"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 didnt 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 others 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 Carlsons 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
Tudors
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, Freuds couch - these objects are a doorway
to a past
that until that moment was closed to us. Maria Roosens 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 Fabres
work, "The
earth
of the ascending angels (better one fish on the dry then 10 in the
air)",
says it all. Fabres 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? Hmmm....
Alice Smits ©1999
Translated from the Dutch by Donald Gardner |