Texts

Statues Die / Also

Selen Ansen

It was our delight to dash those proud faces to the ground, (...) as if blood and agony could follow from every blowance.
Pliny the Younger

That's how we start the war. Everyone has a choice of weapons.
Monique Wittig


At the beginning of the 20th century / the nations of Europe are engulfed by war and art historian Aby Warburg loses his mind. Plagued by hallucinations, he is persuaded to ingest the flesh of his offspring / just as the god Saturn devoured his sons one by one. Aby's folly was dispelled following his lecture on the "Serpent Ritual" (1923), which he gave to an assembly of "mad doctors" at the psychiatric clinic where he himself was interned. His exposé invalidates the chronological conception of historical time by resorting to anachronisms; it expresses the capacity of ephemeral gestures not to die out altogether by migrating across cultures and eras. Aby's science of survival aims to show that the history of humanity is made up of 'ghosts': expressive forms from the past that haunt the representations of the present and impact those of the future. Past gestures return / never the same as they were / never the same as they will be. For this reason, let us call them revenants*. This is how Aby managed to "find his mind" again. By immersing himself in a chaos far greater than his own. By opening his eyes to the whirlwind of images. By connecting distant times.

***

Over the past four years / I have visited Anne Wenzel's studio at intermittent intervals. On each occasion, Aby's ghost was by my side. In this place where techniques, speeds, temperatures and durations converge, I saw clay sculptures take shape from furies both ancient and contemporary. I used Aby's method to see the knots of time in the forms of the present. Open your eyes. Adjust distances. Proliferate points of view. Track gestures, follow their traces, question their origins, their paths, their disappearances, their resurgences.

My first revenant appeared / in the room boasting the voluminous ceramic kiln which can generate heat of up to 1250°C. A few strides away from my body / stood a bust with shades of golden brown. The lofty work had the look of public monuments that embody official history by towering over people. Anne made the introductions. Her sculpture House of Fools (Bronze bust I) represented William of Orange (1533-1584) – nicknamed The Silent and deemed the liberator of the Netherlands. To get a clear view, I moved closer. One step / then two. But as the distance between the bust and me shortened / the blurring grew. Moments earlier / I was convinced I was looking at a superior, invincible head made of a durable, insoluble material. Now / I was staring at the melting of a face, the disintegration of a symbol of power. The sovereign's perforated face was reminiscent of the termite-ridden foundations of mansions on the verge of collapse. His flesh had the appearance of obstinate things that fire consumes without making them disappear completely. One step / then two / again. When I arrived at the shortest possible distance between his torso and my body, its contours vanished. Then / William disappeared from my sight. Then / I saw clearly. The turmoil. The confusion. The explosion of form. The appearance of mass. The retreat of glory. The advance of ruin. Clearly, I had been wrong. I had been wrong to think that Anne's work is an accomplice of monuments whose intention is to raise men-who-die and immortalise their powers. Her own verticality is descending, aiming at the ground that is trampled on without regard / instead of the summits that are held in respect.

Professor Warburg, who set about crafting a "ghost story for adults" in the short interval between his recovery (1924) and his death (1929), was right. Ghosts behave like haunting spectres: they come (back) again and again, never alone. Other eminent revenants, politically more controversial than William of Orange, took shape in the studio over the years that ensued. The sculptures Leopold, Christopher, Jean-Baptiste, Johan Maurits and Jan also emerged from the furnace adorned simultaneously with gold, holes and gashes. Barely born / already in ruins. They stand upright on plinths / yet those they embody teeter. The House of Fools family, which to date includes two sovereigns (Leopold of Belgium, William of Orange), two governors (Johan Maurits, Jan Pieterszoon Coen), a royal minister (Jean-Baptiste Colbert) and a navigator-explorer (Christopher Columbus), is an exclusively male line-up. These deceased luminaries come (back) to us from the "more-than-past" through the sculptural gesture that strips them of their bodily integrity and honours. In the process, they have also lost their names. For all that, their arrogance remains intact. United by the material of which they are made and their brilliance, these petrified "imbeciles" stand in solidarity with each other. Their kinship traces a genealogy of violence. It stems from the blood these men spilled, from the slavery they profited from and/or glorified, from the conquest of lands not their own. By interpreting the destruction of statues of now contested historical figures, House of Fools kills two birds with one stone. The series perpetuates the critique of a colonialist and patriarchal conception of power by altering its symbols and representatives. At the same time, it updates the 'substitutive image act', which consists of treating bodies as images and images as bodies. This is where it begins / and whither it continues / since the dawn of time. The love and hatred of representations. The production of idols and their destruction. Gestures of love and hate. From the moment they come into the world, Anne's ceramic sculptures share the fate of beings of flesh and blood who are subject to gravity and finitude. Appropriating the iconoclastic modus operandi that stipulates the interchangeable nature of image and body, Anne reduces 'great men' to the rank of the putrescible by altering the substitute bodies she provides for them. The effect of her approach is twofold: she makes the absent present / she confers a power of life on sculpture by making it vulnerable. For this is the "dilemma of iconoclasm: the fact that it strengthened that which it denied. For the iconoclast believed images to be lifeless and yet, in destroying them as if they were living (...), he imparted to them the life he had just denied them". Quivering in unison with the revolts of the present and those of the past, these works precipitate the collapse of things; they bring to light the other side of heroic narratives, the dark and incandescent face of history. On a sculptural level, their ambiguous presence, oscillating between appearance and disappearance, forces us to consider the creative process through the simultaneity of antagonistic forces: something appears while withdrawing, rises while collapsing, comes (back) to life while dying. In the territory you are about to survey, opening your eyes is not enough. You have to step over old contradictions, consider flesh and earth / inert and moving / hot and cold / memory and oblivion / together.

One day at the studio / I realised that Anne's sculptural practice and Aby's historical approach have one thing in common. Both are rooted in constellations of images. Like Aby, who at the beginning of the last century tracked the resurgence of gestures and expressive forms through representations of humanity, Anne probes the persistence of destruction through ready-made images from different contexts and times. These images she gleans from books, newspapers and the web have to do with the dark tremors and shocks that punctuate history. Statues dismantled / mutilated / restored, works of art damaged / exiled, museums bombed / looted, barricades, popular uprisings, urban riots, police repression, gestures of triumph / struggle / violence / destruction, colours of blood / fire / ash / dust / revolution / fury. It is all there. Without being here. What has happened / what is happening / what is to come. To his contemporaries and to historians-not-yet-born, Aby would say / we stand before images / as we stand before the knots of time / as we stand before a serpent's nest. Under Construction, the series of female busts inspired by the activists of the FEMEN movement emerging in Ukraine in 2010, is also rooted in this tangle of images and time. Interpreting the tradition of the bust, which focuses attention on the upper body of the subject represented, each of these Amazons gives a face, a body to female demands. Their heads are adorned with flowers / their breasts are bare. Their beauty and nudity are warrior attributes, like the FEMEN activists who politicise their (naked) bodies to rebel against the dominant patriarchal system. Under Construction is a series that materialises a polyphonic community extending beyond the present to countless inaudible 'voices' past and future. Each sculpture, which is the material product of the spatio-temporal displacement of images / the site of the resurgence of age-old struggles, opens up the ghostly time of survival. Their appearance suggests the return of some ancestors: the allegory of the struggle for freedom that Delacroix personified in his painting Liberty Leading the People (1830) in the guise of a topless woman waving the flag of the nation above a sea of men, or the bust of "Marianne" – a symbolic figure of the French Republic that stands as an icon of freedom and democracy. Constructing implies deconstructing. The daughters dismantle the power built up by fathers and sons by hijacking the attributes they took for their charms. The combative femininity to which the ceramics give their rough edges, tints and shine shows the males they do not have a monopoly on combat, revolution, or even brutality and arrogance. The slogans etched into their material like wounds in the flesh release a sedimented violence. And all it takes is one notch in the clay for the sculpture to take flesh. From hereon in, we need to think of clay as a skin that is wounded but does not heal, nor does it suffer; a surface of inscription that records and transmits the desire for freedom and sovereignty that always launches itself from a present towards a future. Under Construction and House of Fools clash in the adversity that pits the Amazons and the 'fools' against one another. Though the two series share a common basis. They generate bodies-that-don't-forget; fossil-bodies that crystallise past gestures / heralding those to come. Nothing moves forwards or backwards / everything adds up and accumulates.

Just like the images from which they draw their inspiration, Anne's works are effective devices that disorientate the official course of history by going against the ideology of progress. They allow the viewer to explore the turmoil of plural times, and to look them in the face / from a safe distance. "And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. This, then, is how ephemeral acts manage to live on after their own disappearance. They return by means of surfaces that record the traces of the impact of gestures / through matter that sediments what bodies forget. Modelling her artistic gestures on those of the 'image breakers', the iconoclasts attacking the symbols of power for over 2,500 years, Anne intentionally wounds what is within her reach. She adds new ruins to existing ones; she revives what has already taken place by interpreting it. Earth begets flesh and weight. Colour, expressed in spurts and splashes, injects movement, speed and intensity. Colour is an agent of disorder / generalised fluidisation / the emergence of cruor – the spilt blood that the Ancients distinguished from the blood contained within the body (sanguis) and which they associated with funerary contexts, since there has to be a murder, sacrifice or an accident for blood to be visible. What happens here / happens in life too. But unlike the iconoclasts, who damage representations of which they are not the authors, Anne alters her own works. She constructs by deconstructing, making as she unmakes. The philosopher Vilém Flusser, who asserted that all human gestures, without exception, are rooted in the desire to change the world, insisted on the need to consider "the gesture of destroying" independently of moral judgement in order to grasp its visceral relationship to "the gesture of creating". The violence that Anne inflicts on matter is both an aesthetic and a political act, one pivotal to both the creation of new forms and the laying bare of the political and symbolic charge generated by our representations. It is high time we took our images seriously. It is time to realise that they are both a means of maintaining distance and a phenomenon capable of reducing or even eliminating it. The turmoil in pictures piling up on Anne's worktop is prolific. Most recently they brought forth the work Reality Check, a series of dark reliefs with splashes of colour depicting scenes of collective uprising. In the realm of classical statuary, "relief" is a term denoting works that are generally wall-mounted, often monochrome, and which articulate surface and volume. Caught halfway between image and sculpture, these representations are likewise involved in the construction of heroic narratives. They are used to celebrate the battles of the powerful, the victory of one over another, and to depict lofty deeds and actions deemed worthy of being held up as examples. Anne subverts tradition with method. The technique of relief, deriving from the Italian "relievare" ("to raise"), is used to detach / give shape to / lift up fury and incandescence. Emancipating her reliefs from the walls, she places them in space, close to the ground from which revolts rise / where remains lie. Within the frame, she injects fire, ash, chaos, instability, rage, vertigo, excess and disproportion. Her reliefs stop behaving like images as soon as they demand to be treated like bodies. Reality Check does not validate reality by representing it faithfully; it absorbs its complexity in such a way as to make it palpable. The ceramic material, which takes on the tinge of lava and asphalt, incorporates its subject. It veers away from the heights to capture those people in the streets attacking power, the revolt in action that overturns the established order. Amongst these incandescent scenes we easily recognise viral images that spread like wildfire across the web. Nothing is here. Everything is there / condensed onto reasonably-sized surfaces easy for the eye to take in. What lifts us up / what shatters us. What we destroy / what builds us up. The figurative style of Reality Check suggests we can easily read these images, which are not images at all. However, Anne eclipses the causes of the disorder, preserving only the acts and lines of power, the gestures and their consequences. In this way, abstraction gains ground, identities are erased, destruction becomes universal, and revolts become ageless. The event to which each sculpture bears witness lies in ashes. And yet it survives, through the work that presents it / through a paralysing sedimentation. We thought we were secure, at a safe distance from fury petrified on immobile plates. Now we are faced with passionate movements and outbursts that shatter the very edifices we thought stable. We believed we could grasp the world from a comfortable distance, like someone browsing of a picture book. It turns out that with every step taken, we head a little deeper into the fog, and a kind of myopia clouds our vision.

Sometimes we have eyes and yet we do not see. Sometimes we have eyes and yet we do not see that we do not see. Camille de Toledo talks of the "singular myopia" that prevents us from distinguishing those intentions motivating our actions in times of crisis. W.G. Sebald notes the strange blindness that affected the German population in the aftermath of the Allied bombing raids, leaving them unable to see the still-smouldering ruins surrounding them. Faced with the beautiful ruins produced by Anne, I was reminded of a film sequence where a huge statue of Lenin is carried up the Danube. Onlookers gathered on the riverbanks make the sign of the cross as the barge carrying the dismantled colossus passes by. We will never know whether this gesture is a mark of respect for the person and that world of yesteryear embodied by the statue when standing / or whether they are warding off the devil incarnate. Yes / often, in moments of intoxication or despair, we are unable to grasp the polysemy of our gestures, the profound meaning of the collapse. The reflective surfaces of the fallen heroes in House of Fools are like blind mirrors, reflecting a blurred image of the surrounding reality. In Anne's studio, Aby's ghost said to me Look. Cast your gaze over the surfaces and into the interstices to see the complexity. Aby, who called his science of survival "the iconology of intervals", advocated reading in-between the images, in other words between times, so as to gain access to knowledge not taught in history books. In the territory we are about to enter, the eye will have to venture into the holes and bowels of the material to manage "to read what was never written" . There / in the chasms / what has already happened mirrors what is about to happen. There / we can see that the present is made up of multiple pasts. And that "in the past lies our entire future".

Soon / the revenants will leave the studio and enter the space of a museum, where they will re-enact that cycle of collapse and uprising. The living who will move them will have to perform the right gestures, use the right means to carry their weight without damaging their fragility. Wherever they go, wherever they settle temporarily, they will extend the territory of ruin, they will blow hot and cold, they will spread the domain of dust and ashes. Where they stand, movement will insist in a paralysed gesture, an inanimate form will manifest its power of life. Splashes of paint will complete the picture of disaster; cruor will smear the surface of the walls in places with a fluid that is vital because it is lethal. We will enter / when everything is in place. Unaware of the amount of effort and sweat that went into composing a landscape of ruins. No matter how keenly we look, we will struggle to identify the protagonists. We will not know how to position ourselves / we will hesitate to say whether things are being rebuilt or are about to collapse. Then the time will come for suspension. Then the conditions will be right / to face up to the fact that staying upright has its price / in a world where everything is falling and keeps falling.
For a long time we deluded ourselves. For a long time we believed that making art meant working for permanence. For a long time, we have been led to believe that the artist succeeds in overcoming the universal principle of gravity by sublimating beings, experiences and things. But "the society of statues is mortal" / too. The passage of time nibbles away at stone faces and tarnishes images. Death can also be brutal. Then the heads screwed on top of the bodies fall from their pedestals. Powers tremble and enchanted tales crack. Today / like yesterday and tomorrow / statues designed to withstand storms crumble one by one, taking with them the powers and ideologies they were meant to cement. Here as elsewhere / a host of sovereigns, gods, heroes and despots immortalised in marble or bronze finally topple to the ground, reduced to dust. Some manage to get back on their feet and dress their wounds. Others are sheltered in museums transformed into conservatories. The death, and therefore the life, of monuments continues to be a matter of state; it divides opinions like everything else that touches on collective memory. Anne's works reopen the debate. Where do our vestiges belong? Is there a right distance to face up to what appears when all is dark? These artificial ruins created for the purposes of art are undoubtedly in their rightful place in an art space. For all that, the territory they produce appeases nothing. Contemplating a spectacle of wreckage and the beauty emerging from it, nothing will prevent us from realising our hands can create and destroy / with equal fervour.

"When men are dead, they enter history. When statues are dead, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture". In 1953, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais used their cameras to take a stand against colonialism. Their documentary film Statues Also Die denounced the way Western culture primitivised African art by exhibiting it in ethnographic museums. We would like masks and statues brought back from "far flung places" to tell us about our origins and the infancy of art; yet, uprooted, deprived of the gazes and gestures that once animated them, they are dying in museum-sanctuaries.
A ghost never comes (back) alone. Others come (back) in their wake. The statement "statues also die " came to mind the day the bust of William disappeared before my open eyes. Resnais and Marker's declaration of death was transformed into an affirmation of vitality on contact with Anne's works and their contexts. Sometimes inert sculptures come to life, because they die / too. They live and thus perish / for "only that which is living can be killed" . Thousands of years of destruction on various scales prove that a statue can disappear in two ways: by being destroyed / by no longer being seen. The first death, which has a long history of vandalism, is the most spectacular because it involves physical violence. The second does not (necessarily) require material destruction. It happens through one's gaze. It stipulates that the power of life (and therefore death) in statues depends on the reciprocal relationship between the viewer and the viewed. Nothing moves forwards or backwards. Everything adds up and accumulates. We are the heirs of Medusa and Perseus, re-enacting the eternal battle against the gaze that petrifies and kills / to protect ourselves from the gaze of the image. Did the American soldiers who, the day after the fall of Saddam Hussein, scaled his colossal statue and covered his head with their nation's flag know that they were perpetuating an age-old story? Anne's sculptures add up these two 'deaths' to revitalise what history has frozen. Re-creating the acts of violence committed against representations of power, they ask us to open our eyes and see the disappearance in progress. A reversal then takes place: the production of ruins restores the critical distance that every iconoclastic act abolishes, and that the current politics of the image seek to annihilate. This distance is also the interval required for things past, distant or buried to come (back) to us and graft themselves onto our lives.

***

Here as elsewhere. Everything falls and keeps falling. The producer of ruins raises what is tottering. She does not raise up temples / glories / fallen powers. She gives rise to something else entirely. The rages / passions / collapses / revolts capable of generating tremors great and small. Her works confirm the crisis of heights. These works say that ruin and violence are our common foundations. That we must constantly return to the abyss in order to move towards what can save us. It is time to reform the fictions we invent for ourselves to mask our trembling lives. It is time to build narratives that can (re)connect us with the turmoil, complexity and vulnerability of life. It is high time we opened our eyes to the loss afforded on the world every day / the beauty that makes a pact with brutality / the chaos that accompanies change. We no longer summon up ghosts. Hereon in, they are the ones coming (back) to us. They infiltrate the present / they come (back) to the surface / through matter. Now the time has come to remember the downfalls and the uprisings / to seize what history engenders and swallows up – like the god Saturn who devours his own children one by one. Take a look. What falls / rises. What teeters / stands. In spite of everything. Behold. See how what (re)surfaces / looks at us / from the depths of time. How it creates our future tremors / tirelessly. Now is the time / to look at the present / with the eyes of other times.