorship (Koopmans 1997). 14 This quotation comes from a brilliant analysis of the relationship between politics and theatricality through a critique of both George W. Bush’s political behavior and Michael Moore’s critique of it in Fahrenheit 9/11. 96

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back into routine. This is why her work with light in this performance is not stage design but participation; it is itself a form of dance. Bleeker’s political conception of theatricality can be seen in the light of Adorno’s manifold conception of representation or, as he and Horkheimer call it, “mimesis” (2002, 7). A brief reflection on this concept will help us to understand how a work entitled Représentation cannot be representational. Adorno and Horkheimer do not dismiss the concept, knowing full well that the iconophobia that is its counterpoint only represses representation’s role in culture. Janssens, who titled her cone work a “representation,” is equally aware of the need to come to terms with representation rather than repress it. Andreas Huyssen’s analysis of Adornian mimesis makes the multiple meanings of the concept into a valuable analytical tool (2003, esp. 123). In Huyssen’s reading, mimesis becomes a palimpsest of different, overlapping meanings, ranging from its power of reification (“stylizing”) and its anthropomorphic appeal to its unquestioned concept of “human nature” (123). In De Keersmaeker and Janssens’ performance this view appears condensed in the moment when the two figures’ movements hover ambiguously between sex and violence—an ambiguity created by the light’s work. This moment of the performance adds to Adorno’s concept the importance of space. It is after all not only in, but also in relation to, space that this ambiguity literally takes place. As a strategy of survival, mimetic behavior in animals has been foregrounded by French scientist Roger Caillois in the 1930s. This insight was subsequently taken up by surrealist photographers, and Lacan made much of it in his psychoanalytic theory of the mirror stage (1977). In his own analysis, Huyssen makes most of the ambivalent aspects of identification and projection in mimesis. Like Huyssen’s example, graphic novelist Art Spiegelman, and my earlier example, sculptor Doris Salcedo, Janssens carefully negotiates mimesis “both in its insidious and in its salutary aspects that, as Adorno would have it, can never be entirely separated from each other” (Huyssen 2003, 125). It is in the theatrical exposition of these ambivalences that, I contend, Janssens’ sculptural interventions, or “live sculptures,” manage to keep “identity and nonidentity together as nonidentical similitude and in unresolvable tension with each other” (Huyssen 2003, 127). 97

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This is the point of the mist-blurred semi-visibility of the figures. Moreover, as the audience’s responses to Représentation d’un corps rond make clear, these works also expose—in the sense of exposure, making vulnerable—the viewer-participant to the dilemmas of representation, and turn the taking of a nuanced yet forceful position toward them into an attractive proposition. This is how art bestows agency. Through her collaborative work with De Keersmaeker, Janssens foregrounds the way sculpture is a live art. It is this quality of the spatial work performed by the installations that the concept-metaphor of theatricality brings to the fore. But the viewers perform in relation to the stage, not on it. Visitors act; they perform the roles scripted for them, but by whom? Not by the work, which is not at all prescriptive, or by the visitors’ imagination alone. It is the invitation the work extends to the imagination, the stimulus built into the thick but traversable walls of light that enables a scripting of the performances in which visitors engage. Scripting, however, still sounds too much like the score for a performance. This would be more directive than the political force of the work, its performativity, warrants. It pushes to perform but does not prescribe how; performance yields to performativity. This is how the work is normative without being authoritarian. Paradoxically, it imposes a Bergsonian freedom, which is . . . the freedom expressed in the creative transformation of what is, but at the same time a concept of freedom that is incompatible with liberal concepts predicated upon the continued existence of the stable subject of freedom. (Patton 2010, 144)15 Unlike McCall’s, this work is not primarily cinematic. Although it moves and entices visitors to move and thus create images that move, as I have argued above, Représentation d’un corps rond remains primarily sculptural. This assessment is supported by the primary difference between McCall’s and Janssens’ cones: the thinness and thickness, respectively, of the walls; the visual hard line versus the fluffy wall that has sculptural volume. Both works engage the distinction between inside and outside space, but on very different terms. 15 See also Patton 2000, 83–87. 98

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Of the arts, architecture most keenly works with that distinction and its impossibility. A building is a delimitation between its human inhabitants and the world, including nature, outside of it. But it is also an integral part of the environment from which it cordons its interior space off. If, then, the interior space is visually extended outward by means of windows, the building is making manifest what it has been all along: like the frame around a painting, it is no more than a parergon, an ambiguous frame that is part of what it delimits. This, then, is an additional aspect of the corrugated golden Pavillon doré.16 Janssens’ work has engaged architecture from the beginning. Her early works, in the 1980s, were constructions that extended architectural space, in a kind of graftings. “Super Space,” the title of her 1999 Utrecht exhibition, indicated the possibility to cancel the delimiting power of architectural walls through opening up space beyond itself. Architecture thus became fluid; its walls as uncertain as the mist-andlight walls. With the paradoxes of limits and control, we can begin to see how installations such as these are also reflections on space in its relationship to the body—its movement, or its process in time. I argue below that this specific demonstration of collaboration and tension, contrast and resonance, between inside and outside and between space and body, derives its power primarily from its exceptionally full deployment of the analogy between space and parergon. This is the sense in which Janssens’ art is baroque. More than that, as a true theoretical object, the installation rethinks sculpture as a (baroque) cultural practice, so that a new space emerges from its production of spatial experience. After observing its relationship with McCall’s work as an example of light art from the twentieth century, then, let us move back in a longer duration of this retrospectivity.

Wavering Baroque, as I have extensively discussed primarily apropos of Caravaggio, is a mode of embodied thinking that considers several 16 Through the term parergon I recall Derrida’s important text The Truth in Painting (1987). 99

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related issues. As discussed in the previous chapter, it thinks how being “enfolded” (in the sense of Deleuze 1993) in what one is considering modifies ontology. Baroque also allows us to understand how deictic seeing affects the result of that seeing, and how embodying is a way of fully grasping. All three of these tenets require the participation of the viewer in the shift of and challenge to the subject–object relationship. As in particular Corps noir has demonstrated “in action,” so to speak, it is also a way of considering the relative importance of unpresuming elements through a wavering of scale. The political result of these aspects is that it enables us to articulate what it means to treat engagement as a way of knowing. Finally, the self–other dialectic of the mirror that at first threatens to conflate the subject and the object of knowing instead suggests that sharing space is preferable to competing for space. Together, these features constitute a vision of art—and by extension, of social existence—that is based on wavering.17 As this description applies term by term to Janssens’ work, I consider her oeuvre to be a prime contemporary example of embodied baroque thought. Nevertheless, her work also undermines the traditional expressions of these terms, primarily by questioning representation. Simultaneously, however, the work incorporates it by way of elusive fragments of representation that emerge because of the viewer. The round body of Représentation, for example, only exists— or rather, emerges—through the deictic looking of the viewer, made literal and extreme by immersion. One of the means Janssens deploys in her revised baroque is the incommensurability in scale between the work and the world, nevertheless firmly anchored in synecdoche. The thickness of the walls of the cone work is one instance of this. Scale all but disappears; the wall’s thickness cannot be measured. This difficulty to assess scale pertains to what light is. Of all aspects of nature, volatile light is the hardest to master. It is also the lightest in another sense that is relevant for this discussion: it is nature’s least threatening element. This makes it so suitable for an art that is “cheerful.” This does not mean that it fails to broach more weighty subjects; we have seen with Tropical Paradise and Pavillon doré that such subjects can be brought in while the tone of the work remains cheerful. But Janssens approaches even those subjects outside 17 For a more extensive discussion, see Bal 1999, esp. 231–62. 100

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of a punitive moralism, if only because such a tone would be predicated upon a stable subject and an equally stable subject–object distinction. Yet, light is indispensable, especially in relation to visual art. In art exhibitions, light is a powerful tool to articulate and inflect visibility (Katzberg 2009). To surrender an entire installation to the vagaries of light when the bodies of visitors make the drawings and paintings on the desubstantialized screen, then, is a bold and, at first sight, humble decision. It suggests the surrendering of the tool, the abandoning of the power to dominate that artificial light provides. It is a decision to unfix what artificial light can fix, and instead to accept difference in light, in visibility, and even (as I suggested above) in form. But while it has been alleged to be sublime, and can be seen to allude to the sublime in its light mode, such a decision is not necessarily humble. The artist cannot be humble in the name of the viewers; that would be so directive it would border on propaganda. The visitors’ freedom must remain untouched, for only then can “becoming” continue, and will change be possible. The abandoning of the power over form and the surrendering of the tool-value of light suggest, instead, that the art is strong enough to survive—with the help of the visitors who constantly produce forms— the changes light may inflict upon it. Indeed, it suggests that the art can live, and only live, by those changes it itself endorses. At best, the accidents of the viewers’ bodies in their encounter with the light may contribute to the art’s enigmatic volatility. The serendipity that may emerge from light’s volatility when those bold viewers touch it is a gift to the artworks, just as the availability of the artworks for participation is a gift to the viewers.18 Together, the works discussed so far in this chapter—the objectbased ones, such as Casa Frollo, Grand disque, Tropical Paradise, Pavillon doré, and also the “nonobjective” Représentation d’un corps rond— nonrepresentational as they are, emanate a materiality that speaks to the body and all its senses. The spaces delimited by a wall of light, an ambiguous form, or the rays that mock the stability of the eye, suggest possible worlds in which seeing relies on a plurality of sense organs. Baroque philosopher Leibniz would speak of “compossible worlds”: 18 Serendipity is a key concept in Janssens’ work. See Chapter 4. 101

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parallel worlds whose existence is thinkable. These artworks give access to possible worlds, telling us that they are commensurable with the one we take for granted. Experiencing virtual reality and the dizziness that results from it demonstrates to us, in the twenty-first century, that Leibniz had a point—one Caravaggio had already made with his Medusa, in which he exposed his own face so that the work drowned in ambiguity. Ambiguity, even if it is as fundamental and irresolvable as in Janssens’ Corps noir, is not arbitrary. Instead, and importantly, we see very clearly what we cannot see. We see the two possible shapes alternately, but not simultaneously. What we do see simultaneously are unambiguous signs of convexity, like the line separating light from shadow, which is slightly curved so as to signify it; and equally unambiguous signs of concavity, such as the rim delimitating the illuminated space that designs the room in which the figures stand. We also see signs of ways of seeing that have lost their monopoly, that are even no longer valid, like the classical set-up of linear perspective that draws our eye to the vanishing point in the reflected, miniaturized window, pointed out by the indexical path of light leading up to it. But whereas these signs can be decoded and their respective meanings can be understood abstractly, the perceptual quality of the sculptures does not allow for reduction of the whole into the sum of its parts. The process must be continued; it, too, is part of the becoming. Expanding on Peirce’s definition of the sign, I see this work as placing interpretation at every stage, calling forth interpretants to make sense of signs by producing more signs. In this sense, Casa Frollo, Corps noir, Grand disque, and Représentation d’un corps rond are essentially baroque works, including the meta-representational element in that quotational style. As far as the common conception of baroque art visually suggests curls, knots, and waves, the waves in Tropical Paradise and Pavillon doré as well as the ones visible in the photograph of Grand disque can be considered specific interdiscursive quotations in this context. The other cliché term associated with baroque art, chiaroscuro—the quintessential trademark of baroque painting—does not begin to do justice to this element. Instead of taking up such commonplace associations, Janssens’ work incorporates history in the retrospective significance of the 102

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trace, as it does absorb Caravaggio’s magic with light in the cultural memory it mobilizes. The materialization of light at stake here does something fundamental to our experience of being in space, to our experience of touching and seeing, and to the objecthood of objects. Thus, Caravaggio does not influence Janssens but Janssens influences Caravaggio, giving effects and meanings to his work with light that it could not have had before. In his chapter “Perception in the Folds,” Deleuze, who opened up Leibnizian thought for today, envisages an image of perception that resonates remarkably with the bodily dizziness produced by Janssens’ work. According to Deleuze, baroque perception is not reducible to the sum of its parts because of two discrepancies: “the totality can be as imperceptible as the parts . . . And a buzzing or a deadening effect are wholes without necessarily being perceptions” (1993, 87). Both these discrepancies resonate with Janssens’ works. Especially the second one Deleuze addresses can be made more comprehensible by confronting it with deictic looking. The buzzing would then refer to the ongoing movement—deictic looking as shimmering. Deleuze accounts for Leibniz’s baroque philosophy of perception in the following—and it is only now, through Janssens’ work with light, that the passage receives full meaning: Every perception is hallucinatory because perception has no object. Conscious perception has no object and does not even refer to a physical mechanism of excitation that could explain it from without: it refers only to the exclusively physical mechanism of differential relations among unconscious perceptions that are comprising it within the monad. (1993, 93; emphasis in text) The perceptual miasma that Janssens’ works produce in their viewers, who are unable to either ignore or solve the problem of perception these works pose, enforces awareness of the issues that Medusa imposed through figurative painting. Perception has no object—what we see is strictly nothing, a mirage. Medusa does not see snakes, Perseus sees no monsters; both encounter nothing more than figments of their own imagination. Now that we have Janssens’ work with light as our companion, we can experiment—not so much with the nonfigurative as with 103

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the ungraspable yet utterly material that exists beyond the burden of objects. Giving up control, not in a penalizing way to cure us of greed, for example, but as a liberation from the constraints of control we exercise as well as undergo: this is the experience Janssens entices us to endorse. This is also the motivating force that pushes the artist to explore scientific, technological theories and facts. The world of her art becomes a laboratory, a space where everyone can be a scientist. This democratic impulse is also the reason why the technology always remains visible. Janssens does not paint; her work is reduced to the barest essence of seeing below the threshold of representation, to the lightheadedness induced by the paradoxical visual invisibility of space. That dizziness has to remain, in spite of the telling signs that constitute the partial entrances into the interpretation of the sculptures without ever leading to the meaning of the whole. It is precisely this dizziness that makes us aware proprioceptively (from the inside out) as well as exteroceptively (from the outside in, through the reflection we see of ourselves) that space is not abstract in the negative sense of emptiness. Hence, it makes us feel, rather than see, that space cannot be incorporated inconsequentially. Instead, Janssens’ work suggests that the bodily presence of even the most aggressively incorporating subject will always be preempted by the resistance of the deictic exchange between “I” and “you”; it will be prevented from ever being stabilized into the predominance of either. Thus, the dizziness is a bodily reminder of deixis as a process, and as such these sculptures are self-critical in Marin’s sense. Peirce’s notion of the “Interpretant” in his account of semiosis as process, not a stable state, is an indispensable element of this reminder: The Sign creates something in the Mind of the Interpreter, which something, in that it has been so created by the Sign, has been, in a mediate and relative way, also created by the Object of the Sign, although the Object is essentially other than the Sign. And this creature of the sign is called the Interpretant. (1998, 493) As Marin formulates it: “the space of representability—the viewer’s space—is the double positioning and rift between correlative subjectivities and personalities” (1995, 121–22). When considered in terms 104

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of folds, a rift goes hand in hand with correlation—that is to say, the spatial rift that vision comprises entails visual correlation that compels the touch. This insight leads to a need to revise the content of allegedly abstract space that can no longer be envisioned outside of the bodily coordinates of the deictic, unstable I/you, which constitutes the essence not only of language but also of semiosis. The journey with Caravaggio through a few of Janssens’ sculptures suggests a sense of space that offers an alternative to ruthless incorporation; a concrete space based on unstable pushing and pulling, on what I have called recoiling. Thinking through the epistemological consequences of this semiotic practice of space adds yet another dimension to Janssens’ consistent focus on the ambiguities of three-dimensional space. The “recoiling” relation to space undermines the image of the humanist individual who rules over objective knowledge—knowledge that effectively has an object. This negativity is visually and spatially embodied in the rift between visibility and stability in Janssens’ work. In this context, Yeats’ famous line of epistemic anxiety—“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”—can be read in Janssens’ Corps noir as synonymous with “How can we tell the reflection from the figures?” and in her Représentation d’un corps rond as “How can we tell the wall from our bodies?” In all three cases, the answer is that we cannot. The “Medusa effect” spells out the ambiguities, and even contradictions, of concrete space. We are, each of us, in the picture. But perhaps we should be worried, for deixis is a game of mutuality; the shadows we cast on space may get back at us. In either case, though, the relation between subjectivity and space can neither be ignored and divorced from the body, nor reduced to incorporation. The spooky, uncanny seriality of reversal in Janssens’ works can be seen as an allegory of a relation to space that both incorporates the subject and checks the subject’s tendency to incorporation. Where space meets body, time is involved. This aspect of semiosis, although strictly speaking accounted for in the description of semiosis as process, is hardly ever addressed in actual semiotic analyses. Both the wavering at the edges explored in Janssens’ work and the communicating through signs offered here for understanding are temporal processes. Whether negotiating subjectivity and space, 105

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exteriority and interiority, convexity and concavity, or traveling from sign to sign producing interpretants: the microcosmos of baroque matter engages an interactivity that can never be construed on the basis of stillness. In this respect, baroque materialism may be at its most radical when it does what Medusa does (and Corps noir as well, thereby showing us how it works), which is to hold the viewer in a temporality by way of its spatial stickiness. It may, therefore, seem paradoxical that it is the anti-narrative stance of Baroque and contemporary baroque art that enforces such an inescapable sense of time. All these aspects of Janssens’ work demonstrate a baroque for today that undermines certainties and proposes wavering as a mode of being and (inter)acting instead.

Cutting Mist Let me return one last time to Venice in 1999, to give my reader a sense of how the mist installation related to the exhibition as a whole. As I mentioned before, in Lisbon I heard the hissing sound of what was most likely the building’s air-conditioning system. It spooked me nevertheless; all senses are on the alert if one cannot see straight. In Venice, something else happened. Throughout the experience of time’s thickening—it became as thick as mist—the clearest of sounds intervened every so often. While vision is impeded, hearing is enhanced. You heard the voice of a young child who was trying to sing a children’s song. He or she did not get very far. Laughter interrupted the effort. The voice, the nonsensical words, and the laughter conveyed a mounting sense of excitement. The voice of the child accelerated, as if it hoped that speed would prevent the forgetting of the difficult words over which he or she seemed to stumble.19 This is the soundtrack’s way of making the deceleration more palpable. The voice and the mist: which is soft, which is hard? The child’s voice has a crystal quality; it sounds like the tinkling of glass. In this sense it is reminiscent of the sheets of glass piled up on the

19 Considering the charge stuttering will acquire in Chapter 5, this voice becomes even richer in connotations. 106

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window sill of Casa Frollo. But glass is hard, while this voice is not. Categories break down again; oppositions cease to work. The varying tempi in which the voice intervenes in the mist make the variability of time so experiential that it is almost hard to bear. It is so disorienting that every fiber in your body participates in the event. The voice cuts through the mist, as it also did at the beginning of Keeping Still Part 1. This, it turns out, is the core event; it is what makes time sensuous. What makes the sound most exciting, in the literal sense of the word, is the way it interrupts the silence. For it is so clear, of such perfect sonic quality, that it seems to cut through the mist like a warm knife through butter. This cutting is helpful, not violent. In all the sweetness of the child’s voice, the sound tears the mist, breaks its cushion-like, cottony wholeness. Sound intervenes in the silence, enhancing the latter and deploying its own purity. The sense of hearing is isolated from all other senses. This isolation, in turn, foregrounds the sense of sight. Sight is, paradoxically, sharpened by the mist that hampers it. Utter clarity— of sound—and utter thickness—of sight—join, in a literal, physical, excitement of the two senses. The effect of this mutually exclusive yet competitive coexistence of voice and mist contributes to the overall sense of delicate suspension that reigns in the pavilion. The mist is not only cut by the child’s voice, but also enriched with other elements. As Janssens’ conception of space is about sharing, it comes as no surprise that the space of the Belgian pavilion was also shared. To the right of the entrance, in one of the open side spaces of the building, artist Michel François, Janssens’ partner in this project, had hung a great number of spent dandelions, their parachute-shaped seeds suspended in impossibly perfect spheres (Michel François, Dandelions, in Horror Vacui). Like the child’s voice, François’ dandelions suspended the contrast between soft, blurred mist and heightened perception. Mist-like themselves, the spheres, consisting of feathery seeds, penetrated through the mist to gain sharp visibility, in another paradox that tells us there is always another nuance around the corner. Every stalk, or hair, of each seed on each sphere could be singled out, while the perfect shape of the spheres remained intact. Their delicacy, the temporal suspension of their wholeness, strikes us with its impossibility only in retrospect. Spent dandelions do not stay intact in the real world. But there, in that fictionalized space, everything became possible. 107

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The way sound cuts through sight can be construed as a form of interdiscursivity. The meeting of the visual and the auditory remains a meeting of two discourses that eventually will go separate ways. But the very fact of their meeting alerts us to other dimensions of interdiscursivity. For example, the wall of the space opposite the dandelions was covered entirely by a photograph of a child. Her shoelaces undone, the sleeves of her coat too long, this child of the streets stands against a background of undulating tin fences—quite like the walls of Pavillon doré, but this time “real.” The red of her coat rhymes with the alternating red color of these fences that cordon off some unruly space of meager housing or building ground. The child is screaming with joy, screaming at the top of her lungs. The perspective dal sotto in sù gives the represented child an unheard-of power: over the world, over the image. She seems congenial to the voice of the soundtrack. Like François’ other black-and-white photographs exhibited in side spaces further along in the pavilion, this work refers to an aspect that the mist installation has silently evoked: the photographic. To grasp how photography participates I back up in time and try to reenter the mist. The experience is not the same. Nostalgic for my first entrance, already craving to reverse the irreversible time this work engages, I see a photograph emerge from its chemical bath. The slow emergence of the lines and walls that produce this space evokes the developing of a photograph—the live emergence of a trace. The miracle of the lines and shapes appearing out of blank nothingness is enacted here in three-dimensional space. The two kinds of indices— trace and deixis—join forces. This transference of a two-dimensional process onto a threedimensional space is not a mere metaphor. The mist does not just “make you think” of the photograph emerging out of the emulsion. Deixis goes beyond association to become allusion. The threedimensionality brings the viewer inside the chemical bath, as it were. It is not a miracle happening before your eyes. It is a miracle in which you play an indispensable part. The bath of liquid surrounds you. You could as well be inside an aquarium. You are, in fact— inside an aquarium of light. I have not chosen this metaphor at random: Janssens’ oeuvre features many aquaria. Here, the sense of floating in liquid is a reversed embodiment of sculpture. Instead of 108

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walking around the sculpture, a possibility Krauss saw as the novelty of modern sculpture (1977), the visitor is immersed in it. So what, or who, is the sculpture? Through this radical shift from photography to sculpture, Janssens interrogates the conditions of perception on yet another level. Earlier, I mentioned the bizarre experience of being inside the cloud that thereby lost its shape. Now, this inside position further challenges the traditional notion of point of view. When looking at a photograph, moving toward visibility in its developing bath, we take a stable position. It, not the viewer, changes. But in three-dimensional space, no fixed position is assumed. Janssens’ collaboration with François in the Venice installation has yielded a perfect integration, making the whole more than the sum of its parts. This integration was perhaps most clearly visible in Planning (1999), a work by François installed at the back of the pavilion. On the back wall, a large photographic panel represented the figures of a digital calendar, like an information board at an airport. The atmosphere indeed evoked an airport. In such a location, time functions as a dictator—one is forced to conform to standardized time, and forget or repress the personal experience of duration. On a table in front of the panel, white legal-sized paper was stacked. These stacks (of unequal height) reinforced the sense of contemporary business life, while also making the installation three-dimensional. But looking up again at the photograph, one noticed that the calendar was already threedimensional. The digits indicating dates looked like the result of a double exposure. The vague doubled digits receded in directions that imposed the middle of the photograph as the center of a perspectival picture. This point of view collapsed into a vanishing point; the calendar eating up its viewer-user. The photograph seemed to warn against fixed positions. Thus, by means of the contrasts between media and between discursive “arguments,” opposition and fixity were both evoked and dismissed [fig. 2.7]. As Krauss has frequently and influentially argued, modern sculpture begins where the fixed positions from which we weave fictions of space are abandoned in favor of new, hitherto unknown positions becoming available (1977). But as long as sculptors make objects, things that can be fixed in a place, the viewer’s potential power over the points of view on offer remains secure. The ephemeral 109

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2.7. Michel François, Planning, 1999. Neon lights, Plexiglas, screen-print, aluminum, paper, and steel. Belgian pavilion, 48th Venice Biennale.

sculptures that Janssens makes instead refuse to yield to the pressure of objectification. As a result, they do not deploy time as medium; they are time, ontologically. No experience can be reiterated; no point of view can be selected for privilege. If there is an object, however tenuous, in this exhibition, it is duration. The visitor is immersed in it as she would be in an aquarium. Janssens’ serial work Aquarium (1992–2006) makes this point abundantly clear. In a glass cube filled with a mixture of water and alcohol, a perfect sphere (made of silicone oil) floats. It never stays in exactly the same place, for it floats freely. It does not change into 110

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formlessness; it never loses its perfect shape. The tiny movements suggest it is the viewer’s eyes that make it move, as if it responds to the viewer’s body heat or movements through the space. She holds her breath, hoping or fearing that the effect of her gaze will become visible. The invisible but inevitable movement of the sphere is as close as we can get to the visibility of the gaze itself. Unlike in the Venice mist installation, you stand outside the aquarium here. But that is only one way of being with this work. Through the clear liquid, the clear glass, the clear silicone oil, the world around you is visible, in the same way it would be in a photograph. In the sphere you can also catch a glimpse of a reversed, upside-down reflection of your own mirror image surrounded by the space in which you are standing. Once this happens, the dizziness commences. Where you are and who you are have lost their innocence. You are (in) the sculpture—or in the photograph [fig. 2.8a–c]. Cinema is another important interdiscourse for Janssens’ work. Perhaps surprisingly, it is not an antecedent, but rather the future of these works. Her sculptures are not “cinematic” in the most obvious sense: one does not see other viewers as moving images. Rather, it is the uncomfortable and exhilarating experience of being inside the story as well as on the set that makes the cinematic effect so powerful. Both actor and character, the viewer performs on the double level of creating the fiction and being part of it. Slow motion is, of course, the tempo of this film. As such, it is congenial to cinematic and video works of the 1970s and 80s, such as Marguerite Duras’ India Song (1975), Lili Dujourie’s Herinneringen met de ontmoeting (Memories with Encounter, 1977), and experiments with real time unveiled as slow by definition, such as Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Douglas Gordon’s installation 24 Hour Psycho, powerfully evoked in Don DeLillo’s novel Point Omega (2010), has become the epitome of the exceeding, indeed exasperating slowness that turns cinema into abstraction.20 But again, the appeal to identification that characterizes cinema, the difficulty of staying abreast of immersion within the fictional world while one’s own situation in a dark room has so little to hold

20 For more on the element of real time as a medium in 1970s cinema and video, see Bal 1998. 111

2.8a–b. Ann Veronica Janssens, Aquarium, 1992–2006. Aquarium, silicone oil, water, and alcohol, 50 x 50 x 50 cm. “Avril,” Air de Paris (2006).

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2.8c. Ann Veronica Janssens, Aquarium, 1992. Aquarium, silicone oil, water, and alcohol, 50 x 50 x 50 cm. Galerie One Five, Antwerp.

on to, is neither imitated—represented—nor simply evoked. The sculptural medium cancels the threshold that allows cinema viewers to stay in their seats. Here, we are part of what we see. We are the experimental subjects of seeing in two positions at once: subject of, and subject to. The suspended state of the subject of viewing is underscored by another work by François, which enters in an interdiscursive play, almost an ensemble in the musical sense, with the mist. Retenue d’eau (1998) is a sculpture consisting of a radiant bunch of nylon threads hanging from a ring in the ceiling, ending in plastic bags filled with water. It is like a rich Venetian chandelier, but hanging so low that viewers can and do reach for it, gently pushing it to make it move. The clarity of the water contrasts with the soft mist, but as with the child’s voice and the photographic calendar, the contrast is suspended. Here, the softness is brought in by the sense of touch. One desires to squeeze the bags, feel the water, and swing the sculpture as a whole. 113

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In light of her later work, Représentation d’un corps rond is perhaps the most programmatic work in Janssens’ early œuvre. Movement and light, the materialization of duration, and the difficulty of motoric efficacy when perception is disturbed: all these elements of the artist’s ongoing search are present in this groundbreaking installation. Light constitutes the body. What is out of light is out of sight and out of life. The light’s substance returns in the Venice installation, which might be seen as a detail of Représentation d’un corps rond, on which the probing director of this lifelong laboratory zoomed in to see what happens if . . .21

Leaving After the long period of immersion in this installation—a duration unusual for visual art that references cinema—the moment comes to leave it. Outside, the sun is shining. Dropping from a nearby tree, the finest rain refreshes the visitor’s body; washing off the fictional space, the intensity of the experience, and guarding it against the inevitable Venetian heat. François has made the finest of showers come out of the tree, which is also the only source of shadow. Restful benches are beckoning. Janssens has coated these with liquid crystal responsive to body heat, so that the body sitting on them leaves a temporary trace. So does the sun, when it manages to shine on the coated parts of the benches. Bright, beautiful colors retrospectively underline the whiteness of the mist. The integration of the work of the two artists has accomplished an integration between what is inside and outside this pavilion [fig. 2.9a–b]. Here I return to an earlier juncture: in the prologue I reached a point where I could choose between dreaming up a criminal character in order to be able to set a murder in this mist; or returning to all my theoretical knowledge, from Bergson to Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze, to understand the philosophy of perception explored and tested in this mist. I may have returned to the bifurcation, but no recurrence can be the same. Now, instead of fantasizing or

21 For the implications of the phrase “what if,” see the second chapter of Bal 2013. 114

2.9a–b. Ann Veronica Janssens, Liquid Crystal, 1999. Benches with thermochromatic coating. Belgian pavilion, 48th Venice Biennale.

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philosophizing, I desire to escape the fixity of position that made me write this text in order to understand what kind of art this is. Janssens’ work, ultimately, does not ask to be categorized. It is neither conceptual nor abstract; neither figurative nor nonfigurative; and while it depends entirely on the viewer’s performance of it, as if the work were “just” a score, it is not performance art. So, categorize it I will not do. It is because of that desire to unfix that I maintain one word loaded with history and troubled with prejudice: sculpture. This work is, indeed, sculptural. Not only is the Venice viewer “in the picture” (as in Corps noir and Aquarium); she is also “in the clouds,” inside the difficulty of seeing. In short: she is in the sculpture. Only in this way, it seems, can the radical consequence be experienced of that simple, fundamental, but often neglected fact Janssens’ light works foreground: that space never privileges a single point of view.

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3

Inside the Polis

Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us. Gilles Deleuze1

Once, when I asked her about her work, Janssens simply invoked two concepts: “abstract” and “political.” These words accompany her and cannot be eliminated from what her work is. At the same time, the artist can be an interlocutor for the critic-theorist, but cannot dictate how to read her art; the art itself stands between her and the viewer. Indeed, according to any vulgarized interpretation of these words, they both seem utterly beside the point; hence, it is not surprising that they are largely absent in writings about her work. For anyone who has been confronted with, submersed in, or welcomed by her installations, her work seems extremely concrete and bodily rather than abstract. And for those who expect political art to address, talk about, indict, and critique the world and the political power games that make it so hard to live in, her work could not be more removed from such loudness. In this chapter, I elaborate what I have been suggesting all along: how Janssens’ art is indeed both radically abstract and radically political. This, however, can only make sense if we revise common conceptions of both. Furthermore, I contend that this is not merely a neutral, juxtaposing conjunction. Instead, it is a causal and mutual conjunction and entanglement, at the heart of which lies the body— the “body politic,” that is. The West has a long tradition of art that obliquely, silently, as if (self-)censured, invokes the body involved in, or subjected to, politics.

1

Deleuze 1987, 500. 117

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This obliqueness is commonly the result of allegory. For example, Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” represents allegorically what politics do to the body. The problem of allegory as a mode of writing is that it encourages a quick reading, coming to the point of the ultimate meaning. Yet, we continue to read Kafka, and primarily for other aspects of his writings. The tone of this novella is bleak, like most of Kafka’s work. The Castle is never reached, and The Trial ends with a death penalty for a crime never understood, inflicted by people with unclear functions: we all know how the author prefigured the lethal bureaucracy of Nazism as well as the labyrinthine mazes of a contemporary world that makes its subjects feel they are just that: subjects, subjected to powers concealed and illegible. He still succeeds in bringing the affective impact of such social torture home to us, by means other than allegorical statements. He also generated a great flurry of artworks that, each in their own way, and in their own time, had a great impact on political art.2 To invoke Kafka in relation to Janssens can only be paradoxical. Bleak versus bright, heavy versus light, figurative versus nonfigurative: the contrast could not be starker. Yet, Janssens can also be seen to continue Kafka’s project. While the Czech literary artist has made the world aware of the mechanisms of its fatally oppressive organization, the Belgian spatial artist takes this insight further. She offers an experience of political art “beyond” intellectual awareness. With “beyond” I wish to suggest three ways in which Janssens goes further than Kafka in making art political. First, theoretically, she overcomes the presupposition of exemplarity that would turn her work into an allegory. Allegory is a discourse (gorein) on otherness (allos) that extends otherness to make it inclusive. Allegory ends in generalization. Janssens’ work instead addresses the world and the way it takes part in it, and by

2

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On the drawbacks of allegory as a mode of (hasty) reading for meaning, see Derek Attridge’s discussion of J.M. Coetzee’s novels (2004). Stan Douglas reworked Orson Welles’ The Trial (1962) and Samuel Beckett’s only cinematic work, Film (1965), into a profound work of political art for our time called Vidéo (2007). This work subjects the allegorical impulse to a complicating slow reading. The result is an amazingly effective political intervention.

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necessity it does so singularly. Deictic looking can only be singular; its potentially generalizing effect can only take place through the performativity that impacts on each viewer in singularity. Hence, it makes each of them perform the “score” that the work (also) is in a different way. Second, as it is sculptural work, it operates from inside “the world.” In other words, her work functions inside the polis where the political occurs. The spatial art of sculpture makes that participation literal: it takes place. Heeding Deleuze’s caution against a fixed position of resistance, however, she sets the subject in motion so that the political counteragency can begin to move or remain in motion. This is fitting for a time, or timespace, where movement is the standard way of life; it is the defining feature of today’s “migratory culture.” Of the two, Kafka and Janssens, I contend, the magician of light is therefore the more effectively political artist for our time. This is also due to a third aspect that moves “beyond” allegory. The starkest difference between the two artists is their relationship to figuration. Kafka uses allegory, an eminently figurative form that overdetermines figuration; Janssens uses what is commonly understood as abstraction. It remains to be seen whether that term as we know it is right to account for this work in relation to its political thrust, or under what conditions the concept itself can be usefully deployed. For now, let me just suggest the paradox that figuration, because it offers specific recognizable forms ready to be narrativized, encourages the leap to generalization. My analysis of figurative art in the companion volume to this one probes the ways figuration can avoid that leap, an avoidance that does not go without saying. The other side of the paradox is that the art events promoted by the form of abstraction that solicits deictic looking remain stubbornly singular. Clearly, this compels a revision of the notion of abstraction itself.3

3

Of course, this comparison is not meant to evaluate Kafka as opposed to Janssens. Rather, I only seek to provide a framework for the contemporary visual artist that demonstrates her specific political work with abstraction. For the political nature of Kafka’s work, with an argument that takes the “minor” nature of the work to a generalized enunciative position, see Deleuze and Guattari 1986. 119

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Let me begin where we are: in the here and now of the 2007 exhibition where the works discussed below were exhibited together. Janssens’ art compels me to do so, as it is always site-specific, in the sense that it affectively inflects the place it inhabits. So far, I have described my experiences with this in Lisbon (1998) and Venice (1999). In 2007, Janssens installed her work in a castle near Leverkusen, Germany, called Morsbroich (not coincidentally a Baroque one, with classicist features). If it were not for its low position, this castle might have been a Kafkaesque one where incomprehensible and invisible powers have their seats. On a good day, with a blue sky traversed by intermittent white clouds, the imposing, symmetrical building built in subdued pink brick with a bluish gray roof fits its surroundings to a T, with its main section flanked by two wings, its round, landscaped front yard with a large tree on each side, and its two stairs at the entrance. Its classical look makes it attractive yet slightly imposing, certainly predictable, and just the right place to welcome equally prestigious works of art. Like many contemporary museums, Morsbroich stages an encounter between ancient architectural prestige and contemporary art. Overall, it makes for a pleasant, unusually quiet place to enjoy artworks. Being slightly intimidating, such a building cannot help but represent a sense of power. Visitors might mentally steel themselves for a somewhat sacred experience, and whisper to their children to behave. The building also emanates a sense of history, a long-term temporality that, together with its spatial grandeur, makes visitors feel small. With such expectations, such sense-based unreflective attitudes, the lightness of Janssens’ work may be almost unbearable—to allude to another Czech writer, Milan Kundera. It fundamentally transforms the experience of art, of that building, and of our sense of self. The lightness modifies the sense of time and history emanating from buildings such as this castle [fig. 3.1a–c].4 Within this context, or, better, framed in this way, Janssens’ work unfolds its nature-as-work in its squatted habitat. Her work inhabits

4

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On the “sacredness” of art and the meaning of exhibiting it in a religious building, see Hernández-Navarro 2008.

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3.1a. Morsbroich Castle, Leverkusen (Germany).

the place of the other, occupying it, but also sharing it, in the multiple senses that were unfolded in the previous two chapters. Ephemeral, it engraves itself in time; surrounding the visitor, it modifies space. I now discuss more specifically how this art works to become keenly, radically, political. This contention traverses a number of qualifiers through which I place issues discussed previously in a more systematic framework.5 Describing this work, these qualifiers join forces to become a program that, as I now hope to demonstrate, is artistic because it is political, and political because it is artistic. These two words are also qualifiers. The adjective seems the most appropriate descriptor for this work. Rather than fixing it in terms of properties, they inflect it. These

5

Jonathan Culler has advanced the argument that the concept of framing is more suitable than the common concept of context (1988). 121

3.1b. Ann Veronica Janssens, Bikes, 2000. Bikes with engraved aluminum hubcaps. Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2007).

3.1c. Ann Veronica Janssens, Untitled, 2007. Artificial mist, colored filter, and natural light, dimensions variable. Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen.

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qualifiers must be seen as being in motion, in varying combinations, characterizing art events as they occur.6 In short, while being “abstract” in ways I will propose, Janssens’ work opens new worlds of possibilities: bodily, it offers visitors an opportunity to reclaim their strong existence, and strengthen their sense of agency as a result; transgressive, it demonstrates disrespect for boundaries and constraints; empowering, it contributes to emancipating the public from the Kafkaesque nightmare of disempowerment; and modest, it is eminently sociable and, as a consequence, social. For all these reasons, the work is radical in the radical sense of the word: it affects us to the roots (rad-) of our being, and puts those roots in movement. Below, I briefly take these features up and bring them to bear on the works exhibited in the Baroque castle. This chapter, then, is about mobile qualifiers.7

Abstract In most of Janssens’ works, there is no definitive form, no fixed contour, no representation, and no figuration. Put in such negative terms, the most characteristic object in this exhibition, and key to this chapter, is Aerogel (2000). This work is based on the idea of the “found object,” yet different from that Duchampian tradition. Indeed, Aerogel was encountered, like the displaced objects such as urinals or bicycle wheels, and thus participated in the shift from “beautiful” to “art” (De Duve 1996). Janssens’ choice to rework bicycle wheels, incidentally, testifies to an affiliation with that tradition. But Aerogel was never even

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In some languages that do not have adjectives, the qualifying function is fulfilled by verbs. With the penultimate sentence of this paragraph I implicitly reply to Nicolas Bourriaud’s essay The Radicant (2009). His definition of “radicant,” useful in itself, can just as well signify that of the more idiomatic “radical” without an emphasis on rootedness: “To be radicant means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them the power to completely define one’s identity, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than imposing” (22). In other words, behave according to migratory culture.

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made as an object; it never was an object to begin with, so how could it be “found”? In addition, it is an attempt to exhibit “nothing.” As such, it gives new meaning to the idea of minimalism.8 Aerogel is the lightest material ever made by man. It weighs next to nothing, consisting of 99.5 to 99.9 percent air. Its lightness affects all aspects of its existence. Translucent, it looks a bit like clouds or mist— but this time one we see from outside. Almost being weightless, it can carry up to 1500 times its own weight, and isolate down to minus 270 degrees Celsius. As an object or thing, its extreme porosity makes it utterly fragile; its tentative shape is arbitrary, and it can crumble at any moment. Materiality and objecthood are in fierce tension. A piece of aerogel is slightly bluish or yellowish, recalling the light as it traverses the atmosphere. More than recalling natural light, it partakes of it; its coloring functions in exactly the same way. In this sense, it is identical to air. Aerogel is blue for the same reasons the sky is blue, thanks to the tiny particles of its material substance that scatter bluish light. But when light outside is seen through aerogel, the latter takes the colors of sunrise and sunset. While being part of it, it is also more radical than natural light. It is, then, simultaneously a synecdoche, a metaphor of, and an allusion to something as simple, self-evident, and indispensable as air. As an object, Aerogel is also radical in the multiple ways it challenges its own objecthood. Its edges are undefined. Since it is hard to be sure what we see, it challenges our visual self-confidence while enriching our visual experience. More radical than all these features is the fact that the thing we see has not been made by the artist. It is just sitting there in a glass case to protect its extremely fragile existence, because Janssens proposes (pro-poses) we look at it. She presents it for us to look at; that, and barely anything else, is the work of art. Far from having made it, she has hardly touched it, for its fragility is daunting. Yet, that small object works with a breathtaking beauty and offers a powerful experience of vision. This minus-object, this

8

On Duchamp and the tradition he inaugurated as well as the one out of which he emerged, see Thierry de Duve’s seminal study (1996). For a cautionary note against too generalizing a use of the term “minimalism,” one that Janssens’ work “touches” without belonging to that movement, see Hernández-Navarro 2010. 125

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3.2a–b. (top) Ann Veronica Janssens, Aerogel, 2000. Aerogel, dimensions variable. 3.2c. (bottom) Ann Veronica Janssens, Aerogel, 2000. Aerogel, dimensions variable. “An den Frühling,” Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2007).

unthing that lacks all features of solid matter, such as form, color, fixed dimensions, and durability, is in this sense a classical abstract object. Being three-dimensional, it qualifies as a sculpture, yet it was nothing more than a random thing—until Janssens chose to put it on display [fig. 3.2a–c]. According to common conceptions of abstraction that gained currency at the beginning of the twentieth century, an abstract work 126

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has no figuration, no representational meaning, and no recognizable referent. The logic is negative: a work is abstract when it lacks recognizable form. Recognizability points to the outside, the world where people and things have forms that artists can “imitate,” represent, in short: make recognizable. But this negativity is literally “abstracting”: purifying the object from its form, as if to punish it for its polluting commerce with the outside. This logic purifies art of its ties to the world. The result may either be a flight into transcendence, even into religious experience, or a riveting fascination with an exalted purity for its own sake. According to such a conception of abstraction, abstract art is also, inevitably, the opposite of political art. It is the conception that underlies the pursuits of artists like Malevich, Mondrian, and Kandinsky.9 Yet, Aerogel seems utterly alien to such pursuits. It is simply too modest. It lacks the ambition, and transcendence seems beside the point.Rather than defining negatively, this object adds to our ordinary experience of air. The ethereal blue must stay away from associations with sky and heaven, or it will be representational and not abstract at all. Instead of pursuing such flights, it attracts the viewer to itself, to its fragile existence and its ephemeral definition, rather than to a transcendental eternity. It might be considered a “direction for use” of abstraction itself. Aerogel is an almost-thing that is on this side of thingness; it has a near-color that is too unstable to be a proper one; it is a piece of matter with a nonform, yet not formless. But for all these reasons, it is to be admired and respected, as its simple display in a glass case stipulates. Instead of negation, a radical “almost-but-not-quite” would be the provisional definition of this abstraction. An exhibition devoted to this phenomenon of negation, called “At the Origins of Abstraction,” opened with Janssens’ work Rouge 106 / bleu 132 (2003–09). This work was presented as a kind of antechamber, a large entrance hall impregnated with vibrant color. Strong, fugitive, and ungraspable, the colors alternated between blue and red. When combined, these two colors produce an incandescent white. The resulting irradiating pulsation brings perception to the edge of dazzlement. This opening work was followed by works from

9

See Kandinsky’s own book on the subject (2001). 127

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the old masters of abstraction, the period covered beginning at the early nineteenth and running up to the turn of the twentieth century (“1800–1914” was the exhibition’s subtitle). Hence, Janssens’ work raised the question of its own placement. Was it out of place because it was not engaged in the kind of negation and search for purity, like the works that pre-posterously followed? Could its placement perhaps encourage misunderstanding?10 Seen in the context of this exhibition, the work is definitely abstract, including in the sense that it refuses recognizable form. The space was a kind of room on its own, a hollow sculpture. The visitor was invited inside it. There, the seams—plinths, corners, ceiling—were invisible, although not due to mist but to the rapidly flickering light. It deprived the viewer of visual mastery but gave exhilaration in return. Presenting itself at the entrance of an exhibition of early abstract art, it asserts clearly that Janssens’ work must be seen as abstract. Indeed, Rouge 106 / bleu 132 can be considered a more radical form of negatively defined abstraction. For, beyond the destruction or refusal of form, it undermined the possibility of even projecting form. There was, to put it simply, nothing in that room; it could not have been more negative. However, as a result, no transcendence was solicited, but a self-aware visual uncertainty instead, with skepticism as a likely consequence. No work Janssens makes leaves the viewer out of sight. This makes it different from the transcendental form of abstraction, even if, in situ, it proclaims affiliation with it. The affiliation-in-difference is consistent because it marks a mode of social existence that is centrally important to the artist’s work. The same holds for its relationship to forms of abstraction other than this founding one. As John Rajchman (1995) and Ernst van Alphen (2004) have reminded us, there are other conceptions of abstraction that are not to be conflated. One that can be seen as the counterpart of the early conception is abstract expressionism. The expressionist conception was mainly put forward in postwar American art, and advocated by Clement Greenberg and later Michael Fried; critics who took, and were given, the position of masters of taste—the 10 “At the Origins of Abstraction (1800–1914)” was curated by Pascal Rousseau. The exhibition ran from November 5, 2003, to February 22, 2004, and was accompanied by an important publication (Musée d’Orsay 2003). 128

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last connoisseurs. Here, purity is also a primary focus, but it is not so much purity from figuration as the purity of the medium. It has been called “optical puritanism” (Rajchman 1995, 17). Painting is emphatically flat: no depth, then; only surface must be made to work. Sculpture has its own obsessions in this respect; abstract sculpture must at all cost be free of narrative and, hence, of time.11 Janssens emerges as a sculptor who, other than light, mostly uses no material at all. Instead, she only modifies extant matter. Foregrounding materiality where none is expected, Janssens can only be associated with this form of abstraction by contrast. Instead of reducing form and matter so that it vanishes into thin air, she takes thin air and turns it into hesitant, fragile, but nevertheless tangible matter. This is the primary reason why I chose Aerogel as the key work in this discussion. Putting mirrors on the hubs of bus wheels (Hubcaps, 2000), or aluminum disks on the wheels of bicycles (Bikes, 2000), mist inside rooms (Muhka, 1997) or creating colored mist (LEE 121!, 2005): all such actions constitute an intervention in a material object or situation, architectural sphere or landscape, that is alien to the materiality brought in to disturb it. This is far removed from the purity of medium, as there is no clearly defined medium to begin with. The medium is the space that hosts the work. Nor is Janssens’ work expressionist. In her work, there is no (self-) expression at all. Rather than making works that have object-like existence the artist puts forward “proposals.” Proposal is a term she seems to give its literal meaning when she uses it for her projects: “pro” designating “forward”; “-posal” designating “putting.” The same goes for project, with “-ject” meaning “throwing.” Once her proposal has been put into effect, she withdraws the moment the visitor takes over. Although I have used the term “signature” here and there, for example, in connection to her mist works, the works cannot even be signed, as there hardly ever is any “thing” to sign.12

11 Fried’s famous article “Art and Objecthood” has later been republished as a book (1998). Krauss’ critique of Greenberg and Fried also insists on the bodiliness of abstract art (1993). 12 Janssens’ major proposals (as well as the idea of calling them proposals rather than works) are well documented in Theys 2003. 129

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British art historian Briony Fer has described a third conception of abstraction (1997). This conception, primarily revealed in critical essays by Georges Bataille on artists such as Miró and Picasso, focuses on the unconscious. Here, traumatism, loss, and castration generate a refusal of or even an incapability to make clear forms. To put it succinctly, forms are not absent but either assaulted or pursued in vain. In such a view, formlessness is form brought down, attacked and defeated. Again, the abstraction is primarily characterized by negativity, this time psychic and historical rather than metaphysical, angry rather than ambitious. Rather than withdrawal and flight, aggression and confrontation dominate the visual discourses. In contrast to the medium-oriented abstraction, it is impure, confused, and superimposed on experiences that are themselves negative. This idea of abstraction is closer to Janssens’ work in one sense: it is anchored in subjectivity. But in three important ways, all pertaining to the question of the political, it is opposed to the latter. Firstly, the mood of Fer’s version of abstraction is melancholic rather than cheerful and empowering. Secondly, rather than facilitating new experiences, it has a registering effect on the subject. The subject is not enticed to change. Thirdly, this surrealist abstraction is very much—if not exclusively—male-oriented.13 If we consider Janssens’ work in relation to these three conceptions of abstraction, it becomes clear that her art can only be circumscribed in polemical debate with them. Rather than purifying form, her art makes new forms, and rather than doing this itself, it needs the viewer to perform this making. For self-expression, this work substitutes viewers’ agency, in a double contrast to both “self-“ and “-expression.” Instead of loss and suffering, works like Bluette (2006), June (2006), and Yellow Rose (2006) solicit an incredible sense of wonderment and joy, while Aquarium and Aquarium (Air de Paris) (1992–2006) make one marvel at the beauty of their simple, barely material forms. These works do not have forms that can be defined 13 The gendered nature of castration is both overdetermined and dubious, as clearly explained by Kaja Silverman in her book The Threshold of the Visible World (1996). Fer’s study is indebted to Krauss and Bois’ exhibition in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. See Bois and Krauss 1997. 130

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in an absolute sense, and neither are they stable. They change over time; they are hesitant, wavering; and they emerge not from artistic sculpting but from a delicate (modest) intervention into a self-driven material agency [fig. 3.3]. The point of Janssens’ work is much more specific than all these forms of abstraction. The term “abstraction” only sounds right if we consider this work in its contrapuntal relationship to figuration’s representational quality; not to figuration as such. Throughout the history of Western art, representation has always met with suspicion from political, religious, and social sides. In Janssens’ case, this opposition does not target the allegedly false, derivative nature of representation. This was the object of Platonic censorship, where spiritual essence was claimed to be lost in the reproduction of appearances only. Instead, I contend, this opposition is motivated and made meaningful in terms of representation’s classical relationship to the body. But here, again, this polemical relationship is much more specific and forcefully relevant than might appear. Moreover, lest this opposition be taken as in continuity to a certain prudish opposition to the representation of bodies in, for example, early feminist oppositions to the nude, Janssens’ position needs to be elaborated somewhat.14 The target of its oppositional posture is distance. In canonical works of art centering on the human body, whether idealized or depreciated, desired or rejected, the body is put on display for the viewer to cast a connoisseur’s eye on it. The body is always elsewhere; it is someone else’s body. The represented body cannot return the gaze. When it appears to do so, as in Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), the public is scandalized because it is caught out in its voyeurism, which is thereby defeated. The primary target of the drastic refusal of representation in Janssens’ work is this distancing—the disingenuous rejection of dialogic looking [fig. 3.4].15

14 Not all figuration is representational. I have discussed this issue in connection to abstract painter David Reed. This artist figures—in one sense, represents— forms that are emphatically recognizable shapes, yet they fail to refer to anything other than the shapes they are. Like Caravaggio according to Marin, then, Reed “destroys” (representational) painting. See Bal 1999, 165–208. 15 For a commentary on this painting and a critical analysis of some key pieces of its reception, see Bal 1996, 255–88. 131

3.3. Ann Veronica Janssens, Bluette, 2006. Installation with seven beams of light. LED beamers and artificial mist, 140 cm diameter, 120 cm depth. “Avril,” Air de Paris.

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3.4. Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Oil on canvas, 130.5 x 190 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Since Janssens is a scientist and explorer rather than a moralist, this antagonism against what is commonly called voyeurism is not moralistic. Rather, it is motivated by the knowledge that the body can be much better served, venerated, and enjoyed without such distance. When the body is enabled to preserve and exercise its own agency, the viewer can take a more productive stance. What is (indirectly) rejected in Janssens’ work is not voyeurism but the shyness that underlies it. This makes the critique more devastating, while the tone remains light and unmoralistic. This abstraction, then, signifies the refusal of the collaboration of looking, appropriating, and judging that distance allows. In Janssens’ art, the viewer herself is at stake. The act of viewing is made to be self-implicating, colluding, and bodily. In Janssens’ “proposition,” then, abstraction is not coincidentally but necessarily bodily; looking at this art is deictic. This form of abstraction is closer to a fourth view of abstraction: the Deleuzian view, as elaborated in his writings with Guattari. Arguing against the negativity of standard notions of abstraction, they refuse—as they do so frequently—the negative logic as well as 133

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the binary opposition this entails. In much of his work, Deleuze prefers the “ands” of relationships to the “nots” of negatively defined connections—“knots” rather than “nots,” in other words. In answer to their own direct question, “What then should be termed abstract in modern art?” Deleuze and Guattari suggestively write: “A line of variable direction that describes no contour and delimits no form” (1987, 499).16 Note that this statement seems also based on negation. This is a temporal negation or suspension, however; “not-yet” rather than “not.” Abstraction, for them, is not the opposite of figuration but, imagined along an axis of temporal logic, precedes it. Janssens’ abstraction has elements in common with this view, but she offers her own version of it. For example, she refrains from representation altogether, while Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract artists, according to their conception, would in fact merely postpone it. For the philosophers, abstraction is the exploration of an unknown world of possible forms, not yet invented, while modernist artists labor to make those possibilities available. Allegedly abstract artworks hint at forms-to-come. For Janssens, more radically, these possibilities would not be realized in subsequent forms that would, in turn, stabilize them, but in the way viewers temporarily and fleetingly experience and thus make forms that by all accounts do not exist “out there.” This is a consequence of both her principles of modesty and empowerment.17 A second important feature of this view seems also eminently fitting to characterize Janssens’ work. According to Deleuze and Guattari, abstraction conveys intensity instead of expression. Intense means that the work is bristling with unknown and unseen possibilities and powers. These emanate from the work to the viewer; they are

16 The question is not so direct, however. It concludes a discussion of abstraction theorists such as Kandinsky and, here, Wilhelm Worringer (1980), specifically on abstract line (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 474–500). 17 This is a simplified account of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of abstraction. They also consider Beckett and Kafka abstract authors (1986). Here, I limit myself to the consequences of their view for visual art. The philosophers’ view, here rendered in conjunction with Van Alphen (see above), has been effectively summed up by Rajchman in a fundamental article already mentioned (1995). 134

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by definition relational. Only when one is blind to the habitual will one be able to suspend already-known forms. This is the paradoxical aspect of abstraction. It points at the limits of the visual. In this precise sense, Janssens proposes her works with mist as abstract; she creates that very limit, not what might follow. Compared to Deleuze and Guattari’s view, the focus of intensity is displaced from what the works emanate to the viewer’s experience and making of it—the latter’s inflection, in other words, reconsideration, active engagement, and (re)making of the intensity. The key is the viewer’s freedom, with which the artwork cannot tamper.18 This also logically follows from the fact that there hardly are objects in Janssens’ works. This is why they are better termed “events” or “proposals.” Like the Lisbon room I began this book with, the work Muhka also consists of a dense, white mist. Here, the mist is infused into rooms bathing in natural light. The walls of the room are translucent plastic in various colors, making the inside colored. The mist changes everything in the viewer’s existence, but in itself it is barely anything. Based on the simple, lucid idea of transforming perception by slowing it down, robbing it of clarity, and using light to counter vision rather than supporting it, these works trigger an incredibly intense, new experience. This intensity is not limited to the individual experience of self, however, nor is it purely visual. In some versions a microphone placed on the outside of the building projects city sounds inside the mist, breaking through the blissful but isolating silence the visual environment keeps suggesting. This happened in the MuHKA (Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp) in 1997. In other versions, as I described in the previous chapter, a crystal-clear child’s voice sings a song about the experience of flying, as in Horror Vacui (Venice, 1999). Thus, this work unbinds the senses of seeing and hearing while simultaneously making them clash. Both the outside and the other senses are thus emphatically made to interrupt the visual solipsism. By way of transgressing the purity of the medium, color ruptures the isolation of the subject even more systematically than sound. There 18 Blindness is also mentioned in Rajchman’s account: “one must become blind enough to see the surface as ‘mixed’ or ‘assembled’ in a particular transformable and deformable manner, rather than as just ‘flat’” (1995, 18). 135

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are multiple colored variations of these mist works, such as Blue, Red and Yellow in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 2001. As there, in LEE 121! the mist pulverizes, and color takes over yet remains ungraspable. In this way, these mist works offer experiences that are utterly pleasurable, while simultaneously forming a devastating critique of routine vision. As a result of this critique, other possibilities begin to shimmer, and in this sense, the mist works conform to Deleuze and Guattari’s vision. The words of Maaike Bleeker I quoted previously, through which she characterized experimental theater, also hold for these mist sculptures: this body of work becomes a “critical vision machine” (2008b, 259). Like theater, these mist works are not static objects but require time. The intensity of the immersive experience increases with time, while vision, if patiently given time, becomes selective, its distance measurable, and its labor sensitive. These works are not simply embodied experiments with vision. Rather, they embody—offer the bodily experience of—abstraction in the generative, Deleuzian sense.19

Bodily In a truly political art, nothing can be taken for granted. That is why political art is necessary, and why no journalism can replace it. The place of the body in Janssens’ art is where the political comes into view most clearly. For, it is the body that must “take place.” It must find “smooth spaces” to oppose, and rest from, escape, and neutralize “striated spaces” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 474–500). And what could be less abstract than the concrete body? The most obvious involvement of the body is in some tentative association of or with form, seen as a spatial arrangement that is or makes visible. Although Janssens’ work opposes the distancing nature of representation, some of her works strongly suggest, or allude to, recognizable forms. This makes us think twice before we classify these works in any one category. Aquarium and Aquarium (Air de Paris) 19 The word “machine” in Bleeker’s phrase must be welcome to an artist whose machinery replaces her self-expression. The word also strongly resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter on abstraction in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). 136

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isolate a portion of their environment by locking it into a form: a sometimes oval, sometimes perfectly round sphere. The floating silicon-oil “lens” allows the viewer to see through it and thus transform the proportions of the outside world with her own eyes. As with the version of Aquarium discussed in Chapter 2, the experience is not quite masterable, as the lens moves on the slight vibrations of air in the room. At the same time, when one manages to see through the lens, the reward is an exhilarating sense of power. With one’s eyes one can change a portion of the world. This delicate balance between the viewer’s body and the body of the work—always ephemeral, fragile, wavering, or otherwise uncertain— is not only generative of new forms but also of new conceptions of what a body is. For example, light works Freak Star, Yellow Rose, and Bluette (2006) offer themselves as gorgeous stars. Especially Bluette looks very bodily, emerging from in between blue points of light. Its seven points are clearer than the rest of its body, which is light that is blue and fuzzy. As a result, it is not entirely clear whether the body is convex or concave. This specific ambiguity is a trademark of the artist, and implies a profound philosophical position on the body. The already-discussed Corps noir not only appears to waver between convex and concave but also seems layered. As I mentioned, when looked at frontally, it has a disk of light in the middle and a voluptuous, soft-looking inner band that has volume made of light alone. Through such effects of light, this work that is an object comes close to works that are not. The endless series of reversals suspends the placement of the bodies reflected. Are they inside (the work) or outside (the gallery)? But instead of making that experience frightening, the works ensure it is exhilarating. This is where the political force of this work must be sought. With Bluette the bodily position of the viewer is quite different from Corps noir. Far from proposing mirroring, at first sight it is the star rather than the viewer’s body that is ambiguous. The points could be the points of attachment of a star whose body is behind a blue glass wall, sucking itself up to that wall like a sea creature. Or its body could be coming forward, offering its softness to the touch. In the former case, the bright points are tactile as subjects of touching; in the latter, the middle portion is tactile as a desired object of touching. In addition to that subject–object reversibility, the kind 137

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of touch is very different: sucking versus caressing; imposing versus giving; needing versus desiring. Either way, the viewer is not really invited to satisfy epistemic longing (the desire to know), for there is no “thing” to touch; instead, she is invited to look in a tactile way. As an alternative to the appropriating gaze, looking lovingly at another body is proposed here as a pleasurable bodily experience. This tactile act of looking can be done either by imagined identification (with the points) or by desire for an attractive (other) body, that which is literally put forward by the star’s body. It is the ambiguity itself—the impossibility to decide and stay in either one of these positions—that makes the work emblematic of the artist’s play with bodiliness. Through its ambiguity Bluette precludes easy access to the position where the connoisseur of art can so easily fall into the trap of the connoisseurship of bodies. The latter position, in turn, is contiguous with voyeurism: an act which implies that bodies seem to tease, to be for the taking, while the viewer remains out of reach. The simple fact that this body is not anthropomorphic makes the experiment easier— aloof from moralizing, and even from shyness. This, then, is one of the points of abstraction as a vehicle for political efficacy. Although Bluette has the form of a seven-pointed star, it remains abstract in the specific Janssensian sense. If it were a nod to figuration as representation, the effect would have to be very similar for Yellow Rose, also a star-shaped work and recognizable as such. Yet, this is not the case at all. Differences reside, of course, in color and size. But Yellow Rose’s star shape offers a completely different viewing experience. Here, the shape and its provenance are clear. The lamps from which the lights are projected so as to overlap and cross have their own material effect. If one happens to enter the work’s sphere at the beginning of the “film,” the six lamps are just that: lamps giving off light. Slowly, mist is let in. The mist concentrates close to the lamps. Their lights become beams, and the mist expands these. Then the star appears. Here, the yellow light is layered rather than offering a smooth body. The ambiguity is in these layers, and in the impossibility to determine which of them makes the eye waver. While we see the layers clearly in the sense that the body of the star, unlike that of Bluette, does not form a smooth whole, the threedimensional thickness that results is not seamless; its seams, however, are constantly elsewhere [fig. 3.5]. 138

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3.5. Ann Veronica Janssens, Yellow Rose, 2006. Installation with six beams of light. Projectors, dichroic filters, and artificial mist, dimensions variable (min. 360 cm diameter, min. 250 cm depth). Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen.

Freak Star is again different in terms of bodiliness [fig. 3.6]. Here, the number of points is eight. The beams of light become slightly weaker toward the center, then stronger again when they overlap at the center, thus strengthening one another. The difference between these two works on the one hand and Bluette on the other is also due to scale. Bluette is almost the size of a young adolescent body, while Yellow Rose and Freak Star are much larger, beyond human scale. Scale is, quite precisely, the heart of bodiliness. It is in confrontation with scale—the gigantic, the miniature, the life size—that the human body becomes 139

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3.6. Ann Veronica Janssens, Freak Star, 2004. Installation with eight beams of light. Theater projectors with shutters and artificial mist, ca. 350 cm diameter. Galeria Toni Tàpies, Barcelona.

aware of itself. No longer able to unselfconsciously collect “things,” the person confronted with large-scale objects—or miniatures, for that matter—must labor to see, and in seeing relates to the object on terms other than those of possession.20 20 For a brilliant approach to miniatures—in her case, eighteenth-century Turkish ones—anchored in contemporary reflection on vision, see Firat 2012. See also Susan Stewart’s seminal essay on scale (1984). For a reframing of the classical image of the perfectly proportioned human body, see Aydemir 2007. 140

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It is in situations like these that the human being sizes up that other in front of her. The tendency to measure things in relation to oneself is undercut when such a thing is out of proportion with the self. The classical model of the perfection of human proportions—Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (ca. 1490)—is undermined. Perhaps in reference to that model, Yellow Rose and Freak Star have an even number of points. Their perfect symmetry makes them formally clearer than the less symmetrical shape of Bluette. Both Yellow Rose and Freak Star, however, are too large to be measures for man, and therefore thwart that model. These works might entice viewers to representational fantasies. These can be tricky, risking a reduction to particular causes and forms. For example, I refrain from going so far as to associate Yellow Rose with the (imagined) hyperbolic male body and Bluette with the (projected) female body, but such associations are surely possible. It would take the willfully nonrepresentational work back to the realm of representation—a move that would betray the art’s endeavor. Thinking about such categories without fully endorsing them, however, would not. It would also bring gender differentiation too close to the binary opposition from which recent gender theory has liberated it. Yet, viewers of Janssens’ work are emphatically free to bring in their own associations. Even without allowing such specific representational interpretations, these marked differences do, I contend, foreground the bodiliness of both works.21 The betrayal I just barely avoided (and of course, by citing it, committed) can be justified in one way. Such a response to the work would be a transgression of interpretive decorum, as it would go against the grain of the artist’s stated intent and the work’s unity. This risk makes such a transgression rather appealing, and brings it closer to the true nature of the artist’s work as well. I argue that the transgressive quality of Janssens’ work is not a side-effect but one of its main tenets, one of the ingredients of her very special way of making abstract-hence-political art. This would make the association I have skirted suddenly much more relevant. In fact, I do believe that anthropomorphic associations—which is not the same as projecting anthropomorphic shapes and features on abstract sculptures—are part 21 The tendency to first reduce objects to things and then possess them characterizes the collector (the connoisseur par excellence). See Bill Brown 2001. 141

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and parcel of the bodiliness of this sculpture. For only by traversing that risky frontier is a viewer able to realize fully the work’s abstraction as bodily and the need literally to embody the work. As I argue below, this is where the work’s political power lies.22

Transgressive Transgression is often overrated in its political impact. It may be pleasurable to transgress certain boundaries, but not all boundaries are oppressive; hence, not all transgression is subversive. The predictable quality of some forms of transgression may contaminate particular transgressions, which then become apolitical at best— they are reduced to mere occasions for feeling good about oneself. Thus, rather than subverting it, facile transgression may make the subject more prompt to endorse the established order that, after all, allows such do-good, feel-good sentiments. In contrast to this recuperative, politically paralyzing cultivation of arrogance, many of Janssens’ works transgress boundaries that we did not even know existed. All these subliminal boundaries point to perceptual habits, and undermining them opens up new possibilities. This formulation makes clear that Janssens’ abstraction requires small transgressions, including transgressions of itself, in its swerving and wavering on the risky border between abstraction and figuration.23 One such boundary is that of value. Around the time that the Italian lira, a currency that was always already fluctuating, became definitively obsolete, the artist polished off the faces of a thousand

22 On citation as performing that which it cites, even if in denial, see Butler 1993 and 1997. Throughout my work I have argued against the projection of unity as well as against the use of the artist’s intention to authorize interpretation. The former argument lies at the heart of Bal 1988; my antiintentionalist argument is most extensively proposed in Bal 2002, 253–85. 23 The predictability of transgression is among the motivations underlying the issue of Estudios Visuales edited by José Luis Brea (2010), which was conceived as a critique of political art. The qualifier “small” for transgressions on invisible boundaries alludes to Hernández-Navarro’s conceptualization of “little resistances” (Hernández-Navarro 2008; Bal and Hernández-Navarro 2011). 142

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100-lire coins, replacing them with shiny surfaces that gave an illusion of three-dimensionality, like miniature versions of Grand disque. The newly engraved side lets the light into the hand that holds the coin. The reflection of the engraving produces an almost tangible convex luminous cone on the surface that is no longer reliably flat. The coins of 100,000 lire (1999) lost their value as money, but this value was small and unstable to begin with. Instead, they acquired infinite light. The engraved small disks not only cancel the boundary between value and worthlessness. They do so by being transformed into coinsturned-disks that capture light so as to suggest both infinite light and infinite movement. Hence, instead of just questioning a boundary, the point of boundaries itself is mocked when a limited monetary value yields to a sense of infinitude. These coins are like a private, portable source of light, an artwork to put in your pocket and keep with care. Even these very small items slow down perception, when the attraction of the shimmering rays of light makes the bearer reluctant to put them away. This work does not venerate money; on the contrary, qua money, the coins have lost their value. Instead, 100,000 lire honors the hand that earned it. This work, like others by Janssens, pays homage to manual labor while obliquely critiquing the way it has been underpaid though its use of the lira as currency. Until its abolition, the lira with its hyperbolic, inflated numbers stood for worthless money to many Europeans [fig. 3.7].24 In larger format, engraved disks such as these function as independent sculptures. They acquire a certain monumentality that at the same time qualifies that feature by means of their abstraction, the implication of the body in their movement, and perhaps even the allusion to corrugated iron. The disk can be seen as a punctual demonstration of the Deleuzian conception of abstraction. The light generates a form, a cone, which is deceptively voluminous. These engravings are also applied even more mundanely, as parts of utilitarian machines (Bikes). As I mentioned, in some exhibitions these bikes

24 As part of my argument for the political power of Janssens’ work, this remark brings it within the orbit of contemporary Marxist thought. Especially because she works with temporality so often, in the slow-down of experience, I consider Cesare Casarino’s vision of the materiality of time very relevant to this art (2003). 143

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3.7. Ann Veronica Janssens, 100,000 lire, 1999. Thousand engraved 100-lire coins. Distributed from the Scuola Grande di San Rocco during the exhibition “En attendant l’année dernière,” 48th Venice Biennale.

have been put at the disposal of visitors. Here, the user cannot see what the bystander sees: a radiant wheel that appears at a standstill while the rider moves on with the rest of the machine. In addition to the boundary between moving and still images, another boundary is undermined—that between seeing and using, or astonishment and routine. Again, perception is deceived and thereby critically engaged. The biker uses her entire body, inhabiting the artwork and making familiar movements the bystander can identify with.25

25 In the 2001 exhibition in Berlin, riders would encounter mirrors standing on the gallery floor, so that they would have to decide between producing the light for others by riding on, or diminishing it in order to see themselves. This light game was enhanced by the lightness of the Mies van der Rohe pavilion. Again, Inge E. Boer’s critique of boundaries as separating, and her concomitant proposal to consider boundaries as spaces for negotiation, is extremely relevant for this discussion (2006). 144

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In other works, boundaries are not suspended or canceled but foregrounded, although their meaning changes in the process, in another form of subversion that shuns facile wholesale rejection. Tropical Paradise is a good example (see Fig. 2.3 above). It marks the boundary between below and above, but also questions it. Like many of Janssens’ works, this plate mobilizes maximum light effect with the simplest of means. It uses daylight to illuminate a space otherwise drab and colorless by means of its luminous golden reflection. The effect of the small distance from the wall is that it appears to float in the air, questioning the division it has just marked. In the simplest possible terms, the small gap states that divisions cannot be fixed. This is one example among many of Janssens intervening in architecture. In her earliest works, in the mid-1980s, she extended buildings, sometimes by simply making holes in walls, sometimes by adding extensions as a kind of grafting, or by amplifying street noise inside a building.26 But the architecture she qualifies is never conceived in its formal features alone. It is already inhabited; it already has certain purposes, which are implicated in the qualification. Tropical Paradise, for example, was created for a mortuary in the Parisian hospital Tenon. Mediating between the “above” and the “below”— with all the connotations this opposition entails in an environment of death and, likely, religion—the gold absorbs all the light around it, to give it back to the people who are, in more senses than one, (be)low. Instead of adapting the surroundings to the sadness of the mourners, this work does the opposite. It gives them something like a peek into the future, when light will shine again in their lives. Materially, the work transgresses the boundary, replete with social implications, between corrugated iron and gold as the universal symbols of poverty and wealth. In Janssens’ social interpretation of architecture, the brightness of this plate of aluminum shaped like iron thoroughly transgresses the decorum of conventional institutional dealings with death. Like a roof, it separates the ceiling from the room where mourners gather. Even the title mocks the sacredness of death, by invoking paradise in the tone of travel advertisements through the 26 In Villa Gillet (Lyon, 1989) Janssens extended a terrace with concrete blocks; in Portrait de scène (Brussels, 1986) she changed the shape of a podium by means of an iron strip. 145

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added word tropical. Yet, what could be more respectful of grief than this small attempt to make the moment, literally, a tiny bit brighter? In the process, the boundary between heavy and light atmospheres is transgressed. This is a thoroughly social act of reaching out with light (“at the end of the tunnel”) to people imprisoned in the darkness of their grief. For the same mortuary the artist designed Espace infini (1999): a concave rectangular shape from which she eliminated corners and edges. This work is a point-by-point symmetrical opposite of Corps noir: white rather than black, matte rather than shiny, rectangular rather than round. It refuses to reflect, soliciting a tactile look instead. Like other works, with Corps noir as the most obvious example, this work is reminiscent of early photography, when studios used sheets of white paper to eliminate background. The result is a complete spatial disorientation. The eye can no longer discern limits and dimensions. This work also operates a sense of scale. No larger than a modest-size human body, its prototype could be a bright coffin. A larger version would immerse the viewer. Either way, due to the elimination of corners and edges, the viewer standing before it is caught in a dizzying sense of infinitude. The space, literally, opens itself to an experience of endlessness, not unlike a plausible association with death (the photograph shows a large version, with people allowing an estimation of the scale) [fig. 3.8]. Espace infini’s modesty makes it another signature piece of this artist—an emblem of a characteristic qualifier. The modesty of scale, of its hanging visibly on the wall instead of seeming to float in the air, and of its very location in a place of sadness constitutes the work’s transgressive quality by excellence. It shows disrespect for the clichés of solemnity that, instead of helping mourning, hamper it. Meanwhile, it facilitates an experience of infinitude to people who have just been bereaved and face the daunting realization of the temporal infinitude of their loss of empowerment.27

27 The allusion to coffins in this piece brings it into the orbit of Doris Salcedo’s 2010–12 work Plegaria Muda. See the exhibition catalogue (Gomes da Silva, Nilsson, and Fabiana 2011). 146

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3.8. Ann Veronica Janssens, Espace infini, 1999. Wood and white plaster, 1082 x 1070 x 600 cm. Musée de la Guerre, Ypres (Belgium).

Empowering Empowerment is a constant quality of Janssens’ art. This is, in the end, how her art is politically effective. In addition to the abstraction that opens up possibilities, the bodiliness that actually makes us sense these possibilities, and the transgressive quality that prepares us for the wish for change, empowerment makes such changes—subliminal as they are—actually possible. It takes on the disempowering nature of a public space constantly invaded—Deleuze and Guattari would say “striated”—by visual, audio, and political loudness. In response to this invasion, the isolation of moments in which we experience duration, perception, and our own body as lengthened, intensified, and stretched beyond the imaginable is precious. In this protective cocoon we are not only given the opportunity to explore unknown forms according to the Deleuzian conception of abstraction, but experience what we explore in a strong bodily manner. We are also enabled to do so with 147

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the exhilarating feeling of being, precisely, able—of having the power to do so. This is a strongly emancipatory experience. Without illusions about the outside world, the experience cannot liberate the viewer from the Kafkaesque nightmare of a preprogrammed world of mazes (striated), but it can and does strengthen the sense of subject-ability, of being in that world with a force coming from a fuller participation in it. I argue that it is primarily this cheerful mood that answers Adorno’s trauma-based cultural critique. It also indirectly answers Deleuze and Guattari. At the end of their chapter on abstraction they warn us that, although “[m]ovements, speed and slowness, are sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space,” . . . smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us. (1987, 500) At first sight, or moment, this empowerment begins with the subject’s isolation. In the rooms filled with mist the viewer is momentarily alone. Others, if present at all, are vague shapes in the distance. This solitude might seem unsocial. But, as I have suggested in connection with the sound, it is in fact the opposite. In order to connect with others, the individual must be strengthened first: the intensity of Janssens’ abstraction is the royal road to empowerment. For Muhka, LEE 121!, and other mist rooms, the subject is bodily inside the work. Neither the artist nor the critic dictates the experience. As an always-unpredictable variation of the singular subject’s existence, the experience is her own. It is intensified, making a new subject with enriched agency possible in the same way that abstraction makes the emergence of new forms possible. It does this, precisely, through the intensity of the perception of, for example, an empty canvas or a bare, formless piece of stone. For this intense and generative perception to be possible, however, the object itself has to be suspended. This suspension facilitates a visual experience close to a kind of hallucination—the most intense experience of perception. In his study on Leibniz, Deleuze puts it in (exceptionally) simple terms: “Every perception is hallucinatory 148

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because perception has no object” (1993, 93). This is a feature of the philosophical position Deleuze calls baroque and which, I have claimed, is the framework from within which Janssens works. Opacity such as exemplified in Espace infini makes the perception without object literally come true. If we consider for a moment that the mist works are programmatic—in the sense that they offer a poetics proper to Janssens’ work—then we can take this experience of abstraction-in-the-body as a starting point to understand the empowering quality of other works. Take Ciel (2003), a work that is utterly simple and highly sophisticated at the same time. The sky outside is projected on the wall inside a building, turned 90 degrees so that the horizontal movement of the clouds is turned vertical. The sheer beauty of the images brackets the absurdity. Transgressive as this displacement of the infinitude of the sky into the limited space of gallery is, the allusion to the habits of Western painting facilitates the shift. This tradition makes it entirely acceptable to turn a landscape into a portrait. In this respect, it is congenial to Ahtila’s video installation Horizontal, a work that, as a portrait of a tall tree, also puts the sky and clouds into the gallery, turning them by 90 degrees into a portrait format. At the same time, it denaturalizes such a shift from powerful and infinite nature to individualistic anthropocentrism [fig. 3.9].28 Ciel takes the images captured by the camera outside the building and instantly projects them on the inside wall or floor. In its initial version, installed at the headquarters of the Belgacom company in Brussels in 2003, there was a fine political point to this work—a point concerning work. The camera was installed on top of the building that houses the company, on a roof terrace only open to higher-ranking management. Thus, through the artwork, the workers in the lower ranks were given access to the forbidden, rank divisions were effectively transgressed, and the workers were empowered. Janssens’ projection gives the workers the access that was denied by the social organization. Hence, it is a transgressive act that emancipates, suspending social-economic hierarchy in at least one, light respect—light in as many senses of the word as one wishes.

28 Although it was planned to be, this work was not in the Morsbroich exhibition. On Ahtila’s installation, see the epilogue to Bal 2013. 149

3.9. Ann Veronica Janssens, Ciel, 2003. Video installation. Live recording video camera, video projector, and projection screen, dimensions variable. Belgacom Towers, Brussels.

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The empowering quality of this work is accompanied by a down-toearth modesty that prevents the imagination from flying to heights from where it can only painfully fall, Icarus-like. This modesty is also a gesture of solidarity: the transmission takes place in real time, so that the image we get to see remains unpredictable, impossible to master by the artist, the viewer, or Belgacom management. Ciel is perhaps the work that most clearly transgresses the boundaries erected by architecture. Empowering the viewers, it also empowers space, bringing the “super space” that extends the building from outside in, for the participation of everyone. Thus, it empowers nature, as the moving quality of the resulting image empowers the sky to escape the confinement of the frame, or frameup. Nature is no longer bound by the architecture to heed the social hierarchy between workers and management. For the viewer, this entails an experience of exhilarating power. Just by looking one sees images that are moving, isolated in their frame yet escaping constantly by their movement. One is able to see what we ordinarily neglect because we take it for granted. Aerogel was just a small piece of this. Yet, by being put in a glass vitrine and treated like art, even that small piece of sky became aggrandized and activated, in ways similar to Ciel. What we see is nature in and as art—a detail of it, its frame or frame-up, its transgression in escaping from that frame—and art’s handiwork, which shifts the movement. Looking more attentively, perception slows down—as the mist works demonstrated—and the cutout from the infinite stretch outside makes the detail of the sky’s beauty stand out. The dispositif created a smooth space out of a striated one. Access to that experience is a great privilege. At the same time, Ciel did not simply hand the sky over to the workers, like a contemporary Robin Hood. For, the stubborn movement of the image avoids the arrogance of human control over nature and the disastrous consequences of that attitude. In Brussels, the sky projected completed the postcard-perfect aspect of the building. Obliquely, it thus consoles Kafka’s desolate searcher in his torturous attempt to reach the habitat of power. More boldly, the work suggests that taking back the sky is possible for those who are willing to empower themselves while modifying their attitude towards possession. Deleuze and Guattari were right: smooth space 152

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alone cannot save us. Only people can do that, with the help of the space.29 Very different in mood, visual specification, and expanse, June (2006), Yellow White Study (2005), and X (2005) propose perceptions whose relationship to abstraction is itself empowering. These three works are produced by mist and natural light that is simply redirected by means of interposed obstacles and their unexpected placements. In June and Yellow White Study the beams of light are sent into the room in different planes. In June beams of different colors cross, so that the mist, upon entering the room, takes on an illusion of substance and solidity. This work demonstrates the newness-generating conception of abstraction by means of its empowering quality. The step from abstraction to the outline of a desert landscape is easy to take, and Deleuze and Guattari’s work, inspired by “nomad art” (1987, esp. 492–95), would make the suggestion attractive. But, as with the gender potential of the star-shaped works mentioned above, the privilege to do so remains with the viewer. One can turn the shape into an outer space, an image under a microscope, or a laboratory in itself just as easily. In order to be empowering, then, the work must be abstract, so that the viewer can generate forms on the basis of that work.30 In Yellow White Study the two light sources are placed in juxtaposition, the light going in opposite directions [fig. 3.10]. The cones of light that, in theory, have the same shape, look very different due to their respective colors, the white one appearing larger than the yellow one. Still, both have a very bodily appearance. Let me demonstrate their potential by citing some associations of my own—part personal, part steeped in cultural history. In X, the black and white reminiscent of early experimental photography suggests shapes rather than places, as did June. When we turn a landscapeformat into a portrait-format image, these shapes come dangerously close to a transcendental image of a night sky with a supernatural

29 This act of taking back the sky resonates, for me at least, with the feminist slogan “Take Back the Night.” 30 The association with the desert is not simply an association with a different world order. As the title of Mireille Buydens’ book Sahara (2005) intimates, the desert is a model for Deleuze’s vision of art: unstable, in constant movement, it is a model of “becoming.” 153

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3.10. Ann Veronica Janssens, Yellow White Study, 2005. Two light projectors with shutters, two gobos in dichroic glass, and artificial mist. Dimensions variable. Galerie Esther Schipper, Berlin.

apparition coming down from “heaven.” On a beam of light such as the one coming down—in the imaginary portrait format—a dove could descend to announce the virgin birth. Turned as it is, however, the viewer can shed such traditional forms and meanings, and instead deploy her own sensitivity to the bodily quality of the beam that seems to divide itself from left to right [fig. 3.11].31 31 One can even see two gigantic thighs in this division. Only in this way can the work resonate with—pay homage to and qualify—Bruce Nauman’s Bouncing in the Corner 1 and 2 (1968–69). This pioneering video is also shot in black-and-white, and equally turned sideways so that the legs of the man stretch to the right of the frame. The imaginary dove alludes, of course, to the Annunciation, a privileged subject of Renaissance art (Holly 1996), a fashionable topic in art at the same time as linear perspective became popular. Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s work The Annunciation (2010) updates this double topic (see the Epilogue to Bal 2013). These two works (Figs. 3.10 and 3.11) were not part of the Morsbroich exhibition. 154

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3.11. Ann Veronica Janssens, X, 2005. Theater projector with shutters, gobo in dichroic glass, and artificial mist. Galerie Esther Schipper, Berlin.

If we consider these works together, the simple combination of mist and light empowers the viewer on many different levels. Both established religion and canonical painting are alluded to, then put aside to make way for the viewer’s own engagement. This move is, in its specific abstraction as the opening to potentially infinite new forms, emancipatory, since it frees us from confining, “striated” traditions. But at the same time it makes us responsible. As viewers, we alone can work with or against these traditions to make experiences of our own that resuscitate and proliferate meaning. These new meanings replace the older meanings that were killed off by the bad habits of quick allegorical reading. Thus, the empowering is not in the service of grandiosity; dreams of individual grandeur are always mitigated, glossed, or even canceled by sensations of not quite being in charge, of not being alone. Democratically, the works nevertheless assure us that the artist has no more power than we do. Without our collaboration 155

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nothing can happen: the work remains lifeless, and the artist’s inventiveness remains without effect. This modesty is an important element of the elastic thread that binds qualified abstraction to qualified political relevance.

Modest In the previous chapter I quoted Bataille, who wrote that formlessness is strictly nothing—it is “no thing,” but “a term allowing one to operate a declassification, in the double sense of lowering and of taxonomic disorder” (Bois and Krauss 1997, 18). The way Janssens lowered the sky in Ciel is precisely such an operation. Or rather, it is a literal way of giving form to such lowering. It is a “term,” albeit a visual one, that “allows” others, the workers, to “lower” the management’s privilege and thus produce a taxonomic disorder in the social sphere. This double “bringing down” is also a mode that promotes modesty. Modesty is not seeing too much and not seeing too little. You try to see things in their rightful place. You don’t get in the way. Modesty in art has to do with a sparing, necessary approach, adapted to the surroundings. (Theys 2003, 42) Critic Hans Theys is one of very few writers who has not only noticed the modesty in Janssens’ work, but also interpreted it as an entrance into the political. Modesty is a social quality, or virtue, and as such is itself modest: not spectacular, and hardly earth-shakingly ambitious. Instead, it is “nice.” Traditionally it is becoming for people in relatively subordinate positions, such as servants, children, or women. In women, modesty is considered gracious; Jane Austen’s novels offer the prototype as well as the counterpart. An artist, on the other hand, is immodest almost by definition: she demands the attention of people unknown to her, and her works demand (lots of ) space. An artist who is always modest will get nowhere in the difficult endeavor of acquiring a reputation, creating exhibitions, and dealing with criticism—not to forget the securing of grants and sales without which artists cannot make a living. The idea that an artist should be modest implies reserving 156

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the profession for the independently wealthy (who are not likely to be modest to begin with), and few people would want to reinstate class society so rigorously. Hence, an artist who is a woman finds herself between a rock and a hard place in the face of modesty as a “nice,” sociable feature. Above I have offered the near-suggestion, withdrawn right away, that some of Janssens’ works might include a gender aspect—barely visible, and most certainly not strident, always humorous and light. I, for one, am quite partial to this light-mood feminism that, like the other specific political points she makes, strikes the more forcefully as it presents itself almost casually. Just remember the subtlety of her homage to manual workers, for example, in 100,000 lire; the inclusion of the perspective of children, as in the sound and mist piece in Venice; or the liberation of the sky from the imprisonment of economic power in Ciel. This lightness smiles at the social requirement of modesty. But like all these light discourses, here too a serious argument underlies the work—one that is political in nature. Modesty, in this artist’s work, is an eminently social quality, in dire need of revaluation; because of its modest importance, it can redraw the shape of the social body practically from scratch. The modesty Janssens displays is nothing like the superficial polite society’s modesty so becoming to girls in search of a well-placed husband. As an artist, Janssens must displace modesty, examine it, and renew its relevance for a social-political community that she actually creates. In her ambition to do that, she is far from modest. An artist who calls some of her projects “Super Space,” seeks to alter people’s experiences, drills holes into walls, breaks into architecture, and takes on the powerful stability of a Baroque castle clearly lacks any modesty in the traditional sense. Her proposal for modesty is, instead, a social intervention of great depth and complexity. It impregnates virtually everything she makes or does. The modest scale of 100,000 lire is the simplest case at hand. Small in scale, in monetary value, and in effect, these coins do, however, bring a bit of light to the hands of lower-ranked workers. So do the coins in 15,000 f. (1999), which come with a sticker that indicates their equivalent in unusual currencies such as oxygen, grains of rice, ecstasy, and silence. Again, monetary value is replaced by different standards of worth. In a very different way, modesty 157

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is a feature of the interventions themselves. I have used the word “simple” to indicate this. That word is by no means a statement on the technical or aesthetic complexity of these works. On the contrary: often, the simpler an intervention is qua intervention—that is, qua alteration of routine—the more complex the different aspects of its aesthetic work. Aquarium (fig. 2.8a–c) and Aquarium (Air de Paris) can also be said to be “simple,” although the idea is not so easy to realize, and its effect, its instability, is infinitely complex. The modesty resides in many of its aspects, such as the unspectacular nature of the works. Like the lira pieces, the floating sphere is small in scale. There are no colors other than those provided by the reflection of light. Most importantly, the work is impossible to master; the viewer cannot determine where the sphere will be at any given time. This is due to the slow evaporation of the water as much as to the movement of air caused by visitors’ bodies and changing temperatures. Visually, these works are affiliated to an early work, Le bain de lumière (1995), where spheres of glass captured the light and modified the outside world. There, the spheres were made of glass and thus more stable, although the water in them was not. In each of these works, modesty does not entail submission to power structures. After all, transforming people’s experience of the material world is in one sense a manifestation of utter ambition, perhaps even hubris; it happens all the time, through manipulation in advertisement and propaganda. Modifying such hubris, characteristic of great ambition, into a form of receptiveness that yields to what happens outside her own volition is the form Janssens gives to a modesty that is not submissive. The point of her modesty is the value of yielding, as distinct from oppositional polemic. This verb indicates a step following that of recoiling, which I proposed to conceptualize the push and pull of the works that waver between convex and concave, and deictic looking, the term I proposed for the bodily involvement in looking in the here-and-now. Yielding brings modesty into that wavering process. The modesty of yielding to nature—to natural light, movement of air, and evaporation of liquids—is supplemented with yet another form of modesty, the form that is most social of all. Making art that needs the viewer’s bodily, experiential, and 158

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perceptual activity to live: this is making concrete and literal the dependency on others that characterizes human existence. Art making thus proposes a model of social behavior; one that makes the political a more livable space. It is a form of recognition of others as sharing space, not in deference but in empathy. In feminist philosophy, this has been called “secondpersonhood.” In psychology, the dependency of the child on care is the most elementary form of dependency. In turn, the caretakers do not care out of charity, but because giving care acknowledges them in their own needs. No satisfaction is greater than that of parents who see in the child the reconfirmation of their care, even of their existence. No friendship is more satisfying than one based on mutuality, where first- and second-person positions are more or less equally distributed. The social dependency on others is also manifest in language, where the pronoun of the individual, “I,” is only meaningful if there is a “you” who recognizes it. I can only speak if you allow me, if you listen and speak back; I can only write if you have the kindness to read me. This is the traditional concept of deixis that I have proposed to extend to visual agency.32 In this social relation, modesty becomes an empowering quality. Recognizing that no one is alone, can act alone, or can enjoy life alone is empowering, even exhilarating when it leads to pleasurable encounters—the social version of the newness emerging from abstraction. An artist needs an audience as much as that audience needs and desires the art. Implicating the entire body, transforming the perceptual routine that all but eliminated the pleasure of seeing from our lives, and in the process affirming that she needs us to make this possible, Janssens’ modesty is more generous than submissive, playful instead of oppressive, and inherently hesitant rather than commanding. That hesitation is not a weakness; akin to Deleuzian abstraction, it is what makes constant innovation possible. Against grandiose, ambitious, and yet

32 For the philosophical background of this concept, see Code 1991. In this revaluation of modesty as yielding, I see an affiliation of Janssens’ work with that of Norwegian artist Jeannette Christensen. 159

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limited political projects, hers is one that, thanks to its modesty on all levels, impregnates the social habitat we all share. For this reason, the modesty—abstraction-based, bodily, and empowering— is, ultimately, deeply political.33

Political Bringing together the qualifiers I have used to characterize Janssens’ work, I now seek to understand it as political art, being well aware that this transforms both the general perception of her work and the general conception of what political is. In the following chapters I further qualify this assessment. My hope is that these analyses will demonstrate ways in which nonfigurative art—art that, in common parlance, we call abstract—can be highly political. There are three related concepts involved in this search. During the last decades, cultural analysis has gone through a political phase, much resisted and then subject to a backlash. This was related to identity politics, which was derogatorily dismissed as “political correctness.” It was succeeded by a moral phase, which allowed those who wished to preserve the status quo to appear still socially concerned. It fell by the wayside as moralistic. Thus it was in turn discarded in favor of an ethical phase. Since no one can object to ethical responsibility, this view is still predominant. During each of these moments, artists and scholars were struggling with questions of social responsibility while making or studying objects that claimed an artistic status independent of social movements. Even while the autonomy of art has been subject to severe doubt and critique, the need to claim a space for art and experiences unfettered by immediate concerns of the everyday has not gone away.34

33 This fundamentally political modesty distinguishes Janssens’ mist works from later, more monumental versions—most notably Olafur Eliasson’s Your Atmospheric Color Atlas (2009). 34 A thorough discussion of ethics is offered by Attridge 2004. For a view on political art beyond identity politics, see also Bennett 2005 and, in connection to large-scale world events, 2012. 160

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I would like to make a new case for political art today, and consider the ethical imperative both self-evident and insufficient in defining how such art can be specifically artistic. The discussion of the relationship between art and politics is as old as art itself, with Plato’s indictment of fiction as the primary “origin” of censorship. It has been a constant topic of debate since the Second World War, under the influence of Adorno’s vehement indictment of art “after Auschwitz.” This oft-cited but rarely contextualized aphorism remains relevant, since, as the philosopher already wrote in 1944, the war that compelled it is not over, and will not be any time soon (2003c).35 It is not necessary to go back to Plato and the subsequent history of state involvement in the arts that is still rampant today—just think of the scandal that was caused by Andres Serrano’s completely misunderstood Piss Christ.36 The 1980s moment of identity politics, crucial as it has been, is also not the best starting point. It was too specific: limited in its concerns and its geographical location in the USA, where it was bound to the ineradicable individualism of that society and finally became subject to backlash.37 Instead, somewhere in between, I wish to return to Adorno, and from there return, pre-posterously, to the baroque. First, I am interested in the role Adorno assigned to intellectuals practicing cultural criticism, which implicates my own role. Second, I wish to argue for art itself, more than assessments by its critics, to possess the capability to be a form of cultural criticism. In other words, I wish to give Janssens’ work its political relevance by characterizing it as cultural philosophy. In a

35 Many of Adorno’s relevant writings have been collected in Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader (2003a). In the context of horror-related art, I have discussed Adorno’s indictment of art apropos of Salcedo (Bal 2010). Here, in contrast to Salcedo’s mournful work, art’s pleasurable effects are central. 36 Piss Christ (1987) is a photograph of a jar of the artist’s own urine in which a small crucifix was immersed. For a more extensive discussion, see Bal 1999, 54–55. 37 In contrast, I consider the early work of Gayatri Spivak an eminent example of identity politics in a thorough sense that would still have relevance today (1987). 161

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different form, medium, and institutional setting, but no less profound, relevant, and empowering, art is politically indispensable.38 Adorno wrote: “Such critical consciousness remains subservient to culture insofar as its concern with culture distracts from the true horrors” (2003b, 155). This “distraction” is what Janssens’ acts of immersing viewers, slowing them down, and enticing them to momentarily be alone, attempt to overcome, without invoking horror per se. For this reason, activism against distraction had to be performed without even coming close to representing anything, let alone horrors. The mist works are, in this sense, encouragements to avoid distraction. But instead of exhibiting a moralism that would make such moments similar to religious meditation and selfexamination, they lead to the awareness of bliss when perception is slowed down. It is from within that practice of slowness, outside of the art experience itself, and with the support of the empowerment and the desire to transgress, that one can face horror and respond to it. Instead of either turning away from it (in distraction) or reveling in it (in the near-pornography of condescension), it becomes more appealing as well as feasible to envision the possibility and the need to act. In accordance with this position below the threshold of representation, Adorno implies the limits of the later identity politics when he writes: . . . the task of criticism must be not so much to search for the particular interest groups to which cultural phenomena are to be assigned, as to decipher the general social tendencies that are expressed in these phenomena and through which the most powerful interests realize themselves. (2003b, 158) This is why Janssens’ allusions to specific political issues have to remain oblique and subtle, as can be observed in the complexity

38 The idea that, far from illustrating ideas, art has its own philosophical power of “speech” has been most effectively argued in Van Alphen 2005. The author takes his starting point in the work of Damisch. Jürgen Habermas’ plea for selfreflection has not lost its relevance either (1972; 1986). With this claim for art I am not claiming that all art is critical, only that it can be. 162

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of Tropical Paradise, Pavillon doré, and Ciel. What Adorno calls “particular interest groups” would make the most powerful interests that inform those particular interests recede into a Kafkaesque remoteness. Adorno relentlessly points out that the limitations of self-reflection concern the need to bear witness, in other words, to go out toward the other rather than staying self-involved: “Even the most radical reflection of the mind on its own failure is limited by the fact that it remains only reflection, without altering the existence to which its failure bears witness” (160; emphasis added). Is it possible, Corps noir and Espace infini appear to ask, to deploy art not only as (self-)reflection, but simultaneously as a form of witnessing that alters the existence of what it witnesses? This possibility of witnessing seems a far cry from the enclosure in mist, the confrontation with the self upside down, or the blissful but objectless stare into infinitude. Below, I attempt to answer this objection. We can see Adorno’s indictment of poetry after Auschwitz in the light of an earlier piece called “Out of the Firing Line,” written in the fall of 1944 (2003c). As I have discussed elsewhere (Bal 2010, 64), that short text describes the permanent state of war the world is in; the way the media make this state invisible; and the global financial interests that sustain this war and even make it indispensable. He could be writing about today. Here, the feature “modesty” becomes relevant, qualifying in important ways Adorno’s alternative to attending to particular interests, namely the task of “decipher[ing] the general social tendencies that are expressed in these phenomena and through which the most powerful interests realize themselves” (2003b, 158). Because the works with coins, too, lend themselves to the misunderstanding that they target particular interest groups, I propose to see Janssens’ utterly modest work 100,000 lire as well as her transgressive Ciel in this context. The former places the particular interests within the “larger social tendencies.” It is not limited to underpaid workers. Instead it changes everyone’s perspective on value. The latter work makes the incisive statement that the sky is no one’s property—something that makes devastating sense against the contemporary backdrop of the air force of one country blackening the sky above another. Without speaking of war, she includes its illegitimacy in her modest, cheerful, and light projection. 163

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Many of her works deploy different ways of engaging these same issues, always obliquely, often even tongue-in-cheek. They are no more able to come up with a noncontradictory answer than Adorno is. Also, in distinction from much art that claims to be political, they are too modest to suggest they can be. But instead of such untenable claims, they attempt to address the situation on its own, real terms, taking advantage of the fact that art, too, is a medium. From within that inevitable collusion, Janssens’ particular brand of abstraction is needed to clear away that collusion’s nefarious effects. In one of his most famous formulations, from Negative Dialectics, Adorno blames “stylizing” for the depletion of art’s effectivity, and cautions against the possibility that art makes suffering meaningful.39 Stylized representation is so devastating because it diminishes the suffering while rendering its representation enjoyable. Stylizing, then, entails cutting off affect from meaning. In this respect, Janssens’ abstraction emerges as a tentative (“modest”) but forceful answer to Adorno’s negativity. One does not need representation, not even stylized, to be able to connect to real human concerns. The artist uses perceptual and sensate experiences to address social issues outside of the realm of representation. Adorno was speaking from the deeply traumatized post-Holocaust culture; his mood was closer to Kafka’s than to the cheerful, sometimes jubilant and even blissful one Janssens often, if not always, stages. How can such pleasurable art have a political impact worthy of Adorno? It can, because it addresses and critiques the deepest problem of representation. Janssens’ art is emphatically not utopian. It is too physical and material, too firmly anchored in the present, and too critical for that. Due to its distancing effect that serves the uncommitted, unreciprocal eye, it cannot be deployed to address issues of political importance in a straightforward manner. It would inevitably collude with what it depicts. The need for abstraction becomes more and more

39 “After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate” (Adorno 1973, 361). Strangely, this crucial text is not in the 2003 volume. 164

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blatant. Janssens offers dilution as the opposite of violently squeezing meaning out of suffering.40 In both “After Auschwitz” (1973) and “Commitment” (2003d), Adorno qualified his indictment with an argument concerning expression. This is not the self-expression of abstract expressionism but the need to hear and heed the voice of the victims. This need compelled Adorno to retract his original formulation, displacing the task from the poet to the survivor—from the “I” to the “you.” Here lies the political foundation of Janssens’ emphatically nonexpressionist brand of abstraction—its poetics of yielding. Her modesty yields to the body and voice of the other. Breaking open the I/you dyad, she lets the “third person” slip in and participate in the communicative play. That “third person,” ordinarily the object under discussion, also stands for the reality check that safeguards sanity. The sound piece Stanford Linear Accelerator (2000) is perhaps the clearest instance of a Janssens work that works with this idea. While in most works the artist yields to the viewer, who receives the freedom to enter the experiences uncoerced, in this large empty room one hears the voices of scientists working at the Stanford Accelerator, explaining things about the materiality of light. This is the “third person,” also enabled to be second—responding to the interviewer’s implied questions— and first—speaking for themselves. The viewer, thus, is not left in the isolation of total self-absorption, nor brought under the new spell of a second-personhood that might in the end become disempowering if it remains exclusive. The voices of experts come from the outside, but given what they talk about, they too are on the verge of stepping into the space of wonderment the artist has created. Meanwhile, visitors involved in enjoying the amazing experiments with light are put in a position where, if they so wish, they could engage in a conversation with highbrow scientists. Finally, the kind of art from which Janssens’ work seems to distinguish itself as political art most clearly—and again, abstraction helps her to avoid this risk radically—is the utterly particularizing, “sympathizing,” sentimentalizing art that induces commiseration.

40 See the previous note. I have addressed the problem of representation as repetition of what it indicts at some length in Bal 1996, 165–94. 165

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Compassion, without an identification that is both specific and heteropathic, leads us to an emotional realm where the fear of alterity can be made objectless and where it can be turned into a vague thrill of feel-good sentimentality about injustice, destruction, and violence. This is why Janssens is a sculptor, and why her works create space. Each visitor is inside that space, participating in what it makes possible. But no opportunity for distraction is offered; there is no representation that allows distancing.41 No representation, no expression, and no particularism; instead, we have abstraction, modesty, transgression, and empowerment. Hugely ambitious, this artist of modesty proposes to cure the depletion that comes from routine and cultural poverty, clichés and forgotten wonderment, by means of empowering bodiliness. There is no hurtful distancing or pornographic collusion, no coercion of any kind—but no free play either. Whoever has experienced this art will, I surmise, be affected by it, see and believe in other possibilities of social existence. This would be an existence where natural light is welcomed as an agent of joy, where we are confronted with the utter beauty of what we had not seen before because we had always taken it for granted. These experiences strengthen us, like nourishing food after a debilitating illness. Thus, they make us more forceful political agents—capable, willing, and committed to help build and maintain “smooth spaces.”

Baroque Imagination In Chapter 2 I characterized Janssens’ work as baroque, due to its work with scale, body, and space. At this point I must give the baroque quality of this work a clearer philosophical underpinning, and by the same token make its political thrust stand out more specifically. For this I turn to Spinoza, a seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher whose identity, if identity politics were applied to him, would be preposterously connected to the Holocaust suffering that profoundly

41 Here I am alluding to an important discussion, best approached through Bennett 2005. The ideas of this section are developed more fully in the context of a book on the representation of suffering. See Reinhardt, Edwards, and Duganne 2007. 166

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influenced Adorno’s thought, as well as to contemporary migratory culture. As a Portuguese Jew whose family fled to the Netherlands to escape the Inquisition, Spinoza developed a philosophy that was transgressive, bodily, and, if I may say so, immoderately modest. I turn to his work to articulate the concept of subjectivity that is at stake in Janssens’ work and makes it profoundly political on terms compatible with Adorno’s caution.42 The key term—and for Adorno, this term could have been the missing link—is imagination. On one level, Janssens’ work, specifically its form of generative abstraction, lets the imagination take center stage, even if the phenomena she stages before us are real and material. In contrast to Leibniz, Spinoza’s concept of the imagination is thoroughly social. In their illuminating book on Spinoza and the relevance of his ideas for today’s world, Australian philosophers Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd anchor the subjectivity that the imagination inhabits in the social realm of intersubjectivity: Intersubjectivity here rests on connections between minds which are grounded in the impinging of bodies which are both alike and different, giving rise to affects of joy and sadness, love and hate, and hope. (1999, 39)43 The social nature of intersubjectivity holds a performative promise of the improvement of the social fabric that the imaginary enactment of identification will help to build. Political art is geared to this improvement. And what could be a more effective way to do this than to fabricate fictions of slow time and infinite space within which we can open ourselves up to others and the world—bodily, with all our being? The images invented and created from within the generative abstraction of Janssens’ proposals fulfill a key function in this intersubjectivity. For images, especially when made fleetingly from within the subject—as distinct from the more stable and exterior ones

42 The appeal to Spinoza must be kept short and simple here, and merely concerns the relevance for our current discussion. 43 I refer the reader to Gatens and Lloyd 1999 for an illuminating “update.” See also the volume edited by Dimitris Vardoulakis (2011). 167

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produced by representation—allow creative forms of binding. This binding is possible on the basis of affect. As Gatens and Lloyd continue, [Spinoza maps] the complex interactions of imagination and affect which yield this common space of intersubjectivity, and the processes of imitation and identification between minds which make the fabric of social life. (1999, 39–40) The term affect that Gatens and Lloyd here juxtapose to the imagination is in fact an indispensable ingredient of it, but we must look elsewhere to find its theoretical elaboration. The term is frequently used in contemporary cultural criticism but rarely explicitly addressed, and what exactly makes the imagination such a potent agent is also never explained. This is the missing link in which art’s political potential resides.44 Affects are, in resonance with Deleuze’s view of abstraction, “intensities” (1994, 182). According to Van Alphen, Affects can arise within a person but they also come from without. They can be transmitted by the presence of another person, but also by an artwork or a (literary) text. They come from an interaction with objects, an environment, or other people. Because of its origin in interaction, one can say that the transmission of affect is social in origin, but biological and physical in effect. (2008, 23)45 Social, biological, and physical: it becomes more and more obvious why an ambitiously modest artist such as Janssens needs to experiment with spatial and material aspects of fugitive and ungraspable elements like light; why she must also become a scientist and engineer; and why, in the end, she must propose artworks, so that the three domains of the social, biological, and physical can be integrated. But for art to be able

44 The following thoughts are part of an ongoing discussion and collaboration with Australian art historian Jill Bennett, whose book I cited above, and Dutch literary and art theorist Ernst van Alphen. 45 Van Alphen’s article on affect and art is key to my understanding of political art (2008). Van Alphen is engaged in a discussion with Teresa Brennan (2004) and Silvan Tomkins (1995). 168

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to cause affect, and thus transform the subject from the outside, it is necessary to take one more crucial step: the articulation of subjectivity with materiality. This step involves, precisely, what Janssens’ work is all about: attributing agency to (non- or barely-) objects. Van Alphen develops an extensive and persuasive argument that allows for objects, such as artworks, films, or literary texts, actively to cause affect. The shift needed to make this argument is definitively to suspend individualism— which, as I have argued all along, has been Janssens’ project from the beginning. Van Alphen writes: Active matter is passive in that it is not individual. But if we reject individual intentionality as the criterion for activity (that is, if we recognize the ideological nature of that criterion), then there is no reason not to acknowledge matter and objects as possibly active. (2008, 25) If affect binds objects to the imagination in a nonindividualistic way, the affected subject will be porous, letting in and emanating outward particles of its visions. I imagine these particles to travel through the mist, or sparkle off the engraved wheels of bicycles. Aerogel, with its particles of air that transform light when the viewer looks through it, is once more a key (non)work. This agency of matter is Janssens’ interpretation of what Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus call intensities. The field of the political is activated when such affect-producing imagining touches others on terms that are neither “mine” nor “yours,” but temporarily float around—and note that this description is strictly applicable as a description of art as well. This is (art with) political agency because it is in the act of inhabiting a space where each inhabitant is porously open to the other that the political can exercise its agency. The polis is that space—the one that gave politics its name. In that polis one can only live in the company of others, bearing witness to their existence by allowing the I/you exchange, and to their plight by experiencing particles of it. In line with Spinoza, it looks a bit like this: Emotions cluster around images—traces of previous bodily modifications. The power of these images is strengthened or diminished 169

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by the dynamic social collectivities formed or disrupted by the associations our bodies form with others. (Gatens and Lloyd 1999, 40) This Spinozist vision matches Janssens’ abstraction quite precisely. This is how her work is baroque, responsive to Spinoza, and how it is political. This is how she transformed the slightly intimidating Baroque castle, that monument to architectural permanence, into a space of collective agency where the imagination and its impermanence and sociality rule. This transgression of art-historical decorum is necessary because— as Kafka and Adorno each in their own way have demonstrated— so far, we have not done a good job with that cohabitation. One important reason for this failure is time. This is clear in the everyday particularities of politics. The pace of politics is fast. The next election, rather than the future of humanity; jobs, rather than sustainable development; economic gain, rather than beautiful light are the priorities of a politics of short-term thinking. Ultimately, Janssens’ experiments with sensate experience constitute attempts to address this failure from the inside, so to speak. Instead of addressing the particulars, she modifies the general conditions from within which politics is being performed into singularity. I recall Adorno’s caution against particularity: “not . . . to search for the particular interest groups . . . as to decipher the general social tendencies that are expressed in these phenomena and through which the most powerful interests realize themselves” (2003b, 158; emphasis added). Addressing this problem involves accepting the severe critique of negative dialectics, yet refusing the paralysis that may result from a permanent inhabitation of negativity. To achieve this, Janssens, in my interpretation of her work, intensifies affect; and she does so by slowing down time to “smooth time” and expanding space into “super space.” The resulting dilution welcomes the body’s intense experience. As a consequence, narrow and oblivious individual existence can open itself up to transform its limited particularity into a porous subjectivity that is able to become permeable to the singularity of others. Clearly, this is only possible in yet another form of abstraction, one closer to the habitual meaning of that word as abstraction-from: an abstraction from routine form, outside the distraction and distance of representation. 170

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Abstracted from routine, these proposals allow extension into super space. Hence, Janssens’ art is not both abstract and political; nor is it political in spite of being abstract; it is necessarily abstract in order to be political.

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4

Serendipity

If the universe is thus progressing from a state of all but pure chance to a state of all but complete determination by law, we must suppose that there is an original, elemental, tendency of things to acquire determinate properties, to take habits. Charles Sanders Peirce1

Making political art takes all the commitments I have described so far—to the viewer in the first place; but also to space, both extended and shared; to the body and its movements; to abstraction and its generative power; to sociable behavior as modest and ambitious at the same time; and to empowerment. However, as my interpretation of this art has suggested all along, commitment alone is not enough. A logical consequence of these commitments is the loss of control as artists traditionally exercise it. Considering this it comes as no surprise that Janssens has titled one of her large exhibitions after such a positive interpretation of the loss of control, namely, serendipity. This chapter is devoted to that loss, which I consider to be positive, indeed, eminently and literally “wonder-full.” I will make my case by focusing on the concept of serendipity. The term serendipity was first used by Horace Walpole in 1754 in the meaning of accidental discovery (Merton and Barber 2004). Serendipity is a strangely enigmatic word. If you do not already know what it means it does not give itself up easily. The sound of it seems to imitate the quick footfalls of a small creature from an enchanted world, rushing toward you. When I looked it up in the thesaurus on my computer, the synonyms seemed all wrong: chance, fate, destiny,

1

Peirce 1992, 234. 173

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karma, providence, luck, fortune, coincidence, accident, kismet (the will of Allah). All these synonyms—or rather, given how approximate they are, para-synonyms—imply a worldview, a religious or secular conviction, or an otherwise metaphysical vision.2 As tends to be the case with metaphysics and religion, these visions all imply that the subject—artist or member of the audience— is powerless, and has nothing to do with the occurrence. When I looked up a definition in the same computer program, however, I got something much more precise, down-to-earth, and implicating the subject: “a natural gift for making useful discoveries by accident.” The elements of this definition (gift – natural – making – useful – discovery – accident) are all meaningful words, pregnant with interesting possibilities that are relevant for an understanding of this exhibition, and of Janssens’ art in its abstraction in general. Here, I deploy the word and its definition to demonstrate another aspect of the political potential of art. A gift is something pertaining to the subject but, as the word says, “given” to her: a talent, something that is not the result of personal merit, but nevertheless unique to that person. She can “make” that gift “useful” even if it was discovered by accident. Making implies a willful, purposeful action that, if used as a transitive verb, entails the new existence of an object, while as a copula linking a qualifier to the object, it brings into existence a feature of that object. Useful signifies something that is good beyond the self; a communal usefulness perhaps; hence, a gift to the community. The gift as talent is “natural.” The accidental qualifies the power of the gifted subject. At the same time, it qualifies that person as open to noticing things that appear to her. In this way, the term describes with precision the artist as well as the exhibition named after it. If I am to make sense of such a title I need to put the two together. So, let me try again: this artist named her exhibition after something that happened by accident, but she is the one who, according to her “natural” talent, made it useful. She does this with “things” that happen, however temporary, fleeting, barely visible, and fragile these things may be.

2

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On the history of serendipity, see Merton and Barber 2004; on the origin of the term, see page 2. On the importance of serendipity for anthropology, see Crapanzano 2010 and Spyer 2010.

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I propose to look at an exhibition that took place in the Wiels Center for Contemporary Art in Brussels in 2009 through the lens of its title, or rather, the words that compose its definition. Putting these words together with the objects exhibited I find myself drawn to a renewed exploration of a number of philosophical ideas that, I contend, this artist takes on, examines as if they, too, were discoveries made by accident, and then gives back to us in revised form: made concrete, transformed, and made useful. I also contend that this “serendipity complex” further defines abstract art. For an example, let me return for a moment to Aerogel. Janssens’ discoveries, these “happenings,” are never objective, durable, tangible “things.” Instead, the raw materials of her work that Janssens “finds,” according to serendipity’s “accidents,” are fleeting, fugitive, momentary occurrences. They hover between thing and event. According to this statement, which alludes to Austin’s comment on fire, they should be (speech) acts. This hovering of semi-eventness is the raw material out of which serendipity is made. The half-thing is what the artist discovers; the accident is the happening, the event. Aerogel—is it a thing, or an event? Serendipitously, the artist discovered that air can be made into a thing, however fragile and porous. She looked at it and saw it change before her eyes. The air-made-thing still posed its condition of total care, out of respect for its (non)substance, which is to fly away. It is air—captured in the slightest, lightest bit of matter that makes it possible to hold it. But if you do more than let it lie in your hand, with hand and slice of air barely touching and equally fragile; if you so much as touch it, it crumbles and vanishes. This fragility proposes an inflection of the notion of “precious” traditionally pertaining to art. The phrase “hovering between thing and event” has a history. As I mentioned above, it refers to what is perhaps the most successful concept of speech act theory, at least in the arts. It has been used to describe speech acts—better known under the term that indicates speech acts’ consequences: performativity. Thanks to this resonant phrase, fire has become a metaphor for a speech act. Like fire, something that is being said, in the everyday circulation of words among people, not only means something but does something: it brings about a consequence, if only the simple one that the interlocutor knows the meaning that she did not know before. But the comparison between speech acts and 175

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fire is not so innocent. It indicates the potentially huge consequence of the occurrence. Fire can destroy, purify, facilitate cooking, warm us, and even kill us. This potential makes fire (and speech acts) sometimes innocent, small, and ephemeral, at other times dangerous, harmful, joyful, or otherwise consequential. Speech act theory as J.L. Austin first developed it was criticized and discussed by many, until Derrida turned it around to contend that all language use is performative. As many speech act theorists have argued, you can declare war with words, marry someone, sacrifice someone, insult them and thus harm their identity; you can condemn a person, or an entire people, to death; and you can add a small, fugitive element to the everyday experience that builds up people’s lives. So far, I have mentioned speech act theory to enhance the way Janssens’ work affects the viewer, particularly through enticing her into recoiling, yielding, and deictic looking. In this chapter, I want to explore yet another kind of performativity at play in art, one of which Janssens’ work is an emblematic example. The theory of speech acts is indispensable to understand how Janssens works as an artist while using serendipity, and in this exhibition even takes it as the guiding principle of her work. So far, I have mentioned several exhibitions of Janssens’ work, and used two of them as my starting point, each time with a very partial view, in the two senses of that qualifier. On one hand, I only wrote about an aspect of the works, and only about some works; on the other hand, my writing, focusing on the political potential of art, was partial in the sense of biased, subjective. I contend that it is in the nature of this art that a subjective account of it is the only option, and that its nature is, precisely, to affect one’s subjectivity. Thus, subjective response becomes “objective” (if such a thing is possible) in the sense that this subjectivity—on principle, not the specific content of it—is “the truth” about the work. Considering the Venice Biennale exhibition I insisted on the bodily nature of the sculptures. This implication of the body is never a passive presence, nor is it a simple representation of a body. What I meant, and what explains the necessarily subjective response to the work, is that it makes no sense to recognize the work as a body without recognizing that, in consequence, the body of the viewer is 176

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also implicated. Either the viewer’s body is reflected, as in the Corps noir works; or it is half hidden, made hazy, blurred, and vague, as in the mist works. For the thermosensitive benches in front of the Belgian pavilion in Venice, the viewer’s body was key to the work: it left its trace, briefly but powerfully, turning an abstract monochrome into a drawing of sorts. Therefore, this kind of work is performative in the sense of speech act theory: it makes something happen. In some works the viewers are compelled to do something with their bodies, otherwise the work threatens to remain “just” a thing. Sometimes, the work might cause “accidents” to happen, as with the bicycles visitors are invited to ride. Sometimes, the visual effect engages the other senses so strongly that it becomes almost impossible to walk—your feet seem cut off from your legs due to slightly oblique mirrors along the plinth of a room. Looking at the exhibition in the Baroque castle Morsbroich, I focused on the politics of abstraction in Janssens’ work. I tried to make the case that Janssens’ work can only be called abstract—a misnomer in the best of cases—on the condition that a temporal perspective, forward-oriented, be part of the concept of abstraction. Here, taking the Wiels exhibition as my point of departure, I focus on the concept of serendipity as an overall idea for the works as they are put together. A trip through the exhibition “Serendipity” is a voyage of discovery of the miraculous nature of the everyday.3 Bodiliness, light, deixis, and recoiling; abstraction and yielding; serendipity—these themes are all connected. Bodiliness implicates the viewer in a game that is physical, democratic, and by definition leaves the precise occurrences to chance. In relation to the meaning of serendipity I outlined above, and as a further step in the development of understanding art’s agency in the political, we can translate these points of entry into Janssens work as a politics of the gift. This phrase is willfully ambiguous. It refers to her gift, as in artistic talent; the gifts offered to her by nature, the world, and chance, which it is her talent-gift to discover. The noun also refers to her gift to the viewer, who is invited to immerse herself in an

3

“Serendipity” was held at the Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels, from September 5 to December 6, 2009. The exhibition was curated by Charles Gohy. 177

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experience that reenchants the everyday by making the accidentally discovered phenomena “useful.” As with the body and the politics of abstraction, Janssens devotes her work—all of it—to this politics of the gift: specifically, she proposes to the public an experience of the marvelous in the everyday. Hence, I contend that the following interpretations hold for all of Janssens’ works. She challenges the world to do what it takes to make this art.

Gift The gift is already the fruit of collaboration. It is a talent “given” to her by nature, chance, or genetics; nurtured by those who brought her up, and further developed through her own dedication. Only in this way can a gifted person become an artist. This makes the gift already less exclusively a gift but rather a mix of something that serendipitously befell her and something she obstinately pursues—push and pull, at work in a different way. This makes the gift a bone of contention regarding the power relations in the world. Major religious traditions hang on the dilemmas of gift and destiny. To explain this briefly, let me abduct a phrase from Christian culture, one of those sayings that, in the semantic field of politics, would be called propaganda, and in advertisement, a slogan: MAN PROPOSES, GOD DISPOSES As an anonymous phrase reflecting an allegedly wise idea, this saying is meant to humble humans into submission to God. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who, in his theorizing of fantasy and projection, simply replaced the comma by a colon, has beautifully perverted it: MAN PROPOSES: GOD DISPOSES Thus he illustrated the concept of Verschiebung in Freud’s dream rhetoric. What was a tool for religious-political submission has shifted by means of punctuation only. Two juxtaposed clauses have become a main and a subordinate clause to counter subordination. The saying 178

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now becomes a self-critical device, pointing out a “disposing”—that is, deciding God is a fiction, a figment of the human imagination. Man imagines, thinks, that God disposes, arranges, decides.4 Man proposes: God disposes . . . what exactly? In the context of Janssens’ work, the object of that disposing would be the world, its light, its sounds. This suggests a view in relation to these two opposing views of the relationship between the human and something greater, more powerful, be it real or imagined, God or nature. Through that change of subject, the nature of the two verbs changes fundamentally. Janssens observes, takes, and gives; and so, we can say: NATURE PROPOSES, (WO)MAN DISPOSES Notice that the comma is back, which makes the relationship between the two clauses a juxtaposition, not a subordination. Now the power relation has been reversed entirely. Nature proposes a world in which humans are free to decide and dispose things. From predestination, the saying reverts to freedom, responsibility, and an ethics of care. From an implicit opposition (“but”) we move to conjunction: the comma now means “and.” This is a freedom that Janssens has a natural gift to exploit, in the sense of making useful. As anthropological theories of the gift have it, the gift is not for the taking but for circulation; its destiny is to be given back.5 This way Janssens makes art that is innovative and technologically savvy, not only as art but also as a series of acts that have an impact on our everyday lives. This transgression of the boundary between art and life occurs because she has sensitized us to the mobility, the transformative quality, and other miraculous appearances of, in particular, light. As if having completed an apprenticeship we return 4

5

On displacement (Verschiebung), see Freud 1900. Kaja Silverman has made a useful critical synthesis of the many theoretical contributions to this concept. See the chapter “Similarity and Contiguity” in her 1983 book The Subject of Semiotics. Lacan borrows this idea of the colon from Bertolt Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1939). I have not been able to trace the quote to a specific publication; I quote from (an old) memory. Theories of the gift abound in anthropology. See the classic work by Marcel Mauss (2000). For recent discussions, see Wyschogrod, Goux, and Boynton 2002. 179

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home with our newly acquired skills, our eyes opened to forms worth seeing. Through a virtual tour of this exhibition I want to make the case for the interpretation of serendipity as a politics of the gift. As I have argued so far, Janssens facilitates experiences of everyday phenomena that we would not notice if it was not for her inventive action of capturing it; of making it hover between thing and event. When I say “capturing,” I do not mean an act of taking possession, as a colonizing move, but rather, with the extreme care and caution a piece of aerogel requires, an act of slowing down, blowing up, or otherwise framing it to make it more accessible. The first work of the “Serendipity” exhibition, Sans titre (Martin) is a good example of such an act [fig. 4.1a–d].6 On a very large screen, through back projection, abstract geometrical images are projected at rhythms that sometimes bother or even hurt, sometimes please the eye. The white light takes different shapes, depending on the moment you enter and look at it. Shapes appear and dissolve, only to gain clarity once more. They shift from blurred to sharp, large to small, round to square, line to surface. A circle that dissolves, a square that blinks: sometimes it makes the viewer nervous, sometimes it allows the brain some rest. This work does not work through appealing to the senses or experimenting with the move from narcissistic to spacesharing mirroring. Here, there is no effort to please, only to entice the visitor to seeing forms in their bare essence. This work is an experiment with white light. A square that blinks has a somewhat violent effect; a circle that dissolves disconcerts when it disappears in a vanishing point and then follows the same trajectory in reverse; and small double circles emerge from blur into clarity. A trait becomes a square and achieves three-dimensionality. A fantastic parade, an inventory of simple forms comes by. We recognize the shapes: circles, squares, lines, cubes, and diamonds. We know them and yet we do not. In addition, it is not clear if and how this is a moving image. It seems to hover between a projection of successive slides and, through the dissolves and transformations, a kind of video. It refuses to declare its medium unambiguously. The gift to the viewer is this presentation, this making available for contemplation and absorption something we 6

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Martin is the name of the robot that is used to program the sequence and the transformations; a machine that can be seen behind the screen.

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know but never stop to become aware of. On the screen we see simple, elementary forms, as if we were attending a first geometry lesson. When the forms are sharp, there are lines that delimit them and thus enhance flatness. These are succeeded by blurs that propose volume. Although the forms are simple, the work itself is not. The artist elaborately programmed this parade of simple forms in different manifestations. At the same time she leaves its reception to chance because it changes all the time, and she cannot master the moment of the visitor’s entry. She uses technical means so sophisticated that I cannot understand them, yet she leaves them visible, so as to make it seem simple but certainly not mystical. She does not play God.

Making The phenomena the artist lays out for us can be extremely simple in themselves. However, they are never independent of their surroundings, and never quite stable. Both the work and its mode of exhibiting make clear why this is the case. Take IPE 535 (2009): a steel beam, laid out on the floor in the second gallery after Sans titre (Martin). Such a beam is usually doubly invisible: normally built into a ceiling, for example, as an element of the architecture, it can also be unnoticeable due to its routine use and usefulness. It is a typical object from everyday life. Invisible, it makes the building stable and durable. It is literally a support, without independent existence [fig. 4.2].7 But here it lies on the floor, deprived of its useful function—just a piece of metal, in its naked being, or essence. This sculpture is not of the artist’s making; after “discovering” it, she just took it, like she did with the piece of aerogel. In the next section I argue that she turns the megalomaniac transitive verb to make into a copula by adding a qualifier; instead of making it, she makes it useful. How useful does the artist make this object, by taking it out of its environment—how did she make anything at all here? In other words, what is use when it comes to art? This is a key question in thinking about art, aesthetics, and the political. 7

I use the term everyday here both in the casual sense (as a word) and in the specific, theoretical sense (as a concept). For this distinction, see the introduction to Bal 2002. On the concept of the everyday, see De Certeau 1984. A Marxist perspective is offered in Lefebvre 2003. 181

4.1a–d. Ann Veronica Janssens, Sans titre (Martin MAC 2000 Performance), 2009. Martin MAC 2000 Performance projector and projection screen, dimensions variable, approx. 9c (looped). Programming assistance by Stéphane De Ridder. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels.

4.2. Ann Veronica Janssens, IPE 535, 2009. Steel, 535 x 20 x 9 cm. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels.

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In this work, in this first step in thinking about the dialectic between use and art, the artist subtracts from usefulness. In addition to taking it out of its regular habitat, the artist has intervened in one simple manner, making it different and, compared to its original use, useless: she has polished one of the bar’s surfaces. Thus, according to Bill Brown’s theory of things (2001; 2004), she turned a thing we walk past without giving it a thought into an object we stop to consider and interrogate. It seems an almost gratuitous act, and certainly simple, although we must not forget that it involves hard labor. This singular intervention has far-reaching consequences. Firstly, and in accordance with Janssens’ primary interest, the extreme sheen creates openness to the workings of light. Since light is Janssens’ material of choice—indeed, it is the thing-event whose materiality she labors to foreground—this is already an act of appropriation. With this sheen the surface captures the light and reflects it. The sheen is so extremely glossy that the light rivals with the form of the steel. Indeed, we lose sight of the steel. The sheen mirrors, and thus brings us back to Corps noir. It is, in fact, that work’s counterpart. Half mirror, it becomes the receptive body in which the surrounding building, rather than the viewer, can reflect itself. This simple use of building material thus pays homage to the architecture out of which it has been taken, showing the inner workings of the art of building. This makes sense in light of the fact that Janssens always shows the inner workings of her own works. But at the same time this simple-seeming work pays homage to the crafts of building, and to the labor involved. In this sense it is congenial to Ciel (Fig. 3.9). All this is mobilized by a simple displacement that enables us to witness, along with the upper corners, niches, and surfaces of the ceiling, the double labor of building and taking the beam out of its use. Polishing one surface was all it took to make labor visible. The labor of polishing resonates with that of building. The sheen of the surface is extreme. It is so deep and radical that the material—formerly dull steel—seems fundamentally transformed, although it is only the surface that was reworked. We can see exactly what has happened and why (as well as how) the transformation has occurred. This transparency is consistent with the artist’s principle that the mechanisms that produce the miracle must always remain visible to the 185

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viewer. But what makes this simplest of objects so miraculous is that it is hard to tell whether the surface is added or subtracted, although according to the logic of everyday life and its labor, it must have been the latter. This visual ambiguity challenges the traditional opposition between surface and depth, one of those binary oppositions that cannot help carrying ideological clichés. It is, moreover, an ambiguity of the order of the convex–concave uncertainty we observed in Corps noir. As such, it involves the viewer’s epistemological self-assurance. Binary opposition is consistently targeted by Janssens’ work. The effort is worth it, since this structure is both the most pervasive mode of thought and the most damaging. This is due to a triple manipulation. First, in a sheer-automatic reduction, due to our desire to establish order in chaos and to understand the bewildering multiplicity of words, a host of issues, aspects, or features are reduced to two. Second, these two groups are polarized into two opposites, as far removed from each other as possible. Third, the opposites are hierarchically ordered into a positive and a negative pole. Note that none of these three manipulations is “natural” or “logical,” yet all three are so frequently applied that it is easy to assume they are. To a certain extent, we need them to survive everyday life. But they need to be questioned every once in a while, for they serve the simplistic mind. In spite of their relatively arbitrary nature, they do so much damage that attempts to undermine their logic are worth exploring.8 This is a good example of the political force of Janssens’ abstract work (if I can now call it that, on the basis of her own inflection of the term). If we simply consider the damage the reduction, polarization, and hierarchical ordering of something so simple and seemingly irrelevant as the thousands of shades of human skin color have done to human societies, this becomes immediately clear. Philosophers would perform a deconstruction of the opposition. Indeed, Jacques Derrida has consecrated much of his writings to such an endeavor. Deleuze prefers “and” to “not.” What Janssens does, in my view, is showing, without even making the stakes explicit, that what we think we can put in a hierarchical opposition remains in fact present in conjunction, depending on the sense perception mobilized: opposition is in the eye

8 186

This quick analysis of binary opposition comes from the chapter “The Value Factory” in Bal 1996, 57–86.

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of the beholder, and thus she puts an inaudible k- before “not.” The shining surface of the beam looks thicker than the other surfaces; it seems to be rising up. The sheen also looks tangible, enticing visitors to touch, to the dismay of cleaners in the museum who constantly need to wipe off fingerprints. Labor remains present.9 Thus, Janssens philosophizes, but not in words or in any other coded sign system, since her works are not representational. Instead, she argues by means of matter, attributing the status of signs to it. This turning things into signs is, according to Hubert Damisch, a form of abstraction—one from before the qualification of abstraction as art (2009a). After the distinction into four different conceptions of abstraction mapped out in the previous chapter, then, and once we have determined that what an artist such as Janssens does is a form of philosophy, we can add this larger distinction to our list. Damisch’s remarks take us back to before the distinction between abstraction as a way of thinking based on generalization, an “operative mode or as a thought-process” (2009a, 136) on the one hand, and an art form that is supposedly withdrawn from social reality on the other. Yet, as he reminds us, abstract art was not really abstracted from society, since the Nazis denounced abstract art as “Jewish” and hence “degenerate”; while in the United States it was considered “un-American,” and sometimes indicated with the xenophobic and class-conscious qualifier “Ellis Island Art” (134). So, even willy-nilly, abstract art is decidedly political—for better or for worse. In another publication of the same year, Damisch discusses the “dispute” around abstraction, and recalling the early work of Meyer Schapiro (1978), points to the impossibility of abstract art to convey a message—something both authors identify with noncommunication. Janssens intervenes in this discussion by demonstrating that communication does not need a message, nor “an explicit code or a fixed vocabulary” (Damisch 2009b, 100). The political of matter-made-sign resides elsewhere than in those crass and dangerous judgments of malevolent ignorance Damisch rightly indicts. Matter and materiality matter as such. With regard to this it is crucial to observe that the concrete noun matter, the abstraction materiality, and the verb to matter are all related. What

9

The classic deconstruction of binary opposition is Derrida 1976. The best introduction to deconstruction remains Culler 1982. 187

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matters when matter is taken out of its primary state and turned into a sign is no longer invisible, hidden by routine vision. It is taken out of the drab everyday to become a sign to notice, look at, interpret, and use. However, this sign making or signification does not lift the thing out of its materiality. The importance of matter lies in its inherent participation in reality; the reality we call “material.” Matter partakes of the real existence of the world that reassures us because it is our habitat. This is, precisely, why matter matters: it helps and forces us to deal with the world on its own terms. No God that disposes, no philosophy that severs soul from body, no hope of an afterlife can get around that simple fact: matter is here, now, and hence, it always comes first. In terms of the deictic looking I have proposed in the first chapter, matter is our “second person.” Hence, we necessarily, logically, and materially take turns when we become its second person, letting it “speak” in the first person. The mirroring sheen of the beam reminds us of that potential for exchange. Matter is also vulnerable, in our care as much as caring for us by providing food, shelter, and a visible, inhabitable world. Matter is also aesthetically vulnerable. It can remain unnoticeable or ugly, it can become burdensome when it heaps up, and it can decay. All three domains demand that we care for it. Polishing a beam to nearimpossible shininess, carefully putting it on the floor, and turning it into a precious sculpture are three ways of caring.10 The light invited by the surface has yet another consequence. The surface is so shiny that even the very flatness of it is visually questionable. It does not only seem to be rising up but also to lose its solidity; it appears to move, its edges softer, like water almost spilling over the edge of a basin. To remind you: we are looking at steel here— the hardest of metals. Thus, the piece not only draws our gaze to the architecture, craft, labor, and the collaborations among these forms of work involved in building that we would otherwise not notice. It also makes us notice the materiality of the object itself in its aesthetic potential as well as its vulnerability. Moreover, it also demonstrates 10 For a philosophy of care, see Heidegger 1962. For an in-depth discussion, see Silverman 2000. Silverman also relates it to film (2003) and to visual art (2009). 188

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the conceptual power of transformation inherent in displacement and intervention. The simple beam lying on the floor, in front of and beneath us, has become something else: the thing has become an object; the useful thing is now a useless work of art—at least, according to clichéd views of art. But while its difference from its previous state can be easily described—from dull it has become shiny—its material appearance changes to the point of questioning matter’s stability. As a result, the real difference, the innovation, is what this difference does to visual experience, and to the visibility of the building. This event is an instance of the conception of experience articulated by Bergson. As philosopher Paola Marrati asserts in a study of Bergson’s concept of innovation: “human experience arises in the broader field of experience as such out of the needs and necessities of life” (2005, 1101). What there is for subjects to select from for that making of their subjectivity, as Badiou suggests they must, is larger than the subject’s own experience.11 This idea points to the political aspect of the effect. Bergson’s view is crucial here because the possibility inherent in the light this sheen produces, and which the artist witnessed, is massively “broader” than her own subjectivity alone could accommodate. For each viewer brings her own needs and necessities to this selective experience. This makes the intervention not simply a proposal by an individual to her viewers, but a fundamental extension of their horizon and agency, to an extent that the artist can neither master nor predict, but “only” facilitate. In the process, along with making, which becomes a copula, the verb to dispose changes meaning.

Making Useful To allow for human experience to arise in the broader field of experience through the insistence of matter: this is, then, how Janssens restores usefulness, making it infinitely more complex by revitalizing something that once was useful, but then became useless 11 For a clear analysis, see Marrati 2005. For the remark on subjectivity, see Badiou 2005. 189

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when it was taken out of its use context. Even if it is her “material” of choice, however, light is not the only element that allows for such innovative, extensive, and immersive experiences in the “broader field.” As if to make that point, at least three works in the Wiels exhibition offered sonic experiences. Hence, it is clear that the artist’s interest cannot be limited to a single physical element or form of sense perception. Nor, for that matter, are any of these works sensorially singular. For, if the first of these can still allow the visitor to think the effect is sonic only, the other two merge audio with visual, tactile, and even olfactory sensations. These works are useful in enriching perception, suggesting that vision always comes with other sensations. Thus, these audio works propose another extension, of the realms of sense perception involved in an art that is denominated as “visual.” In addition to her self-coined term “super space,” then, I suggest “super sensation” as another of Janssens’ extensions. The first of these sound pieces, Untitled (Sons infinis) (2009), made in collaboration with Michel François, is a looped soundscape. It featured a sound that constantly lowered. This seems logically impossible, since it would have to continue infinitely without ever losing audibility. Yet, this was what happened: at no moment could one catch the piece in the act of heightening the pitch. It was never stable, it constantly went down, and still it remained within our reach. The experience seemed miraculous. To be immersed in something we know to be impossible is an odd sensation—both humbling and exhilarating. The lowering was a sonic illusion: a hollow sound was multiplied and superposed onto several descending octaves. The artists had been blowing into a metal tube, recorded the sound, and then put it to infinite repetition. This repeated recording displayed the hollowness of sound. This sound is decidedly nonmusical; it is as if it was just “found,” as a “gift.”12 For the second audio piece called Chambre anéchoïque (2009), a room was isolated by pieces of foam that produced absolute silence inside. This silence influenced the sensation of the skin, and it also smelled, although it was impossible to determine the smell. 12 This work is based on experiments in the 1960s and 1970s by experimental composers Roger Shepard and Jean-Claude Risset. 190

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This work insulated the visitor from the rest of the gallery but not from history. Joseph Beuys’ Plight (1986) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris left a trail of associations that harked back to darker times when binary thought led to collective insanity [fig. 4.3a–b].13 The silent room required labor, as two men pushed the wall into place after the visitor had accepted to be locked up for the duration. Like Sans titre (Martin), this work is not a particularly pleasing one. The experience is intense, but can arouse slight anxiety. The absolute silence intensifies all bodily sensations, from one’s heartbeat to swallowing, and the strong sense of smell, although one smells nothing in particular. In the third of these audio pieces, Sinus / Résonances (2009), installed on the upper floor, a rather large gallery was laid out with nothing especially exposed to the eye. In response to the disembodiment of sound through digitalization, this piece reconnects sound explicitly to architecture and the body that traverses it. Here, the sound constantly changed according to where you put your feet, in a profoundly disorienting experience where individual and environment actively interacted. The space itself seemed to have been personified; it interacted with the visitor on the basis of the principle of an I–you exchange. In other words, the visitor did something with her body, then the space answered. But, since you did what you did unreflectively, without even being aware that you were doing anything, it was as if the room itself was the “first person.” Again, this was an arrangement in space that produced a miraculous experience while being “simply” a disposition: an accidental discovery made sensational (in the literal sense of that word) and given to the viewer [fig. 4.4]. Such sonic works make visitors aware of the collaboration of the senses and the way one sense perception impacts on another. Thus we discover something about our own bodies as they interact with the world. In most works, the visual sensation is primary, but after the experience with the sonic works, we are more than ever aware that vision is never alone in its agency. 13 On Beuys’ relationship to German history, see Buchloh 2001. 191

4.3a–b. (left to right) Ann Veronica Janssens, Chambre anéchoïque, 2009. Chamber insulated with polymeric foam, wood, and sand. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels.

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4.4. Ann Veronica Janssens, Sinus / Résonances, 2009. Sound installation. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels.

As I described above, my first memory of the work Rouge 106 / bleu 132, for example, dates from a version of it mounted at the entrance of the large exhibition in the Musée d’Orsay, “At the Origins of Abstraction.” There, it might have been installed as an entrance into the exhibition in order to actualize the issue of abstraction, or even to update the historical paintings that followed in order to establish history as pre-posterous. Seeing it in Wiels, among other works by Janssens, was a very different experience. Again this work is hard to see on the photograph, which only serves here to keep it present while you read about it; indeed, if you have “seen” it you have entered into it and experienced it. For this work is totally immersive; you have to enter it to experience it at all. The notion, so seemingly out of place here, of “making useful” rests on the relationship between Janssens’ work and the notion of abstraction, still further to be explored [fig. 4.5a–b]. 194

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The lights in this open chamber “blink” without interruption, but at different speeds: red 106 times a minute, blue 132 times a minute. The light makes a halo around people for other visitors to see. Due to that halo, it is not possible to see the other person; only the space around them is visible. This is the bodily equivalent of “super space”—a “super body.” Not being able to see others, while seeing that they are there, like saints or cut-outs: this points to the key aspect of cultural interaction with people we consider “others” but simply because we decline to interact with them—to actually see them. The chamber’s corners are rounded, so that the space qua room remains invisible. And since the back wall is not visible, one walks with one’s hands stretched out. A certain experience of blindness in relation to space and people simultaneously creates an awareness of social space and what happens or does not happen there. This is the kind of temporality the idea of serendipity would predict. It is materialized through the mechanism that changes the color at extremely short intervals. The rounded ceiling corners add to the disorienting effect that so strongly impacts on the bodily sensation. In addition, since the political—including that of the history of art practices—is never far away, these rounded corners gently stab at the form of the cube as in the idea of the “white cube.” This sensation, in turn, is not limited to the body of the visitor herself, but extends to the other. The lights creating halos hollow out other people’s silhouettes but at the same time seem to be offering the future possibility of their visibility.14 These halos promise visibility but at the same time make it impossible; you see the person’s outline but not what is inside that outline. It is a band of negative light. The result of this peculiar operation of the light is that the visitor has experiences of the limits of access that visual representation gives to its represented object. This might be an ideal example of Bergson’s extensive experience; we “make” the world that we also select from.15 14 Critical thinking about the white cube became widespread after publication of O’Docherty 1976. 15 Bergson 1983, xi, 8. See also Gould 2002. Bergson’s concept of extensive experience must be understood in the context of his view of duration as continuous. This view, in turn, underlies the conception of perception in Deleuze 1986. 195

4.5a–b. (left to right) Ann Veronica Janssens, Rouge 106 / bleu 132, 2003–09. Halogen lights, colored filters, retroscreen Barrisol, and white lightabsorbing matte finishing paint, dimensions variable. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2009).

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Accidental Abstraction As I argued in the previous chapter, it is clear that Janssens’ work does not represent, and in that sense it is easy to see it as abstract. There is no representation of anything other than itself or, through reflection, of us viewers. But I also argued that it is the opposite of abstraction in the classical sense. It is utterly concrete. It always works to entice us to go through an experience or perform an action—to become co-authors of the works, and make representations in our responses to the works. This qualifies Schapiro’s definition of abstract art as Damisch rephrased it. The works are emphatically (super)spatial, and in that sense sculptural and concrete. They are also abstract, though, in a specific sense: by virtue of the relinquishing of dominance over artistic intention, they are abstracted in the sense of taken out from the artist’s intention. Thus they join what Damisch distinguished: abstraction as a form of thinking art. To call them abstract, then, is both right and paradoxical, and even more so in view of, especially, Janssens’ photographic and videographic works. For, these are straightforward, not interactive in the sense of contemporary computer technology. They are flat images, printed on paper, projected on walls, or screened on monitors. Moreover, Janssens’ photographs and video works are figurative in the strict sense of the word. Consider, for example, her video installation Eclipses (2006–09)— a sun is a sun after all. There is rarely something or someone else to be seen in or on them, but the sun is there, represented. Most of us, though, have never seen a sun “like that,” resembling this dark elliptical disk with white and blue rays. Representation based on recognition is surely not at issue. Yet, it is a very convincing image of an eclipse—we believe the representation. More importantly than the fact that much of the work can just as easily be seen as representational—Bluette as a star, Corps Noir as a distorted mirror, for example—abstraction is reputed to be apolitical, whereas I present Janssens’ work here as political. The unpacking of the definition of serendipity further analyzes this political effectivity [fig. 4.6]. The video Eclipse (2006) does not really show images of the sun obscured by the moon, however. It is an analysis of the behavior of 198

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4.6. Ann Veronica Janssens, Eclipses, 2006–09. Video installation. Several films, tube screens or projectors, dimensions variable. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2009).

the celestial body when its light is suddenly, and for a relatively brief time, no longer self-evident. It is, in this sense, yet another work that draws attention to what we do not see because it is too obvious: the sun gives us light, during the day. It embodies the quotidian in a literal way. Moreover, when it comes to visual recognition of forms, from childhood on we have drawn suns in yellow, a circle with rays emanating from it. Nothing like that here, though; we can sooner see how the image resembles an eye. In this sense, it is a hyperbolic mirror. But if this is so, then the image suggests, in a rather negative tone, that our eye obscures vision. At the same time, we realize, “speaking back,” that the sun kills the eye. It is well known that looking at an eclipse with the naked eye can make us blind. This mutuality of damage done, between the aggression of the sun and the neglect of the visible by the eye looking routinely, turns this image into a somewhat more emphatic politicizing one than usually is the case in Janssens’ work, much of which seems to be so light, in both senses of the word. 199

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But before we take this little polemical dialogue—“Your eye obscures what I make visible!”/“But you burn our eyes when we look at you!”—to be comprised of those final words, let me point out that there is more to this simple-seeming, single-channel video. Among other possible associations, Eclipse can also be considered as a form of activism against time-reckoning. Duration is not measurable in minutes, here, but in the relentless passage of the obstacle in front of our natural source of light. It demonstrates that our everyday temporality, dictated by calendars, schedules, and clocks, is a form of tyranny. However, this is not a one-line message either. This possible meaning is reinforced as well as complicated by the medium, and the potential of the work to solicit self-reflection on the medium. This is not just a sun being eclipsed; it is a digital video. Although the history of the moving image is already over a century long, in its widespread practices and its digital mediality, video is the medium of our time, available to many and put to many uses. This artist surely takes this democratic quality into account. Video is also the medium of time; of time contrived, manipulated, and offered in different, multilayered ways. This time is no longer captured, as in the very first strips of celluloid, nor even “sampled” in bits separated by cuts. It is time “framed”; made to appear real but no longer indexically attached to the real time it purportedly represents.16 Eclipse seems so simple as a moving image, slowly moving through duration, that it appears to reclaim indexicality, at least durationally, for video. Another eclipse work, Eclipse en Chine (2009), was shot during a thunderstorm. The bad weather makes the sun seem very small; the thundering clouds make the image very dramatic. The difference between these two eclipse videos already points to 16 In his 2004 book, Sean Cubitt goes so far as to identify the flicker effect of early film with the pixels of digital video. Although this identification seems to give short shrift to the technical differences, the concise formulation of the differences among a cinema that represents, one that reproduces, and one that generates makes sense, albeit not ontological sense (360). Lev Manovich uses the phrase “sampling time” (2001, 50); Garrett Stewart speaks of “framed time,” referring to the contemporary (digital) aesthetic in Hollywood cinema (2007). D.N. Rodowick (2007) offers an excellent account of the differences as well as the common elements between analog cinema and digital video. 200

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indexicality through an emphatic serendipity. Because of the bad weather, the eclipse in China yielded an image dramatic in its clouds but with a small, innocent-looking sun, while Eclipse has a dramatic sun and no clouds at all. The two videos are screened in real time and thus appear to represent their subject, the eclipse, its duration, and its visibility itself. Another work, not in the Wiels exhibition, makes this reclaiming of indexicality very convincing. This video, Oscar (2009), presents a single eight-minute shot of the famous Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer smoking a cigar. At the moment of filming he is 103 years old, but he is still active as an architect. Every day he goes to his office in Copacabana. His key word is “solidarity.” But none of that is captured in the video. Instead, the video was shot during a break in an interview.17 Niemeyer smokes a cigar and listens to someone else. Behind the old man we see glimpses of paintings, sculptures, and books. The more we look, the more Niemeyer seems to move, although he remains seated. He is tired, attentive, self-enclosed, in repose, in tension, and sometimes he looks at the viewer. At the beginning we see him in profile. Then he slowly turns, and at the end he rubs his nose. The mere fact that no edits were made foregrounds the duration, but this time not as slowness. In fact, the eight minutes pass quite quickly. The old man does not perform any actions other than smoking, but at the heart of the sense that things do happen is simply the fact that he sits there, almost majestically, yet, as a second person. He is not alone. Bound to someone in the same room, bound to the camera held by someone else, and bound to the viewer who looks at him, he is triply responsive, in what we might call a visual solidarity. This time the image itself is perfectly realistic. The abstraction concerns time. What is recorded is empty time, time between events; and the architect smoking his cigar, the smoke curling upward, fills the time with the matter of his own face. The time of this video is found time, and in this sense, it is a work of accidental abstraction.

17 The political nature of selecting such anti-spectacular footage for display becomes more explicit when we compare it to Aernout Mik’s work White Suits and Black Hats (2012), which consists of such “white moments” of inaction in combat situations from all over the world. 201

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Eclipse is as slow as the eclipse it records, making it a perfectly adequate representation of an event. However, after our consideration of Corps noir, we should examine its possible deictic quality in terms of temporality. Like cinema, video offers images moving in time—slow or fast, interrupting and integrating. But it also offers an experience of time; of time as multiple, heterogeneous: the time of haste and waiting, the time of movement and stagnation; the time of memory and of an unsettling, provisional present, with its pleasures and its violence. A complex, somewhat confusing, and challenging multitemporality characterizes video. It is through this aspect that especially purportedly abstract video work can have political effect. Explaining this contention requires a short detour. I have argued elsewhere that thinking through the state of contemporary migratory culture—where the movement of people joins forces with the movement of video images to sensitize us to different temporalities—helps engage with video art on a different, more socially engaged level. This benefits the analysis of video in terms of temporality. Video as an artistic medium is, arguably, eminently suitable to understand what such a multitemporality means experientially. The phenomenon I call multitemporality; the experience of it, heterochrony (2011).18 I contend that the concept of heterochrony is indispensable for insight in the “micropolitics” of contemporary culture because that culture is so profoundly migratory, and that this coincidence makes sense of Janssens’ deployment of video as a medium as both concrete and abstract. Video and migration are both anchored in the conceptual metaphor of movement—but a movement that cannot be taken for routine, “natural,” or realist. On the one hand, the moving image with its video-specific effects—of digital video, specifically in installation and other exhibitionary practices—multiplies, complicates, and then frames time; on the other hand, moving people generate literally as well as emotionally moving images in the temporality of the social landscape. Another video work from the “Serendipity” exhibition further clarifies this, even if it is even more abstract than Eclipse. Boule (2007) 18 This paragraph is a modified passage from Bal and Hernández-Navarro 2008. Michel Foucault favors heterotopia to heterochrony, a term he also uses. See Doane 2002, 139. 202

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4.7. Ann Veronica Janssens, Boule, 2007. Video. DVD, tube screen or projector, dimensions variable, 10c27s (looped). “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2009).

is a black-and-white video, the images consistently gray, of the floor of one of the galleries in Wiels. The floor is filmed with an extreme wideangle lens, and, as a result, what we see, slowly moving if we care to pay attention, is a huge ball [fig. 4.7]. The extremely wide angle makes the flat floor appear round, and because it is filmed very close to the floor, the motes of dust look like small marbles, like tiny versions of the same ball—mises-en-abyme. The flat, inconspicuous floor becomes a planet, and the scale of the details of the irregularities makes the dimensions completely unreadable. The image is undeniably abstract. It moves, and it takes time. The abstract time is filled in, fleshed out with the accidents of the hand-held camera. The slight movement is that of the hand, the body, through which we get access to this image. Or, is it also that of flakes of dust hovering, floating right above the floor on 203

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the level of which they are being represented? There is a consistent “accidentality” to these abstractions. An accident: something that happens, outside of any will, something that comes into the orbit of the camera held by the artist who simply seeks to capture, in the sense of being ready to take into her hands, that fragile temporality that quivers like the wings of a butterfly. Heterotemporality, in turn, can become a model for any kind of occurrence by chance. Take, for example, the 2009 work Untitled (Golden Section), a curtain of polyester film that functions as a oneway mirror. When one comes from the previous work, the reflections on it create shapes according to the visitor’s angle and position. Visitors coming from the other side produce different shapes, which are sometimes barely recognizable as human. They become personages rather than people. Since these shapes are never stable, they do not allow the contemplation necessary for any purifying sense of abstraction [fig. 4.8].19 The result of abstraction in the classical sense may be a flight into transcendence or even religious experience. It may also end up in riveting fascination with an exalted purity in the general sense, in turn available to move in directions that can be dangerous, as Damisch’s association considering the political suppression of abstract art suggested. According to such a conception of abstraction, abstract art is also inevitably the opposite of political art. Yet, the desire for purity is itself a deeply political desire that, as history teaches us time and again, must not be left to its own devices. The shapes that appear and disappear behind the one-way mirroring curtain are between abstract and figurative; they are abstract until they emerge into figuration. In this they are quite like the Deleuzian concept of abstraction: standing at the threshold between formlessness and form. That threshold (here taking the shape of a curtain) is again to be taken literally, as a space for negotiation. Janssens’ art is emphatically, polemically, abstract against purity. In the work Rouge 106 / bleu 132 she mixes colors, makes them alternate in indistinguishable proximity. Colors, shapes, and even sounds (of visitors inside it) undo its purity. It impregnates the interpenetrating sensations into the visitors’ bodies;

19 This work was made in collaboration with Michel François. 204

4.8. Ann Veronica Janssens, Untitled (Golden Section), 2009. Polyester reflecting film and 1000-watt spot. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels.

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just as the sound works it brings sense domains together. With her commitment to the everyday, the media, and the world, Janssens is most certainly not an abstract artist in this sense. These works are abstract in their ambivalence and temporal delay of figuration, yet invested in materiality and time, historical specificity and process. Their abstract quality lies, precisely, in the foregrounding of those seemingly abstract aspects. Most decisively, the abstraction here is “found”: accidentally produced by visitors who come and go, the sun that takes its time, or the sunset in Crépuscule à Jantarmantar (2008), an 18-minute video of the observatory in Jaipur, India. This observatory, an eighteenth-century structure, evidences the accidental nature of invention: contemporary with similar structures in Western countries yet erected before India was colonized by them. In addition to the heterotemporality captured in the sunset of 18 minutes filmed from the bottom of the ramp, this video also intimates the futility of individualistic claims to priority. Janssens’ work is far from expressionist. Instead, she fulfills the responsibility of her work as an artist—and the “hand” that traditionally indexes it—in her engagement with the world, going out into it instead of putting herself in the mix. If her work is abstract, it is so against abstract expressionism. There is a generosity in, for example, the one-sided mirror curtain, which gently invites the viewer inside, instead of “expressing” the artist’s own personality. This work is also without definite form, although it is materially substantial. It would thus seem to come closer to traumatic abstraction (Fer 1997). Formlessness is closer to Janssens’ works that are subject to short-term temporality, like the more stable-seeming sculptures. These works do have forms, elementary ones, but not forms that can be defined in an absolute sense; nor are they stable. They change according to the distance, angle, and perspective of the viewer, as well as the movement and intensity of daylight. Moreover, the viewer is mirrored in them, although in a reversed or distorted manner, which makes the forms time-based and transformative, and sometimes serendipitously abstract. But most importantly, these works do not have the traumatic, dark mood of the surrealist abstract works. Instead, they merge serious awareness of subjectivity with a life-enhancing sense of humor. 206

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This does not mean they are consistently cheerful. In terms of moods the works compel, sometimes one can be caught in anxiety. This anxiety may be the result of the claustrophobic sense of being locked up, as in the mist pavilion Blue, Red and Yellow, or the “silent room” with foam walls. It can also be induced by the loss of clarity, or the loss of a framework that defines one’s sense of self. The lack of frame that both that work and Rouge 106 / bleu 132 may entail can be temporarily unsettling. But this state, and the subsequent anxiety, is not durable. The material transformation of the self-image and the image of others, as well as the simple but decisive beauty of the environment, make the transition from anxiety to a new, larger satisfaction almost inevitable. The loss of frame and clarity is compensated by the opening up of new possibilities. This opening occurs because Janssens’ form of abstraction is closer to the Deleuzian view of abstraction. Given the temporal dimensions of Janssens’ work, highlighted especially in the videos, it would make sense to state that her abstraction has similarities with this view. But she offers her own version of it. For example, she reverses the temporal logic of representation. While Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract artists mainly postpone representation, Janssens absorbs its possibility but subjects it to time’s caprices; her abstraction is “found,” accidental. Time is not a line but a jumping and dancing, reverting and circling dynamic. These words evoke Jupiter (2009), another video work that further clarifies the heterotemporality. This black-and-white video is among the most literally baroque ones. The screen shows nothing more than a dancing worm—a tenaciously moving small object, between letter and curved line, between found formlessness and sign [fig. 4.9a–e]. For Deleuze and Guattari, abstraction is the exploration of an unknown world of possible forms, not yet invented. For Janssens, these possibilities would not be realized in subsequent forms that would, in turn, stabilize them, but in the way viewers temporarily and fleetingly “experience” forms that by all accounts do not exist as things “out there.” They keep hovering between thing and event. The tiny dancing worm that is the planet Jupiter—filmed, also, from the observatory in Jaipur—again brings the discussion of abstraction within the orbit of the baroque. The tiny curved line is not only formally congenial to baroque avoidance of straight lines; it is, more crucially, ambiguous 207

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in scale. If we did not know this was a planet, we might as well have considered it microscopic. Since these appearances are dynamic, there cannot even be said to be a static “thing.” The gorgeous colors and shapes that sometimes emerge in the always-changing reflections in the one-way curtain, for example, do not “exist.” They are not there, but happen, and the artist simply deploys her “natural gift” to make the accidental discovery useful; she “disposes” it, and of it. The works are at the disposal of the viewers, who are enabled to make discoveries of their own. Instead of expression, abstraction conveys intensity, according to Deleuze and Guattari. “Intense” means that “the works”—those fleeting occurrences for which Janssens has created the possibility—harbor the 208

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4.9a–e. Ann Veronica Janssens, Jupiter, 2009. Video, 11s (looped). “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels.

futurality of unknown and unseen possibilities and powers, diverging according to what visitors “make” of them. These possibilities emanate from the works to the viewer, and vice versa; they are by definition relational. They also need time to unfold. They are all equally valid; no art criticism can judge them. In order to be able to experience them, one must be blind to the habitual. The reward for this shedding of routine is the marvel of seeing shapes that, far from representing anything, appear to be just fragments of light and shade. Fragments hovering, in search of the lost whole from which they were broken off. The futural thrust to become part of a whole is the desire to be a detail, belonging to and pointing the way to understanding the whole-to-become.

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Spacetime Here, I would like to argue, lies the potential political power of such accidental abstraction. To divest oneself and others of perceptual routine is also a political act of opening up a world that had been closed off. Only then can one suspend already-known forms. Behind the oneway mirroring curtain, for example, we see a form emerge whenever someone stands or walks on the other side. Is it a blur, or will it turn out to be a vague shape of a person coming into visibility? And what does it tell us about vision that we cannot yet tell at this moment? This is the paradoxical aspect of abstraction. It indicates the limits of the visual, returning from the world to the self in the self-questioning that results from such realization. But the focus of intensity keeps migrating, from what the works emanate to the viewer’s experience of it, and back to the work that is enriched by the encounter. This is the logical consequence of the fact that there hardly are any objects. How, then, is abstraction the royal road to political art? To achieve this most difficult endeavor—abstract art with political agency—by means of the intensity that is capable of producing affect, Janssens’ art intensifies affect in the confrontation with the ephemeral, the fugitive, and the ungraspable. She does so by slowing down, thickening, and in some works, fragmenting duration. In Creative Evolution, Bergson wrote something that helps us understand in more depth what this slowing down entails. In his life-long effort to theorize life, time, and the world in terms of a continuum, Bergson wrote about the difference of what he calls the “real whole”: The systems we cut out within it [the real whole] would, properly speaking, not then be parts at all; they would be partial views of the whole. (1983, 31) As is well known, Bergson’s insistence on continuity belatedly revolutionized the current conceptions of time. He replaced measurable, dividable time with continuous duration. The tension between fragment (broken off) and detail (integrated) is like that between part and partiality in Bergson’s passage. Apply this tension to time, as Bergson is wont to do, and the key to Janssens’ work emerges. 210

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It is this tension that underlies Janssens’ art of ephemeral, continuously transforming matter, which is also an art of time. Janssens’ modest, perhaps even humble, deployment of the temporality of technology and human usage binds duration to repetition, and puts the middle-term duration between monumental long-term and cyclical short-term of the rhythm of day and night. In Time and Free Will, Bergson explains the importance of a conception of duration based on continuity (1960). The key to understanding this is Bergson’s concept of multiplicity. Partly in discussion with his British colleague and friend Bertrand Russell, who maintained the possibility to break up duration in discrete instants, Bergson distinguished two ways of considering multiplicity, or two kinds of multiplicity, to argue for the continuity of duration: . . . that of material objects, in which the conception of number is immediately applicable; and the multiplicity of states of consciousness, which cannot be regarded as numerical without the help of some symbolical representation, in which a necessary element is space. (2002, 54; emphasis in text)20 Instead of a numerical conception of duration as a succession of instants, he proposes the idea that living in duration is a form of gathering: each moment is accompanied by the memory of the preceding ones. The formulation of the distinction in this passage between countable objects (in space) and states of consciousness might wrongly suggest a phenomenological, subjectivist account. Instead, the two forms of multiplicity can be said to merge in the occurrence of perception that involves both the materiality of objects and that of the human body. This is not a mentalist, subjectivist, or phenomenological conception to the extent that Bergson considers the body as material, and perception, likewise, as a material practice. As a result, Bergson’s struggle to eliminate space from the theory of time, useful as it is to realize the gathering aspect of duration,

20 Originally published in English in Bergson 1960. This text is more readily available in Bergson 2002. The latter volume contains a good selection of Bergson’s writings and an excellent introduction. 211

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ultimately leads to a renewed sense not of time alone but of spacetime in which duration is the overarching dimension or, as Bergson would have it, medium.21 I find the conception of time and space as mediums helpful to consider Janssens’ work with timespace (as matter, fragment of the world) and in timespace (as world, into which matter is integrated). Imagine an exhibition space—real and fictitious at the same time—in which these ephemeral images and their viewers are brought together. No longer a neutral background, the space is a section of the world in which fiction and reality cannot be distinguished. In this sense, every exhibition is a piece of installation art. The proximity of the one-way mirrored curtain, multiply detailed and transforming according to serendipitous appearances, to the slowly transforming eclipse, is a case in point. Beyond the individual artworks installed in it, the space itself has something to say. Bergson calls space, like time, a medium, and this seems a helpful intervention. If the exhibition room is a space, a section or spatial fragment of the world, then the things in the room are companions of the people walking in that space; their bodies are on a par with the viewers’ bodies. They share the fantasy space within which the viewer temporarily lives together with the art objects. Moreover, Western art has selected the human body as its all-time favorite subject matter. As a result, the human body has become the measure of all things, the standard by which we gauge proportions. Hence, every work of art is—or can be measured by the standards of—a representation of the human body. What is proportionately smaller we can handle: smaller size confirms the superiority or, at least, the normalcy of the human body. What is proportionately larger threatens this selfevident status: unable to normalize such extravagant shapes, we easily consider such representations grotesque. Just remember Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726).

21 Spacetime or timespace is a term for the unity of time and space that Mikhail Bakhtin has theorized as chronotope (1996, esp. 84). On the relevance of this concept for contemporary (popular) culture, see Peeren 2008. 212

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With this in mind, look at Jupiter, and consider what happens when this anthropocentric proportion is no longer respected. I consider this exhibition a perfect example of Bergsonian spacetime, where the inextricable bond between space and time does not contaminate time with spatiality. As a consequence, narrow and oblivious individual existence can open itself up to transform its limited particularity into a porous subjectivity able to become permeated by the singularity of others. But this is not compulsory; Janssens’ art offers, as a gift, but does not impose such opening up. To understand that this is more than the result of an ethical relationship to its viewers, one last element from the definition of serendipity must be briefly explored.

By Accident If the reception of this art is not imposed, is it entirely haphazard then? This would make sense in view of the central features of serendipity: chance, accident, and contingency. The centrality of this feature is certainly no coincidence in art that by necessity has a relationship to modernism. Such a relationship is inevitable because of the abstract nature of the work, or rather, the way it proposes a new conception of abstraction. As I have suggested above, the modernist forms of abstraction (from anti-figurative to expressionist to anti-form abstraction) are all partners, but, in the end, declined. In an era that considers itself even post-postmodern, a dialogue with modernism is rather remarkable. This may be motivated by a refusal to repress the ongoing presence of modernist concerns in contemporary culture; a repression too easily accepted by that tricky prepositional prefix “post.” This indication of after should not be taken to mean “beyond,” as if all issues that modernism addressed have been dealt with and eradicated. I consider the tension between chance and the totality of reason and rational, law-directed knowledge to be such a remaining issue. In Janssens’ art, which so tenaciously explores natural phenomena within as well as outside of scientific insights, this is more than a marginal concern. Therefore, as the title of the exhibition indicates, chance, in its “tug-of-war” relationship with, cannot be ignored. More importantly, any attempt to understand modernism 213

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itself as a totality and hence, to sum it up and surpass it, “goes against the grain of what modernism ‘stands for’” (Caserio 1999, 3).22 In the face of totality, chance is both an opportunity and an obstacle, argues Caserio (6). He proposes the term tychisms (from the Greek tychè, meaning chance) for the different conceptions that not only admit chance, but also its dual capacity to preclude totality and to offer an alternative for it. In other words, tychism allows for the agency of chance. The insistence that chance is not just an occurrence, but one that has agency so that it can cause things to happen, is key to understanding its philosophical importance. William James and Charles Sanders Peirce both struggled with chance in its opposition to the totality of law. In this guise, chance is an alternative subject for the second half of our slogan: man proposes, chance disposes. Peirce contended that there can be no law without chance, indeed, that laws originate in chance. In an explanation of his three primary categories Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness (the derived concepts icon, index, and symbol are better known to most), he wrote: If the universe is thus progressing from a state of all but pure chance to a state of all but complete determination by law, we must suppose that there is an original, elemental, tendency of things to acquire determinate properties, to take habits. This is the Third or mediating element between chance, which brings forth First and original events, and law which produces sequences or Seconds. (1992, 234) The most relevant element in this discussion for Janssens’ work, however, is the contradiction these authors cannot avoid running into. Here we need to include their younger contemporary Freud, who also kept wavering between law and chance in his theorization of the psyche. On the one hand, the psyche is self-divided, and thrives on the haphazard wanderings of Eros, “which plays havoc with the attempt to render desire uniform and intelligible” (Caserio 1999, 20). On the

22 In addition to the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, I rely in this section on Caserio 1999 and Doane 2002, as well as Carlo Ginzburg’s fundamental article on the index (1980). 214

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other hand, Freud insisted just as strongly on the fact that nothing the psyche does is accidental. The psyche is both plural and unified, but not coherent. The insight that chance with its agency is always around the corner makes any attempt to prescribe how art should be and how it should be received, futile by definition. Surrendering entirely to chance, however, would be a disempowering attitude that might even lead to cynicism. But denying chance in an absolutist belief in laws risks leading to destructive sciences and totalitarian politics, which is equally disempowering. The solution is to be found in the tension between the two—a tension that is unstable and subject to a heterochronic temporality, which is productive to the extent that it provides agency and at the same time compels modesty. Here lies the potential of art, not to compel viewers to open themselves up to the potential emergence of new forms, and subsequently new social existence, but, paradoxically, to allow that to happen when chance meets habit.

The Politics of Accidental Discovery This seems a long way from the serendipity with which I began this chapter. I would like to propose, though, that this, precisely, is serendipity: the politically effective solicitation of an intensity that opens experience up to the world, beyond the fugitive moment, while that moment is the site of chance. In that durational effect the usefulness of what Janssens makes the phenomena do is embedded. The artist’s gift, if I may recall the definition, is “natural”—and to nature it returns. The artist with her gift meets nature that gives itself through the accidental discovery. Light is natural, even if humans have been able to manipulate it so that it becomes what we call “artificial” light. Light is “given” to her—to her gift as in “talent.” No work makes this interplay clearer than Odeillo (2008), a video showing the solar furnace in Odeillo, in the French Pyrenees: an almost mad installation invented to capture and then put to use the light “given” by the sun [fig. 4.10]. The shining mirror on the façade of the building ostensibly makes the architecture collapse. From the straight, proud modernist cube, a mad piece of postmodern “liquid architecture” emerges, laughing and pulling its nose at the ambition. 215

4.10. Ann Veronica Janssens, Odeillo, 2008. Video, 2c4s (looped). “Les Riffs,” Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp.

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At the same time, as an installation for the use of solar energy, it is humbly submitting to the chance appearances and strength of the sun’s light and heat. This work is serendipity incarnated, so to speak—just as strongly as is the eclipse. Is it a coincidence that the eclipsed sun looks like an eye? This evocation of the eye dramatizes the viewers’ own agency and responsibility, in the encounter with these things given to them, through the artist’s gift. This gift of agency, demonstrating that the artist takes the viewer seriously as a full partner in the endeavor, is a forcefully political act. Some works in the Wiels exhibition recalled Janssens’ political desire. On the upper floor older, explicitly political works were installed, such as the tape that was interposed between the viewer and the view of the city. The simple fact that the window gave visual access to the city in which this exhibition happened, was similar to the visibility of the machinery, the mechanisms, the structures, of other works. This, too, is part and parcel of the political thrust of art, and of Janssens’ work in particular. While this work opened up to the world in the spatial sense, another one, a newspaper ad, did so in a temporal sense, bringing history into the present. The ad read: “In the absence of light it is possible to create the brightest images within oneself.” In addition, the ad showed an image of three people pressing their fingers to their eyes, like the traditional monkeys of “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” This work, Phosphènes, a “proposition” from 1997, is extreme in its nonmateriality, as well as in its temporal brevity. It consists, simply, of an invitation. Visitors are invited to enjoy the luminous sparks that appear when one presses against the eyeballs. As Hans Theys wrote, “It is an invitation that flickers just for a moment and then withdraws again” (2003, 37). Suddenly, the importance of light is overdetermined by its figurative meaning. This ad posits the darkness of the political world and the remedy against this, at the time of the rise of extreme right-wing movements. This work from the year 1997 is suddenly, in 2010, gaining actuality again. Janssens is there to “find” the signs of the time, just by making useful her accidental discoveries. By yielding the traditional power of the artist, by transforming the transitive verb making, in a seemingly modest gesture, into making useful, the artist of serendipity—“a natural 218

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gift for making useful discoveries by accident”—shows us what art is, can be, and can do. How to do things with words, Austin said when he invented the idea of the speech act. How to do things with almost nothing, then, is a speech act theory of artistic agency. It is there, as a gift for all, to discover, make useful for yourself, and enjoy: ARTIST PROPOSES, VIEWER DISPOSES

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5

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The rich connotative content of politeia suggests that politics refers always to a condition of plurality and difference, to the human capacity for producing a world of meanings, practices, and institutions, and to the constant implication of power among us— its generation, distribution, circulation, and effects. Wendy Brown1

The locus and performance of the political in art must not be sought in the narrow space between political acts and artistic forms, but in their convergences. Writing about Janssens’ art, Theys invokes Virginia Woolf ’s “streaming images and thoughts” which “make every supposedly logically-structured argument seem paltry” (2003, 43). Because they move, change, and take time, they are streams rather than arguments. Yet, as a writer about this topic I am bound to argumentation. I argue, then, that the political agency of art is not located anywhere, but occurs when the two domains converge. In the previous chapter, such convergences were enabled by respecting chance. But chance is limitless. No line turns it into form. When chance meets the artistic ambition to change our ways of seeing, modesty, it seems, might be in trouble. For, when serendipity replaces autonomous mastery and chance is allowed in, it becomes difficult—indeed, impossible in principle—to determine a limit to what can happen, and to what is possible. As a result, we are still further removed from the boundaries Janssens has been so keen on transgressing. Boundaries recede into invisibility. Some works have this endlessness of possibility as their effect, even, if it is possible, as their

1

Brown 1995, 38. 221

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primary subject matter. This chapter is devoted to those works. They tell us that if we keep looking for the lines that constitute forms, we commit acts of negligence to what remains invisible as a consequence. And that is the kind of “political act” that art, especially Janssens’ art, is invested in countering. Instead of negligence, she proposes care. There are two further aspects to this endlessness that, so far, have only come up very briefly. One is pace, the other color. Moreover, there is another aspect that must be considered, one that is not related to the limitlessness I seek to understand, but sustains it nevertheless. This is mood. In spite of the light tone that much of Janssens work emanates and the sense of humor that enhances the lightness, not all works are joyful. To put it simply: there are works that bother, unsettle, and almost hurt. Sometimes this is due to speed. Although there is no systematic connection between pace and mood, a relation insinuates itself when we consider that not all works are based on the slow-down on which I have commented rather extensively, but on its opposite. Many of the unsettling works operate through a very fast pace, a flickering, an almost or entirely imperceptible rapidity, as if the work was in a hurry to show us every possible shape or color imaginable. But it is not out of fear of our impatience that these works are so fastpaced. In addition to being experiments in visibility, these fast works respond to the history of cinema. They invoke the flicker film, which, in the 1960s, recalled the flickering of the earliest cinematic images. This phenomenon, in turn, is alluded to in some video works that use pixels as signs rather than matter. Janssens claims this relationship in a work the image of which consists solely of “snow”: the television screen on which no image comes through.2 The second aspect, the particular use of color, is also an experiment in visibility that is responsive to an aspect of the history of art, namely the history of painting—in particular, it responds to the different conceptions of color that have been theorized throughout that history. These culminated in the early abstractionist desire to isolate and purify color. The inclusiveness is in itself multiple. On the one hand, the allusions to the history of painting are hardly selective, which makes all associations equally plausible. On the other hand, far from selecting

2 222

For this work, see the Epilogue.

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particular colors, some of these works operate through an all-inclusive “palette”: an attempt to show all possible colors, and come as close as possible to merging them without losing the distinctions between them. Here, I am interested in that inclusive, accumulative ambition not to have but to give it all. These two aspects of accumulative, multiplicity-enhancing speed of certain works can be profoundly disconcerting. When the tool to undercut mastery is not slowing down but speeding up, it is as if the comprehension through which we approach acts of looking is taken out of us. I argue that this, too, is not a negative act but a clearing of the ground that enables a seeing of “everything.” Mood has been mentioned in previous chapters, but mostly in view of the empowering participatory aspect of the art and the exhilaration this power allows. But if we consider this aspect in relation to pace and color, it returns with a vengeance. Below I consider how mood is ultimately the event of relationality with what Martin Heidegger simply calls “the world” (1962). There, indifference must be replaced with what the German philosopher terms “care,” and as I argue, such care is necessary in order for the inclusive visibility Janssens pursues to emerge and provide space, a shelter from indifference. In this chapter I argue that all three of these aspects—pace, color, and mood—concern a political desire to put in place a logic of endlessness, which entails a refusal of the line that divides as well as of the materiality of objects that hamper that endlessness. The endless additive logic of this art is its “andness”: its abstract stuttering repetition of an “and” that refuses to stop. This “andness” (but without the “endless” part) is also the guiding principle of my writing here. This chapter winds up the many threads through which abstract political art has been explored, in a consideration of that plurality itself. Following the lead of the art while attempting to explain it, I call the logic of this refusal of limits simply “andness.” Scrub To make these concerns tangible in practice, I present a key work in which they join forces. The video projection Scrub (2002) is not pleasant to watch; indeed, it is almost unbearable to look at. It is 223

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based on extremely high speed. One of Janssens’ best critics has called it a “painful bombardment of colored forms which seems to want to prevent us from thinking; it scrapes out the inside of our skull like the hollow of night” (Theys 2003, 38). Whereas form is part of its machinery, it is primarily a work on, or rather with, color. Through this work, speed and color join with the unsettling mood that must also be accounted for. In the 2009 exhibition in Wiels, Scrub was installed almost directly opposite from Rouge 106 / bleu 132, also a work both with and on color and speed. It had made an earlier appearance in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 2001, where it covered an entire wall. This video projection covers at least a large portion of a surface; in scale, it is far from modest. Moreover, the color effect emanates from the projection into the gallery space, modifying all works in its surroundings. Thus it posed a challenge to Rouge 106 / bleu 132, although it was also affiliated with the latter’s experiment with color in pace. Scrub confronts the viewer with hundreds of instantaneous images flashing by in a loop of five minutes. Still images become animated by sheer speed, and the movement is almost, but not quite, smooth. The images consist simply of colored rectangles in different sizes, all in landscape format. They pass so fast that one cannot even try to see them individually. All the effort goes into sustaining the look. If we consider the enormous amount of different colors, it is as if the entire history of painting—all real, possible, and imaginable colors of it— and all units of time, even the briefest instant of the flicker, must join forces to make the video come to life. The differences in size of the rectangles make it seem as if the work is breathing, expanding and contracting its chest, although far from smoothly. Looking at it, the viewer loses control. It seems the work does all this with the goal of depriving the viewer of the tools she normally disposes of to look. It shows many colors, but makes it impossible to see them individually; one cannot distinguish, choose, or have preferences. The viewer encounters so many instants that the mercy of dead time is obliterated. The different sizes of the rectangles bring everything into movement, but there is no way to stop and consider. This work demonstrates that the effect of looking, so frequently exhilarating, is not, or not only, produced for pleasure; at least, not 224

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immediate or superficial pleasure. The word scrub brings to mind the hospital garb doctors wear for surgery—a connotation that is frightfully close to Theys’ feeling of the inside of the skull being scraped. In slang, scrub refers to new and unexpected experiences. In digital technology, this becomes the animation of images through moving the mouse. The latter connotation is of most interest to us here. The art brings viewers to the outer limits of the possibilities of perception. The experience of going beyond even those possibilities, while often joyful, can also exasperate us. Whereas the works discussed so far solicit the desire to stay inside or in front of them for as long as possible, Scrub challenges us to stay even for the short duration of the loop. What we see and have never seen before is, first of all, intense. If this work brings us a fullness of possibility, the idea that one can have it all disappears into thin air, or thin time. This work demonstrates that the plurality of possibilities in Janssens’ work does not come from, nor fulfills, an endless greed to have it all. On the contrary: when “andness” comes too close to greed and ambition, modesty kicks in [fig. 5.1a–d]. Scrub is a key work because of its sampling of the old to create new and unexpected visions. This effect jars but also joins forces with its double allusion to the history of art. Modest in form—“just” a flat image, “only” five minutes, “simply” repetitive—it is hugely ambitious in the way it makes newness out of so much that is old, adding and accumulating the old beyond recognition. The very binary old versus new loses its meaning. Instead, a memory image joins the image of the instant. Rather than an opposition, a space between old and new opens up for “andness” to install itself. This articulation of the function of historical recall in a work so contemporary can be understood in relation to Bergson’s conception of the image and its perception. Above, I have considered Bergson’s conception of space (Ch. 2) and duration (Ch. 4). As Deleuze wrote in Bergsonism, “Bergsonian duration is, in the final analysis, defined less by succession than by coexistence” (1988, 60; emphasis added). The fact that each moment is accompanied by the memory of preceding ones does not necessarily mean that an order is preestablished between those memories. There is no rule of the chronology or logic of their remembered occurrence. The image, for Bergson, is not an object but a process of mediation. If the image 225

5.1a. (top left) Ann Veronica Janssens, Scrub, 2002. Video, 5c (looped), dimensions variable. Galerie Esther Schipper, Berlin (2008). 5.1b–d. (top right, bottom left, bottom right) Ann Veronica Janssens, Scrub, 2002. Video, 5c (looped), dimensions variable. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2009).

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is material, it is so not because of the support we tend to associate with images, but because the action of mobilizing the image, being corporeal, is material.3 Scrub presents a philosophical “andness.” In its flickering, it shows time as a succession of instants, according to, say, Bertrand Russell’s position in the polemic between him and Bergson. In the variation of scale that makes the frame expand and contract arbitrarily it shows the continuity Bergson advocated. Janssens “gathers” instants from the history of color—perhaps, depending on viewers’ interests and memories, of the history of art—and positions them in a frame, like a basket in which one puts gathered fruits, stones, leaves, or mushrooms. There, but only there, in the viewer’s basket, do these 3

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For more extensive discussions of Bergson’s ideas, see the predecessor to these volumes on political art (2010).

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5.2a–b. (left to right) Ann Veronica Janssens, Donut, 2003. Programmed light projection, dimensions variable. “Capp Street Project 20th Anniversary Exhibition,” CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco.

colors coexist. In the relationship between the video and its viewers the two conceptions of duration, incompatible as they are logically and philosophically, are made to coexist. No wonder it feels as if the instruments for understanding we are normally equipped with seem to have been taken away. This sums up Janssens’ work with interventions in the everyday, such as the cloud in the tunnel in Utrecht or the disks on the bicycle wheels. Although the result always seems to open up to unheard-of, unseen new experiences, or “scrubs,” the “things” involved in her work are small, inconspicuous, and by themselves unimportant in the end. Moreover, they are temporally limited. The tiny moments of visibility of each Scrub frame, each with its own memory images and allusions to art history, also demonstrate this. Donut (2003), named after the pastry with a similar shape, is also based on a flickering projection in a dark gallery [fig. 5.2a–b]. 229

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On the screen colors appear in fast and regular flashes. The colors appear and disappear slower than in Scrub, changing color every sixty seconds. The round shape with a hole in the middle looks a bit like an eye, or a target—or, indeed, like a donut. But it is also faster than Scrub; a lot happens in these sixty seconds. Pulsing from wider to narrower, the circles seem to attempt an escape from the screen, or at least rival in size with it. Donut’s flicker is barely visible; it looks more like a continuously moving image. Between flashes, black frames entice the viewer to mentally fabricate her own images of ripples extending after throwing a stone into the water, but this time in implausible colors. The work functions like a diffraction center. Here, as with the technically much simpler Flash Film (2000), the principle of activity is the production of complementary colors that the viewer’s brain produces in response to what she sees. Self-made colors are much more varied and richer than prescribed, “objectively” produced ones. Because the iris widens and narrows according to the light, the pulsing seems much more rapid than it actually is. These works—of which Scrub serves as the prototype here—operate through the combination of (fast) rhythm and color. Another one is Rouge 106 / bleu 132, where the flashing is continuous and, as a result, invisible. The sense of visibility and invisibility makes for an “alter-visibility” of our own making.

Art and Philosophy In his seminal article “Another View of Abstraction,” John Rajchman proposes that “we need other, lighter, less morbid ways of thinking” in order to see the vitality of abstraction today (1995, 16). For this he looks to the work of Deleuze. I speculate that Janssens’ “light” art might have satisfied him, not simply as an instance of but as a complement to the ideas he seeks in philosophy. As Rajchman makes clear, the distinctive feature of Deleuze as a philosopher is a kind of concreteness rare in that discipline. Not only did he write extensively about art, with cinema as his primary field of interest and painting as an important subject. In addition, it can also be said—and has been said—that he wrote philosophy “in” art, as the language he used; 230

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in other words, his philosophy is not “of ” cinema but “as” cinema (Marrati 2008). Something similar can be said about Deleuze’s relationship to abstract painting. In a philosophy of abstraction, concreteness may seem paradoxical, but it is not. It alerts us immediately to the untenability of that traditional opposition. Rajchman writes that Deleuze practiced philosophy as “this abstract mixing and rearranging, a great prodigious conceptual ‘And . . .’ in the midst of things and histories” (1995, 16). After traversing other, older conceptions of abstraction as “not figurative, not narrative, not illusionist, not literary”—in other words, as a great negative vagueness—Rajchman comments on Deleuze’s “stuttering ‘and . . . and . . . and . . .’” (17) as an entrance into a new, “lighter,” less forbidding contemporary conception and practice of abstraction. He writes that this stuttering is linked to “a strange an-organic vitality able to see in ‘dead’ moments other new ways of proceeding” (18). It is this accumulative notion of abstraction that I have termed “andness.” Stuttering, strange, dead: this notion does not sound so cheerful. Yet, it can lead to “new ways of proceeding” thanks to the paratactic, accumulative, inclusive structure sustained by “and.” The series, the variable, the multiple, deviations and swerves are some of the terms that grow out of that stutter, which brings “dead” moments to life. Scrub does this. The work “stutters” because its movements refuse to be smooth and so obscure the instants; yet those instants together bring to life something that does not exist outside of the stuttering. Paratactic, then, points to the work as offering an alternative to syntactic relations ruled by subordination. The structure subject–verb–object rules the powerlessness of the object; the structure main clause–conjunction– subclause establishes and maintains hierarchies of importance.4 This stuttering is not at all bound up with any medium—let alone with painting, the medium on which the discussion of abstraction has mainly focused. In line with Michel Foucault’s argument Rajchman

4

Parataxis is a structure of elements unconnected by rules of subordination. These can constitute lists, but they also have narrative valence. In Hebrew scripture, it is worth keeping the “and” in mind for all translated conjunctions, so that the logic of the narrative can be very different from the traditional interpretations (Bal 1988). 231

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writes that “modernism does not consist in an internalising reversion to the medium but, on the contrary, in an opening of the medium out from itself, to the point where it becomes ‘beside itself ’” (Rajchman 1995, 17). As a result of that centrifugal force, “this externalising ‘madness’ in modern works . . . entails a certain blindness that enables a whole art of seeing” (17). In another article, this time on Foucault’s “art of seeing,” Rajchman develops the ethical and political conditions under which acts of seeing take place (1988). Janssens brings together some of the main tenets of these two philosophers of abstraction: seeing and space. Through these two concerns she enables us to understand the “politics of ‘and’” in her work as just such stuttering madness, where blindness facilitates deictic looking. Scrub makes an extreme case—nearly unbearably so—for the attempt to render visible that which constitutes visibility; the Foucauldian examination of what it is that makes things visible. Janssens’ work with speed, here, adds a comment on the difficulty of Foucault’s project to this query. For, the moments of the visibility of the conditions of visibility, as Foucault would phrase it, lack duration. Theys has noted that, as soon as the small things added to our surroundings to make us look beyond routine have served their purpose, they are taken away again. They are not the end but the means. “Once they have served their purpose they must dissolve” (2003, 57). What remains is the memory of endless possibility—but no place where endlessness can be had. A third philosopher can participate in this conversation, brought in pre-posterously from the Baroque. Through Foucauldian “blindness” an art of seeing is proposed—indeed, compelled—that connects “the known and the lived,” as Rajchman sums up Deleuze’s homage to Foucault, in a remembrance of Spinoza (1988, 88). Here, the three philosophers who proposed new visions of vision are brought together. I have cited Spinoza’s “baroque imagination” at the end of the third chapter, in view of an ethics of intersubjectivity for which the imagination is indispensable. From Spinoza, then, we take this affectdriven, imaginative intersubjectivity. From Foucault we draw an art of seeing that sees what ordinarily remains invisible, in particular an art of seeing that makes that which makes the visual understandable, itself visible—the meaning of that blindness. From Deleuze we take the inclusiveness that enables the stutter: the incongruous possibility 232

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that the poles of binaries are both possible and, moreover, are each other’s condition of existence. A fourth philosopher comes in briefly when we look closer at the issue of mood, and how it inflects the political potential. This is Heidegger, whose “ethics of care” can be unpacked to become specific for art as well as a background to a more developed “ethical abstraction.” All four thinkers bind the known and the lived to the seen and the “seeability” of the seen. At the heart of this conjunction of ideas lies the concept of difference in repetition, of which Scrub presents an extreme and literalized instance. The rectangles are repeated; the sizes differ. This is the simplest level on which Deleuze’s Kierkegaardian conception of repetition (1994) becomes comprehensible. Perhaps to the consolation of Theys, then, new, experientially understood insight streams into the emptied skull.5 The seriality of much of Janssens’ output is relevant for this. Repetition in difference; yet without the stark focus on difference we have learned to suspect at the political moment of identity politics and the individualism that, in the end, prevents it from being politically effective. Instead, the focus is on the fundamental inclusiveness that is not undifferentiated but, on the contrary, a deployment of another kind of difference. This is a Deleuzian difference that escapes categories, oppositions, and distinctions; one that does not stand opposed to similarity but, instead, is entangled with similarity to form complex possibilities. In a sentence full of allusions to Deleuzian concepts and quotations, Rajchman writes that this difference, . . . freed from making “distinctions” or “oppositions” within or among the fixed classes of the three, [it] discovers a “complex” sort of “repetition”—a whole “complicated” time and movement that includes a non-probabilistic “nomadic” kind of chance, which no throw of categorical dice can ever abolish. (Rajchman 1995, 19)6 5 6

To make the conditions of seeing themselves visible—Foucault’s desire—is the primary reason why Janssens’ works never hide their machinery. The words in quotation marks all allude to Deleuzian concepts, while the final clause refers to Mallarmé’s poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (1913). 233

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Mixing and reassembling, bifurcating and diverging are activities implicated in such deployment of difference. Deleuze (mostly, but not always, with Guattari) has written about Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, and Bacon, as artists whose works are “abstract” in different ways; “minoritiarian” (Kafka) or “chaosmic” (Joyce), for example. What these artists have in common is the stutter, the “and.” Janssens belongs in this loose grouping, not as category but as a group in which each member offers something else, something new, to the abstraction they all share and to which each contributes another element. As viewers, readers, and thinkers, we can “gather” these differences in our abstraction basket and see the differences among the members connected by “and” in their affiliations. In Janssens’ case, it is through her work with pace and color that the “and-ness” is most readily understood.

Color Speak Duration, or the lack of it, is not always the primary difficulty in seeing Janssens’ alternative (“and”) possibilities. With or without fast speed works such as Scrub, color is in itself a visual stutter designating “and” in her art. This can be seen in different lines of Janssens’ work, where serendipity in one form or another contributes to the “andness.” Color is also subject to serendipity. Indeed, I have kept that aspect of the concept “serendipity” on hold, because it runs through Janssens’ entire work as well as through the history of abstraction. Thus, it helps to articulate how allegedly abstract art can be considered pre-posterously in relation to figuration as its prior condition, but not in an antagonistic relationship. Instead, I argue, this relationship is specifying, refining, and embracing, but on different terms. This issue is central to the art of painting and, with much less emphasis but historically just as important, sculpture. In abstract art, as indeed in the figurative art of the preceding centuries, color has been a major element. From the late Middle Ages, color became symbolic in a way we now take for granted. While before society was simply “colorful,” now specific colors came to stand for certain social groups and the moral values they sought to represent. In the classical seventeenth century, a debate began to rage, according to 234

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which drawing was manly and color was effeminate. Soon after that, the eminent scientist Isaac Newton (1642–1727) relieved the excess of interpretation when, in his Opticks (1979, orig. pub. 1704), he devised a color wheel with three primary colors: red, yellow, and blue. Janssens titled a key work after this theory, and so did her predecessor in abstraction, Kandinsky, in 1925. Barnett Newman devoted one of his rare series to these colors. Blue, Red and Yellow. For Newton, these are the primary colors: colors that can be mixed to make other colors but cannot themselves be made through mixing. Under this title Janssens presented one of her major works, shown in numerous versions (I saw it in Berlin in 2001, on the terrace of the Neue Nationalgalerie). Since the artist named a work after the Newtonian principle, we must take a closer look at what the primary colors are doing there. To me, this is especially important since, upon entering the work, the first color I saw was purple. Yet, the artist had a good reason for coming up with the title: the outside walls of the pavilion consisted of a double layer of translucent plastic in the three primary colors. The light streaming in from the outside would be blue, red, and yellow—had the room not been filled with mist that refracts and disperses the particles of light. As a result, the colors seen inside the pavilion are almost all mixed, secondary colors. They were not the product of acts of merging on a palette of paint, however. They just “happened,” through serendipity. The mist of my first encounter in Lisbon as I have described it in the prologue becomes very different when you imagine it as colored. Suddenly, it becomes possible to see yourself change color. It is even possible to stick out an arm and see it capture the purple while the rest of your body is still in the red or blue zone. But zone is the wrong word here, because the changes are not stable, depending as they do on the strength of the outside light and the position of the sun. The difference is not only due to the colors themselves but also to the fact that light can come in from outside, while in Lisbon, the room was sealed from outside influence. This makes the colored mist less confining. Rather than an inquiry into ontological and epistemological ambiguities, it becomes an attractive playground [fig. 5.3]. In 1810, Goethe further elaborated on Newton’s theory with a color theory of his own. Seeking to understand and map the perceptual effects of color, he devised an entire terminology for these effects: a 235

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5.3. Ann Veronica Janssens, Blue, Red and Yellow (photo collage), 2001. Pavilion with colored sides filled with artificial mist. Steel, colored filters on PVC, and artificial mist, 350 x 900 x 450 cm. “Light Games,” Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

language of color. Moving inward or outward, warm or cold, mobile or still: all categories of perception also became tenets of individual colors. Janssens seems to work in continuation of such ideas: she too has an interest in perception. Different from Goethe, she pushes these ideas to their limits in works that present colors as detached from any visible support. This is not only the case with the mist works but also with the “stars” discussed in Chapter 3, and with the works I present in the next section.7 Since the nineteenth century, speculation has abounded about the impact, movement, directionality, and temperature of colors. More often than not these speculations were, however polemical, 7

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On color in the Middle Ages, see Pleij 2004. On the color versus drawing debate in the classical age, see Lichtenstein 1993, 138–68. For a general volume on the science of color, see Shevell 2003.

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in continuity with these two early theories. Soon, the emotional effects of color were the objects of speculation. In abstract art, color became a prominent issue. When one attempts to eliminate all the aspects that are part of the great negative—narrative, meaning, representation, language, illusionism—meaning is the hardest to get rid of. We are semiotic animals; we function through meaning. When form is no longer the subject of mimetic representation, all that is left to gather meaning is color. Wassily Kandinsky turned color into a spiritual issue, personifying color’s agency. In painting, he transformed color from a tool for realistic rendering of objects, materials, and textures, to a vehicle for the new abstract art. Swiss painter and theorist Johannes Itten (1888–1967) included temporality in his theory of color. With the term “successive contrast” (1970, 19) he proposed that the brain creates complementary after-images of the colors we see.8 Like Donut, Janssens’ work Flash Film explores this idea. In contrast to what the title suggests, there is not a film in sight in this installation. Instead, a number of colored disks of paper are simply glued to a wall in irregular constellations. If you look at one of these colored circles for a certain time, its color begins to move. It develops a halo in a contrasting color. This doubles the number of colors you see, and blurs the line of the form. It also gains duration, staying in your vision even after you have detached your gaze from it. The idea is not only to create an inner palette by means of these after-effects, but also to play with form, in a mild polemic with Kandinsky’s view of form. The edge of the circle becomes fluid, so that the circle begins to look like a blot. It is no longer a separating line. Nor does it stay still. The halo flickers around the edges. This halo has the complementary colors Itten has theorized, so that it accumulates color (“and”). It allows colors to “interact” in Joseph Albers’ sense. But it also produces the movement that flickers so fast it is impossible to master. Both duration and movement are involved in this process, of which the viewer is the agent. The viewer makes not only her own

8

Itten taught at the Bauhaus until 1923. Kandinsky started working there a year earlier. Damisch (2009b, 45–83) discusses this issue through the art and writing of Joseph Albers (1963). Albers develops the concept of “interaction of color.” 237

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palette, but also her own film. This work demonstrates that the image is by definition in movement, as Bergson had it.9 Flash Film “argues,” visually and experientially, that this fundamental movement can be and needs to be brought into visibility. This becomes visible as a Foucauldian condition of seeing, which depends on the viewer’s willingness to look intensely and duratively. This time, it is not speed that makes the case, but still images that can be made to move only if the viewer is willing to make the effort and spend the necessary time. This suggests there is a stake involved. For now, that stake can be put simply. In these theories, color is given more and more agency in relation to a viewer who is individually engaged with it. More agency to color, more work for the viewer, but more reward for the latter, too. Structurally, the mutual embrace of the color and the viewer points to the Heideggerian notion of “care.” Speaking of Heidegger’s notion in the context of identification, Kaja Silverman formulates this mutuality as a paradox: “we are only really in the world when it is in us” (2000, 29). Heidegger rejects a simplistic conception of identification; he sees no point in either reducing the other to a clone of the self, nor in sentimental identification that leads to a loss of self. This would be one excellent reason to privilege abstraction, and explore the way in which it can promote “care” outside of any narrative identification. But regardless of that stark distinction, even within representation indifference is not the alternative to identification. Silverman formulates the resulting paradox in a manner that suggests the relevance of Janssens’ work with space. She articulates Heideggerian “care” as follows: . . . it is only by embracing other people and things that we can free them to be themselves—only by enfolding them within our psychic enclosure that we can create the space where they can emerge from concealment. (2000, 55) This sense of freedom is not indifferent but, on the contrary, is made possible for others through our care for them. Silverman comments 9

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Bergson’s theory of the image as by definition in movement is my starting point for the examination of figurative images in Bal 2013.

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on this paradox that it “is resistant to all rationalizing gestures” (55). Perhaps resolving this paradox through the solicitation of active involvement is precisely what art can do. It is in this move that art’s political agency lies. Being free of representational lures, abstract art is supremely qualified to achieve this. In contemporary art, the theories of color mentioned above remain active. So much so, that some artists reject color as being too much bound to representation. Robert Morris, an artist with whose “minimalism” Janssens’ work is surely conversant, is an example (Hernández-Navarro 2010, 43). But rather than rejecting color in a kind of purist anti-representationalism, Janssens’ radicalism operates at the other end of this tension: no more representationalist than Morris, she does not eliminate color but its support. What is more relevant, in other words, especially for other media than painting, is the way color can emerge detached from any visible support, as Janssens’ work suggests. The lack of support emphasizes the main issue: what the viewer has to do to see it, and how space participates in that creation of a “color event.” It is to the extent that she does not paint that Janssens’ experiments with color are new explorations of “andness.”

Mixing Meaning Janssens has named more works after colors than just Blue, Red and Yellow. But these other titles emphatically focus on secondary and tertiary colors. The 2007 sculpture Medium Pink Turquoise is an example (more on this work below). Yet other works have allusions to colors in their names, such as Bluette, Yellow White Study, Orange, or Scarlet. Naming works after colors, it seems to me, makes in the first place, directly or indirectly, for an allusion to the Newtonian principle, the color wheel, and subsequent thinking about color. Within an oeuvre like Janssens’, such titles draw attention to the political relevance of color. When the visible colors are not primary, the idea that they are the result of the artist mixing primary colors remains tenacious. The mixing produces another color, uniquely suitable for particular purposes. Colors “speak” when a syntax with its hierarchy remains in place, and lines, imaginary or not, continue to divide color fields into forms. 239

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When Goethe developed his extensive theory of perceptual effects, he insisted on the “temperature” of colors: the effect of warmth, brought about by red and orange, and of coldness, emanated by green and blue. Much as we take such associations with a grain of salt if they are used mechanically as translations, there is something to them that makes the associations stick in everyday parlance about colors; they have modified our experiences of them. What the early abstract artists—Kandinsky most extensively of all—were up against, then, was the idea that a color had inherent meaning, effect, and value that ran parallel to the linguistic production of meaning. Yet, while shunning the conventional ways of talking about it, they continued to search for the meanings of colors. Searching for ways out of these conventions, they looked to music and the language of poetry. Mallarmé was a major source of inspiration, with his relentless attempts to come up with words for other reasons than their meaning. There were good reasons for painters to question the conventions surrounding the meanings of colors while remaining invested in interpreting colors. Here, I confine the discussion to the semiotic untenability of fixed color meanings. The philosopher most suitable to probe this issue is Charles Sanders Peirce. In semiotic terms—that is, in terms of Peirce’s definitions as they have become vulgarized— the meaning that is usually attributed to color is based on a naively simplified semiotic notion. Colors are said to have fixed meanings on the basis of iconicity—one of three “grounds” for meaning production. In Peirce’s somewhat idiosyncratic tripartite terminology, iconicity is based on “Firstness” and, by virtue of that principle, appears inevitable, even “natural.” His definition of “Firstness” is an entrance into the understanding of color as such. Peirce wrote to a friend how she was to understand Firstness in relation to the other two categories, Secondness and Thirdness: I should define Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness thus: Firstness is the mode of being of that which is such as it is, positively and without reference to anything else. Secondness is the mode of being of that which is such as it is, with respect to a second but regardless of any third. Thirdness is the mode of being of that which is such as it is, in bringing a second and third into relation to each other. (1958, 328) 240

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This “mode of being of that which is such as it is” without reference to anything else makes it easy to believe colors have inherent values, meanings, and effects.10 However, I want to emphasize once more that Peirce’s categories are never absolute and always relate to one another. Here, as soon as the color is spoken about in terms of temperature, this inherent meaning is no longer possible. Now, it resembles its meaning, something we call iconicity. Although this is hard to consider as “positively and without reference to anything else,” Peirce categorizes iconicity as Firstness. This semiotic principle of iconicity, better known as “likeness,” “analogy,” or “similarity,” then, has long been an unquestioned basis for the interpretation of colors, whether used in or out of the context of figurative art. When abstraction became an outspoken movement in art—after having been much discussed in the decades before—there was already an entire language of color in place.11 However, these iconic readings were never so simplistic; at least, they were staggered, indirect, or connotative. Red, for example, would stand for blood, and blood for passion or violence; green for coldness, and coldness for a lack of empathy, hence, among other sentiments, envy. These symbolic meanings are not at all explainable as Firstness. If red stands for blood, this is not merely because blood “is” red; it is also the other way around. Because red is considered a “hot” color, and hot blood is a sign of passion, this interpretation is taken to be “natural.” The latter interpretation is, however, not based on iconicity. Passion makes the blood boil, as the saying has it. Regardless of the medical (in)accuracy of this saying, as the word “makes” demonstrates, the ground for meaning production is not iconicity but indexicality. The boiling blood is the result of the passion; it does not resemble it in the least. To make matters even more complicated, it is the convention of calling a passionate person hot-blooded that makes the indexical “diagnosis” appear true. This conventional character of meaning

10 Peirce was ambivalent about his relationship to visual art. On the one hand he opposed art to the logic so dear to him, and with which he identified; on the other hand, he understood the similar role of creativity in both. See Leja 2000. 11 For a history of (the language of ) abstraction, see Roque 2003. Marin systematically uses the words icon and iconic for visual throughout his work, including in his otherwise brilliant book on Caravaggio and Poussin (1995). 241

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production is Peirce’s third category, “Thirdness”—or, as a ground for meaning production, “symbolicity,” which he refers to as a kind of law or rule. Hence, the most worn interpretation of a color based on Goethe’s theory was already the result of a tangled mess of three grounds, not one. The value given to “pure” red in abstract painting, then, is a misunderstanding of meaning production, resulting from a blindness to the tendency to produce meanings all the time. This being the case, let us suspend attempts to interpret colors, and instead look at how they function. This seems all the more necessary as many critics—Louis Marin among them—have taken to using the term iconic as equivalent to visual. Like various canonical examples of theory, the famous passage where Peirce defines the three categories of signs according to their grounds has suffered from overciting and underreading. Therefore, it deserves to be quoted, first of all to remind us that there is no special affiliation between iconicity and visuality; second, to allow us to take a closer look at the implications of each category: An icon is a sign which would possess the character which renders it significant, even though its object had no existence; such as a lead-pencil streak as representing a geometrical line. An index is a sign which would, at once, lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that character if there were no interpretant. Such, for instance, is a piece of mould with a bullet-hole in it as a sign of a shot; for without the shot there would have been no hole; but there is a hole there, whether anybody has the sense to attribute it to a shot or not. A symbol is a sign which would lose the character which renders it a sign if there were no interpretant. Such is any utterance of speech which signifies what it does only by virtue of its being understood to have that signification. (quoted in Innis 1985, 9–10; emphasis in text)12 In the case of the icon, it is the sign itself that possesses its ground. Far from leading to the kind of realism that informs the equation of icon 12 Alternative publication in Peirce 1932, 304. Peirce’s term ground is close to the term code. The two cannot be equated, however, because the former is broader and less rigid than the latter. 242

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with image, the definition, based as it is on resemblance, stipulates that the object—the signified or the meaning rather than the referent— does not need to be anything at all (“even though its object had no existence”). What defines the “streak” as an icon is the fact that we give it a different name: a line. To give another example: the signature is an icon because it is self-enclosed; it owes its ontological status to nothing but itself. It is an effective sign because it enables one to lie, as Umberto Eco’s famous definition has it (1976, 7). It is an example of the index (“a piece of mould with a bullet-hole in it as a sign of a shot; for without the shot there would have been no hole”) that makes lawyers pore over a signature with a magnifying glass to assess its visual resemblance to the “authentic” signature, the guarantee of the existential origin in the body of the person it signifies. According to Peirce, no interpretant is necessary for the indexical sign to exist (although one is necessary for the sign to work as a sign). Is iconicity bound up with resemblance, analogy, conformity? Peirce does not say this. But it is a sign that possesses a quality of its meaning. In the case of a visual meaning, this can lead to resemblance if, and only if, that quality is predominantly visual, even if the sign as a whole is not. I would like to propose that mist, in Janssens’ work, foregrounds this iconicity. It is a haze, possessing the quality of opacity, and opacity is a blurriness, a vagueness that prevents clear seeing. The loss of clarity is, in this sense, an iconic meaning. Whether it makes people anxious, worried, claustrophobic, or happy is not the primary interpretation. At best it is a secondary one, a result of indexical thinking. The difference made by the coloredness of the mist due to the outside light does not inherently transform this. It may change the moods likely to emerge, but not the colored opacity. As I have been arguing all along, it is precisely the freedom of mood that comes with the loss of clarity that makes the political empowerment possible. The example Peirce gives of an icon is neither more nor less visual than the example of an index. But, without the existence of the object, one has no other standard than a presumed resemblance—one which is neither ontological nor total, and which does not overrule difference. This is why color symbolism is so hard to avoid. It is already presumed; hence, the reasoning goes in a backward direction. 243

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The question is whether the quality that renders “red” significant as “hot” converts the sign from the visual to the tactile domain.13 The important element in the definition of the icon is primarily its negativity, for it suspends the ontology of the object. This entails the notion that the “icon” is constructed or conceived by the viewer or reader, the decipherer of signs that we all are in our capacity as homo semioticus. In other words, what makes the notion of iconicity important for reading is not the fact that it leads to some preestablished, allegedly real and fixed model, but that it produces the deployment of the imagination, hence, fiction. It does so by both subjectivizing—through deixis, hence, indexicality—and culturally framing the object—hence, through symbolicity—iconically signified. We would be unable to make the “streak” signify anything if we did not live in a cultural environment where geometry and handwriting circulate and are based on lines. Janssens’ avoidance of lines in some of her color works indicates that this cultural-conventional idea is among those we lose in the experience of gaining access to “andness.” Hers is not a focus on purity.14 Hence, in addition to its negativity, the second important feature of the icon thus conceived is that it can only emerge from an underlying indexiciality as well as symbolicity. It is like the trace that the pencil leaves behind when it is guided by the hand that projects it. But it becomes a sign only when the cultural frame acknowledges this. The overlap of the categories is inherent in their definitions. It is in this sense that Peirce’s basic concepts can be useful for an analysis of visual art, not in spite of but thanks to the tangle of grounds always activated. Peirce, too, is a thinker in “andness.” I would like to contend that, the important reference to primary colors in the title of her colored mist pavilion notwithstanding, Janssens’ work with color is not focused on primary colors—even if she uses these as a starting point—but on Firstness. She deploys scientific data not because

13 See Eco’s relevant critique of the motivated signs (icon and index), which defines resemblance more on the basis of ontology than I think is warranted in terms of Peirce (1976). 14 For a brilliant theorizing account of this aspect of iconicity, see a study by Sonja Neef on handwriting (2010). 244

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science is so eminently suitable to make art. Instead, it is out of a kind of honesty to her material—light—that she seeks to stay as close as possible to Firstness, without entertaining in the least the illusion that pure Firstness is possible. Corps noir is a good case to make this clear, while it also allows us further to understand that work’s recall of figurative art. Above, I argued that this work is an allo-portrait of sorts. Here, this concept can help us understand the mixing of meaning-production as well as the privileging of Firstness. This, in turn, concerns the meaning of “care” as we have seen it above. Through this combination we can get close to the political significance of this work. Although Peirce is not particularly focused on visual signs, his brief discussion of the portrait makes the case for the need to consider grounds as aspects of signs, rather than categories of signs. If the portrait, traditionally claimed to exist by virtue of resemblance, needs the other two grounds as well, then we can safely assume that other visual artifacts do, too: We say that the portrait of a person we have not seen is convincing. So far as, on the ground merely of what I see in it, I am led to form an idea of the person it represents, it is an Icon. But, in fact, it is not a pure Icon, because I am greatly influenced by knowing that it is an effect, through the artist, caused by the original’s appearance, and is thus in a genuine Obsistent relation to that original. Besides, I know that portraits have but the slightest resemblance to their originals, except in certain conventional respects, and after a conventional scale of values, etc. (Peirce 1932, 92) Corps noir is a portrait in this mixed sense. But because its portraiture is the end of the trajectory, not the assumption where one begins the looking, the reward, so to speak, of the effort to see it is what brings iconicity to the fore. In what follows I continue to consider how Janssens’ deployments of color help understand how signs work, what they do, and how they can have an impact on the political, not in spite of their mixed nature but because of it.

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Accidental Colors In order to approach color in Janssens’ work, let us first look at a work that is colorless—or so it seems. Cocktail Sculpture (2008) is made of uncolored glass and water, two icons and symbols of colorlessness and transparency. Transparent glass, transparent water: that is all there is. According to angle, height, and light, you see or you do not see planes, volumes, or lines [fig. 5.4a–b]. The tones of blue, turquoise, and green vary according to point of view. The edges of the glass container are dark green. On the right the dark green line forming the right side edge of the basin—so important because these sides hold the water—seems interrupted; visually, the water remains inside by sheer miracle, and its volume is cut into horizontal slices. The condition of visibility is enacted, performed, and thus brought into the orbit of the viewer’s agency. This is a momentary effect, depending on the angle of vision, the amount of natural light, the height of the viewer’s body, the presence or absence of others, and more. The viewer’s agency consists in making this color effect happen while understanding how and why it happens. This agency is also required to see the possibility of seeing color. On the back left of Figure 5.4b a quarter of an arc is visible, in the colors of a rainbow: yellow, purple, deep turquoise. Try to approach it, and it will disappear. Recede, and its colors will deepen. On the narrow horizontal band at the front, different colors appear, although they too are clearly the result of a rainbow effect. Both sets of colors are deep and pure, brilliantly articulate in spite of the fluidity of the rainbow. Like Aerogel, this exceedingly simple piece captures color and gives it back. It demonstrates that color is just there, to be found, as a gift. To stand before this glass basin is extraordinarily stimulating and empowering: you can see such subtlety and harmony, but what you see is never certain, stable, or permanent. The accidental discovery is yours to make. The container holds 120 liters of water and 54 liters of paraffin oil. It is thanks to the proverbial reluctance of oil and water to mix that the volumes stay in place and the appearance of colors becomes possible. The sheer fact that this extremely simple assemblage of glass, water, and oil yields its power entirely to the fugitivity of the moment, the place of seeing, and the body of the seer makes tangible what we know but do not normally stop to realize about the tremulous quality 246

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of vision, as well as about our own temporal existence. Humans are not nouns but verbs, I once heard someone say. They are verbs, then, with an infinite capacity to inflect tenses, relationships, moods, and colors; they are verbs in deictic subjectivation. Janssens’ container adds to that perspicacious aphorism that no verb can function alone. It is bound to a subject and an object. But if the human is the verb, what or who is the subject? As in deixis, the syntactical functions in that metaphorical sentence also shift and take turns. Sometimes, the human is just an object, the light the subject, and the space the verb. However, there are always three rather than two positions involved. A bit further down the gallery, two glass plates of about 30 square centimeters are suspended at about 23 centimeters from the ground. They seem to give walls to the air. Depending on the light, you either see them or you do not. They have no color, but narrow bands of green at their edges tell you that color is needed to see them. Such accidental appearances of color are not only to be seen in the air or in water preciously captured. Janssens sometimes goes even further in her attempts to make art out of nothing. In a work that we can qualify as pertaining to a “humble” aesthetic, an oil stain on a street in Salzburg in 2000 was there for everyone to see. We see such stains all the time and consider them dirty. The artist had three thousand photocopies with the image of that stain printed, titling it Edelweiss (1999–2001). The name of the flower that grows against all odds in slits between rocks in the mountains suggests an affiliation with this leftover of human presence that manages to display colors, to produce beauty, against the odds of asphalt, oil spill, and traffic.15 Janssens made a series of photographs of it, as well as of other, similar stains. Some were streaming away, like thick serpents; others were illuminated by sunlight. The stain as a flat version of surrealist formlessness is not put on the street, but found there. There are more of these accidental color works. Some of these photographs were taken in San Francisco, for example. Each time the stain is different, a serendipitous variation of the principle of pure, natural coloring—the rainbow, but down to earth [fig. 5.5a–c]. 15 On the notion of a “humble” aesthetic, see Van Alphen 2006. However, see Chapter 3 for a qualification of this apparent humility. 247

5.4a. Ann Veronica Janssens, Cocktail Sculpture, 2008. Glass, distilled water, and paraffin oil, 120 x 60 x 60 cm. Galeria Toni Tàpies, Barcelona.

5.4b. Ann Veronica Janssens, Cocktail Sculpture, 2008. Glass, distilled water, and paraffin oil, 120 x 60 x 60 cm. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2009).

5.5a–c. (top left, bottom left, top right) Ann Veronica Janssens, Edelweiss, 1999–2001. Color photocopies of photographs of oil stains on roads. Posted up throughout the city during the exhibition “In the Absence of Light It’s Possible to Create the Brightest Images within Oneself,” October 26–December 10, 2000, Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg.

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5.6. Ann Veronica Janssens, La nuit, 2009. Video, 4c8s (looped).

Other works can barely be seen—let alone photographed. For La nuit (2009), the artist filmed the light of an emergency exit using a hand-held video camera. She captured these images during the night, when no visitor was inside the building. That emergency exit light was stable, but the camera is not. What we get to see, therefore, is enigmatically moving—abstract yet moving, because the nocturnal ambience overdetermines the slightly disquieting effect of a movement without logic, direction, or chronology. The result is a blot of an undefined color that floats around on the TV monitor [fig. 5.6]. It looks a bit like Jupiter-the-Worm, but also like a reflection on water, or on a shiny floor. But are exit signs not supposed to be green, at least in Europe? Where did that color go? Colors appear and disappear; they become visible or invisible, even, as they do here, when they leave their form behind—a form that is neither stable nor delimited by lines, but a form nonetheless. These colors are 252

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not inherent in the objects, continuous in form, or “iconic” of any association. They are what they are—hence, iconic. But iconicity is no more reliable than any other “ground.” What involves the spectator is not the color in itself but the possibility of its emergence. As soon as we question it, and ask what makes this happen, we are in the indexical realm. Colors do not exist. A privileging of Firstness is not meant to suggest they do, on the contrary. The brain “invents” colors on the basis of (mis)perception. But instead of considering this a negative insight, it should be considered extremely positive. It empowers the viewer to play, work, and invent in interaction with perception. We have seen how the simple paper disks of Flash Film made it possible to “invent” forms, movements, and colors. They gave their viewers the freedom to make their own films. What makes such visions icons is not their correspondence to alleged objects, but the fact that they possess qualities that are “in” the sign; not the disk as such but the image of it that we see, register, and transform. While this description makes color iconic, it also casts doubt on its status as a sign, and hence on the appropriateness of considering it in this Peircean category at all. What we see does not just have the qualities of itself; it “is” itself. A rose is a rose is a rose. This questioning of the sign status does not make it less important to perform the act of looking, however. It makes us aware that we “make” the colors we think we see. A Barre en verre incandescent—or incandescent glass bar—from 2009 is both colored and colorless. It is affixed to the wall, or, in a square format, it lies on the ground outside, where it can capture the light [fig. 5.7a–c]. What is it doing there? Perhaps it is inviting a movement from the viewer. In natural light, the interior shines in fluorescent green. Without natural light it becomes dull. The simple fact of this change goes to show that colors do not exist. It adds to the insight that we need light (in this case natural light) to see, in other words, to invent the color.16

16 The photograph in Figure 5.7a was taken in Kijkduin (2011), where the bar was lying on the ground. 253

5.7a. Ann Veronica Janssens, Incandescent glass bar, 2009. Bar made of incandescent Anla glass. Kijkduin Biennale, The Hague (2011).

5.7b–c. Ann Veronica Janssens, Incandescent glass bar, 2009. Bar made of incandescent Anla glass. Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp.

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Color Democracy The exceedingly nuanced, barely visible color effects we just saw constitute only one side of the deployment of color in the artist’s oeuvre—although I contend these are elemental to understanding the other works. Janssens’ works make the point that—in terms of Newton’s color wheel, in terms of Peirce’s semiotic categories, and in terms of materiality—colors are basically secondary: the viewer needs to invent them. That the outcome of that triple secondariness is so rewarding is in turn conducive to an empowering deployment of the imagination. Sometimes, the artist works emphatically and boldly with color; color can be her unique material to make “objects” consisting only of colors. In some contexts, these can rival with explicit political acts and statements. Let me now take this discussion to the other end of the spectrum—from nuanced as if whispered to bold, intrepid, almost-but-not-quite brash. On March 8, 2010, the Senate of Belgium inaugurated a Janssens sculpture, titled Medium Pink Turquoise, for permanent display on its premises. In the Senate’s collection, numerous prestigious Belgian artists are represented by paintings and sculptures. The context is national— perhaps even nationalistic. Janssens’ work, ostensibly among the sculptures, consists of two lamps mounted on posts [fig. 5.8]. The work’s title is as programmatic as the title that references the three primary colors. Its first word, medium, indicates three ways in which art has a mediating function: active, social, and setting things in movement. An artwork is not an autonomous object to be admired, it says. An artwork is not autonomous, because it can only be brought to life through participation. It is not to be admired from a distance, but through the relationship one establishes with it. Also, it is not an object but an environment, even if it only illuminates a wall. It is a medium, mediating for the creation of new experiences. That medium, continues the title, consists of colors—two colors, to be precise. Both of these are themselves dual, being the medium— that word again—of two other colors. Thus the names of these colors activate another sense of “medium”: between red and white, between green and blue. These are Newtonian secondary colors, the result of mixing. We have seen this in-betweenness at work before. The colors we see in the photograph, however, are not limited to pink and turquoise. 256

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5.8. Ann Veronica Janssens, Medium Pink Turquoise, 2007. Light projector, halogen, and dichroic filters, dimensions variable. Collection Sénat, Brussels.

We also see yellow, green, purple, red, and an endless range of inbetween colors, emerging as we look—and this in spite of the limits of the possibility to photograph the spectrum of these color nuances. “Live,” and with our own bodies moving around in front of the sculpture, the nuances are endless, and endlessly changing. The colors are mostly in between those two in-between colors the title names. Through it, through its play between colors that leads to endless nuances of color, the work keeps us in movement. Between colors already mixed, new colors are possible; there is no point or line where one color ends and the other begins. The more you try to see a demarcation, the more colors you are compelled to “invent.” That line is just not there. Here we would have, then, a literal opposition against form according to Kandinsky’s dictum: “Form . . . is nothing but the separating line between surfaces of color” (quoted in Everett 2007, 116). If this is so, then there is no form here. This would be literal, or strong formlessness. The Russian painter and theorist continues, however: “That is its 257

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[form’s] outer meaning. But it also has an inner meaning, of varying intensity” (116). In Chapter 3, I discussed the intensity of perception as the royal road to abstraction; abstraction, that is, as the locus from where intensity emanates, like mist, to touch the viewer. She, in turn, is compelled to inflect the intensity in freedom, which is the context in which it came up again in Chapter 4. Because Janssens’ gives so much freedom to the viewer in order to encourage the exercise of political agency, the “inner meaning” Kandinsky imputes to form must be suspended. This is another kind of “andness.” The works affirm that the form does not hold inner meaning. It is the viewer who makes the meaning, as Peirce’s theory makes clear. Because this is the case, the best way to make that not only understood but also happen, is to avoid form—or, to put it in positive terms, to make formlessness. Kandinsky’s outer meaning is the expression of the inner meaning. This is why he continues to create forms while resisting representation. In Janssens’ work, in contrast, and beyond Albers’ interaction of colors, the absence of demarcating lines between color surfaces makes the absence of form a tenable idea—even if some viewers may see gigantic eyes, one pink, one turquoise, in a partial face or mask that confronts us; or a huge palette where a super artist has mixed colors. If these eyes or that palette are forms, then they are forms without demarcation, without line. They are, in other words, both form and formlessness. And they do not exist; they can only emerge, in the viewer’s perception. This is an example of endless “andness.” Thus this work, installed as it is in a political institution, demonstrates and gently reminds us that, even in difficult times, there are always unlimited possibilities for renewal within the democratic realm of sharing the exciting ongoing transformation. I am assuming that the committee who voted for its purchase sensed something of its optimism about politics. Either that, or they agreed to the acquisition because the work is so nicely and innocently “abstract.” What harm can it do, what ideological influence can it exert? But that would be reckoning without Janssens’ strong commitment to make her works politically effective. The success of this ambition is regularly confirmed by the criticism devoted to it. De Zegher, for example, refers to the way 258

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Janssens intervenes in “the most difficult and resistant of maledominated areas . . . sculpture and architecture” (1998, 38). She invokes Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence that it is “the mode of spatialization, the manner of being in space, of being for space” that matters most (38). And she recalls Karl Marx’s plea for a more synesthetic mode of existence, because “the problem under capitalism was not so much the separation of the senses but rather their estrangement by property relations; vision had been reduced to the sheer ‘sense of having’” (40). What Pascal Rousseau calls “a sensory space of freedom” (2004, 31) is surely not abstract in the sense of safe but meaningless.17 Acquiring this work for the elected politicians’ ordinary experience is a way of saying that there is no sense in the “sense of having” Marx worried about. Instead, I contend that, acquired by a political body and installed in a site where politicians come and go every day, this work confronts politics with the political, whether this was the intention of the purchase or not. It is emphatic in its refusal of strident politics; it “simply” but almost brashly suggests change is possible, and that the possibilities for it are endless. And it does so through the display of endless possibilities of color, without allowing these colors to acquire a so-called iconic meaning—say, in the post-Goethian sense. Instead of proud autonomy and an insistence on sovereignty, as a state would be likely to see it, this light sculpture intimates that the effort to engage with—care for—the space we share can be rewarded with pleasure, even happiness, on the condition that we refrain from pinning down the colors. The Firstness lies there: in the impossibility to define, determine, and demarcate the colors. That is a quality of the object—the light—itself. We cannot fight over the question where white becomes yellow, or where turquoise becomes green—where one secondary color morphs into another. It confronts the usual strife of politics with a perhaps utopian (because unreadable) indivisible arrangement of the space we share. This sounds more idealistic than it is, however. For, the Spinozian intersubjectivity, emerging from connections between minds, encouraged by that in-between that always remains possible according

17 Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 482; Marx as rendered in Crary 1990, 94. 259

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to “andness,” requires an orientation toward actions. In Theys’ words, this wall shimmering with colors is a public action, hence, a political act in itself. It solicits a way of seeing where, in Rajchman’s account of Foucault’s art of seeing, “one sees something must be done without yet knowing what” (1988, 112). Foucault, Rajchman writes, saw this as an “aesthetics of existence” (112). With “andness” as our guideline, however, we could also call this an abstract ethics, or an ethical abstraction. This would be “the art of seeing outside ourselves, or seeing the ‘absence’ in our work” (117). These lofty thoughts need to be accompanied by a down-to-earth conception of the artwork, in order to save it, and its viewers, from idealism. It is technologically simple and serendipitously complex. There are two halogen lamps on tripods, one lower, the other higher, their beams directed toward the wall. As usual in Janssens’ work, which consistently avoids technological mystification, the mechanism is visible. In this she heeds Foucault’s art of seeing, which must make the conditions of visibility visible. Visitors can even switch the lamps on and off, shift them around a bit, and approach them up close. Who or what makes these endless colors, then? For all to see, dichroic filters have been placed in front of these lamps. That is all. Dichroic filters are made of glass in fixed colors. They work through interference, producing colors through the same principle as oil on water—think of the “humble aesthetic” of the Salzburg oil stains, and the miracle of the interrupted edge of the aquarium. These filters transmit only a limited wavelength of light, while other colors are reflected rather than absorbed. Because, at least in theory, the filter absorbs no energy at all, these filters give off light much better than traditional gelatin filters. The light neither fades nor burns out. But—and here is Janssens the transgressor with a wink and her “lighter” abstraction—they can also be used slightly inappropriately. She discovered that possibility by chance. Like the mirroring plinths mentioned earlier, the artist has mounted the filters with an ever-so-slight inclination on the vertical lamps. As a result— serendipitously—the reflected colors escape and illuminate the wall with an endless repertoire of colors. This endless “andness” is both miraculous and, in its mechanism, visible. Once more, Janssens experiments with “the modes of proprioception of the perceptible 260

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world,” with “the lower thresholds and far limits of perception” (Rousseau 2004, 27). I like the idea of the colors “escaping” the filter. The political body that purchased this work may not have foreseen that this sensorial play of colors proposes a new, sensory-based ecology of thought that, in turn, is based on escape from constraints. This ecology has can be seen as an analogy to the potential of the political domain, where different kinds of thinking, experiencing, and remembering become possible, impermeable to the streamlining work of consensus-based politics, because, escaping that filter, they are anchored in an endless “andness.” With this wall, an imaginary space emerges wherein everything is possible, from the perspective that something needs to be done. This is a utopian version of what Wendy Brown calls “political spaces” (1995, 50) and I call “democratic spaces” (2010, 16). Such spaces are a conditio sine qua non for a functional political domain. For Brown, the conditions for such a domain are the formation of judgments, the performance of democratic acts, and the availability of “political spaces.” Brown defines the realm of the political in terms that fit Janssens’ sculpture quite precisely: The rich connotative content of politeia suggests that politics refers always to a condition of plurality and difference, to the human capacity for producing a world of meanings, practices, and institutions, and to the constant implication of power among us— its generation, distribution, circulation, and effects. (1995, 38; emphasis in text) Janssens’ art not only presents and addresses these three conditions; her art also operates through them and results in them. She creates the conditions of possibility for people to produce a world of meanings within their knowledge that something needs to be done. This is why this art is profoundly political, not as a side effect or thematic preoccupation, but by its refusal of such thematic centering. This is how her dual notions of abstraction and the political keep converging: qua art [fig. 5.9].

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5.9. Ann Veronica Janssens, Medium Pink Turquoise, 2007. Light projector, halogen, and dichroic filters, dimensions variable. Collection Sénat, Brussels.

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5.10. Ann Veronica Janssens, Blue, Red and Yellow, 2001. Pavilion with colored sides filled with artificial mist. Steel, colored filters on PVC, and artificial mist, 350 x 900 x 450 cm. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2009).

Color for Democratic Space The end of the “Serendipity” exhibition brings us to the flat roof of the Wiels building. Against the gorgeous view of the city, we encounter Blue, Red and Yellow; that capsule of experimentation we have already contemplated. This work never ceases to amaze, as the enthusiastic screams of children or the awed silence of other visitors intimated [fig. 5.10]. In Brussels, its installation can properly be called iconic: on top of the city, on top of the world. This position invokes Peirce’s description again. This interpretation is, of course, metaphorical. But here metaphor can be seen in terms of Lakoff and Johnson’s groundbreaking discussion of the bodily “making” of metaphors (1980). The metaphorical use of “on top” is one of their examples. 263

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The position “on top” need not exist, according to Peirce’s definition. Yet it becomes thinkable and as a thought it is a quality of the object that functions as a sign. In another passage, Peirce phrases it slightly differently, and for our purposes here, more clearly: A pure icon can convey no positive or factual information; for it affords no assurance that there is any such thing in nature. But it is of the utmost value for enabling its interpreter to study what would be the character of such an object in case any such did exist. (1933, 447) This passage illuminates the potential of iconicity, the reason why Janssens has cause to privilege it, and the link between this ground for meaning making and the imagination as Spinoza articulated it. The first sentence warns us against the kind of positive interpretations that can only lead to clichés, such as that of red equaling passion and passion equaling heat. Instead, the sign—here, the sign of being on top—enables the imagination. If such a position were possible, what would it look, feel, or sound like? What would we do with and in it? The play with ungraspable colors emerging from the three primary ones, inside the pavilion, enables us to imagine what it would look like, at the other end of predictability and the tyranny of rigidity. Blue, Red and Yellow sums up the different ways in which sensation is altered by color, not because of inherent meanings colors possess but offered as “the gift of making accidental discovery useful.” There is another way iconicity can be helpful for abstraction, rather than being a hindrance to it. The lack of clarity of color matches that of form. Both make thinkable Peirce’s “character which renders [the sign] significant, even though its object had no existence.” What color and form are, or do, to each other, in the blur where both are barely readable and surely ungraspable, is to enable the emergence of both in their interconnection. What shape will emerge from those orange shades [fig. 5.11a–d]? This work is, among other issues, about the infinitely enriching possibilities—the endless “andness”—of uncertainty. It is because you are not sure where you are, who else is out there, what your next step will be, that everything becomes possible. The loss of 264

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clarity enables endless “andness.” I cannot imagine a more effective way of performing the transformation that art offers to the domain of the political where politics has not yet been able to fix us with its deadening stare. In this pavilion, the colors programmed by the primary colors escape the predictability of the latter. The colors merge, change, tinge, touch, and trace; their graded and time-bound transformations cannot be captured. Nor can they be interpreted as icons. They do not polemically reject theories of color; here, too, “andness” rules. With Newton, they acknowledge, if only through the work’s title, that primary colors—whatever their qualities—are indispensable to make others. With Goethe, they offer experiments in perception. With Itten, they take time to emerge, merge, and fade. With a keen sense of history and the political potential of revisioning it—not in the sense of falsifying but of seeing it again—Janssens makes certain (Foucauldian) ideas concrete through her (Deleuzian) form of abstraction. Thus, the questioning, à la Foucault, of “evidence”—the self-evidence of assuming that what we see is objective reality—can be explored anew every time. For Foucault, as he made clear again and again, giving evidence to the status of self-evidence is a practice of rendering acceptable what is not. Hence the importance of seeing what makes this self-evident visibility; something which is ordinarily obscured by self-evidence itself. Thus, “to see the events through which things become self-evident is to be able to see in what ways they may be intolerable or unacceptable” (Rajchman 1988, 94; emphasis in text). This can be considered a definition of criticality—that act of unpacking, unfixing what seems an organic whole. It can also be considered the most essential act of seeing. This is, at least, how Rajchman sums it up: “It is, in short, a ‘critical’ art, and it is in exercising it that Foucault would be, in Deleuze’s term, a seer or voyant” (94). However, in order to work—that is, to enable the ethical abstraction to become truly political—this fundamental criticality cannot be the privilege of a brilliant philosopher or artist. For space to be democratic, the work of, with, and through color must be collectively endorsed by each viewer in her own freedom. The most radical statement about this need for the viewer to “do” it, is visible in the functioning of Janssens’ Aquarium works. 265

5.11a–d. (top left to right, bottom left to right) Ann Veronica Janssens, Blue, Red and Yellow, 2001. Pavilion with colored sides filled with artificial mist. Steel, colored filters on PVC, and artificial mist, 350 x 900 x 450 cm. “Serendipity,” Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2009).

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This is striking, precisely, because the works are straightforward, simple, geometrical objects. A few of them are named after colors: Orange, Sweet Blue, and Scarlet (2010). As a series, the differences among them and the repetition they enact make them “Deleuzian” in thrust [fig. 5.12]. Because they are so simple of facture and visible form the need for the viewer to act in order to see them is conspicuous. Not that the viewer would know what to do, but as the quote above stated, “one sees something must be done without yet knowing what” (Rajchman 1988, 112). Because what needs to be done is nothing political, just some marginal act that is barely visible to the one performing it, the experience is all the more forceful. Orange is a simple aquarium, yet, like the colorless one discussed above, it only works in process. Half of it is filled with water. There is a pink plane. When one gets closer, to about two meters (7 feet), it turns orange. Also, lines appear, making it similar to a Mondrian painting, with two lines crossing near the edge of a square. Cultural memory, the history of painting and, particularly, the history of abstraction, assert their presence. When one comes even closer, the orange turns red, and the lines extend behind the aquarium, as does the colored plane. Mondrian is gone again. The quantity of water seems reduced to half its depth. The artwork is not mobile; it consists very simply of a sheet of fluorescent orange paper placed under the bottom glass. Nothing happens; nothing changes. Yet, it does. A moving version of Mondrian is one thing; but to see Mondrian’s colors and lines change to the point of losing their recognizable identity is quite another [fig. 5.13]. From some angles, Sweet Blue looks gray. From a medium distance the glass that holds the lower three-quarters of the aquarium disappears. Of the lines we expect to see, only the ones delimiting the upper quarter remain visible. The gray lower part floats in space, without lines, hence, without form—but also, without delimitation: a case of “andness.” Coming closer, the neatness of the rectangular basin evaporates in front of the viewer. The gray volumes displace themselves, the oblique lines that appear extend themselves. Instead of preventing “andness,” as lines are wont to do, they participate in it [fig. 5.14]. To see these three aquarium works together is disconcerting because they seem so alike at first, but they diverge wildly upon looking closely. The third work, Scarlet, is again very different. In a 268

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glass basin of 60 x 60 x 60 cm plus a pedestal 60 cm high, we have the largest of these three, although not by much. The others are 50 x 50 x 50 cm, one with a pedestal of 50 cm, the other with one of 55 cm. The differences in scale are subtle but strong. In Scarlet, it is actually the water that is colored. Half the volume of water is pink; one quarter is oil, another quarter is air. The effect is one of cubes, or lines. There is a volume in the lower part, then a larger one in the oil part. Although the lines are perfectly straight, at the corners where the oil touches the water something irregular appears, like a dragonfly that delicately lands on the water. At the back, very far or deep, rainbows appear, on different levels, in different colors, all very bright, like neon tubes. The highest row is purple, pink, and yellow. Below it, we see orange, green, and two shades of blue. These colors are all very intense and sparkling. And yet, their visibility depends on the distance and angle from which the viewer approaches them. The conditions of visibility are themselves the subject of showing [fig. 5.15]. Through experiences like these, one is not compelled to go out on the street and protest this or that political decision. As many of these works drive home, it is not up to an artist to tell people what to do. This is the political meaning of the modesty discussed in Chapter 3. Instead, it is through the experiences the artworks propose that the possibility to act and the resulting subtlety and complexity of perception experience become visible. This is a strictly Foucauldian experience: one sees there is a need to act; if not, one does not see anything. Once that act is performed, the empowering openness to choose a way to act becomes visible. Abstraction, not in spite of but because of its refusal to produce meaning, proposes the spectrum—taken literally in these works—of endless possibilities to choose according to Deleuze, exercise the imagination according to Spinoza, and act out the embrace of the Heideggerian paradox. All this we can do in a “democratic space” in which color appears and disappears, showing us how the world, the image, and what we can see is subject to movement, choice, and an endless “andness.”

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5.12. Ann Veronica Janssens, Scarlet, Sweet Blue, and Orange (installation shot), 2010. Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp.

5.13. Ann Veronica Janssens, Orange, 2010. Glass tank, paraffin oil, colored screen-print, and wooden base, 50 x 50 x 115 cm. Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp.

5.14. Ann Veronica Janssens, Sweet Blue, 2010. Glass tank, paraffin oil, colored screen-print, and wooden base, 50 x 50 x 115 cm. Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp.

5.15. Ann Veronica Janssens, Scarlet, 2010. Glass tank, paraffin oil, distillated water, red pigments, and wooden base, 60 x 60 x 120 cm. Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp.

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On Being in the Mood In theater and film, we are used to speaking of moods. A film or play can leave one sad, happy, gloomy, fearful, or exhilarated. So far I have only brought in theatricality in relation to experimental, contemporary theater, and film in experimental modes such as flicker film and experiments with movements created by stills. However, the issue of mood calls in the entire history of theater, from the classical binary between comedy and tragedy to later genres such as melodrama. Such associations suggest that moods are being produced by means of fiction and its tools. Deploying such tools would go against the grain of Janssens’ adherence to the viewer’s freedom. Instead, the intensity of affect impacts on the viewer but is “semantically” unspecific. Still, I also argued that works such as Scrub can be painful, and that the mist works are not necessarily cheerful; they can make people feel anxious, insecure, or even unsafe, as if they are being suffocated. Unsafe, perhaps; yet at the same time excited, as a video of a visit of children to one of the colored mist rooms suggests.18 This combination is the point. First of all, in distinction from the tradition of theater and film in which mood is such an important element and is conducive to identification, mood is the medium here, not the object of representation. If we must engage with art on the mode of affect rather than the kind of taxonomies on which the divisions of the humanities rest, I am now compelled to spell out what this imperative entails, and why it must by definition transcend as well as work through the different disciplinary domains to which the work appeals. The relation between mood and affect is analytically crucial. According to theories of affect that are derived not from Deleuze but from other theories of affect (of which the school of Sylvan Tomkins is the most widely known), affect is an umbrella term for a range of emotional states of which mood is one. In this way of thinking, mood is the most open of the entire range of affects, yet the most pervasive

18 See https://vimeo.com/62152770 (last accessed May 4, 2012). This video by Marta Liaño, Are You Experienced? (2009), shows the “visita guiada” of the Colegio Carmelitas to the installation at the Espai d’Art Contemporani in Castelló, Spain. 275

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and invasive one. To understand how these concepts interconnect, let me cite one example. Affect, literary scholar Charles Altieri writes in a remarkably negative definition, . . . comprises the range of mental states where an agent’s activity cannot be adequately handled in terms of either sensations or beliefs but requires attending to how he or she offers expressions of those states. (2003, 47; emphasis added)19 Affects, he continues, “are ways of being moved that supplement sensation with at least a minimal degree of imaginative projection” (47). Altieri then proceeds to specify the affects according to a hierarchical range spanning from sensation to passion: Feelings are elemental affective states characterized by an imaginative engagement in the immediate processes of sensation. Moods are modes of feeling where the sense of subjectivity becomes diffuse and sensation merges into something close to atmosphere, something that seems to pervade an entire scene or situation. Emotions are affects that involve the construction of attitudes that typically establish a particular cause and so situate the agent within a narrative . . . Finally, passions are emotions within which we project significant stakes for the identity that they make possible. (48; emphasis added) I have emphasized the terms of the taxonomy, which are hierarchically organized. From this short and reluctantly proposed taxonomy it is clear that mood truly is the affective domain where artwork and viewer or reader can most easily share the diffuse sense of subjectivity. As I have been arguing, however, the efficacy of something like mood in art depends on its reluctance to be specific. The specificity of mood in relation to other affective categories perhaps requires some more reflection. Sometimes, mood seems to be almost equated with affect—except that mood has “semantic” content 19 The definition is remarkable in its negativity because the book in which it appears is in its entirety devoted to promoting the affects as an aesthetic. 276

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while affect stays aloof of it. Affect, I propose, entails mood but does not dictate it. Take the example of a mood that Janssens’ work brings forth only seldomly: anxiety. Silverman writes about anxiety when she asserts that we can assume our finitude affectively, “by way of a mood rather than abstract knowledge” (2003, 325). In the context of my search for ways Janssens’ art pleads for “andness,” I am interested in Silverman’s nuances here. In connection to her own focus in this article, facing death in war, she offers an illuminating distinction between fear and anxiety, derived from her reading of, mainly, Heidegger’s Being and Time. This distinction can help us understand two things. First, it explains why mood is more effective than the other affects, such as, in particular, emotion. Second, it helps us understand how some of Janssens’ works may arouse anxiety, but not fear. Silverman writes: Fear is the affect through which we apprehend the “nothing” in the mode of a turning away. Anxiety is the affect through which we apprehend it in the mode of a turning toward. Fear fails to reconcile us to the nothing, because it always represents the attempt to specify or concretize the nothing. Anxiety, on the other hand, “attunes” us to it, because it is the affect par excellence of the indeterminate. (2003, 325; emphasis added)20 In terms of the gestural tradition in classical theater, this can easily be “decoded”: fear makes the actor cover her eyes and turn away. This only requires iconographic reading. In contrast, anxiety is less readable. It helps viewers to “attune”—in mood—to the source of the anxiety. The difference touches once more upon abstraction, and the reticence toward representation. To create a mood appropriate to assume the disasters the world is staging, representing, and stripping of affect; in other words, to create 20 The first part of this quotation paraphrases Heidegger’s “philosophy of mortality” (Silverman’s phrase, 341) in Being and Time (1962, 228–35). Silverman adds a note explaining the multiple connotations of the German word Stimmung, which means “mood” as well as “attunement,” including in the musical sense. Importantly for Heidegger’s philosophy of being in the world, Heidegger characterizes mood as the attunement of Dasein to something else. 277

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a mood that helps each of us to determine how to respond to them, I contend, Janssens contributes to this reflection, first of all by staying aloof of representation. Those works of Janssens’ that appear “moody,” in the sense that they solicit strong moods, experiment with the moods they “touch” but never represent. If we then return to the idea that affect is intensity without content, whereas mood begins to bring in content, the contribution of Janssens’ “moody” works resides in their suggestive offering of a possible mood; not a compelling representation of it, which would operate through a “blind” identification. The viewer, in other words, is nudged just a bit more, so as to avoid the possibility that intensity remains empty. Duration requires that a follow-up occur; that affect “after a while” does bring about something more specific and closer to the possibility of action. This moment of touch between affect and mood is what the works stage. This, however, is never coerced, as it would be in a melodrama or tragedy, where one passes over mood rather quickly to reach emotion. As a result of the combination of openness and slow duration, the mood does not pass unnoticed; it becomes a moment of intensity itself. Here “staging” takes a particular experimental theatrical form. Not the representation of events, but rather the discrepancy between mood and events—imagined, remembered, foreseen—produces the effect of invading the viewer’s affective capacity. At the end of an explanation of mood in Being and Time, Heidegger writes: Essentially, a state-of-mind implies a disclosive submission to the world, out of which we can encounter something that matters to us. (quoted in Silverman 2000, 60; emphasis in text) Like Heidegger’s notion of “care,” care for the world we relate to— and of which the encounter with such performative artworks offers an instructive, theatrical playground—requires the paradox of respecting the diversity and otherness of the work, while at the same time enveloping it with our “disclosive submission.” This is why Janssens’ art does not dictate particular moods, let alone emotions, but instead opens up an “andless” moodiness, while countering its worst enemy: indifference.

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Epilogue: Ten Ways of Sharing Space

Janssens’ deployment of light as tool, matter, science, and symbol of the space we share takes us out of our routine relationship with it; a relationship that entails we take light for granted. This seemingly simple performative effect has profound consequences. In a recent work, Janssens also foregrounds history as a presence that makes future space-sharing possible, urgent, and aesthetically binding. In order to underscore the project of denaturalizing light as well as the history in which her own work is implicated, and in particular in homage to Chris Marker, Janssens titled her participation in a 2011 group exhibition at Vienna’s Generali Foundation “Sans soleil.” A bit like the obverse of Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s installations turned into exhibition pieces (Bal 2013), Janssens both integrated her work in the group show and separated off a section of it for a more or less autonomous grouping of works. She made an exhibition within the exhibition, challenging the generic division between installation and exhibition. Especially in view of the title of her section, “Sans soleil,” which refers to a single film, it is as if the ensemble of works is one (installation) work. Singular as it is as an artwork, Marker’s 1983 film also broaches more general political questions concerning memory in the space we share. As Kaja Silverman has it, Marker’s Sans soleil constructs “lateral memories” or, as she theorizes in her argument for an ethics of vision, “other people’s memories,” which amounts to “inhabit[ing] time” (1996, 189). The exhibition in which Janssens has installed her version of Sans soleil is similarly an endeavor to inhabit time so as to include other people’s memories, with an emphasis on the present in which the past is now located—along with all those memories. Yet, as if to give shape to her engagement with the larger exhibition, one of her key pieces is exhibited outside of her own section. What 279

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might appear, at first, an instance of Janssens having her cake and eating it too, ends up proposing an endless range of visions about sharing space. What does this say about exhibiting, and about art that is, like Janssens’ work, both concrete—bodily and experiential—and, to all intents and purposes, abstract? In this epilogue I focus on sharing space within a group exhibition as an entrance into the program of sharing space in all kinds of ways; in its own endless andness.1 One. As the title hints, “unExhibit” is a recall of—an homage to and a radicalization of—a 1957 event: an exhibition titled “an Exhibit” by Richard Hamilton with Victor Pasmore and Lawrence Alloway.2 It consisted of grids, panels, and planes arranged in space. The remake, I was told, seemed more sculptural. At the outside entrance in Vienna, photographs of the panels were arranged as a frame of sorts. All three exhibitions, but each in a different way, are concerned with the relationship between object and space: the panels fragment the space, and as a result the space as such—a homogeneous, unified, and visible whole—is destroyed. There is not a single angle that affords an overview. One cannot be in the space and see it in its entirety. The integrity of the space has vanished. Instead, the fragmentation of space by (semi-)translucent walls, panels, and other objects makes it dynamic. A dynamic space without overview: this sounds quite like the social space in which we live in the twenty-first century. This is the first mode of sharing space I consider crucial here.3 To not only convey the idea but actually make a space dynamic, neither closing off certain sections nor keeping the whole visible will suffice. Rather than these negative formulations, a positive term is the key here: translucency. Through it one sees other works, people, spaces, and elements of the apparatus: cables, monitors, screens, and pedestals. One also sees images, near-images, nonimages, and things 1

2

3

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As in the other volume in this pair, I write the epilogue on the project of the artist current at the moment of writing. This underscores the contemporaneity of the work and the issues it raises. “an Exhibit,” Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1957. There was a second exhibition called “Exhibit 2” by Hamilton and Pasmore at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1959. “unExhibit” uses photographs of both exhibitions. “unExhibit” was curated by Sabine Folie and Ilse Lafer. I am deeply grateful for the generous time Ilse gave me for conversations and discussions. On the many issues the notion of framing proffers, see Bal 2002, 133–73.

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that may become images. Translucency is a tool, a condition for the sharing of space, the awareness that there always is something behind what we see; and it concerns light, Janssens’ primary matter, tool, and focus. When diaphanous things tell us that they are not alone, final, or individual, they also raise the question of the ontology of things: is what we see shimmer through the translucent panels and walls, an image, a projection, a photograph, a sculpture? Or, in andness, all of the above? These questions project back onto the visitors as well. The uncertainty is increased and enhanced by the translucent quality of most of the exhibited objects themselves. No object in “unExhibit” is unambiguously an object, visible or tangible. Hamilton’s “an Exhibit” had no images; it consisted only of structure. Rather than to be looked at, the panels were meant to make the space they fragmented dynamic. The space itself was transformed in order to be “played, viewed, and populated” (Folie and Lafer 2011, 169). The last word resonates most clearly with Janssens’ imaginative proposals for and offerings of shareable space. Populating the space makes it grow into form, which is ever-changing and reminiscent of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s influential book On Growth and Form (1992, orig. pub. 1917). That form is never stable, and never independent of the people who populate the space in which forms exist, is, precisely, the primary point of Janssens’ works. In Vienna, the space is shared with history (Hamilton’s exhibition, and the photographs of it outside), with other artists, and between artists and curators, as the artists co-curated the exhibition. Two. The main gallery of “unExhibit,” at first sight austere, soon begins to bristle with life simply because visitors populate it. Here, IPE 600, another one of Janssens’ polished steel beams, is placed on the concrete floor, next to a wall covered with dots except for a screen-size empty patch that evokes a movie screen—a “printed image” by Dutch artist Willem Oorebeek called Dot-Screen-Wall (2011) [fig. E.1]. A bit before and to the left of this wall is another wall, this one translucent and consisting of wire squares, a synthetic mesh that we know from the protection of building sites. This work by Austrian artist Heimo Zobernig (Untitled, 2011) allows a semi-opaque preview of Janssens’ “Sans soleil” (see Figs. E.2 and E.4). Both these (semblances of ) walls play with, undermine, and offer alternatives to transparency; Oorebeek’s by depicting dots on an opaque 281

E.1. Ann Veronica Janssens, IPE 600, 2009. Steel, 600 x 20 x 9 cm. “unExhibit,” Generali Foundation, Vienna (2011).

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wall, Zobernig’s by cluttering the squares of a near-transparent one with adhesives that toy with opacity. And then there is the actual wall of the gallery. I read the original wall through its two doubles, and each added wall through the one they seem to respond to. Placing her beam on the floor in this space where three near-parallel walls already engage in an intense dialogue, Janssens makes a cut in the space, inscribing its flat surface. The sculpture is not quite parallel to any of the walls, nor does it stand at a clear angle from them. Being neither flat nor high, neither object nor nonobject, the beam does not support the walls but gives them surface. This surface, in turn, is no literal surface, no face posed on top. Rather, the sheen reflects both the space (its ceiling) and the visitor, especially up close. Reflection, as it happens, is the most extreme form of opacity. Moreover, up close, the struggle to see the space is lost. Once caught in the reflection game, overview is no longer on the agenda. Hence, even in this near-empty space, one is lured into giving up.4 Three. History returns in a row of four monitors, one of which shows Janssens’ Oscar, the portrait of smoke making the image of architect Niemeyer translucent. Next to it, literary space is added with Jean Genet’s film Un chant d’amour (1950). In the interview displayed here, the French author talks about intercourse through smoke, in prison, with the guard looking on; power inequality is reversed when the guard gets aroused. Time becomes entirely circular in a film on repetition by Peter Roehr (an excerpt from Film-Montagen I–III, 1965). On the fourth monitor, Maya Deren’s The Very Eye of Night (1958) shows dancers in a dimensionless space, where, prefiguring Janssens’ Jupiter, one cannot determine whether it is the dancers that move or the camera. The gaze and its object exchange places, as in deixis proper. In the moving image, the question is: who moves? Each of these films from cinematic history adds another dimension— smoke, temporal miasma, and the uncertainty of movement— to Janssens’ querying of how space can be shared once it is made

4

At the far wall of this first gallery, at a spot almost but not quite the end to which Janssens’ IPE 600 points, Oorebeek has installed a rectangle of Pirelli floor covering, Pirelli Portal (1994–2002), where the dots stenciled in the glass surface make the viewers reflect in dots. The effect was something akin to an old newspaper photograph blown up to human size. 283

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dynamic. Cross-temporal and cross-media sharing is what happens between these four monitors. Not coincidentally, they form a small corridor; a transitional, liminal space between Janssens’ installation and the rest of the exhibition. Four. “Sans soleil” is the final section of the exhibition. With regret, I must refrain from describing the entire show, even though focusing on one artist only contradicts the exhibition’s thrust. “Sans soleil,” already semi-visible through Zobernig’s wall, is itself largely devoted to the differences between transparency, translucency, and opacity, and what those differences do to the space in which we are. The 14-minute loop of Berlin–Barcelona, Part 2 (1999) is a serendipity work: the football match happened to be played in mist, and the artist happened to see it in a café. The felicitous English auxiliary verb to happen to coins a chance event; it gives meaning to arbitrariness, making an occasion for reflection out of nothingness. Janssens noticed how mist takes away color. Here we see her own color theory: color depends on clarity. On the large screen showing the football match, brief moments of color and shape alternate with near-opaque mist. One can see this projection through Zobernig’s wall—and another layer of mist is added. Depending on whether one is inside “Sans soleil” or still in the rest of “unExhibit,” translucent semi-opacity has different effects. Yet, the similarity of these two forms of opacity—mist and a grid or net structure—responds to radically different ontologies, or “worlds.” Inside and out: this is another form of andness. Five. Berlin–Barcelona was once exhibited on two screens facing each other. Here, it has a very different effect now that it shares the space with two other images that question what we see. Next to the screen, on the left, two monitors are standing on the floor side by side [fig. E.2]. The first one, Éclipse ocean (2010), displays waves of the sea. These were filmed in color, but due to the eclipse during the recording, color disappeared. The image we see looks artificially constructed: black-and-white, drawn in pencil perhaps, or old film footage—nature and culture. Next to it, on the other monitor, we see a video called Neige cosmique (2008): a filmed image of “snow” on a television screen receiving only a disturbed signal. It confronts that uncertainty with a yet-more artificial, technological image of a nonimage. Three images, side by side, all three visible through 284

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E.2. Ann Veronica Janssens, Berlin–Barcelona, Part 2 (installation shot), 1999. Video, 14c11s (looped), dimensions variable. “unExhibit,” Generali Foundation, Vienna (2011).

Zobernig’s wall; all three about invisibility; all three questioning color, the iconicity of the filmed image, and the possibility of seeing “something” in favor of seeing, period. Six. The space is rectangular; images surround us; no daylight facilitates seeing, blinds us, or naturalizes what we see—hence the installation’s title. The space itself is subject to the assignment conceptual art gives its viewers: they must participate in the making of the object—here, in the making of the space. Image production, not the refusal of images, is the topic of the exhibition, and Janssens assumes her share of this endeavor. Berlin–Barcelona and its two smaller companions are on the left. Behind me, now, is a small, unobtrusive version of Donut. In the exhibition discussed in Chapter 3 this work was gigantic. Here it indicates another rhythm of seeing by its presence. Now, facing its fast flickering, we notice how the blur 285

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of the mist also slows vision down; something we knew from Horror Vacui. With a live, fast football game as the appearing/disappearing image, this rhythmic discrepancy takes on a different importance. It comes to embody yet another way of sharing space: accepting, and living by different paces, in heterochrony. Seven. On the wall opposite Donut three screens have been hung. In front of the middle one, a little off-center, stands Sweet Blue, one of Janssens’ Aquarium works. Lest we forget the sculptural quality of space, this sculpture inflects the light of the screens behind it. These aquarium sculptures are not only about the emerging forms, as I interpreted them in Chapter 5, but also about lending and borrowing color between original and copy. A monocolor serography is put underneath the glass cube. Paraffin oil is poured in. Due to optical effect, the color emerges, and the serography disappears.5 Now, color is shared. Jupiter turns blue, with the little worm that moves at the command of the moving hand-held camera. The background moves, the little worm moves in it; swimming, dancing, drowning. One movement hosts another. One color helps another. Next to it, equally influenced by the three-dimensional aquarium, we find Bas milieu infini (2008), a simple blue screen on which a light beam passes from left to right at regular intervals. Now, the sharing of color turns out to be mutual: when the beam passes, the light in Sweet Blue changes. Eight. To the left of Bas milieu infini and Sweet Blue a monitor is placed on the floor, slightly in front of the wall. It shows a miniature version of Blue, Red and Yellow—that experiment with historical color theories which also updates the latter through the merging of endless nuances of color. Above it, there is a projection of the 2006 film Slow Light, a slow-moving image of a light bulb that looks black and white but is filmed in color, here on the right [fig. E.3]. Here, we see the wire inside the lamp as the lamp is being lit; while next to it the frames are counted. Both slower and faster than we ever get to see it, the lamp becomes organic, pulsing like a heartbeat. For this work the artist did not need to slow down or speed up the “normal” film tempo. She filmed it with a scientific video camera recording at 1000 images per second to get this slow effect only through time exposure. 5 286

Information from Ilse Lafer, who attended the installation.

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This part of “Sans soleil,” then, shares space between far and close, as live and inanimate, by means of color, while color itself is being shared as well. Nine. At an angle from this microscopic and microtemporal image of the light bulb is a large and slow projection of Looking for the Pole Star (2008), a work filmed from the bottom of a ramp that leads up to an eighteenth-century observatory in India. This very simple, sculptural-looking structure reminds me of the Table Mountain in South Africa. During 17 minutes and 23 seconds, this film image slowly morphs from visible structure to invisible, and in that transformation to abstraction it liberates us from the tyranny of the image. There is, however, a darker side to this transformation. The structure was built to see the pole star. In its time it was a setting for a miraculously successful dialogue with the universe. Now, the star is no longer visible, due to pollution. Hence, the attempt, the ambition, is irremediably historical in its pastness; but the film—the demonstration of darkness and the disappearance of form—brings the memory of what was once possible and visible back to the present. It does not construct the memory of other people, as Marker did, but of things. Here, the space shared is that of history, not of the media but of architecture and its contested relationship to nature. Ten. In the final corner of “Sans soleil” the different modes of sharing space come together in an endless andness. First, the aquarium work Yellow, Yellow (2010) contributes to the different modulations of color here. Then, Jantar Mantar (La Nuit) from 2008 shows the night as captured in Jaipur, India, in two and a half minutes. On the wall is a projection of Odeillo (2008), the video of the solar furnace in the eponymous town in the French Pyrenees (Fig. 4.10). On the floor, there is another monitor; this one shows recordings of the clouds, the blue sky, and the reflection of the sun on an architectural structure with a façade consisting of steel mirrors (Font-Romeu, 2008) [fig. E.4]. At the end of the sunless installation-exhibition, then, there is a sun; not the real daylight sun, but the sun as it is reflected in steel. The furnace in the south of France was built in the 1960s to capture sunlight for energy. As a result, the structure did not only yield energy that required no exploitation of the earth’s fossil fuel reserves (the kind of exploitation that had made the pole star invisible to Indian observers). 287

E.3. “unExhibit,” Generali Foundation, Vienna, 2011. Installation shot showing various works by Ann Veronica Janssens.

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E.4. “unExhibit,” Generali Foundation, Vienna, 2011. Installation shot showing various works by Ann Veronica Janssens.

The form of the façade also suggests the building as a whole seems to be melting down; it seems to be taking on an organic form, a form dependent on growth, in permanent movement.6 In a circularity that dynamizes time, this work joins the impression instilled at the “unExhibit” entrance. There, blown-up views of “an Exhibit” and “Exhibit 2” showed how fragmentation can dynamize space so that screens are all there is, and no overview is possible. As in the first gallery, the translucent quality of the screen yields to the extreme opacity of reflection. Along with the four videos from the history of cinema, the history of reflection itself acts up here. The furnace dates back to a time when the earth still offered us a choice, and the Basque structure—(visually) collapsing under the weight of its decision in favor of solar energy—opens an entirely new world view. Here, clouds are near the floor, as in

6 290

8 mm film transferred to video, 1c25s (looped).

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Ciel. Sometimes, the color disappears, simply because the blue sky is covered with clouds. In addition to the different modes of sharing space, this section will always facilitate moments when one view yields another. Although the fragmentation of the space is consistently maintained, the translucency demonstrates that less is more: through Zobernig’s wall and through the liquid in the two aquariums, the visitor is invited to look back and thus close the circle—following the example of time. This, then, is the political effect of Janssens’ work, and of some other abstract-seeming bodies of art. Taking all possibilities of this endless andness into consideration, visitors are encouraged, sometimes perhaps even compelled, to open themselves up to the otherness that surrounds them, through all the means the artist has deployed, from cognition to psychology, and from reflexes to meaning making. From that openness, choices can be made that are neither sheepishly obedient nor individualistically desired. Instead, such choices are anchored in the pleasures, necessities, and enrichments of sharing space.

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Index of Names Adorno, Theodor W., 20, 48, 97, 148, 161–65, 167, 170 “After Auschwitz,” 161, 164n39, 165 “Commitment,” 165 Negative Dialectics, 164 “Out of the Firing Line,” 163 Ahtila, Eija-Liisa, 20–21, 149, 154n31, 279 The Annunciation, 154n31 Horizontal, 149 Akerman, Chantal, 111 Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 111 Akkerman, Philip, 52n14 Albers, Joseph, 237, 258 Alloway, Lawrence, 280 Altieri, Charles, 276 “an Exhibit” (exhibition), 280, 281, 290 Anzieu, Didier, 63 Aroch Fugellie, Paulina, 9n4 “At the Origins of Abstraction” (exhibition), 127, 128n10, 194 Attridge, Derek, 118n2, 160n34 Austen, Jane, 156 Austin, J.L., 13, 18, 34, 175, 176, 219 How to Do Things with Words, 13 Aydemir, Murat, 140n20 Bachelard, Gaston, 67 Bacon, Francis, 234 Badiou, Alain, 23–24, 189 “Anabasis,” 23–24 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 212n21 Bal, Mieke, 9n3, 11n5, 17n10, 17n11, 32n2, 36n3, 46n9, 46n10, 48n11, 49n13, 52n14, 53, 56n15, 59, 61n19, 62n20, 63n22, 71n3, 75n4, 83n5, 94n11, 100n17, 111n20, 114n21, 131n14, 131n15,

142n22, 142n23, 149n28, 154n31, 161n35, 161n36, 163, 165n40, 181n7, 186n8, 202n18, 231n4, 238n9, 279, 280n3 Travelling Concepts, 10–11 Quoting Caravaggio, 57 Bann, Stephen, 36n3 Barber, Elinor G., 173, 174n2 Barthes, Roland, 67 Camera Lucida, 67 Bataille, Georges, 92–93, 130, 156 Battersby, Christine, 39, 41–42, 48 Baxandall, Michael, 34 Beckett, Samuel, 118n2, 134n17, 234 Film, 118n2 Belgacom (company), 149, 151 Bennett, Jill, 160n34, 166n41, 168n44 Benveniste, Émile, 13n8, 61n19 Bergson, Henri, 22n16, 62n20, 88, 93, 94, 98, 114, 189, 195, 210–12, 213, 225, 228, 238 Creative Evolution, 210 Time and Free Will, 211 Beuys, Joseph, 191 Plight, 191 Bird, Jon, 36n3 Bleeker, Maaike, 37n4, 96–97, 136 Boer, Inge E., 66, 91, 144n25 Bois, Yve-Alain, 49n13, 92–93, 130n13, 156 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 124n7 Boynton, Eric, 179n5 Brayer, Marie-Ange, 51 Brea, José Luis, 142n23 Brecht, Bertolt, 179n4 Brennan, Teresa, 168n45 Broodthaers, Marcel, 7 Brown, Bill, 141n21, 185 Brown, Wendy, 221, 261 Buchloh, Benjamin H.D., 191n13

301

ENDLESS ANDNESS

Buck-Morss, Susan, 48n12 Bühler, Karl Ludwig, 58 Bush, George W., 96n14 Butler, Judith, 13n8, 75n4, 142n22 Buydens, Mireille, 89n10, 153n30 Caillois, Roger, 97 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 31–32, 36, 46, 49–50, 51, 53, 56, 59–60, 62, 63, 64–65, 67, 99, 102, 103, 105, 131n14, 241n11 Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 31–32 Head of Medusa, 46, 49–50, 51, 56, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 102, 103, 106 Careri, Giovanni, 62n20 Casa Frollo (Venice), 71, 75, 107 Casarino, Cesare, 143n24 Caserio, Robert, 214 Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), 53, 130n13, 191 Christensen, Jeannette, 46n9, 159n32 Code, Lorraine, 159n32 Condee, Nancy, 17n11 Crapanzano, Vincent, 174n2 Crary, Jonathan, 259n17 Crewe, Jonathan, 63n22 Cubitt, Sean, 200n16 Culler, Jonathan, 13n8, 121n5, 187n9 Damisch, Hubert, 36n3, 37–38, 40, 47, 48n11, 49n13, 71n3, 81, 162n38, 187, 198, 204, 237n8 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 141 Vitruvian Man, 141 De Certeau, Michel, 181n7 De Duve, Thierry, 124, 125n8 De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa, 95, 97, 98 Keeping Still Part 1 (with Ann Veronica Janssens), 95–98, 107 De Lauretis, Teresa, 58n17 Deleuze, Gilles, 7, 19n13, 25, 26, 27, 28, 39–41, 47, 49, 51, 75n4, 83–85, 88n8, 89n10, 92, 93, 100, 103, 114, 117, 119, 133–35, 136, 143, 147, 148–49, 152, 153, 159, 168, 169, 186, 195n15, 204, 207, 208, 225, 230–31,

302

232, 233–34, 259, 265, 268, 269, 275 Bergsonism, 225 A Thousand Plateaus (with Félix Guattari), 7n1, 84–85, 88n8, 136n19, 169 What Is Philosophy? (with Félix Guattari), 83 DeLillo, Don, 69, 111 Point Omega, 69, 111 Deren, Maya, 283 The Very Eye of Night, 283 Derrida, Jacques, 13n8, 62, 99n16, 114, 176, 186, 187n9 Of Grammatology, 62 De Zegher, Catherine, 46n9, 258 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 36n3, 62n20 Doane, Mary Ann, 61, 66, 202n18, 214n22 Douglas, Stan, 118n2 Vidéo, 118n2 Duchamp, Marcel, 124, 125n8 Duganne, Erina, 166n41 Dujourie, Lili, 111 Herinneringen met de ontmoeting, 111 Duras, Marguerite, 111 India Song, 111 Eco, Umberto, 243, 244n13 Edwards, Holly, 166n41 Eliasson, Olafur, 160n33 Enwezor, Okwui, 17n11 Espai d’Art Contemporani (Castelló), 275n18 Everett, Wendy, 257 “Exhibit 2” (exhibition), 280n2, 290 Fabian, Johannes, 9, 11n6, 13 Fabiana, Rita, 146n27 Fer, Briony, 130, 206 Firat, Begüm Özden, 140n20 Folie, Sabine, 280n3, 281 Foucault, Michel, 9n4, 202n18, 231, 232, 233n5, 238, 260, 265, 269 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 37, 38 François, Michel, 107, 108, 109, 113, 114, 190, 204n19 Dandelions, 107

INDEX OF NAMES

Planning, 109 Retenue d’eau, 113 Freud, Sigmund, 17, 178, 179n4, 214–15 Fricker, Miranda, 25n18 Fried, Michael, 96, 128, 129n11 Galileo Galilei, 42 Gatens, Moira, 167–68, 170 Generali Foundation (Vienna), 279 Genet, Jean, 283 Un chant d’amour, 283 Ginzburg, Carlo, 214n22 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 235–36, 240, 242, 265 Gohy, Charles, 177n3 Gomes da Silva, Ana, 146n27 Gordon, Douglas, 69n1, 111 24 Hour Psycho, 69n1, 111 Gould, Stephen Jay, 195n15 Goux, Jean-Joseph, 179n5 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de, 20 Los desastres de la guerra, 20 Greenberg, Clement, 128, 129n11 Guattari, Félix, 7, 27, 83, 84–85, 88n8, 92, 93, 199n3, 133–35, 136, 147, 148, 152, 153, 169, 207, 208, 234, 259 A Thousand Plateaus (with Gilles Deleuze), 7n1, 84–85, 88n8, 136n19, 169 What Is Philosophy? (with Gilles Deleuze), 83 Habermas, Jürgen, 162n38 Hamilton, Richard, 280, 281 Hatoum, Mona, 53–57, 65, 67 Corps étranger, 53–57 Hatton Gallery (Newcastle upon Tyne), 280n2 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 57, 81 Heidegger, Martin, 188n10, 223, 233, 238, 269, 277, 278 Being and Time, 277, 278 Hernández-Navarro, Miguel Á., 120n4, 125n8, 142n23, 202n18, 239 Heyne, Pamela, 46n9 Hirsch, Marianne, 52n14 Holly, Michael Ann, 14n9, 17, 154n31

Past Looking, 17 Horkheimer, Max, 97 Huyssen, Andreas, 97 “Inside the Visible” (exhibition), 46n9 Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), 46n9 Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), 280n2 Irwin, Robert, 86 Itten, Johannes, 237, 265 James, William, 214 Janssens, Ann Veronica, 7–8, 18n12, 22, 117 and passim 15,000 f, 157 100,000 lire, 143, 157, 163 Aerogel, 28, 124–27, 129, 152, 169, 175, 246 Aquarium, 110–11, 116, 130, 136– 37, 158, 265, 286 Aquarium (Air de Paris), 130, 136–37, 158 Le bain de lumière, 158 Barre en verre incandescent, 253 Bas milieu infini, 286 Berlin–Barcelona, Part 2, 284, 285 Bikes, 129, 143 Bluette, 130, 137–39, 141, 198, 239 Blue, Red and Yellow, 136, 207, 235, 239, 263–65, 286 Boule, 202–04 Casa Frollo, 71–76 Chambre anéchoïque, 190–91 Ciel, 149–52, 156, 157, 163, 185, 291 Cocktail Sculpture, 246–47 Corps noir, 12, 27, 46–67, 69, 76, 77–78, 86, 89, 94, 100, 102, 105, 106, 116, 137, 146, 163, 177, 185, 186, 202, 245 Crépuscule à Jantarmantar, 206 Donut, 229–30, 237, 285, 286 Eclipse (2006 video), 198–200, 201, 202 Éclipse en Chine, 200–01 Éclipse ocean, 284 Eclipses (series), 198

303

ENDLESS ANDNESS

Edelweiss, 247 Espace infini, 146, 149, 163 Flash Film, 230, 237–38, 253 Font-Romeu, 287 Freak Star, 137, 139, 141 Grand disque, 76, 77, 78, 79, 86, 101, 102, 143 Horror Vacui, 1–6, 35, 36, 49, 69, 94, 107, 135, 286 Hubcaps, 129 IPE 535, 181–86 IPE 600, 281, 283n4 Jantar Mantar (La Nuit), 287 June, 130, 153 Jupiter, 207–08, 213, 252, 283, 286 Keeping Still Part 1 (with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker), 95–98, 107 LEE121!, 129, 136, 148 Liquid Crystal, 114 Looking for the Pole Star, 287 Medium Pink Turquoise, 239, 256–57 Muhka, 129, 135, 148 Neige cosmique, 284 La nuit, 252 Odeillo, 215–18 Orange, 239, 268 Oscar, 201, 283 Pavillon doré, 79–83, 99, 100, 101, 102, 108, 163 Phosphènes, 218 Portrait de scène, 145n26 Ral 3002, 12n7 Représentation d’un corps rond, 86, 88–94, 98, 101, 102, 105, 114 Rouge 106 / bleu 132, 127–28, 194–95, 204, 207, 224, 230 “Sans soleil” (exhibition section), 279–91 Sans titre (Martin), 180–81, 191 Scarlet, 239, 268–69 Scrub, 223–30, 231, 232, 233, 234, 275 Sinus / Résonances, 191 Stanford Linear Accelerator, 165 Sweet Blue, 268, 286 Tropical Paradise, 79, 86, 100, 101, 102, 145–46, 163

304

Tunnel, 43 Untitled (Golden Section), 204 Untitled (Sons infinis), 190 Villa Gillet, 145n26 X, 153–54 Yellow Rose, 130, 137, 138, 139, 141 Yellow White Study, 153, 239 Yellow, Yellow, 287 Jarman, Derek, 32 Caravaggio, 32 Johnson, Mark, 263 Joseph, Branden W., 88, 91–92 Joyce, James, 234

Kafka, Franz, 118 –19, 134n17, 152, 164, 170, 234 The Castle, 118 “In the Penal Colony,” 118 The Trial, 118 Kandinsky, Wassily, 127, 134n16, 235, 237, 240, 257–58 Katzberg, Michael, 101 Kierkegaard, Søren, 18–19, 39, 233 Koopmans, Jelle, 96n13 Kosuth, Joseph, 64n23 Krauss, Rosalind, 92–93, 109, 129n11, 130n13, 156 Kundera, Milan, 120 Lacan, Jacques, 46n10, 66, 97, 114, 178, 179n4 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 52n14 Lafer, Ilse, 280n3, 281, 286n5 Lakoff, George, 263 Lefebvre, Henri, 181n7 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 40, 101–02, 103, 148, 167 Leja, Michael, 241n10 Levinson, Stephen C., 58, 70n2 Liaño, Marta, 275n18 Lichtenstein, Jacqueline, 236n7 Lloyd, Genevieve, 167–68, 170 Loh, Maria H., 70n2 Lütgens, Annelie, 86–87 Malevich, Kazimir, 127 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 233n6, 240

INDEX OF NAMES

Manet, Édouard, 131 Olympia, 131 Manovich, Lev, 200n16 Marin, Louis, 32, 46–47, 59n18, 60, 64–65, 104, 131n14, 241n11, 242 To Destroy Painting, 64–65 Marker, Chris, 279, 287 Sans soleil, 279 Marmer, Nancy, 86n7 Marrati, Paola, 189, 231 Marx, Karl, 259 Mauss, Marcel, 179n5 McCall, Anthony, 88–94 Line Describing a Cone, 88–94 Long Film, 91 McHale, Brian, 38n6 Medusa (mythological figure), 51, 65, 66, 103 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 114 Merton, Robert King, 173, 174n2 Miró, Joan, 130 Moholy-Nagy, László, 86 Mondrian, Piet, 127, 268 Moore, Michael, 96n14 Morris, Robert, 88, 239 Morsbroich Castle (Leverkusen), 120, 177 MuHKA (Antwerp), 135 Musée d’Orsay (Paris), 128n10, 194 Museum of Modern Art (Brussels), 78 Nagel, Alexander, 36n3 Nauman, Bruce, 154n31 Bouncing in the Corner, 154n31 Neef, Sonja, 244n14 Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin), 77, 136, 224, 235 Newton, Isaac, 235, 239, 256, 265 Niemeyer, Oscar, 201, 283 Nilsson, Andreas, 146n27 O’Docherty, Brian, 195n14 Oorebeek, Willem, 281, 283n4 Dot-Screen-Wall, 281 Pirelli Portal, 283n4 Panofsky, Erwin, 17 Parmigianino (Girolamo Francesco Maria

Mazzola), 51, 52n14 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 51, 52n14 Pascal, Blaise, 2, 48 Pensées, 48n11 Pasmore, Victor, 280 Patton, Paul, 83, 85, 98 Peeren, Esther, 212n21 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 29, 56, 58, 102, 104, 173, 214, 240–45, 253, 256, 258, 263–64 Perseus (mythological figure), 65, 103 Picasso, Pablo, 130 Pinheiro, Sara, 56n15 Piper, Adrian, 64n23 Plato, 131, 161 Pleij, Herman, 236n7 Poussin, Nicolas, 241n11 Powell, Amy, 17n11 Rajchman, John, 1, 128, 129, 134n17, 135n18, 230–32, 233, 260, 265, 268 “Another View of Abstraction,” 230–32 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino), 36 Reed, David, 131n14 Reinhardt, Mark, 166n41 Riegl, Alois, 88n8 Risset, Jean-Claude, 190n12 Rodowick, D.N., 200n16 Roehr, Peter, 283 Film-Montagen I–III, 283 Ronen, Ruth, 9n4 Roque, Georges, 241n11 Rorty, Richard, 38n6 Rousseau, Pascal, 128n10, 259, 261 Rubens, Peter Paul, 7 Ruby, Christian, 17n11 Russell, Bertrand, 211, 228 Salcedo, Doris, 19–20, 81, 83n5, 97, 146n27, 161n35 Plegaria Muda, 146n27 Shibboleth, 81, 83n5 Santa Maria della Pietà o della Visitazione (Venice), 36 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 81

305

ENDLESS ANDNESS

Schapiro, Meyer, 187, 198 Schneider, Rebecca, 19n15 “Serendipity” (exhibition), 28, 173–219, 263 Serrano, Andres, 161 Piss Christ, 161 Shepard, Roger, 190n12 Shevell, Steven K., 236n7 Silverman, Kaja, 24n17, 46n10, 130n13, 179n4, 188n10, 238–39, 277–78, 279 Sitney, P. Adams, 88 Smith, Terry, 17n11 Spiegelman, Art, 97 Spinoza, Baruch, 166–68, 169–70, 232, 259, 264, 269 Spitzer, Leo, 63n22 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 9n4, 161n37 Spyer, Patricia, 174n2 Stewart, Garrett, 200n16 Stewart, Susan, 140n20 “Super Space” (exhibition), 43, 99, 157 Swift, Jonathan, 212 Gulliver’s Travels, 212 Tate Modern (London), 81 Tenon Hospital (Paris), 145 Theys, Hans, 31, 129n12, 156, 218, 221, 224, 225, 232, 233, 260 Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth, 281 On Growth and Form, 281 Tiepolo, Gian Battista, 36n3 Tomkins, Silvan, 168n45, 275 Turner, Victor, 65 Turrell, James, 86 Roden Crater, 86

306

“unExhibit” (exhibition), 280–91 Valéry, Paul, 15–17, 21, 34, 35, 41, 49, 67, 81, 85 “Poetry and Abstract Thought,” 15–17 Van Alphen, Ernst, 37–38, 52n14, 128, 134n17, 162n38, 168–69, 247n15 Van Gennep, Arnold, 65 Vardoulakis, Dimitris, 167n43 Venice, 18, 70, 71, 75–76 Venice Biennale 1995 (exhibition), 53 Venice Biennale 1999 (exhibition), 18, 43, 70, 71, 176 Verhoeff, Nanna, 62n21 Walpole, Horace, 173 Warburg, Aby, 62n20 Welles, Orson, 118n2 The Trial, 118n2 Wiels Contemporary Art Center (Brussels), 175, 177, 190, 194, 201, 203, 218, 224, 263 Wood, Christopher S., 36n3 Woolf, Virginia, 221 Worringer, Wilhelm, 134n16 Wyschogrod, Edith, 179n5 Yeats, William Butler, 105 “Among School Children,” 105 Zobernig, Heimo, 281, 283, 284, 285, 291 Untitled, 281

Index of Subjects abstraction, 12, 19n14, 20, 28, 31, 37, 119, 126–36, 138, 142, 170, 177, 187, 194, 230–32, 234, 238, 241, 260–61, 264, 277, 287 accidental, 28, 198–209, 210 concrete, 12, 21, 64, 142, 198 Deleuze’s view of, 133–36, 143, 147–48, 159, 168, 207–09, 230–31, 234, 265 ethical, 24, 233, 260, 265 four conceptions of, 126–36 political potential of, 15, 138, 142, 147–49, 153, 155–56, 164– 66, 210, 213, 238, 258, 265 and purity, 127–28, 129, 130, 204, 222 surrealist, 130 traumatic (Fer), 130, 206 accidentality, accidental, 28, 78, 173–74, 178, 191, 201, 204, 206, 210, 215, 228, 246–47 act of seeing, 53, 87, 92, 133, 265 act of viewing. See act of seeing acting, 19–21, 26, 27, 106 action, 10, 14, 21, 85, 198, 260, 278 Valéry’s view of, 21, 35, 81, 85 activism, 162, 200 actuality, actualization, 38, 48, 63, 76, 88, 194, 218 adjective, 121–24 aesthetics, 5, 64, 81, 158, 181, 188 baroque, 53 of existence (Foucault), 260 humble, 247, 260 of meaningless beauty, 63 affect, 83, 84, 164, 168–69, 170, 210, 275–78 versus mood, 275–78 after-effect, 2, 60, 75, 237 after-image, 42, 237

agency, 98, 148, 170, 214–15, 219, 237–38 material, 131, 169 political, 84, 85, 119, 169, 177, 210, 221, 239, 258 of viewers, visual, 124, 130, 133, 159, 189, 191, 218, 246 allegory, allegorical, 67, 105, 118–19, 155 allo-portrait, 27, 52, 65, 245 alter-identification, 16 alterity, 51, 66, 166 alter-phobia, 66 alter-visibility, 230 ambiguity, 51, 96, 97, 102, 137, 138, 186 spatial, 46, 50–52, 105 temporal, 67 anabasein, anabasis (Badiou), 23 anachronism, 36 andness, 25, 28, 29, 75, 223, 225, 228, 231, 234, 239, 244, 258, 260–61, 264, 265, 268, 269, 277, 280, 281, 281, 287, 291 Annunciation (biblical scene), 154n31 anthropocentrism, anthropocentric, 149, 213 anthropology, anthropological, 8, 9n3, 9n4, 10, 174n2, 179 anthropomorphism, anthropomorphic, 96, 97, 138, 141 anxiety, 2, 105, 191, 207 versus fear (Silverman), 277 arcane (Marin), 46–47 architecture, architectural, 27, 81, 99, 145, 152, 185, 188, 215, 287 art history, 15, 31, 170, 229 art, 3 and passim abstract, 17, 19, 20, 22, 26, 32n2, 50, 127–28, 129n11, 134, 175, 187, 198, 204, 210, 234, 237, 239, 240

307

ENDLESS ANDNESS

conceptual, 64, 285 figurative, 20, 32, 119, 234, 241, 245 as laboratory, 34–35, 104 nonfigurative, 17, 21, 41, 160 as philosophy, 84, 161, 187, 230–34 political, 20, 21, 79, 83–84, 117–19, 127, 136, 141, 142n23, 160–66, 167, 173, 204, 210 religious, 7, 17, 26, 36, 42 relationship to politics, 17, 21, 25, 29, 117, 161–66, 170, 258–59, 261 “sacredness” of, 120n4 visual, 3, 6, 12, 34, 47, 63, 75, 101, 123n17, 188n10, 241n10, 244 art of seeing (Foucault), 232, 260 artwork, 35, 60–61, 79, 84, 85, 168–69, 212, 256, 269, 278 as “score,” 116, 119 autobiography, autobiographical, 16, 67 autonomy, autonomous, 41, 160, 221, 256, 259 baroque (concept), 26, 40–41, 47–49, 51, 53, 64, 99–100, 102, 103, 106, 149, 161, 166–71, 207 Baroque (period), 1, 2, 36, 46, 48, 87, 101, 106, 120, 124, 157, 170, 177, 232 beauty, 63, 65, 79, 81, 125, 149, 152, 166, 207, 247 becoming (Deleuze), 83, 85, 101, 102, 153n30 becoming democratic (Patton), 85 blindness, blind, 135, 195, 209, 232, 242 bodiliness, bodily, 59, 124, 129n11, 133, 136–42, 147, 153, 176–77 body, 3, 7, 38, 43, 46, 49, 53–57, 58, 78, 86, 91, 99, 101, 105, 117, 118, 131–33, 136, 137–41, 147, 149, 159, 176–77, 195, 212 foreign, 56 represented, 32, 131 body deixis, 39–43, 59, 61, 91–92 body without organs (Deleuze and Guattari), 84–85 border (Boer), 66, 91

308

boundary, 65–66, 78, 89, 91, 94, 142–46, 179. See also border branching (Deleuze), 40 building, 81, 185 as delimitation, 99 buzzing, 103 care (Heidegger), 188n10, 223, 233, 238–39, 278 categorization, categorizing, 29, 58n16, 116, 233–34 censorship, 96n13, 131, 161 chance, 16, 28, 173, 177, 204, 213–15, 221 chiaroscuro, 102 choreography, choreographer, 95 Christianity, Christian, 178 chronology, 18, 225, 252 chronotope (Bakhtin), 212n21 cinema, cinematic, 59, 94, 98, 111–13, 114, 118n2, 200n16, 202, 230–31 history of, 222, 283, 290 citation, 18, 75, 142n22 politics of, 75 /cloud/ (Damisch), 37–38, 42, 43 coevalness (Fabian), 8, 9, 22 color, 28–29, 71, 74, 75, 222–23, 234–69 interaction of (Albers), 237 meaning of, 234–37, 240–42, 259 primary, 28, 235, 244, 256, 265 secondary, 235, 256, 259 temperature of, 236, 240 color symbolism, 234, 243 color theory, 235–37, 284, 286 community, 157, 174 compassion, 166 compossible worlds (Leibniz). See possible worlds concavity, concave, 27, 40, 46, 49, 51, 61, 63, 78, 102, 106, 137, 146, 158, 186 concept, 83 conjunction, 28, 179, 186 context, contextual, 121n5 dependency (Levinson), 58, 70 contiguity, existential, 57 continuum (Bergson), 210

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

convexity, convex, 27, 40, 49, 51, 53, 61, 63, 78, 102, 106, 137, 143, 158, 186 correlativism, correlative (Deleuze), 41 cosmology, 42, 53 counteragency, 119 critical vision machine (Bleeker), 96, 136 cultural analysis, 58 phases of, 160 Dasein (Heidegger), 277n20 death, 145–46, 277 deceleration, 19, 35, 38, 39, 42 deciphering, 17–18, 32, 56, 79 deconstruction, 186, 187n9 deixis, deictic, 12, 57–59, 60–67, 70n2, 84, 88, 104, 105, 108, 159, 177, 202, 244, 247, 283 bodily-spatial, 59. See also body deixis mode of looking, 27, 28, 69–76, 84, 100, 103, 119, 158, 188, 232 spatial form of, 62, 66 temporal, 62, 66 visual, 57–63, 65 democracy, democratic, 85, 86, 96, 104, 155, 177, 200, 258 act, 261 space, 261, 265, 269 description, 34, 89 despatializing, 38 detail, 210 dialectic, dialectics, 51, 100, 185 between form and formlessness, 93 Hegelian, 57, 81 negative (Adorno), 48, 170 dialogism, dialogic, 60, 61, 131 dichotomy, 9, 28 difference-in-repetition, 71 disclosive submission, 278 discovery, 173, 177, 191, 208, 215, 246, 264 disempowerment, 24, 124, 147, 165, 215 disguised symbolism (Panofsky), 17 displacement (Freud), 178, 179n4 dispositif, 75, 152 distance, distancing, 131–33 durability, durable, 74

duration, durational, 3–5, 11, 13, 16, 18, 26, 35, 39, 109–10, 232, 278 Bergsonian, 195n15, 210–12, 225–29 effectiveness, political. See political effectiveness. either/or structure. See dichotomy Ellis Island Art, 187 emancipation, 124, 148, 149, 155 empathy, 159 empowerment, empowering, 147–56 encounter, 66, 159 endlessness, 38–39, 146, 221–23 enfolded (Deleuze), 100 engagement, 100, 135, 155, 206 epistemology, epistemic, epistemological, 10, 25n18, 38, 105, 138, 186, 235 Eros (Freud), 214 estrangement, 66, 259 ethics, ethical, 25, 160–61, 213, 232–33, 260, 265 of care (Heidegger), 179, 233 immanent (Deleuze), 25 of nonindifference (Bal), 17n10, 25 of vision, 24, 279 everyday life, 8, 66, 181, 200 exhibition, 212, 279–80 experience, 14, 20, 23, 34, 41, 46, 56, 59, 63, 66, 67, 88, 103, 130, 202, 215, 225 of art, 1–6, 18, 22, 23, 25, 53, 61, 99, 120, 125, 135–36, 146–49, 155, 164, 166, 256, 269 Bergson’s view of, 189–90, 195 visual. See visual experience expressionism, abstract, 128, 165, 206, 213 extension, 7n1, 22, 28, 145, 171, 189, 190 extensity (Bergson), 93–94 exteroceptive, 104 fear, 2, 52, 166 versus anxiety (Silverman), 277 feminism, feminist, 131, 153n29, 157, 159 fiction, 4–5, 95, 107, 109, 111, 161, 212, 244, 275

309

ENDLESS ANDNESS

figuration, figurativity, figurative, 12, 17, 20–21, 31–32, 119, 204, 206, 234 as representation, 131, 138 film, 11, 111, 188n10, 275 early, 200n16 flicker, 200n16, 222 structural, 87, 88 film studies, 89 Firstness (Peirce), 214, 240–41, 244–45, 253, 259 fold (Deleuze), 26, 39–41, 47, 49, 103 foreshortening, 94 form, 15, 27, 92–94, 127, 130, 134, 136, 204, 237, 257–58, 281 versus content, 15, 92 formlessness, formless, 27 fragility, fragile, 125, 127, 137, 174, 175, 204 frame, framing, 99, 120, 121n5, 152, 180, 200, 207, 228, 244, 280 free indirect discourse, 61 futurality, 209 gaze, 131, 283 appropriating, 138 disembodied, 7, 91 gender, 13n8, 48n11, 130n13, 141, 153, 157 geometry, geometrical, 88, 244 gift, 174, 178–81, 215 politics of the, 177–78 habit, habitual, 23, 135, 142, 155, 173, 209, 214–15 habitat, 80, 120, 185, 188 social, 160 handwriting, 244 heterochrony, heterochronic, 202, 215, 286 heterotemporality, 74, 204, 206, 207 heterotopia (Foucault), 202n18 hierarchy, hierarchical, 70, 84, 149, 152, 186, 231, 239, 276 historicism, baroque, 41 historiography, 41n7 history, 36, 41n7, 42, 71, 74, 120, 191, 194, 204, 218, 279

310

Hollywood cinema, 200n16 home movie aesthetic, 88 horror, 20 Adorno’s view of, 20, 161n35, 162 hovering, 175, 207 hubris, 158 humility, humble, 101, 211, 247, 260. See also modesty icon, iconicity, 29, 214, 240–45, 253, 259, 264, 285. See also Firstness iconography, iconographic, 17, 36, 56, 277 iconophobia, 97 idealism, idealistic, 259–60 identification, 16, 66, 97, 111, 138, 167, 238, 275, 278 heteropathic (Silverman), 166, 238 identity politics, 160–63, 166, 233 ideology, ideological, 25, 65, 74, 169, 186, 258 illusionism, illusionistic, 28, 32, 37, 46, 56, 65, 237 image, 11, 17n11, 22, 167, 225 moving, 32, 144, 152, 180, 200, 202, 283 as process of mediation (Bergson), 22n16, 62n20, 225–28, 238 still, 32, 144, 224, 238 imagination, 5, 94, 98, 152, 167–70, 232, 244, 256, 264, 269 immersion, immersive, 70, 100, 111, 136, 162, 190, 194 imperfect (tense), 62, 71 impressionism, impressionist, 88n8, 90 in-betweenness, 74, 256 index, indexicality, 20, 56–62, 200–01, 214, 241–44, 253. See also Secondness indifference, 16–17, 24–25, 32, 223, 238, 278 individualism, individualistic, 24, 149, 161, 169, 206, 233, 291 individuality, individual, 61, 63, 105, 155, 159, 170, 213, 281 inhabiting, 69, 120–21, 145, 169, 170, 279 innovation (Bergson), 189

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

installation art, 36n3 instant, 211, 224, 228, 231 image of the, 225 intensity, 7, 134–35, 136, 148, 168–69, 208, 210, 215, 258, 275, 278 interdiscursivity, 108 interpretant (Peirce), 102, 104, 106, 242, 243 intersubjectivity, 167–68, 232, 259 judgment, 25, 57, 261 labor, 143, 185–86, 187, 188 language, 15–16, 41, 58, 105, 159, 240 contamination by, 16 performativity of, 13, 15, 176 law, 173, 213, 214, 242 light, 69–116 and passim democratic availability of, 86 materiality of, 14, 21, 64, 76, 86, 165, 185 as medium, 12, 70 producing form, 88–94 volatility of, 100, 101 light and space art, 86–87 limen. See threshold liminality, luminal, 65–66, 74, 284 linearity, linear, 3, 47–48, 59–60, 62, 65, 75, 102, 154n31 of time, 2, 18, 24, 26, 39 lingua-phobia, 15 linguistics, linguistic, 12, 58, 61n19, 66, 240 look, 8, 9. See also gaze embodied, 10 tactile, 138, 146 looking, 7, 8–12, 48–49, 77, 138, 199, 223, 224, 253 deictic. See deictic mode of looking haptic, 88n8, 89 lostness, 23–24 ludic, 21, 32 machine, machinery, 16, 87, 136n19, 218, 224, 233n5 madness, mad, 23, 96n13, 232 making, 174, 181, 218 Marxism, Marxist, 143n24, 181n7

master–slave dialectic (Hegel), 81 mastery, 61, 62, 221, 223 loss of, 28 visual, 128 materialism, baroque, 106 materiality, material, 8, 13, 14, 15, 20, 21, 26, 64, 76, 101, 125, 129, 143n24, 165, 169, 185, 187–88, 211, 223 mathematics, mathematical, 44, 53 matter (noun), 49, 76, 94, 106, 126, 127, 129, 169, 175, 187–88, 189, 212 made sign, 187 meaning, 13, 15, 29, 61n19, 79, 83, 118, 155, 164–65, 237, 240–43, 245, 258, 261, 269 mediation, 74, 226 medium, 12, 15, 42, 53, 110, 111n20, 164, 180, 200, 212, 231–32, 256, 275 purity of, 129, 135 Medusa effect, 105 melodrama, 275, 278 memory, 61, 202, 211, 225, 232 acts of, 66n22 cultural, 63, 103, 268 lateral (Silverman) in shared spaces, 279, 287 memory image, 225, 229 mentalism, mentalist, 211 meta-art (Piper), 64 meta-painting (Marin). See painting, self-critical metaphor, metaphorical, 263 miasma, 103, 283 micropolitics (Deleuze and Guattari), 18, 21, 84, 92, 202 migratory culture, 22–23, 25, 119, 124n7, 167, 202 mimesis, mimetic, 64, 97, 237 minimalism, minimalist, 49, 125, 239 minor (Deleuze and Guattari), 119n3 mirror, mirroring, 38n6, 46, 48, 77–78, 100, 199 mirror stage (Lacan), 46n10, 66, 97 mise-en-abyme, 203 mobility, 179 of space, 22

311

ENDLESS ANDNESS

modernism, modernist, 10, 28, 36n6, 49, 87, 134, 213–14, 215, 232 modesty, modest, 34, 67, 75, 124, 134, 152, 156–60, 163, 165, 215, 221, 269 politics of, 70, 93 monument, monumentality, 18, 143, 170, 211 mood, 222–24, 243, 275–78 moralism, moralistic, 66, 101, 133, 160, 162 morality, moral, 17, 160, 234 mourning, 20, 145–46 movement, 23, 24, 119, 202, 238 as conceptual metaphor, 202 multiplicity (Bergson), 211 multitemporality, 202 narcissism, narcissistic, 49, 61, 180 narrative, 2, 4, 28, 32, 34, 39, 129, 238 narrative theory, 61 naturalizing, 20, 285 nature, natural, 99, 149, 152, 158, 179, 215 negativity, 105, 127, 130, 133, 170, 244 newness, 153, 159, 225 nonindifference, nonindifferent, 16, 17n10, 25, 70 nonrepresentational, 21, 89, 101, 141 normativity, normative, 85, 98 nostalgia, nostalgic, 42, 108 object, 3, 6, 7–8, 11, 14, 21, 34, 40–41, 104, 109–10, 124–27, 140, 188–89, 223, 281 abstract, 126 found, 124–25 pure, 49 theoretical, 49n13, 50–51, 56, 60, 63, 64, 84, 89–90, 93, 99 visual, 7 objecthood, 76, 103, 125 objectification, 8, 9, 19, 35, 110 observing, observer, 9, 18 ontology, ontological, 10, 11, 13, 34, 38, 42, 83, 100, 110, 235, 243, 244, 281, 284 optical puritanism (Rajchman), 129

312

other, 9 and passim absolute, 51 otherness, 118, 278, 291 pace, 222–23 pain, 31 painting, 1, 17–18, 31, 32, 34, 50, 59, 129, 131n14, 231, 234, 237 history of, 36, 38, 43, 194, 222, 224, 268 old-master, 26, 70n2, 75 self-critical (Marin), 64 parataxis, paratactic, 28, 231 parergon (Derrida), 99 partiality, partial, 34, 176, 210 participation, 7, 8, 18, 26, 93–94, 119, 148, 152, 165, 256 of viewers, 21, 28, 87, 91, 96, 98, 100, 101, 166, 285 participatory observation (anthropology), 8–9, 10 pastness, 62, 287 pedagogy, pedagogical, 83 percept, 83 perception, perceptual, 5, 8, 35, 39, 46, 51, 78, 87, 89, 135, 142, 159, 164, 210, 211, 225, 236, 253, 258, 260–61 baroque, 19, 103 Deleuze’s view of, 103, 148–49, 195n15 intensity of, 148, 258 Leibniz’s view of, 103 performance of, 14, 18, 43 philosophy of, 5, 114 sense, 76, 186, 190, 191 visual, 3, 190 performance, 10–12, 13–14, 18, 19, 26, 32, 34, 35, 75n4, 95–97, 98 temporality of, 13 performance art, 19, 116 performativity, performative, 10–11, 13–14, 15, 17n11, 18, 21, 34, 35, 51, 92–93, 95–96, 98, 175–77 personage, 204 personification, 60, 191, 237 perspective, 59–60, 71, 177

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

baroque, 26 color, 59–60 dal sotto in sù, 38, 108 linear, 47–48, 59–60, 62, 75, 102, 154n31 Renaissance, 88 perspectivism, 40–41 baroque, 49 phenomenology, phenomenological, 14, 211 philosophy, 19, 28, 43, 83–85, 186, 187, 188n10, 230–234 of action (Deleuze and Guattari), 27 as cinema (Deleuze), 231 cultural, 161 as inherently political, 83 of language, 13 of mortality (Heidegger), 277n20 of perception. See perception, philosophy of Spinozan, 166–68 visual, 87 photography, 59, 67, 94, 108–09, 111 early, 146, 153 surrealist, 97 pleasure, pleasurable, 20, 79, 89, 138, 159, 161n35, 164 plurality, plural, 215, 221, 223, 225, 261 poetics, 64, 149 of yielding, 165 poetry, 15–16, 163, 240 point of view, 40–41, 47, 91, 109–10, 116 baroque, 41 pointing (Baxandall), 34 polis, 119, 169 political, 160–66 and passim desire, 204, 218, 223 effectiveness, effect, 8, 138, 198, 202, 291 impact, 11, 20–21, 58, 142, 164 space, 14, 66, 261 politics, 17, 21 and passim consensus, 25, 29, 261 institutional, 84 of sense, 91 pornography, pornographic, 162, 166 portraiture, portrait, 26–27, 51–53, 65, 66, 149, 153–54, 245

possible forms (Deleuze and Guattari), 134, 207 possible worlds, 9, 43, 101–02 postmodernism, postmodernist, 38n6, 213, 215 poverty, 145 power, 9, 25, 29, 41, 57, 101, 108, 117, 120, 137, 142, 143n24, 152, 155, 157, 158, 178–79, 210, 221, 261, 283 power/knowledge (Foucault), 9 precept, 83 predestination, 179 pre-posterous (Bal), 36, 46, 51, 53, 62n20, 71, 76, 87, 128, 161, 166, 194, 232, 234 prescription, prescriptive, 60, 98 preterite, 62 projection, 97, 142n22, 178, 276 propaganda, propagandistic, 19, 20, 21, 25, 66, 69, 79, 101, 158, 178 proportions, human, 140n20, 141, 212–13 proprioception, proprioceptive, 63, 104, 260 psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic, 97, 178 psychology, psychological, 159, 291 purity, pure, 51, 107, 127, 128, 129, 204, 244 qualifier, mobile, 124 radical, 124 radicant (Bourriaud), 124n7 readability, 32, 56, 259 reading, 15–19, 29, 32, 56, 155, 244, 277 for meaning, 15, 17, 29, 79, 118 reception-oriented theories of, 11 recoiling, 27, 63–67, 105, 158 reconstruction, historical, 41 referent, referentiality, referential, 13, 59, 62, 64, 127, 243 reflection, 46, 48, 61, 63, 65, 94–95, 111, 163, 283 history of, 290 relationality, relational, 60, 84, 135, 209, 223 relativism, subjectivist, 40

313

ENDLESS ANDNESS

repetition, 18–19, 75n4, 165n40, 233 representation, representational, 8 and passim resistance, 84, 96n13, 119, 142n23 responsibility, responsible, 155, 160, 179, 206, 218 social, 160 retroversion, 2–3, 13, 36n3 rhetoric, 21 rhythm, 286 rotella, 46, 63, 64 sampling, 200 scale, 48, 56, 100, 139–40, 146, 208 science, scientific, 8, 83, 104, 165, 244–45 sculpture, 53 and passim as live art, 97–98 Secondness (Peirce), 214, 240 second-personhood, 165 self-alienation, 52n14 self-evidence, self-evident, 5, 35, 42, 96, 265 self-portraiture, self-portrait. See portraiture self-reflection, self-reflexivity, selfreflective, 46, 53, 61, 162n38, 163, 200 semiotics, semiotic, 29, 49, 60, 105, 237, 240, 241, 244 bodily, 57–58 sense, senses (faculty), 8, 22, 84, 101, 107, 135, 191, 259 sentimentality, sentiment, 142, 165, 238 sequentiality, 18, 39 serendipity, 28, 173–219 serography, 286 sex, sexual, 13n8, 75n4, 96, 97 sight (sense), 49, 107–08 sign, 37, 56, 57, 58n16, 62, 67, 81, 102, 104, 187–88, 242–45, 253, 264 signature, 16, 64, 129, 243 signification, 42, 56, 188 indexical, 57, 58 sincerity, sincere, 96 singularity, singular, 85, 119, 170, 213 site-specificity, site-specific, 120 situated present, 43 slow-down, 16, 18, 143n24

314

slowness, 49, 91, 111, 148, 162 of perception, 39 sociality, 21, 170 solid light films (McCall), 88 solidarity, 152, 201 solidity of light, 89, 94. See also light, materiality of solipsism, visual, 135 sound, 56n15, 106–08, 190–91 sovereignty, 259 space, 1 and passim architectural, 27, 43, 99 deictic, 62 dynamic, 280, 281, 283–84 fantasy, 212 fictionalized, 107 incorporated, 52, 67, 69, 89, 104 inhabited, 69 as “natural feeling” (Bergson), 88 political. See political space political redistribution of, 94 sharing of, 43, 65, 66, 69, 94, 100, 107, 159, 281, 279–91 smooth (Deleuze and Guattari), 117, 136, 148, 152, 166 striated (Deleuze and Guattari), 136, 147, 148, 152, 155 spacing, 22–25 spacetime, 210–13. See also timespace spatialization, 259 speech act theory, 175–77, 219 stammering, 15, 28, 41, 85, 106n19, 223, 231–34 Stimmung (Heidegger), 277n20 stuttering. See stammering stylizing (Adorno), 97, 164 subjectivism, subjectivist, 40, 41, 211 subjectivity, 25, 41, 49, 61, 63, 85, 105, 167, 169, 170, 176, 189, 213 subject–object distinction, 11, 101 sublime, 101 subliminality, subliminal, 21, 142, 147 subversion, subversive, 142 145 successive contrast (Itten), 237 suffering, 164–65, 166 “super body,” 195 “super sensation,” 190 “super space,” 152, 170–71, 190, 195

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

surrealism, surrealist, 92, 97, 130, 206, 247 swerving, 51–57, 61, 63, 66, 142 as remedial act, 57 symbol, symbolicity, 214, 242, 244. See also Thirdness synecdoche, 100, 125 synesthesia, synesthetic, 84, 89, 259 syntax, syntactic, 40, 41, 83, 231, 247 taxonomy, taxonomic, 58, 92, 156, 275, 276 temporality, 13, 22, 24, 36, 40, 41–42, 56, 67, 74, 106, 120, 143n24, 195, 200, 202, 204, 206, 211, 225, 237 tense, 24, 58, 62, 63, 75 imperfect, 71 visual, 58, 62, 75 textuality, 11 theater, 11, 96, 136, 275, 277 experimental, 136 theatricality, theatrical, 27, 31, 32, 36, 37n4, 86, 87, 94, 95, 96–98, 275, 278 thickening, 24, 59 of concepts, 11, 60 of duration, 39, 210 of time, 3, 106 thing, thingness, 4, 13, 34, 51, 125–27, 140, 175, 180, 185, 187, 207, 232, 281, 287 theory of things (Brown), 141n21, 185 Thirdness (Peirce), 214, 240, 242 third person, 165 thought–art opposition (Valéry), 15–16 three-dimensionality, three-dimensional, 46–47, 53, 78, 105 threshold, 22, 39, 51, 52, 65–66, 74 between formlessness and form, 204 time, 1 and passim empty, 201 found, 201 linearity of. See linear time materiality of, 143n24 standardized, 109 thickening of. See thickening of time

time-reckoning, 200 timespace, 119, 212. See also spacetime totalitarianism, totalitarian, 215 touch (sense), 49, 65, 67, 84, 89–91, 105, 137–38 object of, 137 subject of, 137 trace, 20, 61–62, 63, 64–66, 75, 103, 108 as forward-moving index (Derrida), 62 tradition, 18, 36, 117, 124, 125n8, 149, 155 pictorial, 38 tragedy (genre), 275, 278 transcendence, 22, 127, 128, 204 transgressing, transgressive, 89, 91, 124, 141, 142–46, 147, 149, 152, 162, 170, 179 translucency, translucent, 280–81, 284, 291 transparency, transparent, 71, 74–75, 78, 185, 281, 284 traumatism, 130, 206 trompe l’œil, 66 two-dimensionality, two-dimensional, 47, 76, 108 tychism (Caserio), 214 tyranny, tyrannical, 3, 8, 200, 264, 287 understanding, sensate, 13 universalism, 40–41 usefulness, useful, 174–75, 178, 179, 181, 185, 189–97, 208, 215, 218–19, 264 utopianism, utopian, 164, 259, 261 utterance, 10, 58, 242 value, 142–43, 157, 163 vanishing point, 48, 60, 71, 102, 109, 180 Verschiebung (Freud). See displacement video, 180, 198, 200, 202, 222 violence, 20, 96, 97, 166, 202 virtual reality, 6, 36, 102 visibility, 3–4, 5, 42, 53, 78, 86, 101, 104, 105, 111, 195, 222, 223, 230, 265 conditions of, 232, 238, 246, 260, 269

315

ENDLESS ANDNESS

vision (sense), 24, 49, 63, 65, 67, 96, 105, 106, 135, 136, 140n20, 188, 190, 191, 232, 247, 259, 279 close-up, 67 reliability of, 60 visual experience, 7, 125, 148, 189 as activity (Berger), 53 visuality, visual, 1, 7, 58, 60, 84, 242 and passim voyeurism, 131–33, 138 war, 20, 161, 163, 277 wavering, 27, 46, 51, 56, 57, 61, 63, 66, 67, 70, 99–106, 158

316

white cube, 195 window (topos), 48, 71 witnessing, 163, 169 world (Heidegger), 223, 277n20, 278 xenophobia, xenophobic, 187 yielding, 158, 165, 176, 177, 218

In Endless Andness, Mieke Bal pioneers a new understanding of the political potential of abstract art which does not passively yield its meaning to the viewer but creates it anew—an art perceived not only through the retina but experienced viscerally. In this book, the third of her companion volumes on art’s political agency, Bal explores perception through an intense engagement with the work of sculptor Ann Veronica Janssens. In a series of vividly recalled encounters with Janssen’s practice over a number of years, Bal presents a new conception of embodied perception—art experienced in a body conjured into participation and transformed by the experience. From Janssens’ “mist room” works and the Corps Noir sculptures through to the fugitive, porous Aerogel, Bal traces an art which eludes the subject–object distinction to alter our ideas about the potential of political art in abstract and figurative forms. Enticing us simultaneously to lose ourselves and to come home, the tenuous materiality of installation art empowers those who live in the permanently lost and migratory condition that characterizes contemporary experience. In celebrating and interrogating the work of this prolific and innovative artist, Mieke Bal transforms our understanding of non-representational art to create a new awareness of perception and performance in the shared spaces of our world.

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Mieke Bal is a cultural analyst, critic, and video artist. She was Professor of Theory of Literature at the University of Amsterdam and a founding director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA).