For the sake of the season and keeping in line with the ongoing thematization of horror common in the art shown in the city, this week’s exhibitions pivot around the haunted in direct but different ways. It is stark stuff. Some of it is lush and stark, some muffled to the point that it seems shuffled together. Both exhibitions are playing on the spectre of the archive, that canonical trope constantly trotted out as the operating room for the birth of Contemporary Art. Here it takes two forms that echo one another in their insistence on the archive as a repository of mementos (often of a “visitation”) or of captured decay.
Ashy residues figure in both, in one case as a burned remnant of art careers and absent subjects. In both cases, images are juxtaposed with what suggests archaeological display cases containing monochromized bones or black and white. Both stress an inarticulate distance between “ruins” or “fragments” and some ostensible reality that only seems to exist as an aphorism that is simultaneously as whole and ruined as they are.
Sven Spieker has argued that one substantial aspect of the various archival turns that appeared in Modernist and then Contemporary Art involved a sense of the loss of rationally founded reality. With the collapse of this belief, all of these collections of things, and what made their collection sensible, was replaced with the uncanny and the haunted. Archives are not memories but what memory cannot properly capture. They are also not “culture,” if that is understood as the rhythm of life and its narration (its domestication) or subjectification. Instead, the archive is an anonymous and homeless heap and the art of the twentieth century tended to demonstrate a fascinated horror of its overflowing mass. If it had originally seemed like the sign of order and control, this ended up revealing not the world as a repository or place of meaning and memory but as an increasingly alien and impersonal sphere that denied domestication even as it was placed in rigid grids. As Speiker stresses, “Archives do not record experience so much as its absence; they mark the point where an experience is missing from its proper place, and what is returned to us in an archive may well be something we never possessed in the first place.” [Sven Speiker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (The MIT Press, 2008), 3]
Whether all of this testifies to a loss of rationally founded reality or just the opposite is debatable, but the two exhibitions discussed here both seem to be concerned with the spectre of the archive and the way that it can be inhibited.
Céline Huyghebaert’s Les suppressions at Artexte amounts to an attempt to make an essay into a show. First, this is done through the creation of a small video set to the side in which she speaks on the soundtrack while ritualistically spilling ash and debris out of a bag, collecting it, and putting it away. Second, through the stereotypical use of various pale vitrines with some stuff in and on them (in this case postcards and other ephemera from artists). Spanning the walls are various blown-up texts that look like book page spreads.
These strategies share a fair amount with other book-as-exhibition strategies we have encountered. It comes off a bit twee here, a little Alice in Wonderland thanks to its plays on scale. Less theatrical than other instances of this we have examined, it seems more rhetorically stunted. It is also reminiscent of an earlier show displayed in the same space, Sophie Jodoin’s d’un seul souffle, which relied on archival materials presented primarily in stark black and white.
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In Jodoin, due to how she used duration, pace, and sound in video, this was given a fairly melancholy mood that was relatively successful on an affective level, containing enough restrictive contrasts to provoke a certain degree of visual curiosity. There is not much of either of those things in Huyghebaert’s case, which comes off much more as text art. This is appropriate enough for a show that deals with archives and history, but it also feels too easy and nostalgic.
The basic thematic rationale is given as
The Omissions are those missing pieces subtracted from history, the voluntary or involuntary gaps, the voids, the holes in official stories. But they are also the suppressions we impose upon ourselves: everything we keep quiet about, everything we prevent from happening. [p] This project outlines a fragmentary portrait [of a.]; a fictional artist, a montage composed of voices, images, and documents gathered over the course of correspondences and residencies in documentation centres… I asked myself if it was possible to describe a history of art that is not about success or productivity, but rather one that is found in the gaps of these documents, in what is left unsaid.
What does this imply? That the object is “history,” and that this differs from “official stories.” There is the suggestion that creation, especially of narratives, is a form of subtraction, and also that the portrait that she is constructing is as much an erasure as anything else. There is an implication that “history” is something that can be found, something that exists beyond documentation, and it has a reality to it that can be described. Why is any of this being “described” the way she seems to be attempting?
The texts she presents on the walls are riddled with allusions and references, as are the accompanying texts and those presented in the vitrines. However, textuality seems to be the least effective way to hint at what she claims to be concerned with, which is a more spatial and material question. She seems reluctant to commit to the implications of a subtractive aesthetics and relies on a rough kind of minimalism as a way of giving rhetorical body to the inhibition of the archive that she is practising. This comes across ambivalently.
The inclusion of a box of “phantom works” stresses the collected documents not as descriptions but as things while one of her inflated images simultaneously stresses an object as something to be read. If the absence of the desired “history” as a concrete instance is what is sought, the foregrounding of the objects she has collected as potential "texts" seems to undermine this quest. This points to the extent to which institutional relationality and communication, far from documenting the basis on which art is defined and negotiated, end up negatively illustrating its irreducibility to these things.
Visual art is already the unsaid and the unsayable. The texts that make up most of this work and its performative “history” are its omission or inhibition, an inhibition that is never complete but relayed as the inflation of a gap. Looking at the show becomes an exercise in not falling into the trap of reading it.
To create the fictional artist (identified by a lowercase “a” in the manner of Lacan), she abstracted from the work of 51 artists, creating what she termed a “phantom.” The hyperbole around the phantom artist and the fantasm of art is given form in the dominant ironic mode of visualization. The giant pages are both inflated and flat monuments with no real referents. These pages are sure to double up the title, to give dramatic weight to the unreal dividing line that stresses their symmetry and reinforces their basic sense of dualism, to the clear appearance of numbers that suggests an occult property, and to the implied but absent tactility of a “real” book (which stands itn for a real or whole “community”) which has been held and marked by some mysterious user who is now conveying their thought process through this medium (providing the image with psychic power that the text lacks), stressing it like footprints that have been cast in plaster.
This sort of stripped-down phantasmagoria is very different from the cool and velvety quality that Natascha Niederstrass’ Ruinenlust infuses its collected materials with. Her exhibition at Patrick Mikhail
…addresses this fascination with decay and the morbid while also eliciting a post-romantic imaginary of ruined space in relation to its history. This work focuses specifically on the uninhabited island of Poveglia, located in the Venetian Lagoon, which has recently gained worldwide fame as the “most haunted island in the world”. [p][…] Behind a seemingly trivial narrative, the in-between or transitory state of the ghosts (conceived as cultural objects capable of activating an emotional sphere that goes beyond the rational understanding of places) allows [us?] to reconceptualize the discontinuities of time and space, the disconnection between vernacular and academic cultures and the classic dichotomies attributed to island spaces. The case of Poveglia shows how ghosts can shape the way in which narratives are told and reveals how our desire to mythologize reality transcends historical facts.
In style it is romantic, stark, filled with allusions to the fin-de-siècle that ended with Modernism. In theme, it overlaps with the more severely inhibitory fantasy world of Angela Grauerholz and supplements it with a theatrical tactility. Niederstrass has been doing this sort of thing for some time. Here, it is less flamboyant in playing on the morbid implications of art, such as in her far more complicated Behind Closed Doors: Body of Evidence. Pretty staid and minimal in this instance, she is not creating the kind of perverse muddle that she has done in the past. This also means her style is pared down from its grander theatrical gestures. The setting is still central but it is less stagey. The various rhetorical modes that it borrows from make it amount to a ruined documentary.
Spanning a small entranceway and a lengthy room, the exhibition is made of a series of relatively large inkjet prints, a few smaller images, and some monochromatic black on black bones and debris. It guides the viewer directly from the opening mysterious landscape images that suggest the haunted spaces of tourist destinations absent the tourists. Then it opens up into even more allusions with the juxtaposition of various ruined spaces, monochromatic objects, and fragments of text on the walls. Some of the images just contain white on black text, appearing like the subtitles of an absent film. There is a fair amount of blank space between them that gives their relation an elliptical quality. The narrowness of the space and the high ceilings also serve to provide a vaguely religious quality to it, referencing generic church architecture, something that the station by station set-up and various “relics” also reinforce.
The parodically religious aspects of the set-up and the use of black also give the whole thing a vaguely satanic or occult character. The visitation to the “haunted” island is mimed by the haunted quality given to the seemingly archived objects that have been rescued from it. Neither of these aspects is properly narrativized, instead remaining in the realm of atmospheres that cannot be reduced to being significant (they are suggestive in their quality as excess). In this, the exhibition does not seem to work “mythologically” at all. The discontinuity is what is insisted upon by the mode of display which explicitly lacks the liturgical framework that would bestow much sense to it. There is an interesting contrast between the monochrome’s distinct lack of any kind of differential pathos and the implied animation of pathos in images of ruin. As the title suggests, it is a kind of ruined lust; the “haunting” is the desire for a narrative that art denies.
* Photos for the Niederstrass exhibit are my own.