Capurro AMPEdS Talk 2004/5
A Little Too Much Time on My Hands: the (Un)Making of 'Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette'
Violent men are generally sickly, 'brokendown'. They live in perpetual combustion, at the expense of their bodies, exactly like ascetics,
who in the discipline of quietude erode and exhaust themselves,
quite as much as the furious.
E.M. Cioran
Form
Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette is a project in two main parts: the initial five-year period between 1999-2004 during which time the magazine was erased; and the subsequent program in 2004/5, where the erased magazine-artefact was staged at nine public sites around Melbourne. At each of these sites different individuals were invited to respond to the project, with most responses taking the form of a site talk or discussion. This second part is ongoing and further stagings outside of Melbourne are planned. In addition to this the project has spawned a series of photographic works, the most important of them, so far, being Coda (Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette), 2005+.
[2007 Update]
------ The presentation of the project in Think with the Senses - Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense at the 2007 Venice Biennale of Art, brings together its various elements in an installation display (including Coda) for the first time, whilst also developing the 'response' component further with a series of six 'off-site' presentations. ------
The first stage of this mass-collaborative magazine erasure project involved asking around 260 people to completely and anonymously erase with a rubber, a page of an intact magazine: a Vogue Hommes, September 1986, #92 featuring Sylvester Stallone on the cover (looking suave, in a gormless 1980's sort of way, with his suit, high starched collar, and gold tie-pin). Additionally, each person was asked to write in pencil on the page both the time it took them to undertake this act of erasure, and whatever monetary value, translated into an hourly rate (or hourly rates), they currently received for their time: not what they thought, or wished, their time was worth, but what they actually received as a result of some negotiation or some agreement they had come to with another party - for their time, the skill or labour of their body, their creativity or, maybe, for their intellectual contribution.
Taking into account these two different indices of expenditure, each page has a nominal value based upon their sum. The shortest time taken to erase a page was nine minutes, while the longest was in the vicinity of three and a half, to three and three quarter hours. The value accrued 'on' each page ranges from nothing in a number of instances - as some contributors were receiving no calculable money for their time (and a few chose not to state it) - to one page 'worth' over USD$1,000. These disparities matter to the work. The sum of the value of all these peoples' pages proposes a value, a certain value, of sorts, for the thing as a whole, which is by necessity, and to be at all truthful, incomplete. The combined totals of time, 267 hours, 49 minutes, 5 seconds... and of monetary value, AUD$11,349.18..., are always shown (on the project poster, for example) with three dots of elision after the figures as a reminder of its unfinished state.
Furthermore, due to possible oversight, inadvertent post-erasure erasure of the pencil notations, or willful neglect on the eraser's part, some pages have no inscriptions of time or value. Those contributions then cannot be fully accounted for - on a certain scale - much like the activities in our daily lives that fall outside the ledger. Hopefully, these lapses (in attention? in performance? of presence?) forestall the urge to read this work as a closed book.
Aged between 10 and 80 years, the people involved in the erasing stage came from a range of different backgrounds and occupations, as did the contributors to the talks (with some crossover). Most of them live(d) and/or work(ed) in Melbourne; some were passing through to, or from, somewhere else, while a number also reside(d) in the European countries the work traveled to in 2001.
Can he believe that the wreckage of his existence is unentailed!
No liens, no creditors?
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian.
The second, and equally important stage of this project involved the erased magazine-artefact going back into the world; back into a productive circulation for other encounters and for others to encounter. The purpose of doing this is so that some of the ideas, some of the concerns, and some of the fantasies that emerged from the conversations and interactions which took place during the process of its (un)making over those five years can be revisited, rejuvenated, expanded, and opened-up to a wider audience. Also, it is my hope that it may even be a catalyst for other, equally paradoxical forms or engagements.
Each site was chosen in order to contextualize an aspect of the work related to the journey it took becoming what it is, and undoing something of what it was. Having become this 'thing' - material presence, intellectual proposition, affective encounter, or touchstone - I am interested in exploring what it might now allow us to say about our relationship to the values ascribed, either by us or by others, to our time and our labour; or, about the exchanges we make, both material and immaterial, and our investment in the images that surround us. A further consideration in determining the sites on the itinerary was that, where possible, they should intersect spatially, temporally, or obliquely with the private and working lives of the collaborator-erasers' on the project.
The sites in 2004/5 have included: a hairdressing salon, a public library, a church 'opportunity' shop, the trade unions' headquarters, an optometrists, the home of a collaborator-eraser, an exhibition tracing 'utopian' practices and lines of endeavour in contemporary art, a Greek Orthodox Church, and a private psychiatric hospital. Some of the themes and ideas addressed in the site presentations were: the place and workings of the image in the life of the Orthodox Christian faith (Fr. Dimolianis): considerations of the erased magazine as drawing, proposition, and trace of action (Nicholson); as an overcoded body (d)riven by a culture of waste (Moore); as emblematic of an historical - and ongoing - struggle between labour and capital over the surplus of our production (Bandt); from a psychoanalytic and philosophical perspective as part of a tradition of aesthetic effacement (Clemens): and, with an inclusive, poetic and critical zeal, a take on the project as something that emerges out of, and generates, very particular individual passions and passionate encounters (Brown/Perry/et al.).
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Henry David Thoreau
Origins
As a way of making some sense of the origin of this work I think it is worth recounting a situation I found myself in around late 1998. The occasion, and the considerations it generated, played upon my mind quite a bit back then - troubled me deeply it would be fair to say - and, to an extent, still do today. However, this should not be thought of as the rationale for the work: it wasn't.
The situation arose when I was employed to photograph works of art in a private collection, including, as it happens, some of my own work that had entered the collection not long before. I regarded it as quite fortuitous that, having sold the work, I would now be paid to photograph it. It was then that I came up against a glaring discrepancy. While undertaking the work it dawned on me that in these circumstances the value of my time as a photographer was much, much higher, remuneration-wise, than it was (or might ever be!) as an artist. I surmised, correctly as it turned-out, that they would never have paid me fully for the time it took to produce the works (which were small and labour-intensive) they had purchased. When I raised the issue in passing the collection advisor made it quite clear that the works had been chosen, in part, because of their "reasonable price". And besides, he said, they needed to have the works photographed for the archive whereas they didn't necessarily need to buy them (mine). Having worked as a photographer and as an artist for a few years by then this should not have been surprising news, but some revelations only come belatedly - when you are very close to things - and they are all the more confronting because of it.
What it did do was set me thinking: what shifts, what accommodations, what (de)formations take place in the image you have of yourself when you are in the position of having to re-evaluate, over and over and over again, the value of your time and the value of your labour in the eyes of others? And, furthermore, is a stable self-image even a viable or valuable thing to have, or to aspire to, especially in an age that demands flexibility and mobility in its workforce and from its consumers - not to mention what our psychological needs may be? For the majority of us who are not working full time or in the same job all our lives, this dynamic is part of the reality we have to negotiate whenever we are considering, work-wise: what, where, when, how, how long, how often, for how much, at what cost, and too what end.
So how does one begin to do justice in pictorial or material terms, to this shifting ground without resorting to illustration or merely reiterating easy resemblances? From early on I had a strong sense that somehow the Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette project needed to embody those things in our lives that, in a sense, resist picturing: the time spent; the identifications and investments made, and as easily lost; the mediations; and the exchanges.
But they weren't compulsions... rather a response to death and nothingness, fixing things and times, establishing rituals and passages in opposition to chaos, which was full of holes and smudges.
Julio Cortazar, Summer.
Why This, To This Object?
Gradually it became clear that certain conditions needed to be met, conditions that would ultimately shape the form and process of Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette's coming into being and, to an extent, my subsequent thinking: it should be a mass-act on, or against, a mass-market object; be discrete enough in size that it could be passed from one person to another; have a certain volume or density that would require a persistent, drawn-out form of engagement; and it needed to be something intact, not only to necessitate its passage, one person at a time, but also to withstand a certain dissipation.
This French mens' Vogue from the mid nineteen eighties was already ten years out of date, so in a sense temporally dead when I happened across it (probably in an opportunity shop). It represents a particular order of the aspirational consumer lifestyle that feeds so voraciously off of, and is so inextricably linked to, the mass-mediated glossy image. It's all there on the surface: easily pictured and easily consumed, with little confusion or doubt as to what is at stake, or so it seems.
Just as importantly, the magazine as a form or form of engagement is emblematic of a type of distracted attention. It is something one picks up, glances at, dips into or browses through in in-between times, or, in in-between places: on public transport, while waiting in line at the supermarket or for an appointment at the dentist. To then inscribe it with such prolonged and drawn-out attention, and then manifest that investment as an absence at the heart of the thing, seemed a necessary inversion.
There were also more pragmatic decisions that influenced my choice of this magazine. At around 250 pages it is a substantial volume, with high quality paper that I felt could (better) withstand such robust handling; and, it was in French. This final factor, I reasoned, would change the way most - non-French reading - people engaged with the magazine, limiting the time they spent reading it as opposed to rubbing it, and thus, hopefully, allowing me to get it back from each one of them that much sooner (every little bit sooner over 260-odd people definitely adds up!).
Additionally, I found the iconic image of 'Sly' Stallone on the cover a strange and compelling one: something I could face every day over the considerable duration of the project. There was something solid about that picture of him - it seemed like he could (the magazine could) withstand. As someone remarked, the more scuffing and inadvertent erasing he 'took', the more dignified, even classical-looking he became - almost like a "Florentine prince". Perhaps more unnerving though was a comment from one of the last erasure participants. In her eyes there appeared to be an uncanny convergence of resemblances between that face on the cover and my own countenance. It was an observation that at the time I couldn't totally discount - I still can't today. What that remark did do was make me reflect further on other unspoken or unacknowledged identifications that may have played some part in the formation of the Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette project.
The determining factor, however, in my choice of this particular magazine, was a particular Antipodean 'identification' alluded to on the un-erased front cover but hidden for the most part by the erasing. It was an oblique but necessary germ, one that I hope to elaborate on at a future site. Taking pride of place in an article on the defence of The America's Cup (to be held that year in Fremantle, Western Australia) was, naturally enough, Alan Bond - that great Aussie accumulator and squanderer of wealth in the 1980's. A sign painter made good beyond imagination who then lost it all and more, Mr. Bond's familiarity with economies, both financial and aesthetic, were marked by more than a little excess (and here, as if through an inverted mirror, is the linkage to Etienne de Silhouette (1709-1767) himself; Louis XV's unpopular Controller General whose fiscal tightness was matched only by his passion for - equally 'economic' - shadow portraits, and from whom, thanks to a popular conflating at the time of his economic and artistic personae, we have acquired the word silhouette in its current usage). The America's Cup victory aside (not to mention Swan Lager beer or an overpriced buyout of Channel Nine), Bond was perhaps most internationally renowned for his, then world record, 1987 'purchase' of Van Gogh's Irises for US$49 million. But it was another, even more financially dodgy painting transaction from that period which eventually led to his jailing in the late 1990's and, perhaps fortuitously, to the revitalization of his artistic passion. While doing time 'inside' he took up the brush again - with a passion - and now, purportedly, specializes in watercolours and oils.
By asking people to erase, to "rub-out completely" a page, I envisaged an undertaking that would breach the magazine but not necessarily compromise its physical form, leaving its identity intact for the most part. That is why the covers were not erased. It also needed to be a physical act of economic means that was not materially additive, so as not to encumber the object. Though you could say that a certain "additive subtraction" (how Jasper Johns regarded Robert Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning) has taken place in the process. Importantly, the more someone worked on 'their' page, the more they removed the traces of their effort. In a sense, a double-effacement was taking place: as the image and text under erasure became indistinct, so did the distinctiveness of their contribution. One participant in Berlin, who found this dynamic especially disheartening, recalled: "There came a point when the more I worked on my page, the more it became like everyone else's!" Anecdotal evidence suggests that this may well have been a determining factor in a number of the abandoned pages. In those instances where someone else completed the unfinished page, two sets of times and hourly rates are inscribed on that page.
This mass-collaborative magazine erasure work is informed by the exchanges we make in our lives, of material and non-material things, the looks we give and take, the objects that pass between us, the trading of our time and our labour, the values that accrue and the losses we incur in the process. It is a rendering of accounts, so to speak: a document of 'magpie' earnings. What I hope this work asks us to consider, in its own mute way, are the condensed remains of a multitude of such exchanges having brushed up heavily against a culture obsessed with the idea of visibility.
In concluding, I would like to say that what I think is going on here in this work is something like a willful confusion of looking with a very physical act: the body putting the image/object under pressure and making it away - as though it were a corrosive or, even, erosive gaze - in a situation where the look outlives, outdoes, or undoes the object of its attention.
Christian Capurro
2005