The Square in a Forest by Westphalie

The Square in a Forest

BenoĂŽt Maire

The Square in a Forest Chronicle of an exhibition

Westphalie Verlag

Published by Westphalie First published in French at Le Pavillon, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2006 Translated into English by Anna Preger Set in 11/14 pt JansonText Printed in Austria Copyright © Benoît Maire, 2008 All rights reserved Westphalie Verlag Anilingasse 2/45 A-1060 Vienna www.westphalie.com ISBN 978-3-9502302-6-0

Contents

Preface Introduction The “As-If” and the castle of Chance (Az-Zahr) ..................

The copy ................................................................................

The labyrinth .........................................................................

The axioms of diegetic space ................................................

Diegesis ..................................................................................

Departures .............................................................................

Things themselves .................................................................

Chapter One The path through the bushes ................................................

Paths that lead nowhere ........................................................

Bataille and the “outside-oneself” .........................................

The onthology of the game ...................................................

The system of un-knowledge ................................................

The archeology of decadence ...............................................

The past norm .......................................................................

The ethics of ghosts ..............................................................

The fourth dimension ...........................................................

The first crime .......................................................................

The race .................................................................................

The political novel ................................................................

The philosophical novel ........................................................

Liam Gillick and the square ..................................................

N spaces .................................................................................

The running of the affect ......................................................

The modelization of the affect ..............................................

The screenplay ......................................................................

Politics ...................................................................................

Chapter Two The clearing ..........................................................................

The square .............................................................................

Shakespeare and spirits in the notion of the forest ...............

The limits of the forest ..........................................................

The author .............................................................................

The six hands of the author ..................................................

The name of the author ........................................................

The mask ...............................................................................

The black hole .......................................................................

The narrated story .................................................................

The ethics of ghosts, bis ........................................................

Haunting ................................................................................

The mould of the ghost .........................................................

The mark ...............................................................................

Joy ..........................................................................................

Infinity ...................................................................................

Space itself .............................................................................

The burden ............................................................................

The place................................................................................

Noise ......................................................................................

The difference between haunting and hauntedness .............

Fear ........................................................................................

Chapter Three After Heidegger and the end of metaphysics ........................

The circumference ................................................................

Two worlds, one of them being the ideal ..............................

Materialism ............................................................................

Parallel worlds .......................................................................

All possible worlds .................................................................

The never-ending tower ........................................................

The invisible object ...............................................................

Projection ..............................................................................

Cinema ...................................................................................

Aristotleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s physics ...................................................................

Galilean reversal ....................................................................

Copernicus .............................................................................

The inversion of values .........................................................

The second mathematical revolution ...................................

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Two parallel lines intersect at infinity ................................... 102 Halâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s song ............................................................................... 103 The concept of temporality after the end of History ............ 106 Stories .................................................................................... 106 History ................................................................................... 110 Historical materialism ........................................................... 113 Critical materialism ............................................................... 116 Deictics .................................................................................. 118 Language games .................................................................... 118 Persuasion analysis ................................................................ 119 Spin-doctors .......................................................................... 120 Microsoft ............................................................................... 121 The thought from outside ..................................................... 121 Indecision ..............................................................................

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The seducer ........................................................................... 127

Preface

The square in a forest is an exhibition, it has already taken place, it is repeating itself, even in the distant future it has not yet come to an end. This text sets out to present a chronicle of it, it is an attempt at establishing a chronicle, it is its starting point, its failed attempt, the first published pages of a chronicle, that is: its present time. Due to its economy, the exhibition itselfâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the square in a forestâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;is a crime. Rather, it is the repetition of a crime already committed; with three chapters and various entries the chronicle seeks to determine the modalities of its intrigue. It is inspired by the works of: Gabriel Orozco, Ryan Gander, Balthus, Seth Price, Liam Gillick, Marcel Duchamp, Donald Judd, John MacCracken, Ian Wilson, Ugo Rondinone, Elaine Sturtevant, Lee Lozano, Dan Graham, Reena Spaulings, General Idea, Steven Parrino, Adam Pendleton, Brice Marden, Martha Rosler, Marcel Broodthaers, John Armleder, Philippe Thomas, Pierre Joseph, Le Cercle Ramo Nash, Pierre Klossowski. The music is by Philip Glass. It takes place in a castle surrounded by woodland. Beyond this lies the shore. All of the works are known, the castle is

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known, and the same goes for the forest. Nonetheless everything will repeat itself again. Again is Lacan’s word. To state that everything will go and repeat itself again does not, in the present moment, signify anything at all, and it still will not signify anything later, the word remains Anzeichen, a call, an announcement. Michel Polnarref will remove his glasses on entering the castle. Everything that is streamlined, trousers, cars, watches, all of these things disintegrate at the castle doors. The castle is known, it is called the castle of Chance , it is in fact this very castle that lent its name to the game of chance (hasard), the dice game played within its walls in the 12th century in Syria (see Clément Rosset, Logique du Pire). Chance is known, people with long hair groom themselves meticulously, chance is calculated, it becomes a probability, the probabilities of risk are calculated, in the castle there is no great risk, only the interplay of these works, the game is known, it is played out in the castle and the surrounding forest, a screen by Liam Gillick is installed in the clearing in the forest. Lee Lozano speaks but cannot be heard and Pierre Joseph—who cuts a path for himself in the metaphorical undergrowth—sees through it all. It is a set, everything that occurs in the castle will repeat itself, there is a square in the forest, the question of the exhibition —what is at stake—is formalism, the undergrowth versus the square, the clearing and the deer that graze there, Philip Glass’ haunting music; a philosopher is invited—Satyagraha —an expert in the theory of knots. May it be stated without further delay that every knot is a Translator’s note: In Arabic transliteration the castle was known as ‘Az-zahr’ (the dice), giving the French term ‘hasard’ (chance), that in turn gives the English term ‘hazard’ (but which, semantically, is slightly further removed.)

Preface

knot of knots and that formalization is the point of cominginto-force of the real. “Knots, formalism and debate” could be the exhibition’s subheading.

Introduction

“We will thus have to distinguish between a form of chance that follows necessity (and all causal series) and a form of chance that precedes necessity”, Clément Rosset utters through muffled laughter. Martha Rosler’s as-if approach points up the manner in which conceptual art dresses itself up with the modes of signification, or the signifying practices, of other disciplines. How can the as-if be conceived in the castle? The origin of the term ‘chance’ (hasard), a dice game played at the castle in Syria in the 12th century, is rapidly absorbed into the French language as a term that suggests a certain passivity on the part of the player, for his destiny depends on factors other than his own qualities as the cast dice decide for him. A distinction is thus drawn between the game of chance and the game of fate in which one’s destiny lies in the hands of the gods. Here the trial of tragedy presents itself in its fundamental sense as that which eludes all possibility of control. At this point we should state the relationship between the as-if and chance, only at this stage in the game there has yet to be one, their relationship thus remains Anzeichen, a clue, a call. It is night-time and the darkness hangs like a black cloak over the forest, heavy, damp, shrouding it entirely. Elaine paints a sky in the manner of De Chirico, producing the same flat surfaces. De Chirico is back in vogue in the 1980s. In the 1950s

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and 60s he created copies of his own metaphysical paintings to make money. The circulation of fake Warhols due to the silkscreen printing technique is another problem, but Warhol claims to be able to spot the fakes. Warhol often talks about Elaine Sturtevant. But we must draw a distinction between the term copier and copyist. There is a big difference between the copier and the copyist. It seems that the copyist has a Classical Renaissance approach to her work whereas the copier’s stance is more like that of a shrewd trickster. The copyist’s as-if dimension forms the link with classical repetition: that which is repeated is the initial energy, the impulse, the jouissance of an impulse that ventures the appropriation of territories that have no fixed form for the time being, having been borrowed from other disciplines. The as-if of the copyist, whose work is definitively never done or finished, but always redone or started over, suffers from a jouissance of the ‘again’, that is, it relies on a repetitive differentiation of a jouissance that cannot be wholly divulged, and announces its repetition, over and over, again and again. So to begin with one must be aware of this, in the castle and the surrounding forest, the works on display, the exhibition, is a repetition again, or rather it is again a repetition, and not a copy resembling an imitation of an exhibition, or of all the possible modes of exhibiting the works re-presented. We must reflect here on the again of repetition, a question of gender that remains unresolved, a question of gender that has to do with a specific jouissance of the affect that we will observe further on, but so as to introduce it briefly straight away: it is Lacane’s again, Lacan’s hysterical side, his female conceptual character, in as much as he supports part of feminine language (langage) with his cane (canne). In texts on aesthetics an image can often replace what is discussed, an image that iterates the question. One generally exits

Introduction

the labyrinth by its entrance, in the Holzweg, one can also leave by the same place, which brings about a strange relationship to time, exiting by the entrance in a different time without ever really backtracking, or without realizing it perhaps. This produces a temporal series of a different nature, no longer the passing of time, but moments that are threaded together like beads, on a spatial line, a line that I occupy each time I find myself where I was before. On this string of beads successive retroactions occur, a form of nostalgia sets in, this temporal series is of a different kind. For example there is such a thing as an abstract temporal series made up of all the days when I see my sister—all of the days at first, then fewer days, up to the point when I cannot even see her anymore—for whatever reason, including dramatic ones, which lends it a certain colour. Once closed, the temporal series is organized into a story, with a beginning, development and end. By the way we entered, does this mean one should always retrace one’s steps? The work of certain artists as the constant return to the starting point stands precisely as the copy of the initial energy, the original impulse. Can we conceive of a labyrinth with such impulses? And could it form a backbone in terms of the organization of the exhibition? The castle’s metaphorical labyrinth would be made up of the grouping of the affective qualities of the starting points, the impulses, a labyrinth that would perhaps be punctuated, at its limit, by the kitsch repetition, the repetition of an emptied form repeating itself across the scattered shards of history. The sense of the repetition always occurs within a diegetic space. Let us say that under the sky, a repetition that is not a copy configures a diegetic field, that is to say: the elements that make up the framework of a story. The repetition of the form of the affective impulse, the choice of a form that is at its point of exhaustion brings about its devaluation into kitsch, which amounts to a type of affect that proceeds to re-

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peat itself without an as-if in the historical-logical series of the diegetic space of a circumscribed territory. “Kitsch is the repetition of a form, of its mode of formation”, claims a member of Le Cercle Ramo Nash. “Is a temporal delay a crime, are we summoned here because of our relationship to repetition?” he enquires. “Not a single one of us can be said to be kitsch, but we play a part in the repetition of diegetic series of the history of forms”, he declares to the other members of the Circle while Glass can be heard playing in the background. The idea of the crime occurs at this point, when the Glass music repeats itself, when the labyrinth takes shape, when the kitsch quality emerges, there is a Minotaur hidden within the exhibition becomes a possible statement, silence would be pointless, the wind blowing through the branches of the poplar trees, the thorn bushes. This is to be read in the running of the present words, or in the attempt to structure un-finalized statements that rhythm the pass band. At this point in the exhibition the diegesis is determined by a certain number of works that punctuate the link, a considerable amount of which are created by members of Le Cercle Ramo Nash. The curator has placed Reena Spaulings’ flags nearby, Seth Price breaks a pane of glass, once with his foot and once with his hand, he is now bleeding. Seth Price walks slowly through the forest, his long hair gets tangled up in the low branches, but in reality his hair is short, in his hand he clasps a book by Don DeLillo, he is now reading a passage to Liam Gillick (who is watching Lee, who remains silent): “He found a dark lounge and went inside. Two men sat at a table playing an Egyptian board game. Squares of equal size. Penalties levied. Element of chance. Billy recognized the game; he’d seen it played at

Introduction

the Center by colleagues of his. Numerous geometric pieces.” Liam recognized the book: “Yes it’s in Ratner’s Star, the 1976 book, towards the beginning I think”, he says. Everything is set up to suggest a theory of games in an exhibition centre, only the glass panelling is missing, in the castle everything is made of stone, and the visitors use candles to light their way. In the forest everything suggests that there is only the announcement, only qualities of the announcement and references to statements that structure the understanding of the works that are exhibited there, without one knowing what it is about exactly, but a politics of statement inter-referencing does not amount to a story but to the contours of a diegesis. This diegesis which is an ‘other’ word but one intrinsic to Lyotard’s propositions on postmodernity is the one the inhabitants cover on the pass band. The people that visit the exhibition find themselves on the pass band, it is a fastened belt according to philosophies of the return, it is a zone of impulse, and of initial qualities according to vitalistic philosophies, and from Lyotard’s perspective, at least in his Libidinal Economy, it is both simultaneously. At that point in time Lyotard spent all of his time in the forest, he climbed trees and let his beard grow, like Wittgenstein he lived in a den, but more in the manner of Tom Sawyer’s friend Huckcle Berry Fin [sic], a name that sounds like that, I’m unsure of the spelling, a home, a little tree-house. Reconciled with the countryside, with Nature, as in Thoreau’s novel, Lyotard meditates on the stream and wonders how best to go about fishing trout bearing in mind the ebb and flow of the current. At the same point Philippe Thomas walks towards a strange DS , her headlights are still Translator’s note: the DS (pronounced ‘Déesse’ meaning ‘Goddess’) is the legendary Citroën car created in the 1950s.

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on, she has probably been split down the middle and reassembled, he overheard some talk about a crime while he was walking through the clearing, a reactivated character standing not far from Gillick’s screen was holding herself in an awkward position and Ugo Rondinone went to meet Philippe: “We have all committed a crime, but I don’t know which one yet, the crime is probably metaphysical, it has something to do with lived time, with the time of memories as much as with the time of mental projection, I’ve heard people talk about temporal retroactions in which we are all involved. — I don’t know, answered Philippe, personally all I’m doing here is killing time, and I know very well that I am treading someone else’s steps, but even so, this doesn’t mean that I’m in a closed universe, killing time is really the only crime that I can claim to my name. — No, I’m not sure that that is what it’s about, apparently in the castle there’s a person with a covered face, she always appears with her back to the light and it’s impossible to unmask her, she goes through doors without opening them, we all have some link to this person without knowing exactly what it is. It may be the case that, as I’ve been told, it is a full and positive relationship at points, then turning negative and hollow at other points in our lives; I think I’m going to try and plant some cacti in the clearing, I’ll chose the ugliest ones to be sure that no-one picks them.” The phenomenological discourse that at one point may have formed a framework for Dan Graham’s work has recently been crumbling apart. ‘The return to things themselves’, the classic phenomenological watchword that Martin Heidegger catches like a common cold from his master Husserl, forenamed Edmund, is, for a period, what Graham Dan’s constitutive diegesis is concerned with. Why? we might ask. The

Introduction

exhibition, with its conceptual basis, is built on a novel approach to artworks with recourse to the theory of games, thus leaving much to chance, that sees to the determination, the outcome of a number of games and posits a phenomenological relationship to things, to objects located in space. This relationship seeks to establish itself as first in the castle so that the experience of the look may be that made possible by the Husserlian époché, also known as a phenomenological reduction, that is to say: a perspective that has been rid of the evidence of the existence of elements that make up the world. At last, no more evidence—thus is the curator’s wish once one is inside the castle.

Chapter One

“Do you remember Syracuse’s ideal, the city ruled over by the tyrannical Denys II?” chirrups a bird in the forest. Steven Parrino moves closer to Adam Pendelton, Thoreau’s work in the American transcendentalist vein and namely in Walden 2 exacerbates the idea of a free subject living in harmony with nature, living on earth with an intimate relationship to her sphere of immanence that is, in a sense, as if held in her core. Thoreau puts forth the idea of an Adam-like return to nature, a utopia that is close to Plato’s concept of reminiscence, or Heidegger’s return to-things-themselves, the stream, the trout, the return, perhaps even in its nostalgic form, several centuries have passed over it: “Do you remember Plato’s travels every which way? Thomas More, Campanella, Fourier remember very well what the shifting site of the improbable can mean” sings the blackbird. Through this existentialist quest Thoreau reconnects with a direct experience of nature and works on a phenomenology of lived experiences that are not diffracted in the space-time engendered by the technical world. Nostalgia for passed times, the forest bordered by birdsong positions itself as the semiotic space of experimental aesthetic situations. Iwona Blazwick draws closer to a sketch on a slightly crumpled piece of paper, it belongs to the series published in EXIT DARK MATTER by Steven; after explaining the origin of the exhibition’s title she evokes the twists and turns and

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the labyrinthine aspect of the ‘metaphorical bushes’ that the paths opened up by the culture of Liam Gillick’s screenplay lead us onto. In the preface to the book he holds in his hand, Martin H. succinctly clarifies the semantic intention regarding the choice of term we are concerned with: “…In the forest there are paths, most of them overgrown, that suddenly end on reaching undomesticated parts of the forest. They are called Holzwege. Each one follows its own course while remaining in the same forest. Often they seem to resemble one another. But it is only an appearance. Lumberjacks and foresters understand paths. They know what being on a Holzweg means, a path that does not lead anywhere…” Now we may wonder whether it might make sense to translate The Wood Way by Holzweg. Donald Judd is presently walking over his squares, and Adam Pendelton is also getting ready to get people talking. The semiotic situation that is set up is played out at a point of de-teleologization of history, the point that follows the end of utopias as a set of ideals made up of society’s projections. We are free to believe in it, or not; the exhibition stands for its hypothesis. An analysis of the ‘other place’ or ‘other share’ (l’autre part): that which is not some place else but rather that which is well and truly here, part of the very fibre of experience, but which is not directly visible, this being its dark, doomed side, ‘the accursed share’ (sa part maudite) . In the drawing-room there is a new flag, it is as if it were driven into the wall, the flag presents a pattern of red bricks, a wall within the flag, a slide by Ceal Floyer is projected just next to it, in the drawing Translator’s note: an allusion to Georges Bataille’s eponymous book.

Chapter One

room there is a fireplace, and in the fireplace there is a fire, and in the fire there is firewood, and in the firewood there are atoms, and in the atoms lies a void. The flag is moving gently as a draft was created by a window being opened, someone is going through the door, it is open now, someone else enters the television screen that is on the low table near the fire that crackles noisily, excited as it is by the flow of air in the room; we cannot as yet recognize the person passing over the threshold, but she seems outside herself, that is to say: both spaced out and furious. But the person stands with her back to the light, we cannot see her face clearly, she gently puts down what she was holding in her hand, she first closes what she was holding in her hand before putting it down, it is an umbrella, or one might as well call it a spur if one insists on being surrealistic, it is raining outside, it is an event, the rain pours down on the sculptures and Lyotard’s tree-house, the chickens must be led to shelter or else they will get soaked. The person passing over the threshold is the whole avant-garde, not the members that make up the avant-garde, rather, and only, the avantgarde, the concept, what happens before the door is opened as the saying goes, but she goes through the door, armed with an umbrella, Nietzsche’s phrase analysed by Derrida in Spurs, Nietzsche’s Styles, being this very one: “I forgot my umbrella”; speaking of the dialectic effect, Magritte says: Hegel’s holidays, and places a glass of water on top, we will come back to that later. Total dissipation now reigns in the drawing-room, the avant-garde wants to seize Reena Spaulings’ red-brick flag while dialectics is away on holiday. Dialectics comes back, two opposite forces now replace the rain and surrealism is present. Lee stops talking, the person entering the television screen is Dan Graham, the entire audience is captivated at the point when Dan Graham’s hind legs can be seen going into the screen, an ape climbs in through the window, it eats

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a banana and scatters monkey-nuts here and there, it was fed up with the electrodes that the dialectician had fastened onto him, after photographing it Robert Doisneau quickly sets it free. The ape plays the part of the primitive namo, Jean-Yves Jouannais puts his Rosset book down, the ‘outside-oneself’ is a farce. Dan Graham finds that the reading Price delivers to Liam has sparked his interest, and he gets out a book by Robbe-Grillet, forenamed Alain. Then he proceeds to not read it and starts talking about psychoanalysis instead, or rather Bataille’s relationship to psychoanalysis, that slut; we have fallen into a hole in time, it is 1972 and Dan creates for the first time his “Intention Intentionality Sequence”, he observes the audience before him and describes it briefly. His description of the audience alters the audience’s behaviour: “I see just about everybody in the front row in an absolutely static, almost timeless kind of a statue-like expression except that the girl in the front row is fooling with her fingers, scratching on her legs and smiling, laughing, coming very, very close to my time, just sort of natural. And everyone else is very close to me now, except for Max, who is deliberately looking to the side, but out of the corner of his eye . . . Everybody is focused directly on Max . . . except Marta who turns to look behind her at other people in the audience looking. . . . There is a man behind with a beard in the third row who is turning at an angle and chewing.” Price grasps hold of the Robbe-Grillet book and starts reading, beginning at the end, and while he reads the book backwards without really thinking, thus practising without really

Chapter One

being aware of it the “verlan” of the French language, or more originally, imitating Gargantua who could recite several works from beginning to end or back to front with ease, he is wondering about a piece by Dan he saw earlier in the castle bathroom. The backwards reading structures part of his mind, it is quite a pleasant exercise, leaving him room to mull over that little piece placed on the rim of the basin in the bathroom. He recalls that unflinching little girl, who seemed like she were coming out of the Balthus painting exhibited in the drawing-room; she was fingering the piece, a single-player game made up of 15 small white squares with the inscription “ONE” on them. The 16th square is missing so as to allow mobility to the others so that the right solution to this puzzle may be found, a puzzle that accepts them all definitely (unlike ordinary single-player games, for which one has to make up a fixed series of numbers, or else re-form a plan). With this puzzle, all solutions are right, as the only pattern on the squares is an identical “ONE”, having said that, with the generic square, containing the space of 16 squares, of a quarter of the side of the original square, the missing square creates a gap. This absence, this gap, is precisely what allows Seth Price to not get tired—not Seth Price, the real one, but his Doppelgänger in the exhibition narrative, because here everyone has a double according to the Dostoyevskian logic of doubling, to take up a role, the one of supporting the exhibition script—of intriguing the conscious part of one’s consciousness. Whereas the unconscious part of his consciousness is concerned with a current dream in which the unflinching little girl can well and truly walk through walls, and she talks to a big white rabbit, is called Alice, then enters a Klossowski before observing love Translator’s note: verlan—derived from l’envers, lan-ver (meaning backwards/ back-to-front)—is a form of French back-slang.

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scenes revealing Dolmancé’s reckless activity. In the conscious part Seth recalls reading an article in Scientific American about black holes that caused a big furore, but he wonders if the Lacanian theory of the ONE (l’UN) was already about in 1966, the year this piece was created. The avant-garde as an instance of the ‘outside-oneself’ enters the castle drawing-room by going through doorways without opening the doors, leaving her visible side cast in shadow on entering the room. Lacan’s claims about the ONE, his exclamations that were afterwards relayed: “There is the ONE! There is the ONE!”, form a logical starting ground (another historicality of being) in the ontology of language dominant in the Anglo-American world of the 1960s. This way of going through doorways without opening them is a way of conceiving of the counter-thrust of foreclusion, if we can allow ourselves the jouissance of naming thus such an expression. Over the following decades this brilliant idea was left to stagnate until multiplicity was conceived of in all its myriad dimensions. Starting from the basis of the actualizations of the question of the ONE, one would have to imagine an archaeology of decadence, but the exhibition is not concerned with this, it can only claim to bring together myriad discursive practices structured by an impossible referent, which is the primordial way of speaking, and thus of talking of one’s nostalgia for a time when the relationship to the ONE was full (plein), before this non-relationship (announcing the decadence of being in its laborious devaluation) was pitied (plaint). The exhibition has multiple forms and the contours of the forest are tricky to define. One thing that seems to be certain is that there is some discussion, in real space, when the pieces are being set up, and through the pieces that communicate

Chapter One

with one another. Also, the various artists, doubled here for the requirements of the diegesis, talk with one another a fair deal and name certain things. If Lee Lozano has stopped talking, her silence is just as important, it becomes a fact in itself, and as she wanders about the exhibition all of the actors can see her and then remember that, fundamentally, they have nothing to say to one another but that it is really quite pleasant (not to say engaging) to carry on chattering nonetheless. The turntable spins the loops of the Kronos Quartet, initial qualities are threaded together like beads, “I always prefer starting over to finishing” says a copyist, Lee’s silence is the strong signifier, the metaphorical crime, the actors’ involvement in it, agrees on the not-all of the jouissance of the finite object often left up to technique as if to free itself of it and later to break away to a setting suitable for meditation, the last statement of the various statements lasts forever in the future, the dusk of the birth of the full signifier, the slut, the crime is not adequately defined. Out of respect for the adolescence of their lives / before the different cracks of idealism / come and have their say about the ‘overject’ (surjet) vis-à-vis the impossibility of seeing things through to the end / a project that matches its possible norm / at the point when the starry sky—which is always the absolutely ‘far-away’ in itself / was not in that instant involved in a long-distance disaster / the actors have never stopped not stopping. The director is there, he is the motor, everything and anything is possible. Regarding the difference between the designing of a project— a stage in which a subject throws herself into the concrete, material, thick, difficult, dry, austere, desirable, poetic, engaging act of creating—and the shape it actually ends up taking once the task of creating is completed, plays with—not quite like a throw of the dice, but not far off—the uncertainties in-

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volved in making visible the guiding principle that supports it. It is therefore possible to speak of a subject taken as overject, hyperject, superject (surjet, hyperjet, superjet) or further still, with a certain, authentic irony regarding this poststructural aesthetic, a wonkyject (bancaljet), that plays with its materialized being with a distance vis-à-vis its idea, and thus hides behind the deformed shape of its initial intention. If the exhibition included works by Alicia Framis, this is precisely what we would be able to observe: intentions inscribed on temporary works that, stripped almost entirely of any semblance of formalism, carry the nudity of an idea. In a differentiated moment of death, spectres that never stop not dying glide over projects in which the formal shape is borrowed from past registers that have been actualized. To use the official expression, we could describe this exhibition as having always-already taken place, but its place is cerebral, it has begun, without really beginning, always already, it has stretched out in time, it never stops not stopping, it owes its classical roots to Paolo Uccelo’s work on the symmetrical forest, it is indebted to Kafka for formalism, to Plato in terms of nostalgia for the ONE place, which is indeed the name of the whole being, to Don DeLillo for his postmodern writing, to Hölderlin for his candour, to the whole of history that we only have a very limited, infinitely biased appreciation of; one would need millions of eyes, Odilon Redon’s eyes coming out of a green plant would do just fine, they would look up at the sky, at the dusk looming over the forest, the shadows projected from the castle onto John MacCracken’s monoliths, the sky-blue reflections on the glass panels of a Dan Graham pavilion, a lost Translator’s note: the term ‘sujet’—‘sub-ject’—literally means ‘thrown under’, and B.M.’s coinage ‘surjet’ thus suggests a being that would instead be ‘thrown over’, hence the neologisms ‘overject’, followed by ‘hyperject’, ‘superject’, etc.

Chapter One

collector standing opposite Philippe Thomas, the rain falling on Marcel Broothaers’ manuscripts, the nocturnal silence in the forest, broken by the howling of a dog and the screaming of a lamb, every animal has a voice when it dies a violent death, this is what Jodie Foster realizes in the film, the animal has no face, this is what Giorgio Agamben, reread by a filmlover, demonstrates. The old concepts of spectres actualized through recent art, Nosferatu, his lover’s scream that awakens his companion, Lyotard’s concept of the West, cowboys, Indians, rodeos, death differentiated in time. “A few days later, they came up to visit us. We all took a stroll together in the garden. Diotima and I, lost in our thoughts, found ourselves walking ahead alone, and I shed more than one tear of joy at the thought of that saintly presence advancing so modestly at my side”, Hyperion to Bellarmin, read by Elaine Sturtevant, in the rolling garden bordering the castle woodland, its moat, its neglected draw-bridge, the ivory creeping over its SouthEast exposed side. The avant-garde then goes out through the nether parts, the parts that are full of knick-knacks the curator had stored up in the castle lavatories, a treasure-chest for the likes of André Breton, Giacometti, and all manner of bric-a-brac and antique dealers, the avant-garde, with her ever-hidden face, presents herself at this point as an animal, with no face for the time being, or rather, not like an animal but a machine, a war machine in the Deleuzian sense, that consumes historical distance, that axiomatizes itself into postures, but whose vocabulary has run out, the various postures having evaporated in the previous narratives, even recent ones, and through the effect of successive retroactive modes, all of these postures are swiftly revisited, one after another, the avant-garde thus resembles a Braun food processor, the postures now form a soup that can be more or less sweet

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or savoury. The machine-like body of the avant-garde now matches the candour of the narrative being read, it is an initial energy, adolescent, synchronous with its objects of jouissance, without the so-called nihilistic distance—that overlaps with the feeling that one is somehow removed from life and experience—and it is this that makes it a potential war machine, breaking down doors, matching her ideology—her actualized soup—the thick creaminess of the synchronicity of tools of artistic jouissance, the strength of proposition, her manifest character that rejects all ghosts, those back from the dead, distanced from their relationship to the world through a doubling of their being-there in an historical period made up of different plateaux lying parallel to historical time given by the objective calendarity of a world given as technical. This temporal dimension of synchronicity gives a face (donne du visage) through contact with the initial experience, a way of merging the there of experience with the matter of the event, even if this face always appears backlit, the contre-jour or Caravagesque aspect of such an irruption repeats itself in an again that signals a differential repetition that shifts the castle’s possible nihilism to the transcendence proper to philosophies of language supporting themselves with the jouissance of the missing x in propositional structures. The exhibition also occurs—through the doubling of these artisans—in n spaces, diverse spaces, in imaginary dimensions, spaces in which the word ‘dog’ can bite, for example, or spaces made up of given specified worlds in which, for example, certain historical facts are excluded, worlds in which, for instance, there has been no Copernician revolution, or a world in which the discovery of relativity is excluded, that is to say: worlds created via the exclusion of a founding element, worlds that are different because a single individual happened to not live.

Chapter One

The exhibition has already taken place, as has the discussion about the exhibition, and the spectators’ visits—who came to see what was relevant to them—the same goes for the shortclad security guards in the forest, or the castle valets with their immaculate jackets, cast here against type, like the artists, alive, dead, sick, the site is full, saturated with affects and the stories that each piece is bound up with, the exhibitions in which they have already been viewed, the works that followed or those that came before in each artist’s career, their cost, their various periods of press-exposure, their reproduction onto postcards, everything is laden, and the spectators, on viewing the new display of the works, attempt to feel afresh, with a clarified iris and a clear eyelid; just for an instant, anew and entirely, they seek to behold the landscape with their first eye. Which crime is it about? In the first few paragraphs, when the crime has been Anzeichen, because the clue is indeed the call, Zeichen is not merely Ausdruck, there is already a question of risk in the castle. The game of chance opens the tragedy, that is to say: the passivity of the players vis-à-vis the result, the works installed in the castle are the fruit of a tragic form of chance, there is a play between the different works, and sometimes they are played against one another, that is the diegetic game of the exhibition, but no-one finds the choice of pieces intriguing, all the actors here are inscribed in a period of their own, with a period of appearance, necessarily punctuated by a period of work, a period of forgetting, then a period of reappearance. The level of importance of the questions addressed varies over time, and when the questions reappear, they generally get caught up in a flow that passes their actors by. The various reappearances curve time in such a way as to make its linearity absolutely discontinuous, broken up (délitée), woken up (sortie de son lit). As with Nouvelle Vague, where the expression of foolishness is actualized under a new form:

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What are you making? I’m making a fool of myself , here, after being in the castle for a while all of the actors are fully aware that they are killing time, in its minimal sense this expression merely refers to the act of keeping oneself busy while waiting for time to go by, in the maximal sense all of the actors present here find themselves in a Bataillian relationship to the origin and their exchanges inscribed in the exhibition that never stops not stopping, nor starting over, disactualize a group of affects that have yet to be specified. The affects temporalize themselves and it may be possible to create a new kind of calendar, an emotional calendar, containing series: a series of happy days, a series of all the gloomy days, a series of days when one is struck by an idea, a series of days, or hours, when this idea is rejected, then a series of minutes when one goes back on this rejection, and so on and so forth from series to series. From the perspective of the technical horizon that frames the exhibition, we could probably say that formalism—the core and the knot of all that circulates within the Castle and its surrounding woodland—is at the heart of the discussion. Technical time, Gestell, is figured in the serial nature of the exhibition’s post-minimal works, manufactured, polished works that reflect the light, swallow up all surrounding space, monolithic works that undermine the historical depth of all that is manmade, with no other temporality than that of the factory, not yet like a Chinese one, but not far off, the foundation of the 1990s post-utopian ideologies, works that shimmer during the day. Translator’s note: the film does not in fact deal with the question of ‘foolishness’ but rather with that of ‘pity’; however, the type of play we have with the original French ‘Que faites-vous ? Je fais pitié’ cannot be rendered as such in English.