Capurro AMPEdS Talk 2004/8
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 essentially a project in two parts: the initial five-year period between 1999 and 2004 when the magazine, the core of this work, was erased; and the subsequent presentation of the erased magazine-artefact, accompanied on each occasion by what I loosely describe as a 'response' program. At both series of presentations to date—nine locations in Melbourne throughout 2004/5 and six instances at the 2007 Venice Biennale of Art—various contributors were invited to address the project directly or 'at a slant'. So far, these contributions have taken the form of either a talk/discussion or a performance. This 'response' component is ongoing. Additionally, the project now has an archive (web-based at www.christiancapurro.com and, materially, as part of the work's exhibition-state), plus it has spawned a small number of associated works, the most important of them being the photograph Coda (Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette) 2005-07.
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 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 and some agreement they had come to with another party: for their time, the skill or labour of their body, their creativity, or, for their intellectual contribution.
Taking into account these two indices of a certain 'expenditure', each page nominally has a 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 are central 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. 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 incomplete state.
Due to possible oversight, inadvertent post-erasure erasure (for the notations are in pencil), 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 do the contributors to the 'response' program (there has been some crossover). Most of the erasers lived and worked in Melbourne, some were passing through to or from somewhere else, while a number also resided in the various 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, equally important, stage of this project has involved the erased magazine-artefact going back into the world—back into circulation for other encounters, and for others to encounter. The purpose of doing this is to pursue, expand, and opened-up to a wider audience some of the ideas, the fantasies, and the troublings that emerged from the conversations and the interactions which took place during the process of its (un)making over the five years. It is my hope that along the way it may become a catalyst for other equally paradoxical material forms or other singular forms of engagement.
Each location, particularly in Melbourne, was chosen 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, or affective encounter—I am now interested to explore what it might allow, as a touchstone of sorts, us to say or do about a few of the following: our hold on the values ascribed, either by us or by others, to our time and our labour; the exchanges, both material and immaterial, we make; and, our investment in the images that surround and absorb us. A further initial consideration in determining the sites was that, where possible, they should intersect spatially, temporally, or, perhaps, obliquely with the private and working lives of the collaborator-erasers' on the project.
The sites in 2004/5 included: a hairdressing salon, a local 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 talks included: 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 (Tom Nicholson); as an overcoded body (d)riven by a culture of waste (Ross Moore); as emblematic of an historical and ongoing struggle between labour and capital over the surplus of our production (Adam Bandt); from a psychoanalytic and philosophical perspective as part of a tradition of aesthetic effacement (Justin 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 (Elizabeth Brown/Tony Perry/et al.).
At the Venice Biennale of Art in 2007: Tom Nicholson expanded on his 2004/05 ideas to include a specific analysis of the political and economic circulation of pictures via G. B. Tiepolo's two versions of The Banquet of Cleopatra (the fresco version is held in Palazzo Labia just metres from the location of his talk in Campo S. Geremia), while Jonatan Habib Engqvist in the Cloisters of the Seminary of San Nicolo, Treviso, beside Tomaso da Modena's Sala del Capitolo dei Domenicani fresco cycle of monks working with manuscripts, spoke on the relationship between remembering and forgetting, and the sometimes necessary work of a productive 'forgetfulness'; English artist Ti Parks enacted his quietly affecting 'performontages' across Venetian public spaces twice daily over three days in June, and, with similar poise, the young l'Arsenale musicians took up positions amongst the Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette installation in the Corderie and performed 'in response' a challenging occupazione sonora/sonorous occupancy for the final Saturday Biennale crowd; and, to conclude, there were talks at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa by Islamic scholar Biancamaria Scarcia on 'thinking, saying, producing images' from a 'partial' Islamic perspective, and, by Roger "I was a 1980's commodity fetish" Cook, a humorous and touching personal account, woven through with philosophical and aesthetic musings, of the differing values of a life in and out of 'the picture'.
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 on my mind quite a bit back then—troubled me deeply, it would be fair to say—and, to an extent, still does today. However, this should not be thought of as the rationale for the workâit wasn't.
The situation arose when I was employed to photograph works of art in a private collection, including some of my own work that had been bought not long before. I regarded it as quite fortuitous that, having sold the work, I would now be paid to photograph it. While undertaking the work I came up against what I felt was a glaring discrepancy as it dawned on me that in these circumstances the value of my time as a photographer was much higher, remuneration-wise, than it was as an artist. I surmised, correctly as it turned out, that the collector would not have purchased the works if the time it took me to make them—they were small and labour intensive—had been factored into their pricing. 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 (or, at least, mine). Hmm. Having worked as a photographer and as an artist for some 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 get me thinking about the shifts, the accommodations, the (de)formations that take place in the image you have of yourself when you are placed in the position of having to re-evaluate, over and over and over again, the value of both your time and your labour in the eyes of others. And, furthermore, the question of whether a stable self-image is even a viable or valuable thing to have, let alone aspire to, 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 in the same job all our lives, this dynamic is part of the reality we have to negotiate whenever we are considering, at least, work-wise: what, where, when, how, how long, how often, for how much, at what cost and too what end.
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?
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?
Quite early on I had a strong sense that somehow (what became) 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. Then, 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 (and remain so) not only to necessitate its passage, one person at a time, but also to withstand a certain dissipation.
I chose this mens' Vogue from the mid 1980's—already ten years out of date and, in a sense, temporally dead when I came across it—because it represents a particular order of 'aspirational' consumer lifestyle that feeds so voraciously off of, and is so inextricably linked to, the mass-mediated glossy image. It is all there on the surface: easily pictured, 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 invest it with such prolonged and drawn-out attention, and manifest that investment as an absence at the heart of the thing, seemed to me an appropriate, even necessary, inversion.
There were also more pragmatic decisions that influenced my choice of 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. The latter I reasoned would alter the way most, non-French reading, people engaged with the magazine, limiting the time they spent reading it as opposed to rubbing it and, hopefully, allowing me to get it back from each one of them that much sooner (every little bit sooner over 260 people definitely adds up!).
Additionally, I found the iconic image of 'Sly' Stallone on the cover compelling: one I thought I could face every day (or most days) during the years the project would take to unfold. There was something solid about that picture—it seemed like he (the magazine) could withstand. Curiously, the more scuffing and inadvertent erasing Stallone's image 'took', the more dignified, even classical-looking he became—almost like, as someone remarked, a "Florentine prince". Most unnerving perhaps was a comment that came from one of the last eraser-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, nor can I today. It has niggled away at me and got me reflect a little more deeply 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.
One of the other reasons for my choice of this magazine was a particular Antipodean 'identification' alluded to on the un-erased front cover, but now hidden for the most part by the erasing. 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 who made it good beyond imagination, then lost it all (his and others') and more, Mr. Bond's familiarity with economies both financial and aesthetic, was marked by more than a little excess. And here, as if through an inverted mirror, is the link to the project's titular persona, Etienne de Silhouette (1709—1767) himself. De Silhouette was 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 the conflation 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 Vincent van Gogh's Irises for US$49 million. It was, however, an 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 vocation. While doing time 'inside' he took up the brush again with a passion and now, purportedly, specializes in watercolours and oils. Though perhaps a little oblique, especially to an audience outside of Australia, this particular 'identification' was an important germ and one that I hope to do justice to at a future presentation.
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 Drawing) has taken place in the process. Importantly, with this act 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 the one page.
....
This mass-collaborative magazine erasure and inscription 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; plus, the values that accrue and the losses we incur in the process. Mediated through the focus of a culture obsessed with the idea of visibility, I would also like to think that, via these sparse remains (before you), in its own small way it gives due consideration—and, hopefully, asks that it be given elsewhere—to such exchanges. It is a rendering of accounts and a document of 'magpie earnings' gleaned from others, as we do in so many different ways, along the way.
Finally, what I think may be going on here in this work is something akin to a willful confusion of looking with a direct physical act. Where the body puts the image/object under pressure and makes it away—as though it were a corrosive or, even, erosive gaze—in a situation where, just possibly, the look outlives, outdoes, or undoes the object of its attention.
Christian Capurro
2004/2008