Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette

Brief Description

This mass-collaborative erasure project ostensibly deals with disparities of value and exchange; training a refusing, yet, perhaps, still enraptured eye, on aspects of contemporary image culture. It is informed by the exchanges we make in our lives, both with our time and our labour, and how that is valued. It is also concerned with the residue of those less tangible, less 'pictureable' things in our lives brushing up against a culture obsessed with the idea of visibility.

The Work and its (Un)Making

To create this work different individuals were asked to completely and anonymously erase with a rubber one page of a 246 page Vogue Hommes (September 1986, #92) magazine, with Sylvester Stallone on the cover. Additionally, they were asked to write in pencil on the page both the time it took them to erase the page - ranging from 9 minutes to just beyond 3.5 hours - and whatever monetary value, translated into an hourly rate/s, they currently received for their time. Consequently, each page has a nominal value based on the sum of these indices. The dollar value accrued 'on' each page ranges from nothing in a number of instances (some contributors were receiving no calculable money for their time) to one page 'worth' over USD$1,000. Such disparities are central to the work. Taken together the accumulated monetary value of all these peoples' pages proposes a value, of sorts, for the work as a whole.

Begun in 1999, this initial collaborative stage took 5 years to complete and involved in excess of 260 people, ranging in age from 8 to 80. Coming from many walks of life, most of them live(d) and work(ed) in Melbourne, Australia. Others were passing through there, to, or from, somewhere else; while another group resided in the various European countries that the magazine travelled to in 2001.

Sites and Response Program

During the course of 2004/5 the erased magazine was shown at nine public sites across Melbourne; sites chosen to contextualize a compelling aspect of the work and its (un)making, whilst also intersecting with the personal and/or professional lives of some of the collaborator-erasers on the project. Of these locations only one saw the work in direct relation to other artistic productions. Each site was open to the public for, on average, three weeks (seven weeks in one instance and for just an afternoon in another two), depending on the nature of the location. For the most part the magazine-artefact has been presented open, often in a display case, with the pages turned regularly. When situated in the home of one of the collaborator-erasers it was, however, encountered just like any other magazine: on the livingroom table with all the other magazines. Accompanying each display was a brief text outlining aspects of the work, as well as a complete list of the collaborator-erasers.

In conjunction with this, at each location a writer, artist, participant in the work, site host, or interested party was invited to respond to the work - to give a talk or coordinate a discussion around one or more aspects of the work's social and/or artistic context - or, possibly, to create a new work, exchange, activity, or proposition in the shadow of the work. That is, in addition to my presentation of the project to the different audiences at each site i.e. the employees, local constituents, guests, or the general public. Transcripts of the various site contributions - including from the 2007 Venice Biennale of Art - are available online and can be accessed here or via the sidebar links. They will eventually be compiled into a publication that documents the evolution and dissemination of the work, while expanding further on the ideas, forms, interactions, and social contexts that have, and continue to inform it. (See the sidebar links to the sites and the talk transcripts).

On Reflection

The magazine has been diminished, emptied of its original, primarily pictorial content and re-inscribed, palimpsest-like, by other energies and with other values. In the process, and while maintaining the basic integrity of its original form - an impersonal, mass produced, and ephemeral product of popular culture - this out of date object with little intrinsic worth was transformed: invested with a significant amount of time (267 hours, 49 minutes, 5 seconds...), of attention, of labour, and propositionally endowed with considerable value (AUD$11,349.18...). The artefact that has resulted from this drawn-out, yet economical mass undertaking could be thought of as a social and/or artistic document of a certain disproportionate investment and disproportionate attention: one that hopefully embodies some of the paradoxical impulses evident within the contemporary politic of images, toward both negation and proliferation.

Images from Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette

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