Solvent form

Art and destruction

Jared Pappas-Kelley

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781526129246
• eBook ISBN: 9781526129260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

This book is about the destruction of art, both in terms of objects that have been destroyed – lost in fires, floods or vandalism – and the general concept of art operating through object and form. Through re-examinations of such events as the Momart warehouse fire in 2004 and the activities of art thief Stéphane Breitwieser, the book proposes an idea of solvent form hinging on the dual meaning in the words solvent and solvency, whereby art, while attempting to make secure or fixed, simultaneously undoes and destroys through its inception. Ultimately, the book questions what is it that may be perceived in the destruction of art and how we understand it, and further how it might be linked to a more general failure.

1

The destruction of art

Solvent form examines art and destruction—through objects that have been destroyed (lost in fires, floods, vandalism, or, similarly, those that actively court or represent this destruction, such as Christian Marclay’s Guitar Drag or Chris Burden’s Samson), but also as an undoing process within art that the object challenges through form itself. In this manner, events such as the Momart warehouse fire in 2004 (in which large holdings of Young British Artists (YBA) and significant collections of art were destroyed en masse through arson), as well as the events surrounding art thief Stéphane Breitwieser (whose mother destroyed the art he had stolen upon his arrest—putting it down a garbage disposal or dumping it in a nearby canal) are critical events in this book, as they reveal something about art itself. Likewise, it is through these moments of destruction that we might distinguish a solvency within art and discover an operation in which something is made visible at a time when art’s metaphorical undoing emerges as oddly literal. Against this overlay, a tendency is mapped whereby individuals attempt to conceptually gather these destroyed or lost objects, to somehow recoup them in their absence. This might be observed through recent projects, such as Jonathan Jones’s Museum of Lost Art, the Tate Modern’s Gallery of Lost Art, or Henri Lefebvre’s text The Missing Pieces; along with exhibitions that position art as destruction, such as Damage Control at the Hirschhorn Museum or Under Destruction by the Swiss Institute in New York. In this sense, destroyed art emerges as a sort of ruin or oddity in which one might wander in the present; however, it might also point to the object as something fatal rather than simply a collection of or an attempt to revive the lost for posthumous consideration. From this vantage, Solvent form investigates work by artists such as Jean Tinguely and Gustav Metzger, while expanding to art in a more general sense through considering works by artists such as Agnes Martin, Rachel Whiteread, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jeremy Blake, Louise Bourgeois, Urs Fischer, Pavel Büchler, and Tracey Emin (again within the context of the Momart fire). In Solvent form, perhaps, there is an absurdity in grouping art together merely because it has been destroyed—but it reveals a resonance. In this sense, the book is neither an art historical document nor even a proposal for bringing together remnants of memory and remainders into some sort of exhibition. Instead, its aim is to investigate what it means when art is destroyed.

Others have similarly considered destruction or undoing as a kind of trick within the inception of a work of art. In an essay on The Brothers Karamazov, Jean Genet proposed that every act “means one thing and its opposite.” The act for Genet implies both the thing but also its opposite, so that creation in form similarly implies a destruction, as he warns: “everyone expects a miracle, and the opposite occurs.”¹ From this, he concludes:

Having read [The Brothers Karamazov] in this way it now seems to me that any novel, poem, painting, or musical composition that does not de-stroy itself—by which I mean, that is not constructed as a blood sport with its own head on the chopping block—is a fraud.²

While this is the sort of proclamation that gets the blood racing, there is also something more nuanced in our understanding of art that Genet is missing. Art, in its inception, implies its own undoing with the cutting of its own head; and this apart and aside from its impulse or intention—conscious or not—through its construction, as Genet stated, separately from its author or artist. What I’m suggesting here is not simply a trick or booby-trap that an artist might build into the works, but instead an energetic revelation of what is at risk or has already disappeared in the endeavor. With this, any art form that is not in a sense undoing or cultivating a destruction of sorts, in Genet’s words reveals a fraud (also an undoing)—and that is what we see here. For example, it might appear a fatal trick when one looks to an artist such as Michael Landy and his Art Bin, in which he asked artists to discard works they were dissatisfied with in a massive bin. Or similarly Jack Kerouac’s attempts to construct On the Road as one long scroll of paper fed through his typewriter so that he could frenetically type it in a stream of consciousness, exactly as it happened and without pause. Kerouac’s scroll became a nightmare for his publisher, and it was ultimately revised and written again so that there remains no definitive condition.

In Solvent form, the intent is not to get caught up in how a specific artist (or, as Genet suggests, novelist, poet, painter, or composer) might choose to construct art to mimic this destruction or contrive it as a booby-trap—as this emphasis tends to cast destruction more as a parlor trick (the work of a didactic clock builder)—or as a clever device a writer or artist constructs and employs. The more accurate observation is that like the shipwreck, which is implied with the creation of the ship, there is a similar destruction implied in the art object itself.³ In this sense, Landy’s Art Bin doesn’t offer this destruction, but a sleight of hand where the work demonstrates the performative action of absorbing the failure and destruction of others into a redemptive act—masking destruction and instead replacing it with compensation. As with the story of Kerouac’s scroll, we are not concerned with the machinations of how an artist attempts to craft a destruction (creating a bin for others to cast their failures into) or the expectations of a publisher, as perhaps the most salient detail of the Kerouac story is that the final section of the scroll was destroyed—apparently eaten by a dog named Potchky.⁴ These are the primary destructions somehow implied in the work of art.

In this manner, this book introduces ideas from Bataille and Paul Virilio (the shipwreck that resides within the ship’s invention) and their conceptions of the negative miracle and reverse miracle, which are correlated to understand a method in which absence makes something visible while simultaneously revealing an impulse within art. Solvent form aims to determine what may be perceived through the destruction of art, how we understand it, and, further, how these destructions might be linked to some general failure in art that allows us to see through instances when art appears to trip on a rug.⁵ Expanding upon this, the text takes cues from literary and varied sources, such as Perec’s Life a User’s Manual—in which the character Bartlebooth spends twenty years painting seascapes of various ports only to spend the next twenty attempting to erase them. Similarly, McCarthy’s Remainder, in which an unnamed protagonist re-enacts obsessive scenarios following an accident; Mann’s The Magic Mountain as an act of withdrawal from the daily flow and decay of the world; or the amassed warehouses of Citizen Kane. These chartings explore art and its destruction through accounts in the media and newspapers, interviews, and cinematic examples. Amid this accumulation, they weave a narrative of art through events that intermingle with Jean Baudrillard’s ideas on disappearance, Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the image (or imago as votive that keeps present the past, yet also burns), and Giorgio Agamben’s notion of art as an attempt to make the moment appear permeable. With this, as Bataille proposes, art emerges from a shipwreck with the moment in which assumptions, expectations, or what appears fixed are ultimately undone. Likewise, these destructions are considered through narratives such as Sarah Winchester obsessively building the Winchester Mansion in San Jose, California, as an attempted house that never ceased. Alongside these attempts to construct an undoing, and amid a volatile remainder in art, these events provide a metaphoric consideration of real and emblematic events in the world that underscore ideas of destruction and solvency in art. Through this, our understanding of art emerges not as a timeless and fixed entity, but as one that both burns and is burning—putting forth and pulling down; an art that is perpetually shipwrecked, undone, and given form through this moment inhabited.

With these incidents, the destruction of art absorbs, catching us unaware, yet amassing again in newspapers and online, accumulating in books, or gathering as an impetus for exhibitions—capturing popular imagination and calling a bluff, so that it might appear as if destruction itself is having a moment (or perhaps always is). But what is it that may be perceived through the destruction of art? In conversation, Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer suggested that art had perhaps reached a point where it was not up to the challenge before it, such that art expanded and sped up, becoming more persuasive, cumbersome, and sprawling as compensation and with this, as Virilio observes, “They have masked the failure or the accident with commercial success,” and in the process made a thing of it.⁶ Lotringer continues: “There were all sorts of attempts to maintain the impact of the visual arts in a world that was rapidly cha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The destruction of art
• 2 Art and permeable moments
• 3 Solvent form
• 4 The thing that is not a thing
• 5 Things lie
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index