Christian Capurro (Part 1)
On the (Un)Making of Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette, or, A Little Too Much Time on My Hands.
This transcript is the first of two edited texts combining a number of site talks Christian Capurro has given on the AMPEdS project in Melbourne, Australia, in 2004/5. A second text will follow.
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
I won't be talking too much today about what this thing is, except for a brief description of its different faces and manifestations. In many respects what it is keeps escaping me just when I think I've got a handle on it: it is worth pointing this out from the outset, and it is something to keep in mind if it appears at times as though during this talk I'm discussing something that was neatly resolved and worked out from day one - it wasn't! That is not to say what matters most with this work is in doubt, it's not; at least from where I stand, after five years of dwelling on it, wrestling with it and holding it up to the lived experiences of the many whose path it (or I) have crossed.
In whatever form the work took it needed to be faithful to the contradictions and to the complexities of our relationships with the images around us; and to those we form - and keep having to form - of ourselves.
Firstly, what I will try to do here is to shed some light on this work's 'coming into being' as a material proposition, as a particular encounter with the image, and as an exchange; both between and amongst people, of time and value, of material identities and of forms of attention. These exchanges were not always clear nor where they necessarily equitable.
FORM
Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette is a work in two main parts: the initial five-year period between 1999 and 2003, during which the magazine was erased; and the subsequent public program which saw the erased artefact 'staged' at related sites around Melbourne throughout 2004/5. At each site various individuals have been invited to address the project, either in the form of a site talk or a discussion. Further 'stagings' outside of Melbourne are planned in the future. Also, in addition to this, the project has spawned a number of photographic works that I won't be discussing here.
The first stage of this mass-collaborative magazine erasure project involved asking different individuals to completely and anonymously erase with a rubber, a page of this intact magazine, this Vogue Hommes, September 1986, #92 before you, with Sly Stallone on the cover looking quite suave, in an 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 their time was worth, but what they actually received, as a result of some negotiation, and some agreement they'd come to with another party: for their time, for the labour of their body, for their creativity, or for their intellectual contribution. 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.
Taking into account these two indices of a certain expenditure, each page nominally has a value based upon their sum. The value accrued 'on' each page ranges from nothing in a number of instances - some contributors were receiving no calculable money for their time, or, ignoring my request, they chose not to state it - to one page 'worth' over USD$1000. These disparities are central to the work. The sum of the value of all these peoples' pages taken, together then proposes a value, a certain value of sorts, for the thing as a whole. This is, by necessity, incomplete; as the three dots of elision after the two totals (267 hours, 49 minutes, 5 seconds and AUD$11,349.18...), shown here on the poster attests to.
Some pages have no inscriptions of time or value; due to an oversight, inadvertent post-erasure erasure (for the notations are in pencil), or willful neglect on the eraser's part. As such, their contribution cant be accounted for in this way, just as certain activities, in our daily lives, fall outside the ledger. Hopefully these lapses (in attention? of presence?) forestall the urge to read this work as a closed book.
Can he believe that the wreckage of his existence is unentailed!
No liens, no creditors?
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
The second stage of this project, why were here today (and why the magazine isnt now lying spent, under my bed gathering dust!), has the work going back into the world; back into circulation for other encounters, and for others to encounter. It's my hope that some of the ideas that developed, and conversations that took place in the process of its (un)making, over those five years, can now be revisited, expanded and opened-up to a wider audience.
Each site has been chosen to contextualize an aspect of the work related to the journey it took becoming what it is, and undoing what it was; or, having become this 'thing', what it, as a material presence, an intellectual proposition, an affective encounter, or touchstone, might allow us to say about: our relationship to the values ascribed - either by us or by others - to our time, and our labour, to the exchanges we make, both material and immaterial, and, to the images that surround us.
Important also was my desire that a number of the sites on the itinerary intersect spatially and temporally with the private or working lives of the eraser-collaborators on the project.
ORIGINS
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.
H.D.Thoreau
A common query people have about the work (it usually comes after theyve exclaimed I didnt know you could rub that out!) has to do with its origins, and the motivations behind undertaking such a, seemingly incommensurate, work. Apart from occasionally falling back on the well worn but not-too-inappropriate response, "It seemed like a good idea at the time" (for it did!), the way I've made some sense of it, is to recall a situation I found myself in, around 1998, that played-upon my mind quite a bit then - troubled me it would be fair to say - and still does, to some extent, today.
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. Not a bad thing I thought; having work I'd done create a bit more work and some extra returns. But, while undertaking the work it dawned on me that, in this situation, the value of my time as a photographer was much, much higher, in remuneration terms, than it was as an artist. I surmised they would never have paid me fully for the time it took to produce those works they had purchased - an assessment confirmed by the collection advisor who made it quite clear that the works had been chosen, in part, because of their reasonable price. And besides, he said, they needed the works photographed for the archive whereas they didnt necessarily need to buy them.
That set me thinking: what shifts, what accommodations, what (de)formations take place in the image you have of yourself when you're in the position of having to re-evaluate, 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 image even a valuable or viable thing to have, especially in an age that demands flexibility and mobility in its workforce, or from its consumers - not to mention what our psychological needs may well be?
For the majority of us who arent working full time, or in the same job all our lives, this dynamic is part of the reality we have to negotiate when we are considering what, where, when, how, how long, how often, for how much, 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 work 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.
WHY THIS, TO THIS OBJECT?
In thinking about these things it became clear that a number of conditions needed to be met, conditions that would ultimately shape the form and process of Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouettes coming into being: it should be a mass-act on, or against, a mass-market object, discrete enough in size that it could be passed from one person to another, yet, with a certain density of its own that would require a persistent, drawn-out form of engagement; and, needed to be something intact, not only to necessitate its passage one-by-one, but also to withstand a certain dissipation.
The magazine, this French mens Vogue from the mid-eighties, that was already ten years out of date, so, in a sense, temporally dead, when I happened across it (probably in some church opportunity shop), represents a particular order of the aspirational consumer lifestyle that feeds so voraciously off, 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 is emblematic of a type of distracted attention; 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. And so, to inscribe it with such prolonged and drawn-out attention, and then manifesting that investment as an absence at the heart of the thing, seemed a necessary inversion.
Of course there were also more pragmatic decisions that influenced my choice of this magazine: its volume of pages, around 250, was substantial, the good quality of the paper I felt could better withstand such handling, and it was in French. This final factor, I reasoned, would change the way most (non-French reading) people engaged with magazine, limiting the time they spent reading it as opposed to rubbing it, and thus, hopefully, allowing me to get it back off them that much sooner. Every little bit sooner over 260-odd people definitely adds up!
On top of this, I could not go past that image of Sly on the cover. I thought to myself at the time, "Could I live with that face every day, maybe even grow fond of it? Especially considering god knows how long it's going to take!" There was something, how do they say, solid about that picture of him - it seemed like he could/it 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 the comment from one of the last participants that in her eyes there appeared to be an uncanny convergence of resemblances between that face on the cover and my own countenance. It's an observation I couldn't totally discount. What it did do was make me reflect a bit more on the unspoken, or unacknowledged identifications that may have taken place in the framing of this project. A couple of other curious ones were raised during Site Talk #5, at Collins Place Eyecare.
There was, however, one particular 'identification' that I was in no doubt about when I chose this magazine: one that gave the work a certain Antipodean inflection which, while hidden for the most part by the erasing, still resonates via its front cover acknowledgement. There, 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 - that great Aussie icon of accumulation and, later, on an equally grand scale, misspending in the 1980's, Alan Bond. A sign painter who 'made good' beyond most peoples' imagination and then lost it all and more, Mr. Bond's familiarity with economies, both financial and aesthetic, were marked by more than a little excess. World renowned for his 1987 purchase of Van Gogh's Irises for US$49 million, he was briefly jailed in the late 90's as a result of another painting transaction which was deemed by the W.A. courts to be somewhat 'dodgy'. While 'inside' he again took up the brush - reportedly with a passion - and now specializes in watercolours and oils.
Maybe what sealed my choice of magazine were the tantalizing correspondences that exist (even when they are in the negative, like a shadow) in the conflation of fiscal and aesthetic personas between Mr Bond and this project's namesake, Etienne de Silhouette. I intend to explore this more thoroughly somewhere along the line - perhaps even at the Fremantle Yacht Club!
By asking people to erase - "rub-out completely" - a page, I had in mind an undertaking that would breach the object but not necessarily compromise its physical form; leaving its identity, for the most part, intact. That is why the covers were not erased. I also felt it needed to be a physical act of economic means, that wasn't materially additive, so as not to encumber the object. (You could say though, that a certain 'additive subtraction' - how Jasper Johns regarded Robert Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning - has taken place in the process). The more someone worked on 'their' page the more they removed the traces of their effort. So, in a sense, a double effacement was taking place, because, as the image and text under erasure became indistinct, so did the distinctiveness of their contribution. One participant in Berlin found this dynamic especially disheartening. As she put it, "...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, and why some people didn't finish the task. In those instances someone else completed the unfinished page, so two sets of time(s) and hourly rate(s) are inscribed on that page.
I have always thought of what was taking place here as something like a willful confusion of looking with a very physical act; where the body puts the image/object under pressure and makes it away, like a pressurized and corrosive, or even, erosive, gaze; in a situation where the look outlives, outdoes, or undoes the object of its attention.
END OF PART ONE