JOËLLE TUERLINCKX: AT THE EDGE OF THE VISIBLE
and sensibility: she has moved from a concern with the “in-between” spaces and interstices of time, her circles acting as traces of absent objects and the spinning disks as markers of “useless” time, to indicate the voids and null moments that exist yet are suppressed in everyday life and that serve, by their very “worklessness,” their nonfunctional or excessive character to expose the movements and transformations in their vicinities as potential for change. SHADOWS AND FRAMES
An exhibition or installation is conceived by Tuerlinckx as an occasion: it is an event that involves a doing. This means that the things that we actually see are to be regarded not as objects but as traces and as possibilities. They are the traces of an operation, containing the potential for rearrangement, for new doings on other occasions. As Frank Vande Veire writes in the catalogue Inside the Visible, “[Tuerlinckx’s] constellations of ‘little things,’ which literally never get oV the ground, reflect a well-meant attempt to create order yet simultaneously provide a vision of a landscape following a catastrophe. It seems as if everything still has to begin, still has to find its place. At 14. Frank Vande Veire, “Something about How a Tuerlinckx Machine Traverses the Exhibition Machine,” in Inside the Visible, ed. Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 452. 15. CANTOS curated by Michel Assenmaker, January 5–April 10, 2005, including Nobuyoshi Araki, Olivier Foulon, Pierre Klossowski, John Murphy, Willem Oorebeek, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, and Eric Van Hove. 16. For the philosophical implications of this and what follows, see Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1–13. 17. Tuerlinckx writes of the use of “confetti” in her work in her statement in connection with the collective exhibition Watt at Witte de With and the Kunsthal Rotterdam in 1994 in Cahiers 2 (Rotterdam: Witte de With and Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1995), 101–2.
the same time, everything is no more than a trace, a memory.”14 The event as such is not given, its traces are — traces that situate not a “past present” but a void. At the entrance to Tuerlinckx’s space in the recent group exhibition cantos at Casino Luxembourg15 was a book open onto an illustration from Diderot and D’Alembert’s eighteenth-century Encyclopédie; when I arrived, the page was “Métallurgie-fer blanc” and depicted women working on sheets of tin at sloping tables. The title is a homonym for “faire blanc” [“to make white”] — which is what Tuerlinckx, the only woman in the group exhibition, was doing with the white hatching, a negative representation of shadow, with which she was delineating a white rectangle on the floor of the space. On the book sat a passepartout, a rectangle of white cardboard with a window cut into it.16 This frame-within-theframe was eVectively included within the page, the border between outside and inside falling on the inside. When understood as passepartout, the frame comes to function not as isolating the inside from the outside, but as a place of passage, a “between” that also enables inside and outside to exchange places. The passepartout here recalled the way in which in earlier exhibitions Tuerlinckx had activated the “between” spaces by scattering confetti on the floor, a temporal process that allowed her “to do cinema, but in space”: “shredding up pieces of paper by hand to reconstitute these types of form-territories simply allowed me to explore the limits of the visible, the exchanges between the visible-material and the invisible-mental.”17 At Luxembourg, the passe-partout on the pic-
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