- Avoiding Objects
- Animals are divided into: a) belonging to the emperor,
b) embalmed, c)
tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included
in the present
classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine
camel hair, l) etcetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that
from a long way off look like flies”.
In his enquiry into the basic principles of Western thinking, Michel
Foucault tells how he roared with laughter on reading these words of
Borges; it is a laugh that has shaken the foundations of our knowledge
since. This is because Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia, while striking
us as
absurd, only is so if we judge it according to the rules we have drawn
up
for arranging the things that surround us. But every classification system
whether based on reason or intuition, is equally valuable in deciphering
the order of things that will never betray its secret. When Alice entered
the world behind the looking-glass, she often thought that the things
she
encountered there were irrational, because they didn’t tally with
how she
had been taught things should be. But a looking-glass world where cause
and
result are reversed, so that the queen’s finger bleeds before she
is
pricked and the mountain becomes more distant the more you run towards
it,
is no longer absurd if we accept it on its own terms.
The poet Lautremont, pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, gave us the image of
“the fortuitous encounter on a dissection table of a sewing machine
and an
umbrella”. It prompted Man Ray to make a sculpture he called the
“Enigma of
Isidore Ducasse”. It consists of a sewing machine wrapped in a piece
of
cloth tied with a string. On it is a card on which is written in three
languages “Do not disturb”. But what is it we are not supposed
to disturb?
What is the secret that lurks beneath this cloth? Jacques Lacan discovered
the answer one day when he went fishing and suddenly noticed a can of
sardines gazing at him from under the sea. The danger here is not Medusa’s
turning us to stone; no, it is Humpty Dumpty we see reflected, broken
into
hundreds of pieces that cannot be put together again. For centuries people
have endeavored to avert this danger by silencing the gaze of things,
in a
gradual process of disenchantment to rid the world of all mystery. The
material world has become framed in a window through which one can view
it
as lord and master from a safe distance. Man had proclaimed himself the
measure of things. But when night falls and windows turn into mirrors,
we
become aware that the thousands of things that surround us are watching
us.
These are glances we only felt when we were children, when chairs could
pounce on us from behind at any moment, when a boiling kettle bewitched
the
soup ladle with its whistling and when crossing a carpet was a perilous
journey, as it was for the boy in Roald Dahl’s story.
“Avoiding Objects” are flirtatious and seductive. They want
to be seen, to
be caressed and listened to. What they avoid is the way we only see them
as
a means to a human end. These objects are in revolt against the
straight-jacket of human signification, they refuse to be incorporated
in
our rational systems of classification. They are more at home in Borges’
encyclopedia or in the world behind the looking-glass where Alice has
her
adventures. To escape our clutches, these objects cloak themselves in
new
guises that we might call their poetic power. Man Ray for instance could
only reveal the mystery hidden in an object by concealing it.
A work by Merijn Bolink consists of a fan and a cabinet, called “Reciprocal
Adultery”. At first sight there is nothing strange going on. But
what is it
supposed to be, this betrayal perpetrated in the relation between a fan
and
a cabinet? And then we see just how intimate this relationship is, when
we
discover that they have taken over each other’s materials. A confusion
of
identities has occurred, because what is it that decides the essence of
a
fan and a cabinet - function or material? In a glass case there is a glove
that Ann Hamilton has embroidered with the words of a poem by Susan Stewart.
A glove is an artificial skin placed between our bodies and the things
we touch.
Just as we use language to keep the world at bay. The glove tells of
gruesome murders committed by reason; the victim is our direct contact
with
the world. This is why Mary Carlson’s chair rejects our measurements,
but
this only makes it more seductive. And high above it hangs an object,
very
literally making its voice heard. This object is part of David Tudor’s
project Rainforest IV, a sonic and visual environment in which everyday
objects produce sounds due to the resonant qualities of the material of
the
object itself. Floors and walls too can vibrate with the resonance of
lived
presence. Ann Messner lends them an internal quality with her installation
consisting of casts of the inside of her mouth. These negative spaces
-
passages between inside and outside, between speech and muteness - are
inserted at various points in the wall. Among these artists, Donald Lipski
is the supreme ‘bricoleur’. He is the collector Walter Benjamin
wrote about, who picks up things on the streets and in flea markets,
ordering
them in unexpected combinations so that they take on new meanings.
“Freudian Abstracts” by Cornelia Parker are photograms, the
negative of
feathers from the couch of Freud. Parker restores the unconscious of
objects, the stories and memories that things preserve in themselves such
as the heroic history of “Pillow Cut by a King’s Sword”,
and “Poet’s
Crown”, a gold dental crown once owned by a poet, but which, set
in its
cushion, dreams it is meant for a king’s head. Like Proust’s
madeleine -
or, still more so, Freud’s couch - these objects are a doorway to
a past
that until that moment was closed to us. Maria Roosen’s black pupil
on the
wall mirrors this company of curious objects. In the same way as Jan van
Eyck authorized his presence in the Arnolfini portrait, so this eye, that
gives back to the world around it its own image, is a signature that these
objects have been here.
All that poetic objects want is simply to be there and their presence
can
be disturbing. But we have to ask whether they really can do that.The
fact
that they are art works in a gallery means that even the most disturbing
object becomes coded under the category of art. Everything that might
rebuff our gaze is thus immediately made transparent again. Wonder about
the material world has become a rare thing in our modern age that is ever
more speedy and immaterial in its pursuit of a technological and rational
logic. In a world in which our relation to objects is dominated by a
commodity economy and our experiences mediated by media imagery, direct
experience is declared fiction. We do not feel the gaze of things as they
stare at us, nor do we hear their voices. But Man Ray’s wooden box
sees it
all. “Enough Rope” means that humans employ their freedom only
for their
own destruction. This box offers us a ready-made suicide kit. But a better
alternative is, with Borges, to convert our perplexity into an attitude
towards the world,
- remaining open for the irrational and the unexpected.
Job Koelewijn’s tombstone of babypowder is thus not only a monument
to
death, the coffin-lid at the end of every road, but at the same time that
of a rebirth. This soft sweet-smelling substance arouses our more intimate
senses of touch and smell, reminding us of our first encounters with the
world.
The resistance of “Avoiding Objects” to the world of human
codes does not
mean any return to an older notion of art as a transcendental object that
gives access to a hidden truth. The title of Jan Fabre’s work, “The
earth
of the ascending angels (better one fish on the dry then 10 in the air)”,
says it all. Fabre’s angels take the form of a mermaid, half fish,
half
human, her skin is made of beetles. It is an ascent, but it remains
earthbound. The material of dead beetles, metaphor for metamorphosis,
creatures living off putrescence, hits up against the limits of
representation. They are guardian angels of the poetical space, which
Fabre
calls “the blue hour”, the moment of stillness between day
and night where
two worlds meet and things take on a mysterious evocative power. They
dwell
in another
world than ours, but are constantly trying to lure us. Writing of the
childish terror an old man can feel when night falls, W.B. Yeats understood
the disturbing presence of things:
“Fifteen apparitions I have seen
The worst a coat on a coat-hanger”
A coat-hanger? O well!....
Alice Smits
Translated from the Dutch by Donald Gardner
