Nick found this.
Hard to categorise!
All posts by John
Wood
(Making with wood, rather than without it.)
Another useful guide from David Teager-Portman
Richard Wentworth
Statement (2007)
[ … ] I grew up in a world held together with string and brown paper and sealing wax, and that’s how it was. I slowly realized that this is the underlying condition of the world, and there’s nothing I like more than when, for example, there’s been a near-disaster at NASA and they say: ‘If it hadn’t been for the chewing gum .. .’ It’s not because I want to fetishize chewing gum or the aesthetics of gum pressed over some break or membrane; it’s because we have the intelligence to think: ‘Hey, there’s a malleable, mastic material and we can use that.’ A large part of our lives is spent using that very edgy bit of our intelligence [ … ]
Richard Wentworth. extract from interview with Kevin Henry in Henry, ‘Parallel Universes: Making Do and Getting By + Thoughtless Acts (Mapping the Quotidian from Two Perspectives), 2007. http://www.core77.com/reactor/03.07 _parallel.asp
Annette Messager’s Images of the Everyday
Rebecca J. DeRoo (2006)
From 1971 to 1974, Annette Messager created over one hundred notebooks and collection albums in which she pretended to document her daily life. Inside the notebooks, which constituted her first major series, Messager claimed to describe her daily activities and chores, such as caring for children, cooking, shopping and knitting. She drew diagrams with pen and ink and coloured pencils, sometimes pasting in clippings from magazines that she labelled in pen. Beginning in 1973, Messager exhibited her notebooks in horizontal display cases or hung their individual pages on walls of museums. [ … ] The notebooks [ … ] did not emerge from her own private experience or represent an ‘individual mythology’ of her own creation. Instead, these works had their sources in the home economics and childcare lessons taught to girls in the 1950s and 1960s when they attended primary and secondary school – lessons that have since largely been relegated to the national education archives after decades of struggle by feminist critics of education. [ … ]
Indeed, Messager’s notebooks directly engaged contemporary feminist debates over the teaching of women’s domestic tasks, an engagement that explored the problems and possibilities represented by both sides. For example, the page titled ‘Le Lavage’ (‘Laundry’) from her 1974 notebook Ma Vie pratique (My Practical Life) repeated detailed and didactic textbook instructions on doinglaundry properly. It read: ‘To wash a wool garment, I use warm water and a bit of soap. I squeeze the wool but don’t scrub it. I rinse it several times, always with water the same temperature. I squeeze the wool and ring it out by hand and lay it flat to dry.’ Messager’s mechanical repetition of the tasks implied utter immersion in daily routine and clearly related to the strand of feminist thinking that denounced the ways the curriculum trained women into domestic roles. At the same time, the elaboration of the detailed skills and processes learned made visible the value – the intensity of the labour, the care and skill – of the domestic aspects of many women’s daily life.
In its more critical mode, Messager’s repetition of tasks from the home economics curriculum can be compared to ideas being explored concurrently by the sociologist Luc Boltanski [brother of her partner, the artist Christian Boltanski].1 Luc Boltanski, like his contemporaries Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, saw the curriculum as a means for dominant social classes to structure and control students’ lives by regulating daily practices.2 I want to examine this connection at some length here, for it helps to make clearer how her work formed a critique of the ways the curriculum regulated students’ daily activities.
Since its inception in the 1880s, the housekeeping curriculum had been promoted by the state as a means for bringing happiness and health to all homes. In his 1969 study, Prime Education et morale de classe, Boltanski sought to expose the ideology underlying this codification of housekeeping practices. He argued that the housekeeping curriculum had formed part of a systematic project to regulate the habits of the working classes. In the late nineteenth century, popular opinion characterized the working class as immoral, disorderly and free from collective constraints. In response, educational programmes were organized to teach moral lessons, housekeeping and hygiene, in order to acculturate the working class to the middle-class values of order, work and economy. The schools instilled enseignement menager and puericulture, housekeeping and childcare lessons, by teaching rationalized attitudes and practices to be adopted in daily life. Because the familial sphere was considered ‘women’s domain’, these housekeeping courses for girls supplied a means to control the private life of the working classes. The factory and office workday had been timed, organized and rationalized since the nineteenth century, and the housekeeping classes provided a corresponding way to structure the private life of the working classes by regulating domestic labours:
Not public life which occurs in factories, offices and administration, which for a long time, since the beginning or middle of the [nineteenth] century, has been made uniform, standardized, constricted in space and time, confined in workplaces, delimited by work schedules. What needed to be regulated henceforth was private life, the multiple activities that are done in the privacy of the home, done behind the walls of individual houses. The ‘habitual manners of behaving’, [which were] governed by custom, passed on by tradition, had to be replaced by rules.’
This structuring of private life was manifest in home economic textbooks, which provided rationally organized chronologies of daily activities, with precise amounts of time allotted for each child-rearing and housekeeping task. Beyond teaching rules of housekeeping, hygiene and childcare, the lessons encouraged students to adopt methods of order and discipline in their daily life. Most importantly, the lessons compelled students to regulate their own behaviour, accomplishing what Boltanski called ‘a total transformation of spirit, a peaceful and internal revolution:•
Boltanski’s analysis of the home economics and childcare curriculum provides an important perspective on the class-component of education, yet his analysis of women’s role in the curriculum is limited. For him, women as homemakers enter into his model simply as the means for transmitting middleclass values to the working class. He does not consider how the home economics classes – because they were taught to and carried out by women – shaped the subjectivity of women in particular.
Messager’s work, in contrast, not only enacted the ‘rationalization of behaviour’ that Boltanski noted, but also showed how women’s training shaped their subjectivity. Messager represented the ways in which the behaviours taught in school were internalized at the level of the individual woman and, despite the reality of class differences, became common to some degree to all French women.
Messager’s notebook Ma Vie pratique (1974) evoked the systematization of daily behaviours that Boltanski observed. [ … ]
In line with feminists who saw the teaching of home economics as a means of preparing girls for menial roles, Ma Vie pratique and Mes Travaux d’aiguille enacted ways that the social order was incorporated into individual behaviour. By selecting statements such as ‘I must take a shower each day’ or labels such as ‘my needlework’, Messager isolated the moments at which educational directives were absorbed and expressed in the behaviour of the individual. From this perspective, it appeared that women across social classes shared, though unevenly, quotidian experiences that had been perpetuated through the education system for their subjection. At the same time though, grouping together these documents of women’s daily hygiene practices, household labours and domestic arts, could be seen to produce a detailed catalogue of women’s work and traditional skills that gave them dignity and respect. Both readings are possible, and in the mid-1970s, both readings would be advanced.
The dual modes of forming a critique and displaying attachment in Messager’s work seem particularly crucial coming at a time when traditions were changing due to feminist challenges, and equally significantly, the encroachments of consumer culture. These changes were particularly noteworthy in relation to women’s housework. Messager documented this separate and currently modernizing women’s culture, which stood in opposition to the promotion of standards of national culture that had been the aim of the education system and the museum.[ … ]
In contrast to the ‘artisanship’ and ‘culture’ of traditional feminine household arts, the contemporary housekeeping techniques promoted by women’s magazines were based on acquiring housekeeping gadgets that required no specific skills to operate.
The critic Pascal Laine’s description of feminine culture as a ‘local culture’ (ironically, one created and perpetuated in part by the national school system) that was in the process of being liquidated by Western modernism, echoed the ethnographic approach to modernizing traditional cultures exemplified by Claude Levi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques.5 And like Levi-Strauss and the ethnographers, anthropologists and museum curators influenced by him, Laine saw this local culture as a feature to be preserved. Within this framework, Messager’s albums can be seen as constructing the kind of archive that would preserve a vanishing women’s civilization, making visible the skilled and detailed labour in household work that had frequently gone unnoticed. [ … ]
One of her albums, Ma Vie pratique, for instance, was an encyclopaedic inventory of home economics lessons from the 1950s and 1960s. In the various notebook entries, Messager pretended to document her rigorous methods of housekeeping, health and hygiene, analysing her daily chores in handwritten instructions, and including textbook passages and textbook-style illustrations with bright, diagrammatic colours. For example, ‘La Cuisson des aliments’, one page from the album, described how to use a pressure cooker and how to cook meat, fish, dried and fresh fruits and vegetables, and represented each method schematically in diagrams. The notes described the health benefits of certain methods. For example: ‘Boiled meat is easy to digest. The heat makes the food either softer or harder, and it becomes more savoury and easier to digest, and further, it’s sterilized.’ In contrast, Mon Livre de cuisine (My Cookery Book), was filled with fiches cuisine, recipe cards published in women’s magazines such as Elle in the 1960s and 1970s. These clipped-out cards had a picture of the prepared dish on one side and the simple recipe on the back. Both Ma Vie pratique and Mon Livre de cuisine were based on the idea of women as housekeepers and cooks. Yet unlike Ma Vie pratique, the recipe cards in Mon Livre de cuisine did not promote principles of cooking in careful diagrams, but were simple recipes – often called ‘grandma’s recipes’ in an effort to lend them the aura of tradition – clipped out of magazines and glued into notebooks or copied over word for word. Whereas ‘La Cuisson des aliments’ illustrated the steps involved in each task, emphasizing the tradition and science of housekeeping, the recipe cards merely showed the final product, displaying the finished dish in an effort to entice the reader into purchasing the merchandise whose ads appeared on the pages of the magazine. The learning, the detail and the labour represented in Ma Vie pratique all vanished into a vision of a readyto-be-consumed meal. Whereas ‘La Cuisson des aliments’ described a number of techniques to be used at the discretion of the housekeeper, the fiches cuisine provided a simple, generic model leaving little room for the housekeeper’s discrimination, and thus little recognition of her skill. Viewed in this light, Messager’s albums would seem to reinforce Laine’s comment that homemaking skills were being effaced and transformed. Where the domestic arts had gained dignity from the rhetoric of health, order and moralistic progress that surrounded their skills, now, it seemed, ‘All that remains are “grandma’s recipes”, produced by the major food companies’ – mere publicity for brandname products.6 [ ••• ]
The role of women’s magazines and their advertising in saturating the everyday existence of their readers was not lost on Lefebvre, who noted the rapid influx of American-style commodities in the 1960s in Everyday Life in the Modern World.1 He believed that women’s magazines were the perfect object through which to study this transformation of the everyday, because of their intense focus on the new domestic commodities and their promulgation of the step-bystep behaviours needed to use them. The increased repetition and mechanization of household gestures that they displayed, Lefebvre believed, were a quintessential image of the broader restructuring of the everyday in which work and leisure had been so quantified and structured that no room remained for individual creativity, turning people into passive consumers. The consumerist ethic that Lefebvre noted would have profound effects on not only women’s practices in the home but also their subjectivities and bodies.
As an example of the influence of this consumer society on subjectivity, Lefebvre described how one day his wife brought home a new laundry detergent and exclaimed, ‘This is an excellent product’, with her speech and behaviour unconsciously imitating the advertising for the product.8 The force of this unconscious immersion was a striking example of the difficulty women would
have in attaining a critical perspective on the everyday. Like Lefebvre, Messager explored the way women emulated everyday gestures from the media, but also took the idea further, in Mes Collections d’expressions et d’attitudes diverses (My Collection of Various Expressions and Attitudes) to show how even women’s emotions had become saturated with these representations. In this series, Messager collected mass-media representations of women and catalogued them by activities or emotional states – ‘on the telephone’, ‘at the beach’, ‘fatigue’, ‘sadness’, ‘fear’, ‘jealousy’, ‘happiness’, and so forth. The series ‘tears’, for example, contains highly staged representations of women in distress: one woman holds her head in her hands, another leans her head on folded arms, and another covers her face. In the centre of the page, Messager drew herself in a similarly cliche pose – with her eyes closed, her head thrust back, and one hand held to her forehead. Another series of her ‘expressions diverses’ presented photographs of couples embracing, which surrounded various sketches of Messager embracing a man, being kissed by him, and leaning against his shoulder. By portraying herself within these stereotypes, Messager acted out how advertising had influenced her.9 Yet her drawn activities appear exaggerated and highly unnatural, providing a parody of the stereotypes and rising above the media immersion, signalling a critical perspective that Lefebvre would have thought women could not attain. [ … )
footnote 16 in source] Luc Boltanski, Prime Education et morale de c/asse(Paris: Ecole Pratique
des Hautes Etudes and Mouton, 1969). Luc Boltanski’s book formed part of a larger study directed by Pierre Bourdieu and carried out by the Centre de Sociologie Europeenne. Boltanski’s approach to the educational establishment as a means of social control was indebted to Michel Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic. See Michel Foucault, Naissance de la c/inique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963). 1 … ]
2 117] The other renowned contemporary work on this subject was, of course, that of Louis Althusser, who saw school as one of the ideological state apparatuses that perpetuated the dominant ideology and class divisions; through forming the students’ subjectivities, school also accomplished their subjection. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971 !orig. 19691).
3 118] Boltanski, Prime Education et morale de c/asse, 21-2. 1 … ]
4 119] Ibid., 26. ! … ]
5 125] See Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques(1955), trans.John and Doreen Weightman (New
York: Modern Library, 1997).
6 127] Pascal Laine, la Femme et ses images, 23. 1 … ]
7 130] Henri Lefebvre, Everyday life in the Modern World, 67, 72-4, 85-8.
8 131] Henri Lefebvre, Le Temps des meprises (Paris: Stock, 1975) 34.
9 132] Whereas Messager’s references to the French school curriculum remain more nationally specific, her explorations of the way mass media representations were internalized by women may be compared more broadly with the work of international artists active in the mid-1970s, such as Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills. For an account that emphasizes the similarities of French and American artwork of the 1970s, see Thomasine Haynes Bradford, The Relations of American and French Feminism as Seen in the Art of Annette Messager’, dissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2000.
Rebecca J. De Roo, extracts from ‘Annette Messager’s Images of the Everyday: The Feminist Recasting of ’68’, in The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France after 1968 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press 2006) 125; 130; 131-4; 140-2; 144-5; 146-50.
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov
Night Journey (1998)
- Take or build a desk (it’s best to take an old wooden one, dark brown with age, a simple wooden table with a long ‘history’) 70 x 130 x 72 cm in size.
- Buy a glass dome 28-30 cm in diameter and 20 cm high and place it in the upper right corner of the desk.
- Take a few small objects which can usually be found on a desk: a box of paperclips, erasers, pens, pencils, an ink bottle, a piece of cookie, a sheet of paper, etc. Place all of this under the dome.
- Place an electric desk-lamp next to the dome, turn it on and direct the light on the objects under the dome. The lamp should be 75 watts. The lamp should be simple, black, office-like.
- On the rest of the table, place objects which are usually found there: notepads, pens, paper clips, a telephone book, a water glass, a bottle of glue, etc.
Place all of this in the same way, in the same ‘disorder’ as the items under the dome so that – and this is very important – it gives the impression that the dome covered the corner of the desk and the objects there completely accidentally and not selectively, the objects under it are just like the ones nearby. - The circle of light from the lamp should illuminate only what has wound up under the dome, it should coincide almost exactly with the rim of the dome.
W. Petrov, Pensioner, Kiev
- How can you escape far-far away, to set off on a boundless journey, where everything around you will be new, unexpected, where everything is surrounded by the unfamiliar and interesting, you encounter things which don’t have names, their purposes and reason for existing are incomprehensible, where your every step is accompanied by the risk of falling under the feet of a strange being, and at the same time you will be surrounded on all sides by symbols and signs addressing you but in a language that is foreign to you? It is not at all mandatory for such a journey to buy a ticket for a train, plane ol’ boat, or even to leave one’s own apartment. When night has fallen, and you remain alone in your room, sit down at your desk, turn out the light, and turn your desk lamp so that it illuminates only one small part of the desk, it can be one of its corners (but this circle of light shouldn’t be too wide, not more than 20-25 cm in diameter). And you will quickly see how suddenly a new mysterious world emerges, which you couldn’t have anticipated before. Ordinary things – a note pad, a pen, a ruler, a box of paper clips, an eraser – which during the day were lying on your desk, will acquire roles in this magical circle of light that are unexpected and unfamiliar to you. But most of all, you yourself will change. In a strange way and without any particular effort, you will begin to shrink, and soon you will become very tiny amidst these enormous, strange and incomprehensible objects. This ‘journey’ of yours begins at that moment: very slowly, not rushing, you begin to walk around each of them, carefully examining them, concocting all kinds of guesses about the purpose of each of them and about what is written or drawn on them …
llya and Emilia Kabakov, ‘Night Journey’, from The Palace of Projects (London: Artangel/Madrid: Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 1998) n.p.
Laurie Anderson
on language, story and losing her archives to Hurricane Sandy
Peter Eleey If You Couldn’t See Me: The Drawings of Trisha Brown//2008
[ … ] Beginning in the latter part of [the 1970s), a major shift occurred in the ways Trisha Brown made dances, which in turn affected her drawings. With Son of Gone Fishin’ (1981 ), she started to use video to compose her choreographies, recording the company’s rehearsals and editing together phrases of improvisation that could be studied and replicated by her dancers. Video provided a much more powerful combination of documentary and generative properties than drawing ever had been able to offer her. Drawing, thereby freed from the yoke of composition, was liberated to function differently.
Instead of thinking about her body from the inside or in the abstract, Brown could now look at it as an object, much as video allowed her to do. It does not seem accidental that a subtle but significant breakthrough that the artist made in 1980, when she drew each of her hands with the other, coincided with the commencement of her use of video. Overlapping on the page in a graphic duet reminiscent of the opening ‘thumb dance’ of her classic Accumulation ( 1971 ), Left hand drawn by right hand #1 (1980) … was the first time she depicted herself through observation, and so specifically on the page. ‘I looked down the front of my body, and it was all that I could see’, Brown says.1 A seal had been cracked, yet she continued to draw abstractly throughout the decade. She mapped paragraphs of texts into their elemental parts according to various rule sets and structures, as if trying to establish or break some code. As such, these drawings feel related to Alighiero Boetti’s Biro pictures (1970-88), for which the artist deconstructed words and phrases along a letter-based alphabet register to one side, with the words spelled out in space like a musical score, demarcated by commas in their given alphabetic register. But it was fifteen years after that first hand drawing before Brown took the logical next step that it implied.
Sitting beside a piece of paper on the floor and holding a pen between her toes, she used each foot to draw the other.2 The difficulty of the method was exactly its allure. ‘I purposely take [the drawing) one step out of my control by using something other than my hand to draw it’, she explained, but the iconography of the feet remained somewhat too logical or expected, ‘too beautiful’ for an artist who had always worked away from the recognizable, toward the abstract.3 ln moving the paper from the notebook or desk down to the level of the dance floor, these foot drawings put the picture plane at the mercy of Brown’s entire body. With the paper on the floor, it was only a short skip and hop for her to realize the full gestural possibility of line, what the critic Harold Rosenberg meant when he described it as ‘the primary agency of physical motion … conceived not as the thinnest of planes, nor as edge, contour or connective but as stroke or figure (in the sense of”figure skating”)’.4 The ‘action’, he deadpanned, ‘became its own representation’; extrapolating from the foot drawings, Brown realized that she could use her whole body to depict itself.5
Beginning in 1999, Brown allowed her movements to speak for themselves on paper, in the process creating a kind of full-body self-portrait. She once noted admiringly that Robert Rauschenberg ‘arrives fresh at the scene of the accident he’s about to create’ – the forensic attitude again rears its head – and the attendant metaphors of messes, collisions, mishaps and skid marks are exactly right for describing the results of Brown’s entrance onto the paper.6 Using a sheet large enough to encompass her whole body, she began to treat the frame of the paper as a stage.7 Moving across it with pastels or graphite in her toes, rolling over, pivoting, sitting back, pushing, skidding, pulling, swooping, breaking her materials, skipping and stuttering them over the surface (or across the gap between sheets), thrusting, rubbing up the texture of the floor beneath, sweating, scooting, fidgeting, smearing, X-marking-the-spot, lying in wait: Brown creates a mystery novel in two dimensions. In places we can discern actual footprints and handprints rendered painterly, like those ofjasper Johns and David Hammons, in the mingling of charcoal dust, oil and sweat. But these drawings are mostly composed of the residual markings of movement, not static prints. Brown thereby recalls a whole range of artists, from Yves Klein to Tom Marioni, in whose surfaces the moving figure is present at full scale. Carolee Schneemann, who was part of the Judson circle, produced a work in the early 1970s that most directly anticipated Brown’s large drawings ( despite its marked differences – its relationship to gravity being among the most significant).
Using a rope attached to the ceiling of a train car, Schneemann ‘held a chalk in one hand extended, so that changes in weight, position, motion were charted by the free motion of the hand on the perimeter of the walls and floor it touched’.8 This performance, which Schneemann called Tracking (1973), itself recalls the earlier works of Kazuo Shiraga, who, similarly suspended, paints with his feet on floor-based canvases, and once wrestled mud as a public performance. Calling her series It’s a Draw, Brown evokes the futility ofShiraga’s early action work, punning on the state of exhaustion that marks the conclusion of these pieces, the detente she achieves against the imposing emptiness of the . paper-cum-stage.9 I … I
The It’s a Draw pieces perfectly and precariously balance the ‘concrete’ and ‘elusive’ qualities that Rauschenberg found, albeit in opposite proportions, in dance and art.10 In this tenuous concordance, Brown ironically holds out the possibility of breaking it all back apart: expanding the ‘history’ in history painting (and putting the lie to Walter Benjamin, who saw history as a compressed stratum piled upon itself); ungluing the simultaneity of the Futurist legacy; and excavating the gestural layers of Action Painting. In short, Brown proposes restoring the primacy of the moving body that is the absent or
obscured subject of all of these things, working back towards Eadweard Muybridge and against the vacuously instantaneous image we’ve ended up with. What Brown’s drawings represent, then, is a chance to repatriate a piece of what dance – not music or theatre, nor performance more generally _ bequeathed to the modern image, and in particular to the fated gesture that came to loom over the past half-century. The terms of Action Painting, naturally, are the terms of dance, and Brown has no need to borrow them back. [ … ]
Bruce Nauman On Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) (2001)//2002
What triggered this piece were the mice. We had a big influx of field mice that summer, in the house and in the studio. They were so plentiful that even the cat was getting bored with them. I was sitting around the studio being frustrated because I didn’t have any new ideas, and I decided that you just have to work with what you’ve got. What I had was this cat and the mice, and I happened to have a video camera in the studio that had infra-red capability. So I set it up and turned it on at night and let it run when I wasn’t there, just to see what I’d get.
I have all this stuff lying around in my studio, left-overs from different projects and unfinished projects and notes. And I thought to myself, Why not make a map of the studio and its left-overs? Then I thought it might be interesting to let the animals, the cat and the mice, make the map of the studio. So I set the camera up in different locations around the studio where the mice tended to travel just to see what they would do among the remnants of the work. The camera was eventually set up in a sequence of seven positions that I felt pretty much mapped the space.
I had only one camera, and I could only shoot one hour per night. So it’s a compilation. There’s 42 hours altogether, made over 42 nights of shooting in the course of four months. Before I went to bed I’d turn the camera on, and then in the morning I’d go out and see what had happened. The piece ended up being about six hours. (That is, each of the seven simultaneous video projections – representing each of the camera positions -runs six hours.) It just felt like it needed to be long so that you wouldn’t necessarily sit down and watch the whole thing but could come and go, as with some of those Warhol films. I wanted that feeling that the piece was just there, almost like an object, just there, ongoing, being itself. I wanted the piece to have a real-time quality. I like the idea of knowing it is going on whether you are there or not.
‘Fat Chance’, which I think is just an interesting saying, refers to a response for an invitation to be involved in an exhibition. Some time ago Anthony d’Offay was going to do a show of John Cage’s scores, which are often very beautiful. He also wanted to show work by artists who were interested in or influenced by Cage. So he asked if I would send him something that related. Cage was an important influence for me, especially his writings. So I sent d’Offay a fax that said FAT CHANCE JOHN CAGE. D’Offay thought it was a refusal to participate. I thought it was the work.
I was interested in the relationship between cat and mice, but more in a psychological way. Their relationship exists somewhere between a joke and reality. They’ve been cartoon characters for so long that we think of them as light-hearted performers, but there is this obvious predator-prey tension between them. I wanted to create a situation that was slightly unclear as to how you should react. The overall effect is … ambiguous, maybe a little anxious. Then you can hear the dogs barking once in a while and the coyotes howling now and again. So there is also an element of what’s going inside and what going outside, which I like.
What I’ve felt in watching is almost a meditation. Because the projection image is fairly large, if you try and concentrate on or pay attention to a particular spot in the image you’ll miss something. So you really have to not concentrate and allow your peripheral vision to work. You tend to get more if you just scan without seeking. You have to become passive, I think.
Because I wasn’t shooting every night, every hour the camera moves a tiny bit. The image changes a little bit every hour regardless of any action that’s taking place. I was working in the studio during the day all that time, and I would unconsciously move things around. Maybe organize a few things -what you do in a studio when you’re supposedly not making art. So the areas that I was shooting tended to get cleaner or have fewer objects in them over the six hours. I thought that was kind of interesting.
It ends pretty much how it starts. It begins with a title and a few credits, and then basically it just starts, and then it ends. The image goes blank. No crescendo, no fade, no ‘The End’. It just stops, like a long slice of time, just time in the studio.
Bruce Nauman, ‘Bruce Nauman Talks about Mapping the Studio’, Artforum (March 2002) 120-21.
Claire Bishop Fischli & Weiss: Equilibres – Quiet Afternoon (1984-85)//2008
One of my favourite pieces of writing on Fischli/Weiss is by Peter Schjeldahl, because he openly refuses to make grand claims for their work. In fact, he does the exact opposite: ‘As professional artists, these guys are pretty jejune. Their ideas are hybrids or retreads of precedents they don’t advance or otherwise alter significantly.’1 It’s true: Fischli/Weiss don’t strive to be the first or best or most spectacular. They even seem to harness mediocrity. As a result, all attempts to stake them a place in art history appear painfully strained, since every aspect of their work actively resists aggrandisement. Stiller Nachmittag ( Quiet Afternoon 1984/5) is completely typical in this respect. It comprises a series of twenty-
seven photographs of sculptures made using everyday objects precariously arranged into understated, pointless and often unmemorably complex neologisms, untitleds and the utterly inexplicable. None of the compositions bear any significant relation to any of the others in the series, which is so disparate that it fails to produce a coherent whole. There could be forty pictures or only five; it wouldn’t make that much difference.
Such slack randomness has an immediately deflationary effect on art historical analysis. If anything, Quiet Afternoon is a send-up of traditional sculpture and the language with which we read it. Composition, matter, dynamism, re and weight, the language pictoriality: with all these which terms we read fall it. flat in the Composition, face of matter, ropey matenals and bathetic titling. It’s hard to discuss a work as sculpture when the object of your study is a quizzical courgette tentatively gracing a stumpy carrot supported by a slim cheese grater. What follows, then, is a replacement for such potentially excruciating legitimations. It’s a short compendium of art references that come to mind when perusing Quiet Afternoon. What comes to the fore is the recurrent theme of gravity: a split second of provisional balance before the objects
come clattering to the floor. Perhaps those afternoons weren’t so quiet after all.
Am Abgrund (On the Brink)/Das Experiment(The Experiment)/Die Verfeinerung (Refinement)
Raised up, but visually unstable, these table sculptures could be smaller in scale, skeletal, and so present faster, dynamic compositions. Elegant drawings in space, they lead the eyes like swift dancers, seemingly ready to step gracefully free of the table’s boundaries.’
Schlummerschlinge (Slumber Loop)/Ohne Titel (Untitled)/Die Verschworung (The Conspiracy)
Luc Sante: Sophie Calle’s Uncertainty Principle//1993
Like a sculptor of a past century, Sophie Calle in her art manipulates and reconfigures a commodity central to the economy of her time. This commodity does not happen to be bronze or marble, however, but information, the elusive stuff that circulates incessantly between consciousness, document, and cyberspace. It is a maddeningly imprecise and unquantifiable commodity, hovering somewhere on the border between objective and subjective, public and private, hot and cold. It is farmed in huge quantities, fought over, stolen, adulterated and negotiated by credit bureaus, intelligence agencies, polling organizations. market-research firms, and yet its value resides in minute specifics and fugitive shades of meaning. Its pursuit thus resembls experimental science – vast quantities of print-outs are generated for every nit that can be seized upon and exploited – as well as art: it is at every point along its process so immaterial, so woozily figurative or abstract, that its commodity status seems like a bit of legerdemain, and its manufacture and trade a kind of parody.
Calle is not the first artist to work this medium. of course. The Surrealists probably were the pioneers, notably in their fascination with opinion polls. The aphorist and suicide Jacques Rigaut put his own spin on the matter: he carried on his person a tiny pair of scissors with which he used to remove surreptitiously a button from the garment of every person he met; this he insisted was a form of art collecting. The novelist Philippe Soupault once staged a version of a highway robbery: he stopped a bus on the Avenue de l’Opera late at night by extending a chain across its path; then entered it and ordered all the passengers to tell him their birth dates (the combination of violence and trivia present in this act does not seem very far from Calle’s concerns). Trivia devoid of violence, data accumulated for their own sake, the relentless documentation of the most apparently boring processes – these are traits associated with various phases of conceptual art, which pursued the sublime through sevral disciplines, one of them being busywork. The Surrealist and conceptual approaches to the management of information as a medium in itself could be said to represent in their very different ways the mingled fascination and horror inspired by the looming triumph of bureaucracy. The Surrealists responded with bemusement and savagery, the conceptualists with Zen, which is not identical to complacency.
The work of Sophie Calle appears at various times to display all of these qualities, at others only some. Her first work, The Sleepers, resembles straightforward conceptual bookkeeping but with an added layer of sexual risk. at least by implication. Risk, as well as stealth, deception and intrusion, dominates her most notorious works, Suite venitienne, The Shadow, The Hotel and L’Homme au carnet. The commanding metaphor here is espionage, with more than a suggestion of sadomasochism. Anato/i is a portrait, sharing with her earlier works the fact of having been assembled not in spite of but through adverse conditions, in this case the lack of a common language. In its plainness it throws into relief this common thread, which we might name ‘the blind men and the elephant’. Not surprisingly, her next piece is The Blind. This work, which connects as well to the earlier and more prosaic The Bronx, employs hearsay in pursuit of the ineffable, in effect constructing an artwork only alluded to and not represented by the objects on the gallery wall, a pursuit taken up in Ghosts, Blind Colour and Last Seen.
There seems to be a rough split in Calle’s career to date: her earlier works are, broadly speaking, concerned with narrative, and the later ones with image. In both, the principal tool is language, with the visual component filling an illustrative role. In this way, her work suggests the forensic process during a police investigation: she assembles clues, descriptions, guesses, allusions, and pieces them together into an approximate rendering. In the earlier works, this rendering takes the form of a dossier; in the later ones it resembles an identikit sketch. Cash Machine might be a sort of pun on this idea, with its disembodied, almost ectoplastic surveillance-camera portraits. Autobiographical Stories and The Tombs extend the principle of the visual substitute or approximation in another direction, toward the iconic. The objects that stand in for epochal incidents in the artist’s life and the laconic gravestones that reduce entire existences to a mere familial title possess a weight of their own; the referent is almost beside the point. If one were to hear or read a description of Calle’s work and try to reconstruct it on that basis without actually seeing it, it is possible that one might imagine its theme to be the poverty of language or of image, the insufficiency of second-hand experience. Instead, her work continually stresses the beauty of imprecision, the poetry of gaps and lapses.
She is, in other words, a kind of impressionist. Uncertainty dapples her pictures the way the sun’s rays spatter the leaves and splash the grassy swards in the Bois de wherever. But that’s not all there is to it. Uncertainty is an inevitability when it comes to information; information is uncertain in the same way that humans are mortal. But information nevertheless strives for certainty, or rather its purveyors do, whether quixotically or disingenuously. The police tipster, the industrial spy, the political clairvoyant, the highly placed source – all are in the business of pretending infallibility. And their commerce, once a small-time traffic, is in the process of becoming ever more institutionalized, increasingly central to the global economy as it moves from nocturnal alleys to glass-walled offices. Tremendous financial decisions are made on the basis of lore – consumer profiles, focus-group questionnaires, extrapolations of trend curves – that are about as reliable as the divination of bird entrails. This metaphor is not idly chosen: the
commerce of information is descended in part from that of the augurers who advised military leaders in antiquity. It has merely been dressed up with technology and soft science for the benefit of contemporary rationalists.
Calle’s work is to a certain degree a parody of this trade, and so could be said to be a parody of a parody, a simulacrum of a sham. But to the extent that her portraits – the address-book man, Anatoli, the occupants of the hotel rooms, herself even – are distortions, they are no more so than a Cubist head, say, would be as compared with a photographic likeness. Even when the deck appears stacked – the address-book scheme, viewed from one angle as a tin-pot Citizen Kane, might prompt questions about her motives – enough air is admitted in the form of indeterminacy to prevent any agent including Calle from having full control of the drift. Uncertainty, in short, is the footprint of truth. It is the only aspect of any piece of information that can always be relied upon, and, of course, it is the aspect that diminishes information’s value as a commodity. It is nearly always inconvenient; it is unproductive and inefficient; it is often dangerous. And that is why it is so beautiful, as Calle repeatedly demonstrates in her work.
Luc Sante, ‘Sophie Calle’s Uncertainty Principle’, Parkett, no. 36 (1993) 74-8.