Joelle Tuerlinckx Study Book

STUDY BOOK

0

The Drawing Center

The Renaissance Society

0

Acknowledgements Catherine de Zegher Suzanne Ghez

5

A Story around Zero Catherine de Zegher Katherine Carl

7–15

Tuerlinckx and the Fold: Within and Beyond a Critique of Institutions Jaleh Mansoor

17–29

Joëlle Tuerlinckx: At the Edge of the Visible Michael Newman

31–45

Drawing Inventory: Lines, Dots, Forms, Figures, Color, and Collages (scale 1:1) as applied to The Drawing Center j.t. 2006 The Drawing Center, New York, 2006 1–577

47– 496

Chicago Studies: Les étants donnés. space thesis in 8 sequences of 60 minutes with videos and demonstrations of material in natural and artificial light The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago, 2003 1–89

497–541

Chicago Studies: Les étants donnés. space thesis in 8 sequences of 60 minutes with videos and demonstrations of material in natural and artificial light The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago, 2003 543–560

Illustrations by Joëlle Tuerlinckx

cover, pp. 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 45, 237–242, 265, 280

3

Acknowledgements The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago and The Drawing Center are honored to present the first American museum exhibitions by the Belgian artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx. Coopting the living museum as a found object and employing its empty forms — vitrines, labels, walls, and frames — to probe, measure, and reconfigure the relations between objects and people within the institutional setting, Tuerlinkcx is a provocative operator.

For Chicago Studies: Les étants donnés. at The Renaissance Society, she integrated video and slide projections, moveable walls, and sculptural elements within the gallery to create a space whose conceptual identity came to fall somewhere between the tutorial, administrative, and exhibitive functions of the building in which it was housed. For Drawing Inventory at The Drawing Center, the artist created a constellation of marks, which, to trace her experience of the space, she measured and rearranged in an infinitely additive process that mirrored the institution’s method of broadening the notion of drawing.

Both The Renaissance Society and The Drawing Center are profoundly grateful to those dedicated people and organizations that lent their invaluable support to these projects.

At The Renaissance Society, the exhibition and publication were made possible through generous support from The American Center Foundation and the Commissariat Général aux Relations Internationales de la Communauté française de Belgique. Additional support for the publication was received from

The Getty Foundation and The Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation. We would like to thank the lenders to the exhibition: Collection Lohaus-De Decker, Antwerpen; Museum DhondtDhaenens; and s.m.a.k., Gent. Our thanks also go to Jos Degruyter, Christoph Fink, Keith Larson, Stella Lohaus, and Jana Phlips: their support, goodwill, and hard work allowed us to realize this exhibition.

At The Drawing Center, the exhibition and publication were made possible, in part, by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, JPMorgan Chase, and the Consulate General of Belgium in New York where we are particularly grateful to Renilde LoeckxDrozdiak. Additional support for the publication came from Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation and Sara Nainzadeh. The Commissariat Général aux Relations Internationales de la Communauté française de Belgique and the Direction générale des Relations extérieures aux Ministère de la Région Wallonne provided additional assistance for this project. We express our sincere thanks to the lenders to the exhibition: mv Collection, Belgium; Moritz Kung; s.m.a.k., Gent; Cera cvba; Argos, Brussels and Ivan Thomas. We also express our gratitude to Christoph Fink, Erica Gambini, Stella Lohaus, and Maryline Terrier who worked tirelessly to bring the exhibition to The Drawing Center.

Susanne Ghez Director, The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago

Catherine de Zegher Director, The Drawing Center

5

Tuerlinckx and the Fold: Within and Beyond a Critique of Institutions Jaleh Mansoor

I more and more think of the exhibition as a slow progress inside my own brain. But here it can be a 1,200 square meters brain.

— Joëlle Tuerlinckx, excerpt from Notes, #3, Witte de With, 1995 1. THE FOLD

On a poster designed by Joëlle Tuerlinckx to accompany Stat.ic, a series of films presented on the occasion of the 2004 International Film Festival in Rotterdam, the artist enlarged an image of twenty-four unevenly stacked business cards. In the picture, the topmost card is placed face-side down, presenting an expanse of blank surface, its edge underscoring the bold typeface that interrupts the white surface of the card underneath.1 Below that, a third card appears, identical to the others except insofar as its exposed surface area presents enough of a graphic pattern to suggest an obscured image or icon. That “icon,” in turn, is the logo for the International Film Festival, Rotterdam, under which the requisite “business as usual” information, such as the name of the organizer and 1. The verso of the business card is shown topmost in the poster discussed here. Some versions of this image present the card printed face forward. The poster, verso forward, resembles a blank screen upon which other images could be projected.

2. For a discussion of the baroque emblem as an enfolding of mutually exclusive functions, see Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, “The Poetics of Place: The Space of the Emblem (Sponde),” trans. Katherine Lydon in Yale French Studies: Baroque Topographies: Literature/History/Philosophy 80 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).

3. Tuerlinckx in conversation with the author, February 2003.

Tuerlinckx has made it clear that she has absolutely no interest in the rococo as a conventional category of style.

so forth, appears. (That logo would have been easily recognizable as an image, ubiquitous and recurrent in the visual field at the time of the festival in Rotterdam, as is so often the case with film festivals and exhibitions, where the venue ’s logo and other promotional materials invasively organize vision, deflecting interest in the actual film or exhibition itself.) And below that third card, a fourth appears, again more hidden. This presentation of an instrumental object, the business card, enlarged and made strange, gives rise to a sense of the object as dilated to become other to itself, as transformed into another object. The stacked flat cards form an irregular fan of cast shadows and milky creases. Twisting into another form, the magnified pile of business potential, or of wasted paper, comes to fluidly, if momentarily, take on the appearance of a baroque emblem, a stone plate asymmetrically framed and ready to bear text, an opportunity the artist here eschewed.2 The white surface suggests at once a cinematic screen and a sculptural framing device. While screen and base, seemingly incongruous supports, function as frames for a diVerent kind of articulation, both nonetheless set the condition for the possibility of presenting material enunciation to view.

In conversation, Tuerlinckx has mentioned her interest in the baroque and rococo as phenomena of aberration and transformation, leaving her interlocutor to envision a spiral of dynamically interlocked forms, of biomorphic objects twisted into other elliptically shaped items, as in the rococo object, where the shell becomes the sugar bowl.3 But rather than a world of pumpkins become carriages and vines

17

JALEH MANSOOR

become ornate scrolls framing texts, we are confronted with thinking become architectural ornament — with forty-eight business cards.

Their use — the advertisement of information about the person to whom they belong that makes possible other transactions, circulations, and advertisements ad infinitum — remains withheld.4 Consider Tuerlinckx’s exhibition pas d’histoire pas d’histoire [“no story no history”] at the Witte de With Center of Contemporary Art in Rotterdam in 1994, where many projects in many mediums were strewn about in various states of realization. Each constellation of work, in its refusal to join with the others to form a cogent plan, opened onto endless process. Individual clusters suggested the development of a project from its initial formulation to its manifestation in the exhibition space to its eventual dismantling. The exhibition presented gesture and labor as continuously developing, expanding on themselves and severed from ends, products, or goals. Bits of tape and paper were assembled in groups all across the floor, almost forming a pattern, or some other kind of evidence of intention; here and there stood objects seeming to be in the process of becoming sculpture. Projections flickered without crystallizing into film. These objects raised the question of what constitutes a finished project: how and why does the status of completed or not-completed become conferred on a work?

The literature on Tuerlinckx has noted this aggregate of unfinished practice. Frank Vande Veire characterized the pas d’histoire pas d’histoire piece as “a degree zero point of all art, where all modernist procedures are reviewed.”5 4. In her engagement with advertisement and printed information, Tuerlinckx evokes the sixties materialist Conceptual art practices of Marcel Broodthaers.

TUERLINCKX AND THE FOLD: WITHIN AND BEYOND A CRITIQUE OF INSTITUTIONS

What is more striking than any “degree zero” of modernism’s tropes and privileged strategies — an emphasis on primary color, line divested of its role as guarantor of shape and contour, the objet trouvé — is the sheer accumulation of nonformalized gestures in her oeuvre. The folding of one medium within another surfaces as a consistent approach to practice.

In regard to this mutual enfolding of mediums, consider Tuerlinckx’s films and projections of mark-making processes. There, the filmic flicker becomes the condition for the possibility of proVering the marks, the pulse of the film both echoing and enabling the nervous movements of the hand. Conversely, like a glove turned inside out, the act of drawing makes the flicker of the projection possible, drawing it forth as an internal framing device. In other words, although the film encloses and appears to frame the grapheme, the mark folds back to remind the viewer that the projection too is a mark making, a proVering to vision, a drawing of light.

The envelopment of one object in another — the enfoldment of one medium in another — generates an oscillation between terms in a larger proliferation of process and practice.

This mutual envelopment, moreover, diVerentiates Tuerlinckx’s art from any other demonstration of the “degree zero” of representation. The operative economy of both the posters for the 2004 International Film Festival in Rotterdam and the projections moves along another trajectory, one that prevents the work from becoming another analytical exploration 5. Frank Vande Veire, “Something about how a Tuerlinckx Machine Traverses the Exhibition Machine,” in Catherine de Zegher, ed., Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996).

of the conditions of representation, as in the sixties work of Michael Snow. At the same time, the glove-turned-inside-out condition of Tuerlinckx’s work reroutes it from becoming another staging of the continuity of process à la Schwitters’s Merzbau in Hannover and London.

The Merzbau involved two components, an inside and an outside shell. Each developed through an equal emphasis on cutting and aYxing elements from and to other elements.

The inner core consisted of a formless accretion of discarded random objects and fragments. The outer dimension comprised a handmade architectural structure of wood and plaster. Built around multiple axes, the expanse of Merzbau failed to bind as a unified, homogenous space. Friends of the artist and viewers of the work often described the place as illegible and unstable and alternately as comforting or suVocating, vertiginous, frightening. Because the Merzbau was a continuous project that was altered daily, small apertures were frequently sliced out of a larger solid, and open space was often buried under the agglomeration of objects, wood, and plaster.

Schwitters’s work involved a desublimatory drive in which the boundaries of objects, spaces, and ideas could be dissolved in the economy of endless regress. By contrast, Tuerlinckx’s projects, while submitting objects — and the very notion of the medium — to a shape-shifting elasticity and an emphasis on process over products, preclude the possibility of endlessness.

They also bar the kind of anomie that frequently accompanies open-ended work. Which returns us to Tuerlinckx’s baroque.

Another elaboration on the baroque, serv-

19

JALEH MANSOOR

ing less as an explanatory model for Tuerlinckx’s object production and more as an analog for her mode and economy of work, is Gilles Deleuze’s contention that “the baroque does not refer to an essence, but rather to an operative function. It endlessly creates folds. It does not invent the thing, but it twists and turns the folds, takes them to infinity, fold upon fold, fold after fold.”6 Deleuze insists that the fold — the baroque’s salient characteristic — accounts for the movement’s formal and structural specificity by describing the way that it operates rather than its static aspects. What defines the baroque is the fold as a continuous circuit of process that traverses identities, discrete objects, and specific mediums.

The fold: The baroque invents the infinite work or operation. The problem is not how to finish a fold but how to continue it, make it go through the roof. Take it to infinity. For the fold eVects not only all materials, and thus becomes matter for expression in accordance with diVerent scales and speeds and vectors (the mountains and the waters, papers, fabrics, living tissues, the brain), but it also determines and brings form into being and into appearance, it makes of it a form of expression.7 Moving across all categories along an endlessly self-diVerentiated materiality, a support subtending the frames, molds, and systems that determine materiality, the fold pushes matter forth into shape and expression. It could be cast as the infinite process of drawing, of drawing forth the invisible (yet present) within the visible.

6. Gilles Deleuze, “The Fold,” trans. Jonathan Strauss, in Yale French Studies: Baroque Topographies: Literature/History/ Philosophy 80 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 227.

7. Ibid., 242.

TUERLINCKX AND THE FOLD: WITHIN AND BEYOND A CRITIQUE OF INSTITUTIONS

This movement does not entail any dediVerentiation or desublimation. In other words, it does not become the endless and unmotivated spillage of any idea or object into any other whatsoever. On the contrary, Tuerlinckx is insistent that the transformation of one term into another — this hiccup of drawing into film and of business documents into emblems — does not occur along a chain of infinite regress.8 Rather, one term enfolds another, each oscillating into the other and back, again like a glove inverted and reverted, a fold turned back. “The ideal fold is a fold which diVerentiates and self-diVerentiates,” writes Deleuze.9 Tuerlinckx’s videos of her mark-making emphasize the endless division of each support by another, of the graphic trace that cuts the surface, which in turn cuts into the field of recorded view, which in turn cuts into a sense of a greater visual field. That “cutting” is also, and simultaneously, a form of connecting. Tuerlinckx locates the connections among supports, a process she refers to as “decategorization.” While in the process of exploring a given technique and procedure, she may introduce another to work out the problem at stake. For instance, while projecting an image on a wall or using video to manipulate 8. Tuerlinckx in conversation with the author, February 2003.

9. Deleuze, “The Fold,” 236.

10. Tuerlinckx in conversation with the author, February 2003.

Tuerlinckx has spoken of her tremendous interest in the work of Daniel Buren and Marcel Broodthaers, in particular Broodthaers’s Musee project. And while she aligns her practice with a history of cultural production that questions institutional power, she also emphasizes her attempt to diVerentiate that practice from within and to produce it along other terms.

11. Similarly, in Kassel for Documenta XI, Tuerlinckx required a window in the room in which her work was shown to be open at all times, during exhibition hours. She also set the volume of the central films at the volume level of the regular stream of outside sounds.

that image, she will begin drawing on the projection to assist a possible discovery.

Tuerlinckx, finally, has had occasion to investigate this notion of the baroque fold more literally — conceiving of it not as a style, nor as a term referring to objects, but as a modality and process, be that the process of making, of thinking, or of their mutual entwinement. In Karlsruhe, Germany, Tuerlinckx decided to draw loops and curls descriptive of the architectural ornaments of the Karlsruhe castle.

Having drawn the line, she plotted its coordinates on a computer application, which then “returned” the line — or better, expressed it — as perfectly straight or as quadrilinear. The resultant line, on view at the exhibition at The Drawing Center, insistently articulated the fold as a process, a means without end.

2. EXPANDING ON THE CRITIQUE OF INSTITUTIONS

In the light of Deleuze ’s proposed project, in which “the problem is not how to finish the fold but how to continue it, to make it go through the roof,” Tuerlinckx’s intervention into the limits of institutional space — the museum and the gallery — assumes a significance inclusive of, yet much more generous than, “institutional critique.” Rather than dismantle the assumptions and conditions of power (both latent and manifest), Tuerlinckx stages the limits of the institution, producing new possibilities.10 In May of 2003, for her project at The Renaissance Society in Chicago, Tuerlinckx had the door to the gallery remain wide open to puncture the enclosed integrity of the exhibition space.11 Opening the gallery onto

21

JALEH MANSOOR

the outside and challenging the integrity of the architectural container reminded the viewer of institutional hierarchies, the inclusion and exclusion that conditions the viewing, distribution, and reception of a work of art and consequently constitutes a work itself. Tuerlinckx elaborated on this trope of destabilizing center and margin, inside and out, by extending pieces of her work well beyond the architectural frame, requiring viewers to reposition themselves in order to see the entirety of the work.

Furthermore, she filmed components of the piece far afield in outlying neighborhoods.

While the strategy indeed interrogated the ideological and economic hierarchies subtending the space of exhibition, it also self-reflexively staged its own spaces and sites of reception.

Beyond the dismantling of existent and oppressive norms, the artist stakes out and inscribes other and singular practices that involve negotiating a new relationship to the discourse and institutions of art, as I hope to demonstrate.

The advent of the readymade showed that the institution carried an agency and power to transform objects into art — much more than any individual “author” could — a notion that Tuerlinckx complicates. Her work marks the relationship of object to space as a mutually defining condition. Her inscription of social and institutional space12 suggests another mode of expression, one that is at once emancipatory and cognizant of the conditions of presentation.

She stages the validity of any space she chooses to exhibit in, making that space as much the envelope of the work as the institution is. In other words, through the gesture of placing an object in a site traditionally dismissed as purely 12. As opposed to the formal marking of landscape in many sixties practices.

TUERLINCKX AND THE FOLD: WITHIN AND BEYOND A CRITIQUE OF INSTITUTIONS

arbitrary, Tuerlinckx achieves what French theorist Jacques Rancière has called “a repartitioning of the sensible,” drawing new lines in what can be said and thought, specifically concerning the object of art. According to Rancière, partitioning the sensible involves staging subjectivities and experiences that require social norms to reorganize them to respond to new proposals. To demonstrate his concept, Rancière cites the case of a French woman, Jeanne Deroin, who in 1849 presented herself as the candidate for a legislative election in which she was legally barred from running. As such, far from merely critiquing and dismantling the limits of democracy, she staged its contradictions.13 On a third level, beyond both institutional critique and the staging of a new partition in the visible, Tuerlinckx again sets into play the operations of the fold. “The tendency of matter to overflow space, to be reconciled with fluidity,” connects the artist’s interrogation of institutional power to that of staging possibilities anew, presenting the continuity of process and practice and the act of forming matter into expression as enfolded through acts of resistant enunciation.14 In this strategy of enfolding a critique of institutional norms into a staging of other possibilities, Tuerlinckx’s work moves in tandem with other contemporary artistic projects intent on repartitioning the field of what constitutes the visible. One fellow traveler is Thomas Hirschhorn, who, in his Bataille Monument, presented at Documenta XI, set up a library, a video studio that the audience was encouraged to use (the artist provided sign-up sheets), and a café, far from the exhibition’s central exhibition 13. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 41.

14. Deleuze, “The Fold,” 229–230.

spaces, in a Turkish neighborhood accessible by jitney cabs (also part of the project). This clustering of regular bourgeois public-sphere spaces of information exchange, circulation, and consumption in a marginal, semi-ghettoized, ethnic minority neighborhood in Kassel, Germany, both demonstrated the incommensurability of utopian and critical artistic strategies with contemporary experiential realities and sought to overcome that aporia by carving out new points of contact in the everyday life of existing communities. In a two-part move, this repartitioning of the sensible retained the negative critical dimension of an earlier generation of artistic practices while seeking to integrate critique with experiential reality in the hope of producing other realities. With Tuerlinckx, on the other hand, the staging of possibility remains grounded in a sustained engagement with the processes of presentation and representation, of drawing forth the unthought in thought, making it visible.

For Tuerlinckx, the very medium of drawing continues to provide a space where the individual may show his or her cognizance, while simultaneously attempting to work through the presence of both institutional power and the forces of a society of control.

Drawing responds openly to the pressure of a series of forces that expands outward in greater circles of determination and management: the very surface of the inscription, the frame, the gallery or museum wall, the institution that provides the possibility of drawing’s visibility and value. Drawing’s relationship to media is analogous to the subject’s position — the subject made subject to and thus made subject — in

23

JALEH MANSOOR

relation to institutionalized and media-determined speech. To describe this contradictory bind — that of finding voice and choice in and through pre-constituted and managed enunciative systems — Etienne Balibar has introduced the term “civility,” by which he means “the movement of disidentification-identification” where the subject is able to join communities in a way that allows for the possibility of individual choice while acknowledging that choice takes place within a preexisting framework.15 3. MATERIALITY: “MATTER BECOMES MATTER FOR EXPRESSION.”16

Tuerlinckx refers to some of her work as “Elastics,” or “Elastic Drawing.”17 Here, a length of elastic is stretched between the floor and ceiling of the exhibition space. The excess of the material hangs on the floor as a remainder.

Line, in a manifest response to “conceptual” art, is rematerialized. At the same time, the foundational binary of material/conceptual comes undone. Elastic line is at once material and hovering there like an idea, a thought.

4. TECHNOLOGY AND DRAWING

In her work at Documenta XI, Tuerlinckx set up a room of slide and film projections, including what she calls her Stretch films, on a scale of 1:1, which present the performance of graphic marks continually made, erased, and retraced. This immense machinery of visual stimuli hybridized electronic genres and manual drawing. Yet the arrangement of imaging systems returned to a single trope: the humble enactment of touch, the 15. Etienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, trans.

Christine Jones, James Swenson, and Chris Turner (London: Verso Press, 2002).

16. Deleuze, “The Fold,” 245.

17. On a maquette designed to accompany Stat.ic.

TUERLINCKX AND THE FOLD: WITHIN AND BEYOND A CRITIQUE OF INSTITUTIONS

tactile contact with a graphic surface, a simple mark made and remade. Slides, video, and film coalesced around the practice of drawing, its memory and its possibility. Nevertheless, this apparent memorial mobilized little nostalgia for drawing. Tuerlinckx’s Stretch piece paid tribute to a practice that stretches the limits between obsolescence and futurity. Not regressive, marking no return to craft, or to empty academic virtuosity, Tuerlinckx’s graphic trace marks an interval in the velocity of new media development where the single manual act enfolds entire communications systems. As “a flexible or elastic body,” drawing forms a fold, with the result that it does not separate into parts of parts, but rather divides infinitely into smaller and smaller folds that always retain a certain cohesion. What is more, the labyrinth of continuity is not a line which would dissolve into independent points like sand flowing in grains but is like a piece of fabric or a sheet of paper which divides into an infinite number of folds or disintegrates into curved movements, each one determined by the consistency or the participation of its setting.18 Drawing, for Tuerlinckx, insinuates itself by folding into and enfolding other entities and mediums without allowing those to rupture its own integrity and continuity, nor does it engulf and diminish the integrity and continuity of 18. Deleuze, “The Fold,” 231.

19. Tuerlinckx in conversation with the author, February 2003.

Tuerlinckx may be evoking Deleuze’s discussion of processes of transformation in literary contexts, where transformation has been expressed through metaphor and thereby traditionally understood as a function of representation. For Deleuze, by contrast, such expressions or images of transformation are not a matter of mimesis or metaphor, but an acknowledgement of the processes of thinking-as-becoming. See Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 65.

20. Deleuze, “The Fold,” 243.

other media. One of the most striking characteristics of Tuerlinckx’s graphic trace is the resilience with which the medium of drawing is shown to be capable of interfacing with the technologies and media that appear to render it outmoded and irrelevant. Tuerlinckx’s mark has demonstrated that it can fluidly keep reaching out to points that would seem to be not-drawing, a place where it no longer necessarily defines contour and thereby no longer supports representation, as in the classical tradition, or expresses the interiority of the artist through gesture, as in the Romantic or modernist sketch.

Here institutional pressure and electronic media paradoxically condition the possibility for drawing to realize itself through new processes, the undrawn in drawing.

5. EXCHANGING TRANSFORMATION FOR METAPHOR

Tuerlinckx has told me that she is more interested in the transposition of one term into another than in the rigidity of metaphor. “I would replace the statement, for example, ‘the woman is like a rose’ for the reciprocity of rose/woman, the becoming rose of woman and woman of rose.”19 To succinctly specify this kind of transformation, Deleuze invokes the notion of the “unfold.” The unfold, in turn, does not elaborate itself in opposition to the fold as in a binary, a paradigm, but rather exists in the continuity of expression. “The Unfold: certainly not the opposite of the fold, nor its eVacement, but the continuation or extension of its act, the condition of its manifestation. When the fold ceases to be represented and becomes a method, an operation and an act, the unfold becomes the

25

JALEH MANSOOR

result of the act which is expressed in precisely that way.”20 This movement, far from a slide from form into formlessness, is precisely the condition of form, of expression.

Again, metaphor-substitution of one fixed entity for another yields to the operations of the fold, which occurs through continual movement. Neither term remains still, one term enfolds another; each folds and unfolds as a process of enunciation. Just as the exhibition site, the interiority of architectural space, folds into thinking — this “1,200 meters long brain”— so thinking unfolds as architectural space. And this term/unfolded term of making thinking and thinking making happens along the continuum of process.

In the pas d’histoire pas d’histoire exhibit, Tuerlinckx included a piece entitled A Wonderful Journey around Zero. This “journey” entailed a number of slides in a slide tray, arranged around the central void of the appliance. That the administrative and pedagogical dimension of art should become the journey speaks to the economy of elastic transformation at the core of Tuerlinckx’s work. The work and its secondorder representation are mutually enfolded, a strategy at play in the production of a fellow Belgian, albeit of some generations earlier, Marcel Broodthaers. More strikingly, both work and representation of work become a third entity, a trip temporally unfolding before the viewer. The work becomes simply the temporality of its reception. Furthermore, this reception has no closure, as the journey circles around “zero.” The fold permits of no static product; it is pure means.

To return to the baroque emblem, its logic

TUERLINCKX AND THE FOLD: WITHIN AND BEYOND A CRITIQUE OF INSTITUTIONS

analogously cleaves metaphor open, exposing it to a continuous circuit of active transpositions.

Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani has called this movement the slide back and forth from semiosis to mimesis. The logic of the baroque is that it “does the opposite of what it says it is doing, pretending [for example] to describe a landscape in order to describe the state of a wretched soul. But which also does the opposite of what it thinks it is doing; is the landscape a metaphor of the soul? It appears that the soul is also a metaphor for the landscape.

The thing compared-to becomes the thing compared.”21 At once work, record-of-work, and journey, A Wonderful Journey around Zero invents and continues an infinite operation that self-reflexively inquires into the nature of “work” while producing its own field of selfsustained solutions. In other words, the fold does not simply dismantle traditional identities.

It asks after and extracts the impossible within the possible to generate other solutions. When traveling can occur along the rotation of a group of images in a slide tray, or more precisely along the time it takes to look at each slide, and when thinking can manifest itself in so many meters of gallery space and so many meters of gallery space reciprocally are expressed in and through thinking, art is shown to be pure means and, beyond that, means that involve both physical labor and the imminent labor of thinking, the unthought in thought.22

21. Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, “The Poetics of Place: The Space of the Emblem (Sponde),” 37.

22. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 280.

Deleuze considers cinema as a means of thinking, or rather, a mode of thinking.

addendum (or Expanding the Critique of Institutions, Part 2) For the exhibition at The Drawing Center, Drawing Inventory, which I was only able to see after the bulk of the preceding was written, Tuerlinckx’s work appeared to have been arranged without adherence to any one organizing principle. After some moments of exploring the show, circulating among clusters of drawings, archival accumulations, and explorations of line in a range of media, the viewer might have begun to sense that the entirety of the work was diagrammed by an irregular grid drawn lightly on the wall. In other words, this graphite grid, because of its internal inconsistency, refused to map or represent the coordinates of the gallery space, acting as a web-like design that described rather than represented.

Instead of functioning as a systematizing plan or a fixed a priori form, Tuerlinckx’s grid was subject to the vagaries of the process of drawing. Thus it was a drawing that assisted in drawing out the relations of the many parts of the exhibition without making that exhibition reducible to the sum of those parts.

While diagramming the interior of the gallery space, the grid also established Tuerlinckx’s awareness of the space external to the architectural container. The Drawing Center show marked the artist’s first exhibition in New York, and the space marked out by the grid on the gallery walls corresponded to the pavement blocks on Broadway, drawn to scale. The irregularities of the grid, then, were consistent with the changes in the concrete composition of Manhattan’s main artery. But unlike some other

27

JALEH MANSOOR

well known works that pay homage to New York City – Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie or Palermo’s To the People of New York City come to mind — Tuerlinckx’s art traced the very ground of the city’s material fabric, projecting it onto the gallery wall and putting it to work, as it were, to diagram the constellations of her work, to draw relationships among her existent productions. Thus, this reminder of the greater urban exterior on the interior surface of The Drawing Center recalled the way that Tuerlinckx’s art repeatedly insists on making the exhibiting institution physically and conceptually porous to its surrounding environment.

That openness, conversely, rhymes with the way that the spatial arrangement of Tuerlinckx’s work — such a necessary component of the work at The Drawing Center and not just a “mere” curatorial factor — enfolds the institution in which it appears. Like a glove turned inside out, Tuerlinckx’s project includes and accounts for factors that determine the appearance of artwork even as art traditionally purports to neutralize those terms and, thereby, to present itself as always already neutral, cleansed of institutional aYliation or geo-political context. Moreover, Tuerlinckx’s work enfolds the institution as an institution, allowing it to be textured by its own history and administrative life and not defused as either just another architectural container for the passive display of art or a site of unmitigated power (the position of the institution according to much work that is undialectically critical of the institution).

For instance, at The Drawing Center, Tuerlinckx left the far wall of the gallery rela-

TUERLINCKX AND THE FOLD: WITHIN AND BEYOND A CRITIQUE OF INSTITUTIONS

tively blank, with the exception of that eccentric grid, drawn so very lightly it is almost illegible from the distance of the entrance. On venturing behind the wall to view a series of drawings hung above and below one another, one was struck by surprise that Tuerlinckx had also installed work on the opposite, non-public side of the wall, as though the traditional surface for exhibition had been flipped to face The Drawing Center’s administrative oYces rather than gallery visitors. Once again Tuerlinckx had manipulated the entire space through the presentation of her work, achieving a sense of having turned the gallery inside out, the center becoming the epicenter of the show’s focus. Moreover, in doing so, Tuerlinckx achieved a sense of having stretched out some spaces and shrunken others. Thus, the narrow interstitial space of administrative commerce struck the visitor as paradoxically both large and significant and, at the same time, as shrunk even further by the people who gathered there to view the artist’s framed drawings. By contrast, the presence of the blank wall made the gallery appear both larger than usual and yet diminished in importance because of its relative emptiness compared to the density of visual information on the blank wall’s other side. One eVect of such a spatial and curatorial arrangement was to make the viewer aware of the institution as an agent collaboratively tied to artist and artwork, neither neutral nor possessed of the power to wholly determine the work.23 There were other moments that corroborated this sense of a loquacious, reciprocally respectful dialogue taking place between work and institution. Tuerlinckx produced a series of 23. As explored in the work of Daniel Buren among many others, for instance.

books answering to The Drawing Center’s well-known Drawing Papers series, which are related to Drawing Center shows but also resemble a single periodical comprising many issues. Tuerlinckx’s Parallel Drawing Papers operate as an homage to The Drawing Center by enfolding the habits of the institution and the strategies it uses to define itself. This enfoldment emerges not through mimicry, which could be read as a kind of parody or spoof, but through the economy of repetition and diVerence that Tuerlinckx mobilizes.

Tuerlinckx’s Parallel Drawing Papers, some 120 issues at the time of this writing, are each singular, each carefully made, each a candidate for the category “artwork.” On the other hand, that singularity is mediated by the repetition of the title and the repetitive quotation of the design, layout, and typography used for the Drawing Papers. Tuerlinckx’s practice inhabits the institution’s practices and sites of identity, then carves out its own singular project from within — and through a dialogue with — the institution. This strategy marks yet another way in which Tuerlinckx’s approach draws awareness to the institution without presupposing a priori that the institution enacts forms of concealed power that must be exposed.

29

30

Joëlle Tuerlinckx: At the Edge of the Visible Michael Newman

and served as the governor of Tasmania. But as a boy he was so slow that he was unable to see, let alone catch, a ball: A blip streaked across John’s vision. If he looked up to the hotel chimney, it perched in the uppermost window. If he fixed on the window’s crossbars, it slithered down to the hotel sign. That’s how it jerked further and further down as he lowered his glance, but up it went again with a sneer when he looked at the sky.4

“Variety in sensation (and hence the property of reflecting air), in the materials you employ, distinguishes the writing from the drawing, the drawing from the engraving, the engraving from the picture.”

— Denis Diderot, quoting Mademoiselle de Salignac 1 For every event, apart from being localized by its site, initiates the latter’s ruin with regard to the situation, because it retroactively names its inner void.

— Alain Badiou 2 When I am oVered an exhibition space it is as though I received a kind of parcel, a packet of air.

— Joëlle Tuerlinckx 3 In his fact-based historical novel The Discovery of Slowness, Sten Nadolny describes the life of a man who lives at a slower pace than everyone else. In real life, the protagonist, John Franklin, fought in more than one sea battle under Admiral Lord Nelson, led two expeditions to the Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage, 1. Denis Diderot, “Addition” to the “Letter on the blind for the use of those who see,” in Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works (New York: AMS Press, 1973), 156.

2. Alain Badiou, Being and Event (New York and London: Continuum, 2005), 192.

3. Joëlle Tuerlinckx, “About Stukjes stukjes en dingen, dingen, dingen en stukjes [Pieces pieces and things, things things and pieces],” in Cahiers 2 (Rotterdam: Witte de With and Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1995), 101.

4. Sten Nadolny, The Discovery of Slowness (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2005), 4.

To one who lives slowly, everything seems fast, and this is exacerbated at a time of accelerating change such as the period of the industrial and scientific revolutions — Franklin is even interested in optical experiments with moving images, as he thinks that the speed of succession of still images serves as a measure of the relative slowness of the person looking at them.

Franklin’s life reminds us that diVerent temporalities coexist, that each person lives at a diVerent speed, and that to allow one’s “being in the world” to be determined by the pace of technology and commerce may be neither the best, nor the most eVective, form of existence.

Joëlle Tuerlinckx is equally concerned with the diVerent speeds of perception and action and the ways in which these stretch and contract space for the subject. This was evident in her installation, made with Willem Oorebeek, at the Badische Kunstverein in 2004, Bild, oder: mit dem Fuss in der Realität, (Picture, or: with a foot in reality [or: on the ground]) in which diagrammatic figures from Gestalt psychology — recalling the “Oculist Witnesses”

31

MICHAEL NEWMAN

scraped from silvering in Duchamp’s The Large Glass (1915–23) — were to be found applied to a wall and on sheets of transparent plastic attached to bottles on shelves on the walls of the space. They had also set up a strobe light in a room in the basement that flashed at regular intervals to reveal, for just a split second, a photocopy of an eighteenth-century print of a store of barrels pinned to a column. Tuerlinckx’s concern with perception, however, is neither simply empirical nor psychological: what is at stake, rather, is not so much the relation of the subject to the object, as that of both to the void. The distinctiveness of her work is the coexistence within it of, on the one hand, multiplicity and a tendency towards proliferation (lists, endless videos, stacks of paper circles, and so on), with, on the other hand, emptiness and extreme spareness (a fine mark or thin pencil writing on the wall, a single small object in a large space).

What are the implications of this combination of multiplicity and emptiness in Tuerlinckx’s work?

STUDIO, GALLERY, ARCHIVE

Entering Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s exhibition at The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago in 2003, Chicago Studies: Les étants donnés, it was not quite clear whether we were in a studio, a gallery, or an archive: was this a place where art was being made, shown, or stored? To the left was a long table with wire frames, paper disks, pieces of wood that were painted white (some of them looking like they had been used as dipsticks), and various other things, meticulously arranged as if on a grid. Beneath were four plywood boxes — their interiors painted red, green, pink, and black — and two spinning wood disks, 32

JOËLLE TUERLINCKX: AT THE EDGE OF THE VISIBLE

one painted gray and one with its original brownish surface. Reminiscent of vinyl records, such disks are included in many of Tuerlinckx’s installations, suggesting the idea of a dj finding, scratching, and manipulating a given tune to create a new soundscape just as she tweaks the “given” of her installations. The table looked as if it contained material for making things, or perhaps for experiments of some kind. To the right of the entrance, we were confronted by classroom chairs with writing surfaces on which sat photocopied “books” of what looked like lists or inventories. A little further on in the same direction we found plastic files of slides and video monitors on gray shelves, including a monitor that had been painted gray with the words “No (film)” incised on its screen. On another monitor we could view a film that appeared to be an inventory of all the written signs in the gallery office. Screens on which videos were projected filled most of the large room. Sometimes sheets of colored paper were attached to the screens, over which the projections were superimposed. The screens had wheels, and every so often someone came and moved them around, changing the arrangement of panels.

Studio, gallery, archive: these three spaces, with their distinct times — the futurity of production, the presentness of display, the past of the collection — had been condensed 5. Tuerlinckx continues an investigation into and a displacement of the spaces of art begun by Marcel Broodthaers in his Musée d’Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles (1968–72), including the Section XIXe siècle at the rue de la Pépinière (1968), comprising mainly postcards and packing cases for works of art; the Section des Figures at the Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf (1972), comprising an archival display of artifacts involving representations of eagles; and the Section Publicité at Documenta V in Kassel (1972), comprising images including slide carousel displays.

6. Le visiteur parfait at the Austellungshalle zeitgenössische Kunst Münster, March 12–May 8, 2005.

into a multilayered, open distribution.5 At the same time, the exhibition overflowed its limits.

Objects from other parts of the building were brought into the gallery, and videos were shown that had been shot elsewhere in Chicago. This inclusion of the exterior has been a feature in a number of Tuerlinckx’s installations.

The exhibition Space Parts at the South London Gallery in 2002 included an artificial wall across the street, viewable from the gallery entrance as well as from within the exhibition, the artist having specified that the doors be kept open as part of a strategy to include the outside within the exhibition. Named by Tuerlinckx “the fifth wall,” this eVectively turned an element of the real world into a mimesis or double of itself, with the artifice obvious on closer inspection, the imitation being on a slightly larger scale than the original. At the exhibition titled The Perfect Visitor in Münster,6 the main room was empty apart from circles, crosses, and other marks drawn like choreographic indications on the floor, but to be heard at the many windows, with diVerent views of the city from above, were sound recordings of Tuerlinckx and Willem Oorebeek visiting diVerent locations outside.

INSTALLATION AS SITE OF THE VOID

At The Renaissance Society, Joëlle Tuerlinckx used a mid-gray paint on panels, on the table, inside boxes, on spheres and cones, and on furniture. This is the color that is typically found on the sheets of card used by photographers to get a standard exposure reading. Also, Tuerlinckx had discovered that Cézanne painted his studio in the same shade of gray. So, recalling his still 33

MICHAEL NEWMAN

lifes, she placed a red and green apple on one of the windowsills of the gallery to add color accents as in a painting. The slow change in the color of the fruit added a dimension of time, like a film. Often Tuerlinckx thinks of aspects of her installations as film by other means.

“Exposure” implies more than simply a photographic technique; rather, it suggests the ways in which things in the world show themselves, and how this is aVected by diVerent conditions, such as changing light. This concern was also reflected in the videos on display in the gallery. In a number of the shots, we see the artist’s hand holding something — perhaps a strip of paper or card — between the camera and the scene beyond that is being photographed, such as a view from the window of a building or a car. Like a litmus test, these strips make us aware of the conditions and shifts of light or atmosphere in which the video is being taken, as well as the changing focus of the camera. In French, the word “exposition” combines both exhibiting and exposing: something shows itself, is made manifest according to certain conditions. The gray paint — referring to both photographic exposure and the need to set the conditions for things to show themselves, as in the studio of a painter like Cézanne — brings these two senses together.

“Exposition” also implies the order of an argument. Tuerlinckx’s work constitutes a form of visual thinking, where thinking needs to be understood as more than conceptual and as a relation not so much to a body of knowledge as to the unknown and to the unpredictable event. The table displays two aspects of thinking in the more conventional sense: things which

34

JOËLLE TUERLINCKX: AT THE EDGE OF THE VISIBLE

may be used as tools for thinking, and models that project an idea into the future. As the flyer for her Bonnefanten exhibition states: “Tuerlinckx manipulates the museum halls so as to give you the impression that you are entering a model, but a real scale 1:1 model.”7 A “model” suggests something looking forward, projected towards a future possibility. In the gap between the “given” and the model, it is as if the present has been loosened from its moorings. The model is a projection into the future, but that future, as event, is unpredictable and cannot be controlled from the present. In this way, through the work of “exposition,” the “situation” — the totality of that which is present or represented in any particular context — is detached from itself, rendered volatile, open to unpredictable alterations not determined by the structure and history of the situation.

Tuerlinckx enables this in two diVerent ways: by the doubling of the given and by opening up 7. Joëlle Tuerlinckx, A Stretch Museum – scale 1:1, Bonnefanten Museum Maastricht, The Netherlands, February 11–May 6, 2001.

8. Magritte gave a copy of Mallarmé’s poem “Un coup de dés” to Broodthaers, who made a work by blacking out the lines of the poem on aluminium plate, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. Image (1969). See Antje Quast, “Qui songe a des mains simple” or “What does poetry have to do with the world” in Marcel Broodthaers: Le poids d’une oeuvre d’art, ed.

by Wilfried DickhoV (Cologne: Tinaia 9 Verlags, 1994), 251–271. Tuerlinckx’s work is related to the line of modern practice explored by Jean-François Chevrier in exhibitions at MACBA, Barcelona, Spain in 2004 (see Jean-Francois Chevrier and Manuel J. Borja-Villel, eds., Art and Utopia: Limited Action (Barcelona: Actar, 2005)) and at Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, France (see Jean François Chevrier, L’action restrainte: L’art moderne selon Mallarmé (Paris and Nantes: Hazan/ Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, 2005)).

Chevrier uses aspects of the poetics of Mallarmé – his notion of “limited action” in the redefinition of the artist’s relation to languages, writing, the book; and the new space that the poet invented with the typographic innovations of his poem “Un coup de dés” – in order to open new pathways through the history of art since the mid-nineteenth century.

the space or site of a void within the place.

DOUBLINGS: OF ROOMS AND MAPS

At Tuerlinckx’s exhibition in the fall of 2005 at the Power Plant in Toronto, NO’W’ (no Rest. no Room. no Things. no Title), 1:1 mapping was used to bring together the Borgesian map that replaces the territory it refers to and the white page of Mallarmé’s poem “Un coup de dés.”

The walls of the various spaces of the gallery were covered with sheets of paper, on which notes had been written in pencil indicating things like power sockets and cracks. These sheets were then cut and bound into seven books that were laid out for inspection on a table. The entrance to a room adjoining this area was blocked with a sheet of transparent Perspex, ensuring that it remained visible but empty. One other gallery space, situated along a passageway that looked out onto Lake Ontario, still had the papers on its walls. This doubling of wall into page was not reality’s representation but its self-diVering. This play with resemblance is consistent in Tuerlinckx’s practice: at the South London Gallery, which was opened in 1891 as a place specially designed to display painting, leaning against the wall were what looked like large sticks that had been used to mix paint — they turned out to be simulations made of paper.

In addition to this doubling of reality, Tuerlinckx also explores the “edge” of manifestation, the visible as considered in its relation to the non-manifest void or null point. Following in the wake of Mallarmé, Magritte, and Broodthaers, the artist locates the true originality and importance of her work here, on the margin between something and nothing. 8 This is 35

MICHAEL NEWMAN

where she aims to bring us.

The subtitle of the installation at The Renaissance Society, “Les étants donnés,” not only refers to Marcel Duchamp’s late installation Étant donnés (1946–66) but also with “étant” (“being” in the singular) becoming “étants” (multiple “beings”), evokes the multiplicity of beings or things that comprise the situation in which Tuerlinckx was doing her work. 9 This situation included not only objects, but also the physical spaces and the history and character of the place and its surrounding environment.

Some of the videos in The Renaissance Society exhibition were shot from the roads leading from downtown south to Hyde Park, where The University of Chicago is located; the desks in the installation helped to establish the location of The Renaissance Society — a space that has shown cutting-edge contemporary art for decades — as being in a building full of classrooms. The title of the show, Chicago Studies, suggests both academic work and the artist’s sketches. Indeed, Tuerlinckx’s whole practice, with its various media, could be understood as a form of drawing, of disegno in the Renaissance sense, as conceiving and projecting. Thus, by drawing and writing by hand on the walls of her installations, Tuerlinckx reactivates the earliest impulses of the medium. She deals with the “sit9. See Matthew Evans Teti, “Une Nouvelle Archiviste Est Nommé Dans La Ville: Joëlle Tuerlinckx At the Renaissance Society,” Afterall 10 (2004): 21–26. Teti discusses the title of Tuerlinckx’s exhibition in relation to the phenomenology of givenness presented by Jean-Luc Marion in his book Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) – although it must be said that there is nothing of Marion’s Christianizing of the phenomenon (underplayed by Teti) in Tuerlinckx. Teti also discusses the relation to Duchamp’s installation Étant donnés (1946–66) and the implications of the additional “s” in Tuerlinckx’s subtitle for The Renaissance Society exhibition, Chicago Studies: Les étants donnés.

JOËLLE TUERLINCKX: AT THE EDGE OF THE VISIBLE

uation,” with the totality of that which is given as the occasion of the installation, by introducing fluidity, movement, and change, and by reflecting on both the particular and the general conditions — including those of space and time — under which things become manifest.

On this topic of space and time, the art historian Hubert Damisch once said in an interview that “one may describe a game of chess in two ways, either as a succession of linear blows, or as a series of positions, states, synchronic, simultaneous. One may therefore think of the passage from one state to another in terms of transformations.”10 An installation could be conceived in the same terms: as either a kind of linear passage or as a series of contiguous states. In Chicago, Tuerlinckx’s use of time-based elements — videos, the movement of the screens, for example — prevents the arrest of the states and allows for fluidity and non-synchronous overlaps. Having explored and indicated the context, by marking its perimeters, drawing attention to its history, reminding us of aspects that are occluded or taken for granted, Tuerlinckx then “potentialized” this “given” situation, rendering it volatile, as if the given things and marks were the traces of an event or series of events. Each moment needed to be understood not as static and self-sufficient, but rather as a “stoppage” in a fluid and open duration — this is one of the 10. Hubert Damisch, “L’espace, le temps et les arts ae l’espace,” in L’espace et le temps aujourd’hui (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 233–245.

Translation by the author. Damisch applies the chess metaphor to the museum in Hubert Damisch and Ernst van Alphen, Moves: Schaken en kaarten met het museum (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1997).

11. This is a version, corrected by the artist and her translator Orla Barry, of part of Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s statement in the catalogue for Manifesta 3. Francesco Bonami and Igor Zabel, Borderline Syndrome: Energies of Defence (Ljubljana: Cankarjev dom, 2000), 177.

implications of Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages (1913–14), in which measures were constructed from the chance eVects of dropped pieces of string, to which Tuerlinckx alludes with a photographer’s tape measure hanging from the ceiling. “Stoppage” of course refers to arrest, but also to the aperture of the lens, which, with time, determines the exposure of a photograph.

Another approach to rendering the situation a space of change and possibility is to open up within it the space of a void. Tuerlinckx writes in a note to an exhibition catalogue: The best place of space is its border…to look at something, one distances the thing from the eyes. To see space better, to photograph it, one always ends up in the corner of a room, stuck to the walls.

And it is from this extreme position and found in the end at the limits of space that the point of view seems to us most often the most right, corresponding to our first apprehension of space. From whence comes the fact that space may be seen from its borders. The best place in space is not the center. The best place of space is its edge.11 Generally by working around the edge of the space — for example at the Badische Kunstverein, where she lightly marked the walls of the large gallery and placed objects on a shelf — the emptiness of the interior or the room came to be felt. Recall, too, the empty room, which could be looked into but not entered, at the Power Plant. If the situation is a

37

MICHAEL NEWMAN

totality, a bounded set of conditions about which we may have knowledge, the void marks the place where an event opens up or explodes the situation, showing that what appears as a structured totality is the specific limitation of infinite multiplicity. If the multiple is infinite, and infinity as such cannot show up in the situation, since this would be to limit infinity to a determinate “something,” then infinite multiplicity can only manifest itself as a void, circumscribed by determinate things or marks.12 Or, to put it another way, the void is that which cannot be accounted for by the knowledge of the situation as a whole considered in relation to the conditions that determine it: the void is the truth, as distinct from the knowledge, of the situation. The view from the center would strive towards the panoramic, a point from which everything is visible and can be seen. This is a fantasy, and involves the total saturation of the void and thus the repression of truth by knowledge. In a space that has been mastered panoramically, there would be no voids. Such a view of the world would be that of a pure, disembodied visuality. Everything in Tuerlinckx works against this. The void is that in the situation that eludes any attempt to “saturate” or totally understand it as a context.

The void is not just spatial, it is also temporal. As temporal, it figures as a “null” moment, another significance of the “zero” that is inscribed in the installations.13 Tuerlinckx has found a new role for art in relation to space, time, 12. On the event as void and the truth of a situation, see Alain Badiou, Ray Brassier, and Alberto Toscano, Theoretical Writings (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 97–102, 119–133. An excellent discussion of the philosophy of Alain Badiou can be found in Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

13. For a discussion of the figure of “O” in Tuerlinckx, see Catherine Wood, “Stories of O,” Afterall 10 (2004): 11–18.

JOËLLE TUERLINCKX: AT THE EDGE OF THE VISIBLE

and sensibility: she has moved from a concern with the “in-between” spaces and interstices of time, her circles acting as traces of absent objects and the spinning disks as markers of “useless” time, to indicate the voids and null moments that exist yet are suppressed in everyday life and that serve, by their very “worklessness,” their nonfunctional or excessive character to expose the movements and transformations in their vicinities as potential for change.

SHADOWS AND FRAMES

An exhibition or installation is conceived by Tuerlinckx as an occasion: it is an event that involves a doing. This means that the things that we actually see are to be regarded not as objects but as traces and as possibilities. They are the traces of an operation, containing the potential for rearrangement, for new doings on other occasions. As Frank Vande Veire writes in the catalogue Inside the Visible, “[Tuerlinckx’s] constellations of ‘little things,’ which literally never get oV the ground, reflect a well-meant attempt to create order yet simultaneously provide a vision of a landscape following a catastrophe. It seems as if everything still has to begin, still has to find its place. At 14. Frank Vande Veire, “Something about How a Tuerlinckx Machine Traverses the Exhibition Machine,” in Inside the Visible, ed. Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 452.

15. CANTOS curated by Michel Assenmaker, January 5–April 10, 2005, including Nobuyoshi Araki, Olivier Foulon, Pierre Klossowski, John Murphy, Willem Oorebeek, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, and Eric Van Hove.

16. For the philosophical implications of this and what follows, see Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1–13.

17. Tuerlinckx writes of the use of “confetti” in her work in her statement in connection with the collective exhibition Watt at Witte de With and the Kunsthal Rotterdam in 1994 in Cahiers 2 (Rotterdam: Witte de With and Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1995), 101–2.

the same time, everything is no more than a trace, a memory.”14 The event as such is not given, its traces are — traces that situate not a “past present” but a void.

At the entrance to Tuerlinckx’s space in the recent group exhibition cantos at Casino Luxembourg15 was a book open onto an illustration from Diderot and D’Alembert’s eighteenth-century Encyclopédie; when I arrived, the page was “Métallurgie-fer blanc” and depicted women working on sheets of tin at sloping tables. The title is a homonym for “faire blanc” [“to make white”] — which is what Tuerlinckx, the only woman in the group exhibition, was doing with the white hatching, a negative representation of shadow, with which she was delineating a white rectangle on the floor of the space. On the book sat a passepartout, a rectangle of white cardboard with a window cut into it.16 This frame-within-theframe was eVectively included within the page, the border between outside and inside falling on the inside. When understood as passepartout, the frame comes to function not as isolating the inside from the outside, but as a place of passage, a “between” that also enables inside and outside to exchange places. The passepartout here recalled the way in which in earlier exhibitions Tuerlinckx had activated the “between” spaces by scattering confetti on the floor, a temporal process that allowed her “to do cinema, but in space”: “shredding up pieces of paper by hand to reconstitute these types of form-territories simply allowed me to explore the limits of the visible, the exchanges between the visible-material and the invisible-mental.”17 At Luxembourg, the passe-partout on the pic-

39

MICHAEL NEWMAN

ture was also a frame that could be moved by the visitor, thus functioning somewhat more like the frame of a film screen, where the relation between in- and out-of-frame is continually changing, than a frame around a static image. In other words, it was a frame-within-a-frame that circumscribed an emptiness that was continually being filled — and thereby concealed — by representations. Finally, the passe-partout echoed the suggestion of a square in the main room, the trace on the wooden floor of the walls of an earlier exhibition by Dan Graham.

Tuerlinckx picked out this residual square on the floor by means of hatching made from white tape, which not only functioned as a frame that repeated and picked out the trace of the previous gallery configuration but also as an inverted form of shading. The eVect was to create an edge, with the suggestion both that it was a part of the floor that was framed, catching the changing eVects of light and shade from numerous windows, and, at the level of the hatching as drawing, that the floor functioned as a kind of page, so the frame circumscribed an emptiness. Here we had two senses of the trace: the standard sense of the trace as a mark that has been left, the record of a past-presence (in this case, the marks on the floor), and the trace as that which withdraws, the non-present that “gives” what is to be seen. By creating a “rhyme” between the passe-partout on the illustration at the entrance and the white, hatched shadow on the floor of the main room, Tuerlinckx indicated the relationship between passe-partout and shadow: both were the conditions that withdrew for the sake of presence, of the disclosure of what is given.

JOËLLE TUERLINCKX: AT THE EDGE OF THE VISIBLE

Against the white back wall of the room leaned a ladder missing some of its lower rungs and lit so that it cast shadows in the complementary colors of red and green. It had white hatching on the floor at its base. Hatching is a graphic convention for shading. To include it in the real space is to turn the ladder into a mimesis of itself, something produced through the act of drawing — thus here again we have the dual strategy of doubling, where the space becomes a 1:1 imitation or copy of itself, and voiding, where the sense of an emptiness is created through circumscription. On the wall beside the ladder was a framed fragment of green paper, with a piece of white paper hatched around its outside. This functioned like a second “epigram,” with the drawing functioning as disegno and the hatching, normally an element within the drawing, imagined as the passe-partout itself, which is exactly how it functioned on the floor, inverted from dark to light. Hatching represents shadow and serves to make volumes and shapes visible. It is thus an indirect acknowledgment that darkness and obscurity are necessary to vision. This idea of manifestation as “disclosure” rather than “presence,” so dear to Heidegger,18 contrasts with the Enlightenment ideal of transparency — of a world without shadows where everything is present to the gaze of knowledge — invoked by the prints at the entrance.

THE EVENT OF TIME

Time is also a factor. One could say that 18. See Martin Heiddegger, “On the Essence of Truth” in Basic Writings (London: Routledge, 1993), 111–138.

19. In this respect, Tuerlinckx’s work may be compared with that of Tacita Dean. See Michael Newman, “Salvage,” in Tacita Dean (Paris: ARC / Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Göttingen: Steidl, 2003), n.p..

Tuerlinckx’s installations are suspended between the trace and the project. Each installation includes elements of her previous exhibitions, and sometimes also those of others. At the Power Plant, she left traces of a previous installation by Glenn Ligon and salvaged some pieces of wood from an exhibition in the neighboring space by GeoVrey Farmer.

Tuerlinckx’s response to her fellow artists’ work (not the first time she has done this, and something that rarely happens in mixed shows) indicates the importance of the dimension of “the salvaged” in her own work, an acknowledgement of how the present is marked and made possible by the past.19 Observant visitors might notice a teddy-bear head at the window of the space, the walls of which were covered by paper — was this a previous inhabitant?

Something found and rescued? This emphasis on traces, and therefore on memory, contrasts with the ideas of a revolutionary “new beginning” and the theological idea of “creation from nothing” (which come together to form the Romantic idea of the artist as genius). The trace is an aspect of the given, not as static situation but as the trace of the past that may either be eVaced or remembered.

Tuerlinckx’s installations also include an element of proposal or hypothesis. Her collections of elements, often displayed on tables, are not only archives of remnants, but also the ingredients for future assemblages. The wire space-frames, which probably derive from the three-dimensional frames Alberto Giacometti put around his scenarios of diminutive figures, suggest models, the kinds of thing we might see on an architect’s worktable. Usually, with

41

MICHAEL NEWMAN

Tuerlinckx, the frames are empty. The spaceframes serve to create voids within the collection.

If the trace that withdraws is the condition for manifestation, the void is also the opening to the future.

However, time in the work of Joëlle Tuerlinckx is not limited to a simple opposition between past and future. Rather, as I have suggested, there are diVerent modalities, speeds, and qualities of time. This includes the distinction between time as a function of labor that is a means to an end, on the one hand, and the purposeless, idling time that is “out of work” and open to the event, on the other.

Film can be conceived as a way of measuring time. In certain of Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s films, the process of the making of a drawing replaces the result.20 The condensed time of the result is unfolded into the “real” time of its realization.

Among examples of earlier object-based art, Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961) used recording technology to realize the implications of Pollock’s “poured” paintings, with the work being the trace of the activity that produced it. These works indicate a shift in the paradigm of the artwork from that of a representation or expression to that of the trace of an event, folded back in modernism so that it becomes the trace of the event of the artwork’s own coming into being. Tuerlinckx’s installations mark a further move: to the artwork as the traces that circumscribe — rather than cover or replace — the void that the event leaves in the situation (in this sense, we could say that all art becomes a form of drawing). As 20. For an extended discussion of Tuerlinckx’s work in film and video, see Michael Newman, “Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s Filmwork: Time, Multiplicity, Void,” in Anke Buxmann and Frie Depraetere, eds., Argos Festival 2005 (Brussels: Argos Editions, 2005), 100–115.

JOËLLE TUERLINCKX: AT THE EDGE OF THE VISIBLE

well as circumscription, the drawing can take the form of eVacement, as in Robert Rauchenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) or the animated films of William Kentridge. In a video that played outside the entrance to the Power Plant, Tuerlinckx showed a process of “whiting-out” — the erasure of a text — as a form of drawing that threw into question the demarcation between inside and outside the exhibition.

As well as showing them on monitors, Tuerlinckx characteristically projects her films onto the wall or a screen. As a projection, the image acts on the space. The projection renders the image of drawing architectural.

Sometimes, as at The Renaissance Society, the projection is over sheets of paper hung onto the screen, which is either blank or covered by something such as a drawing. If the drawing becomes an image on the wall, Tuerlinckx reverses this by making the wall a page. In other words, she makes drawing enter real time and thereby actual space, and makes space into the page for a drawing.

Another way of conveying temporality via 21. Precedents for this are Automobile Tire Print (1951) made by Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage – the inked tire of a Model A Ford was driven over a long sheet of paper that was subsequently rolled – and Piero Manzoni’s rolled up lines of 1959–60, each presented in a tube, titled Linea, with the date on which it was made.

22. See Alain Badiou, Le siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 83–85, 215–225, where he distinguishes between an avant-garde art of “destruction” and new beginning, which looks to the “terrorist” aspect of the French Revolution for a model, and an art of “subtraction” – of which Mallarmé is a key figure – where the present is opened up to its void and to an infinite no longer determined according to the finitude of a horizon.

23. Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 39–48. The use I make of Badiou’s ideas in this essay is necessarily a simplified one: in particular, I cannot elaborate on the role of mathematics in his discussion of ontology.

24. Joëlle Tuerlinckx sent a package of notes to the author.

drawing is through the use of rolls of paper, including rolls of toilet paper.21 Insofar as the paper can be rolled, it anticipates a future unrolling in a new configuration. We could compare this with the role of the page in Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés,” in that the page becomes a place, and the place a page. At stake is a transformed understanding of art, no longer as representation, but as event, or, more precisely, as traces of an event. The words, or marks, in relation to the void of the surface of inscription, revealed by a process of subtraction or removal, become traces of the unanticipated and un-representable event.22 AT THE EDGE

Tuerlinckx’s works as “tools of thought” are not so much fixed objects as means of transit, constellations on the edge of the visible. What does it mean, according to this work, for something to become visible? For something to become visible means for it to exist in a determinate form. To determine something is to limit it. That which is undetermined is therefore not visible as such. We could say, then, that the “void” in the visible is the place of the undetermined or the not-yet-determined. This is the place of “being” as opposed to determined beings. Now, if we follow Alain Badiou and understand being as pure multiplicity before it is counted into determinate beings,23 then the void would be the presentation — or more accurately, non-presentation — of being as multiplicity, the place of the “event” of being.

The question, then, would be how to indicate the void through the traces of the event.

The number zero appears repeatedly in 43

MICHAEL NEWMAN

Tuerlinckx’s work, and it suggests an answer to the aforementioned question. In her notes 24 she recalls a visit to the Boston Museum of Science, where she saw a definition of zero projected onto the wall: “the number of things you have when you don’t have anything.” The infinite manifests itself as void within the finite. The void is the limit of presentation — the limit that makes presentation possible but cannot itself be presented — within presence itself.

With this in mind, we may begin to understand the relationship between the apparently contradictory characteristics of Tuerlinckx’s installations. Firstly, the sense of proliferation, of things that could go on and on: Tuerlinckx’s installations are simultaneously tightly disciplined and tend to overflow their temporal and spatial limits. Secondly, a tendency to delineate voids, to circumscribe an emptiness in the space, that is to say, to perform an operation of subtraction from that which is given, counted, structured. The combination is intriguing, as it implies a relation between infinite multiplicity and void: manifestation takes place between the two. According to Alain Badiou, the void is always the void of a situation — it is localized, and it is the condition of the situation — but it doesn’t appear as present in the situation for two reasons: insofar as that which is present is the result of an operation that exceeds it, and insofar as there is something, which for Badiou amounts to a pure, not-yetcounted multiplicity, on which the operation operates.25 Both have implications for Tuerlinckx’s art, which seeks precisely to draw attention to the operations by which it comes into being — indeed, at times the work comprises nothing else — and which intimates a multiplici25. See Badiou, Being and Event, 52–56: “The Void: Proper Name of Being.”

JOËLLE TUERLINCKX: AT THE EDGE OF THE VISIBLE

ty, indeed an infinity, in excess of that which is actually made present in the work. The installation is the place where the event of that which is not “counted” — present and represented — in the situation may, or may not, have happened. As the event of presentation — as distinct from that which is present or represented — it can only appear as “nothing,” localized as void, in the given situation. For Badiou, the site of the event “can be said to be ‘on the edge of the void.’” 26 By demarcating voids, Tuerlinckx transforms “situations” into “sites.”

The event itself is only given in its traces (the implications of this for “drawing” are obvious, and enormous). According to Badiou’s reading, Mallarmé’s poem “Un coup de dès” is about nothing other than the undecidability of the event with respect to the site. Either the poem is the very trace of an event, figured by the “constellation” on its final page, or “rien…n’aura eu lieu…que le lieu” [“nothing…will have taken place…but (the) place”].27 To make an installation, for Tuerlinckx, is, starting with a given situation, to open up and circumscribe — with marks, traces of actions — a void. Frank Vande Veire writes, “… Tuerlinckx opens up the void that sets the ‘exhibition machine’ in motion…”28 The void in Tuerlinckx indicates not lack but infinite multiplicity. What is present is founded on more than itself, and this “more” — whether the operation of com26. Badiou, Being and Event, 175.

27. For Badiou’s readings of Mallarmé, see Badiou, Being and Event, 191–198, and Alain Badiou, “A Poetic Dialectic: Labîd ben Rabi’a and Mallarmé,” in Handbook of Inaesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 46–56.

28. Frank Vande Viere, “Something about How a Tuerlinckx Machine Traverses the Exhibition Machine,” 455.

29. See Badiou, Le siècle, 215–225.

30. David Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), 166.

ing into being, or the multiplicity before it is structured — “appears” as a void that opens up the situation, that creates a site where an event may have happened. Everything is Janus-faced, looking towards its determinate form on one side and towards infinite multiplicity on the other. Infinity insists, not as the ever-receding horizon of Romantic art, but as the void of the event as it is broached in the work of Mallarmé and his successors.29 If the work is specific to its situation, this is precisely to open up, even explode, the latter by making sensible — manifest to the senses — the diVerence between the situation as “context,” the totality of objects and relations, and the installation, or “site,” as the place where the visitor apprehends the void.

Tuerlinckx presents not objects in space, but the edge between the object and its void, where the object appears out of nothing, or gets eaten up by space. David Sylvester writes that “one of the most enduringly satisfying qualities in the way Giacometti’s sculptures re-create appearance is how bodies disappear at their edges — a sort of three-dimensional sfumato.”30 This interest in the “edge” of appearance, which is also to be found in the multiple contours in Cézanne’s still lifes, exactly coincides with Tuerlinckx’s concern with the edge of the visible. Frequently in the artist’s work we find a line traced very thinly, dots and touches of paint, a flash of light in which something can be seen for just a fraction of a second. As if the tactic of the work is to induce a certain kind of attentiveness in the visitor, a feeling of being located on the verge.

45

ENTRANCE (panel of acknowledgements)

1

ENTRANCE + EXHIBITION ROOM (panel of acknowledgements)

2

2–3

48 WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS: Big Yellow Screen, Big Folded Chicago Screen, Old Screen, World Map verso, Little Detail of Belgium Wall + VITRINE-PLATE#12A + VITRINE-PLATE#13

2.ENTRANCE + EXHIBITION ROOM (panel of acknowledgements) 3.WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS: Big Yellow Screen, Big Folded Chicago Screen, Old Screen, World Map verso, Little Detail of Belgium Wall + VITRINE-PLATE #12A + VITRINE-PLATE #13

2–3 3

WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS: Big Yellow Screen, Big Folded Chicago Screen, Old Screen/STRECTH FILMS scale 1:1, World Map verso, Little Detail of Belgium Wall, Drawing Slide Projection + VITRINE-PLATE #12A + VITRINE-PLATE #13

4

WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS: Big Folded Chicago Screen, Old Screen/STRETCH FILMS Scale 1:1 —Lines.Dots.Figures 2000–2001 series, World Map verso

5

5. WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS: Big Folded Chicago Screen, Old

WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS: Drawing Slide Projection —Exhibition Material 1994-2005 series

6

WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS: Drawing Slide Projection —Exhibition Material 1994-2005 series

7

7. WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS: Drawing Slide Projection

Exhibition

WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS: Big Folded Chicago Screen, Old Screen, World Map verso, Little Detail of Belgium Wall, Drawing Slide Projection + VITRINE-PLATE #13

8

9. WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS: Big Yellow Screen, Blue Technical

WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS: Big Yellow Screen, Blue Technical Screen, Big Folded Chicago Screen + VITRINE-PLATE #10

9

WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS: Old Screen/STRETCH FILMs scale 1:1 —‘Dessins Négatifs 2000-2001’ series

10

WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS: Blue Technical Screen, Big Folded Chicago Screen, World Map verso, Wall-label —‘cube’ series

11

11. WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS: Blue Technical Screen, Big Folded

WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS: World Map verso, Little Detail of Belgium Wall, Wall-labels —‘Schémas d’exposition’ series, Drawing Slide Pojection + VITRINE-PLATE #13

12

WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS: Old Screen/STRETCH FILMs scale 1:1 —‘Dessins Négatifs 2000-2001’ series

13

13. WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS: Old Screen/STRETCH FILMs scale 1:1

WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS: World Map verso, Little Detail of Belgium Wall

14

WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS: Wall-label —‘Schémas d’exposition’ series

15

WORK TABLE#3, WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS, VITRINE-PLATE#11, BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place,’ VITRINE-PLATES#12A,12B

65

65–66

65–66 BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place,’ INVENTORY WALL,‘EMPTY WALL,’ WORK TABLE#1

65. WORK TABLE#3, WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS, VITRINE-PLATE#11, BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place,’ VITRINE-PLATES#12A,12B 66. BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place,’ INVENTORY WALL,‘EMPTY WALL,’ WORK TABLE#1

105

66

67. BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: ‘Figure d’angle’ —‘Floating Time Figures’

BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: ‘Figure d’angle’ —‘Floating Time Figures’ series

67

BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: ‘Figures d’angle’ —‘Floating Time Figures’ series

68

69. BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: ‘Figures de temps’ —‘Floating Time

BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: ‘Figures de temps’ —‘Floating Time Figures’ series

69

BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: ‘Frottage: mur d’atelier anthracite #1’

70

71. BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: ‘Étude pour trous muraux + Typex’

BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: ‘Étude pour trous muraux + Typex’

71

72. BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: ‘Étude pour trous muraux + Typex’

BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: ‘Étude pour trous muraux + Typex’

72

73. BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: ‘Dior’ (‘Rond de journal’), ‘Theory of

BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: ‘Dior’ (‘Rond de journal’), ‘Theory of Walking second generation,’ ‘Étude pour Trous Muraux + Typex’

73

BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: ‘Theory of Walking second generation’ (detail)

74

75. BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: ‘Theory of Walking second generation’

BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: ‘Theory of Walking second generation’ (detail)

75

76. BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: ‘Theory of Walking second generation’

BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: ‘Theory of Walking second generation’ (detail)

76

BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: Overhead Projection ‘Found Sentence’ (detail)(Museum of Science, Mathematic Section, Boston, 1996)

77

77. BLACK WALL

82

82–83

83

78–83

BLACK BLACK BLACK BLACK BLACK BLACK

WALL WALL WALL WALL WALL WALL

‘trouvé ‘trouvé ‘trouvé ‘trouvé ‘trouvé ‘trouvé

sur sur sur sur sur sur

place’: place’: place’: place’: place’: place’:

Overhead Overhead Overhead Overhead Overhead Overhead

81

82.

80.

78.

83.

81.

79.

80–81 Projection Projection Projection Projection Projection Projection

‘Found ‘Found ‘Found ‘Found ‘Found ‘Found

Sentence’ Sentence’ Sentence’ Sentence’ Sentence’ Sentence’

(detail)(Museum (detail)(Museum (detail)(Museum (detail)(Museum (detail)(Museum (detail)(Museum

of of of of of of

Found Sentence

aDrawing WALL Inventory Zone K: Projections Vitrine-Plate, Blue Floating Lines Sentence’ (#1) The Drawing Center, New York, 2006 BLACK ‘trouvé sur place’:Wall, Overhead Projection ‘Found (detail)(Museum of Science, Mathematic Section, Boston, 1996)

Science, Science, Science, Science, Science, Science,

Mathematic Mathematic Mathematic Mathematic Mathematic Mathematic

Section, Section, Section, Section, Section, Section,

Boston, Boston, Boston, Boston, Boston, Boston,

BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: Overhead Projection ‘Found Sentence’ (detail)(Museum of Science, Mathematic Section, Boston, 1996)

79

BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: Overhead Projection ‘Found Sentence’ (detail)(Museum of Science, Mathematic Section, Boston, 1996)

78–79

BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: Overhead Projection ‘Found Sentence’ (detail)(Museum of Science, Mathematic Section, Boston, 1996)

Drawing Zone K:sur Projections Wall, Vitrine-Plate, Blue Floating Lines (#1)(#2) The Drawing Center, New York, BLACK Inventory WALL ‘trouvé place’: Overhead Projection ‘Found Sentence’ (detail)(Museum of2006 Science, Mathematic Section, Boston, 1996)

80

BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: Overhead Projection ‘Found Sentence’ (detail)(Museum of Science, Mathematic Section, Boston, 1996)

trouvé sur place : Overhead Projection

78

1996) 1996) 1996) 1996) 1996) 1996)

84. BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: Overhead Projection ‘Found Sentence’

BLACK WALL ‘trouvé sur place’: Overhead Projection ‘Found Sentence’(detail)(Museum of Science, Mathematic Section, Boston, 1996) (ZERO) IT IS THE NUMBER OF THINGS YOU HAVE WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE ANYTHING (BOSTON, 1996, MATHEMATIC SECTION, MUSEUM OF SCIENCES)

84

WALL: Wall Labels —‘Barrés’ series + WALL OF ADMINISTRATION AND RESERVE MATERIAL

191

191–192

191–192

WALL: Wall Labels —‘Barrés’ series + WALL OF ADMINISTRATION AND RESERVE MATERIAL, Wall Labels —‘Quadrillés colorés’ series

191. WALL: Wall Labels —‘Barrés’ series + WALL OF ADMINISTRATION AND RESERVE MATERIAL 192. WALL: Wall Labels —‘Barrés’ series + WALL OF ADMINISTRATION AND RESERVE MATERIAL, Wall Labels —‘Quadrillés colorés’ series

243

192

Wall Labels —‘Quadrillés colorés’ series

193

193–194

193–194

193. Wall Labels —‘Quadrillés colorés’ series 194. Wall Labels —‘Quadrillés colorés’ series

244 Wall Labels —‘Quadrillés colorés’ series

194

WALL OF ADMINISTRATION AND RESERVE MATERIAL, VITRINE-PLATE#8, VITRINE-PLATE#9, Big Yellow Screen, Drawing Labels + Floating Letters, Black Mental Object

195

195–196

195–196

195. WALL OF ADMINISTRATION AND RESERVE MATERIAL, VITRINE-PLATE#8, VITRINE-PLATE#9, Big Yellow Screen, Drawing Labels + Floating Letters, Black Mental Object

245

196

VITRINE-PLATE#8, VITRINE-PLATE#9 + Floating Letters, Black Mental Object

197

197–198

246

197–198

A H K

197. VITRINE-PLATE#8, VITRINE-PLATE#9 + Floating Letters, Black Mental Object

198 A H K

Floating Letters

199

A H K

Drawing Labels —‘Grille colorée’ series

200

200–201

248

200–201

200. Drawing Labels —‘Grille colorée’ series

201

202. Drawing Labels —‘Grille colorée’ series Fellini pense ses films « selon une logique du prome-

déjà commencé » « je suis quelqu’un qui a besoin qu’on lui montre. Ou qui pour voir a besoin de s’inventer des scénarios compliqués, qui à un moment passe par son corps. Par la marche par exemple. » (Fellini conceives his films “following the logic of a walker” (Serge Daney) / “the walker accepts the notion of a scene already in place” / “I need to be shown things. Or, in order to see things, I need to link a scenario – often a complicated one at that – with a physical experience. That of walking for example.” )

Drawing Labels —‘Grille colorée’ series Fellini pense ses films « selon une logique du promeneur. » (Serge Daney) « le marcheur est quelqu’un qui accepte cette idée que le spectacle est toujours

202

203. Drawing Labels —‘Grille colorée’ series Fellini pense ses films « selon une logique du prome-

jours déjà commencé » « je suis quelqu’un qui a besoin qu’on lui montre. Ou qui pour voir a besoin de s’inventer des scénarios compliqués, qui à un moment passe par son corps. Par la marche par exemple. » (Fellini conceives his films “following the logic of a walker” (Serge Daney) / “the walker accepts the notion of a scene already in place” / “I need to be shown things. Or, in order to see things, I need to link a scenario – often a complicated one at that – with a physical experience. That of walking for example.” )

Drawing Labels —‘Grille colorée’ series Fellini pense ses films « selon une logique du promeneur. » (Serge Daney) « le marcheur est quelqu’un qui accepte cette idée que le spectacle est tou-

203

VITRINE-PLATE#8: Drawing 1988, Label —‘Project’ series/‘Boucher-Belgique’ (scan ‘Papier adapté’)

204

204–205

204–205 VITRINE-PLATE#8: Drawing 1988, Label —‘Project’ series/‘Boucher-Belgique’ (scan ‘Papier adapté’)

204. VITRINE-PLATE#8: Drawing 1988, Label —‘Project’ series/‘Boucher-Belgique’ (scan ‘Papier adapté’) 205. VITRINE-PLATE#8: Drawing 1988, Label —‘Project’ series/‘Boucher-Belgique’ (scan ‘Papier adapté’)

251

205

VITRINE-PLATE#8: Drawing 1988/‘Boucher-Belgique’ (scan ‘Papier adapté’)

206

06.

#8:

a

g

988/

ouc e

VITRINE-PLATE#8: Drawing 1988/‘Boucher-Belgique’ (scan ‘Papier adapté’) (detail)

207

e g que (sca

ap e

adapté )

VITRINE-PLATE#8: Label —‘Project’ series/‘Boucher-Belgique’ (scan ‘Papier adapté’)

208

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006

449

449–450

422

449–450

449. VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006

450

455

455–456

456

451–456

VITRINES VITRINES VITRINES VITRINES VITRINES VITRINES

FOR FOR FOR FOR FOR FOR

ARCHIVES ARCHIVES ARCHIVES ARCHIVES ARCHIVES ARCHIVES

AND AND AND AND AND AND

STUDIES: STUDIES: STUDIES: STUDIES: STUDIES: STUDIES:

454

455.

453.

451.

456.

454.

452.

453–454 VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7:

Found Found Found Found Found Found

Archive Archive Archive Archive Archive Archive

New New New New New New

York York York York York York

2006 2006 2006 2006 2006 2006

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

(detail) (detail) (detail) (detail) (detail) (detail)

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

452

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

451–452

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

453

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

451

461

461–462

462

457–462

424

VITRINES VITRINES VITRINES VITRINES VITRINES VITRINES

FOR FOR FOR FOR FOR FOR

ARCHIVES ARCHIVES ARCHIVES ARCHIVES ARCHIVES ARCHIVES

AND AND AND AND AND AND

STUDIES: STUDIES: STUDIES: STUDIES: STUDIES: STUDIES:

460

461.

459.

457.

462.

460.

458.

459–460 VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7:

Found Found Found Found Found Found

Archive Archive Archive Archive Archive Archive

New New New New New New

York York York York York York

2006 2006 2006 2006 2006 2006

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

(detail) (detail) (detail) (detail) (detail) (detail)

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

458

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

457–458

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

459

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

457

467

467–468

468

463–468

VITRINES VITRINES VITRINES VITRINES VITRINES VITRINES

FOR FOR FOR FOR FOR FOR

ARCHIVES ARCHIVES ARCHIVES ARCHIVES ARCHIVES ARCHIVES

AND AND AND AND AND AND

STUDIES: STUDIES: STUDIES: STUDIES: STUDIES: STUDIES:

466

467.

465.

463.

468.

466.

464.

465–466 VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7:

Found Found Found Found Found Found

Archive Archive Archive Archive Archive Archive

New New New New New New

York York York York York York

2006 2006 2006 2006 2006 2006

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

(detail) (detail) (detail) (detail) (detail) (detail)

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

464

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

463–464

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

465

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

463

473

473–474

474

469–474

426

VITRINES VITRINES VITRINES VITRINES VITRINES VITRINES

FOR FOR FOR FOR FOR FOR

ARCHIVES ARCHIVES ARCHIVES ARCHIVES ARCHIVES ARCHIVES

AND AND AND AND AND AND

STUDIES: STUDIES: STUDIES: STUDIES: STUDIES: STUDIES:

472

473.

471.

469.

474.

472.

470.

471–472 VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7: VITRINE-PLATE#7:

Found Found Found Found Found Found

Archive Archive Archive Archive Archive Archive

New New New New New New

York York York York York York

2006 2006 2006 2006 2006 2006

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

(detail) (detail) (detail) (detail) (detail) (detail)

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

470

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

469–470

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

471

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

469

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

475

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

476

6.

S

O

C

S

S U

S:

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

477

# :

ou d

c

e

e

VITRINES FOR ARCHIVES AND STUDIES: VITRINE-PLATE#7: Found Archive New York 2006 (detail)

478

VITRINE-PLATE#10, Black Mental Object —‘Contour’ series

546

546–547

546–547 VITRINE-PLATE#10, Black Mental Object —‘Contour’ series

546. VITRINE-PLATE#10, Black Mental Object —‘Contour’ series 547. VITRINE-PLATE#10, Black Mental Object —‘Contour’ series

475

547

552

552–553

553

548–553

VITRINE-PLATE#10, Black Mental Object —‘Contour’ series

gazoline / r. 23

DRAWING MATERIAL: ‘Architectures Négatives (Modèle à angle mort)’

‘The Renaissance Toilet Paper’ —‘scan Papier adapté’ series + Label —‘Contour’ series Black Mental Object —‘Contour’ series Black Mental Object —‘Contour’ series Black Mental Object —‘Contour’ series Black Mental Object —‘Contour’ series ‘Architectures Négatives (Modèle à angle mort)’

VITRINE-PLATE#10, Black Mental Object —‘Contour’ series

551

476

VITRINE-PLATE#10: VITRINE-PLATE#10, VITRINE-PLATE#10, VITRINE-PLATE#10, VITRINE-PLATE#10, DRAWING MATERIAL:

550–551 549

552.

550.

549.

553.

551.

549.

VITRINE-PLATE#10, Black Mental Object —‘Contour’ series

548–549

VITRINE-PLATE#10, Black Mental Object —‘Contour’ series

gazoline / r. 23

550

VITRINE-PLATE#10: ‘The Renaissance Toilet Paper’ —‘scan Papier adapté’ series + Label —‘Contour’ series

548

VITRINE-PLATE#10: ‘The Renaissance Toilet Paper’ —‘scan Papier adapté’ series + Label ‘gazoline / r.23’ —‘Contour’ series

554 gazoline / r. 23

555. DRAWING MATERIAL: ‘Architectures Négatives’ (‘Modèle à angle mort’)

DRAWING MATERIAL: ‘Architectures Négatives’ (‘Modèle à angle mort’)

555

WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS + WORK TABLE#1 (1 element)

559

559–560

559–560

WALL OF ADMINISTRATION AND RESERVE MATERIAL, VITRINE-PLATE#12A, WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS + VITRINE-PLATE#13

559. WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS + WORK TABLE#1 (1 element) 560. WALL OF ADMINISTRATION AND RESERVE MATERIAL, VITRINE-PLATE#12A, WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS + VITRINE-PLATE#13

481

560

INVENTORY WALL, WORK TABLE#1 (1 element)

561

561–562

561–562

561. INVENTORY WALL, WORK TABLE#1 (1 element) 562. WALL OF ADMINISTRATION AND RESERVE MATERIAL, VITRINE-PLATES#12A, #12B, WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS, INVENTORY WALL, WORK TABLE #1 (1 element)

482 WALL OF ADMINISTRATION AND RESERVE MATERIAL, VITRINE-PLATES#12A, #12B, WALL OF PROJECTIONS/WALL OF SCREENS, INVENTORY WALL, WORK TABLE #1 (1 element)

562

ENTRANCE HALL: Display of Books and Publications The Drawing Center. Left: ‘The Drawing Center’s Drawing Papers’, right:’The J.T.’s Parallel Drawing Papers’ (exhibition material ‘Drawing Inventory’)

563

563–564

563–564

563. ENTRANCE HALL: Display of Books and Publications The Drawing Center. Left: ‘The Drawing Center’s Drawing Papers’, right:’The J.T.’s Parallel Drawing Papers’ (exhibition material ‘Drawing Inventory’)

483

564

The j.t.’s Parallel Drawing Papers #100 ‘DAMIER américain 2002’

565

565.

e j.t. s

a a

e

a

g

ape s: # 00

The j.t.’s Parallel Drawing Papers #57 ‘GRILLE POINTS NOIRS millimétré bleu (9 détails) 1992–2006’

566

a é

ca

The j.t.’s Parallel Drawing Papers #110 ‘HERE YOU DON’T EXIST 1997–2005’ HERE YOU DON’T EXIST

567

567.

e j.t. s

a a

e

a

g

ape s: #

0

The j.t.’s Parallel Drawing Papers #117 ‘CONFIGURATION FOREX 1999,’ #5 ‘CROIX LOTTO 2005’

568

OU

O

S

The j.t.’s Parallel Drawing Papers #24 ‘THEORY OF WALKING/VISION MATERIEL COPYMOBILE VERTICALE 1 1996-2005’

569

569.

e j.t. s

a a

e

a

g

ape s: #

The j.t.’s Parallel Drawing Papers #135 ‘FICHES GRAND CUBE FLOTTANT 1995-2005’

570

O

O

G/

S O

The j.t.’s Parallel Drawing Papers #116 ‘PORTRAIT MONDRIAAN 1979’

571

57 .

e j.t. s

a a

e

a

g

ape s: #

6

O

O

979

The j.t.’s Parallel Drawing Papers #98 ‘FICHE PRISE sanguine opaque 2001,’ #2 ‘THIS BOOK LIKE A BOOK B.O.O.K. special dessin 1999–2005’

572

The j.t.’s Parallel Drawing Papers #104 ‘THEORY OF WALKING copy-ombré SÉRIE VERTICALE 1996-2005, #91 ‘ETUDE TYPEX série grands formats 1993,’ #87 ‘FICHE ANGLE DE DOIGTS prototype pour dessin mural 2000’

573

574. ‘VITRAGE DE FAÇADE’:HERE A HOLE TO SEE THE OTHER SIDE —Wall Drawing

‘VITRAGE DE FAÇADE’: HERE A HOLE TO SEE THE OTHER SIDE —Wall Drawing series

574

575. ‘VITRAGE DE FAÇADE’:HERE A HOLE TO SEE THE OTHER SIDE —Wall Drawing

‘VITRAGE DE FAÇADE’: HERE A HOLE TO SEE THE OTHER SIDE —Wall Drawing series

575

‘VITRAGE DE FAÇADE’: HERE A HOLE TO SEE THE OTHER SIDE —Wall Drawing series

576

577. ‘VITRAGE DE FAÇADE APRÈS FERMETURE’: HERE A HOLE TO SEE THE OTHER SIDE —

‘VITRAGE DE FAÇADE APRÈS FERMETURE’: HERE A HOLE TO SEE THE OTHER SIDE —Wall Drawing series

577