It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to no longer be obsessed by it.
— Cesar Pavese, 16 October 1938
1
I am sitting on a street curb in New Orleans, drinking coffee and preparing for a panel discussion where my peers will say astonishing, unforgettable things. There is a fake plastic sunflower near my left foot, small enough to have fallen off a hat or a birthday cake.
The book is open . . .
Artist Manon Bellet selects the most reactive papers for her materials: their volatility is what ensures that they are vulnerable, malleable, capable of expressing relationality.
“There is a direct link to writing, to printed matter, while mere contact with heat blackens the rolls – word monochromes; there is no ink, but the paper is blackened all the same,” Manon Bellet said in an interview. “What I am interested in here is this overturning of meaning, a re-enchantment of the world that is possible and can be built up through serendipitous effects.”
Whether it be paper curling up or slowly disintegrating upon contact with fire, or just a draught causing the translucent pages of a wordless book to quiver under a lamp, there is one thing common to all of Manon Bellet’s work: she keeps the artist’s gesture in the background,” wrote Julie Enkell Julliard, likening Bellet’s work to what Marcel Duchamp called the “infrathin . . . the artistic cultivation of the intangible and invisible to ‘produce intensities through subtractions’.”
2
William Blake drew “Head of a Damned Soul” 1789 as an illustration for Dante's Inferno. Although based on a drawing by Henry Fuseli, Blake's focus is on a single detail of Fuseli's larger drawing, namely, the agonized face of the damned soul.
There is no color in Blake’s work, and yet there is a sense of fire around the man's head, where fire, itself, also evokes falling. These two ways of death— fire and falling— are not directly conceivable as connected, apart from the horror they inspire, the material of nightmares.
I find myself thinking about burning lines, and what happens when we let a line scorch a bit along the edges.
3
In New Orleans, I am transfixed by Bellet’s cyanotype series, Sous sur face (2012-2013). Using transparent plastic bags, she transposed the ordinary into the ethereal. Plastic bags are cheap, gratuitous, not built to last but created for disposability: their texture is almost tissue-thin and light enough to be carried into tree limbs by wind. They are the one-night-stands of bag-relationality.
Developed in the 1840’s, cyanotype is a printing process that relies on exposure to sunlight to ‘develop’ the image. First, paper is coated in a light-sensitive solution (often Prussian blue) and allowed to dry in darkness. Then, the object that the artist wants to “print” or reproduce is laid atop the paper, which is then exposed to sunlight. The sunlight creates an imprint on the paper which appears as a pale shadow or silhouette on the Prussian blue surface of the paper.
Bellet’s images in Sous sur face are so soft and sheer that one can mistake them for dropped lingerie. In her hands, the synthetic plastic takes an organic form that is malleable, tender, touched by light, in her own words, “less a thing than the trace of a movement.”
I watch the pages flutter in the wind.
Later, I discover a comment by Bellet on her video work, Vestige. A comment about paper and wind. “There is a slight breeze to generate the movement of the pages, and their transparent quality is enough to bring out the geometrical shapes,” Bellet said, “but the book is not a narrative; we gaze at the void and become aware of how words wear out and time passes... It is as if the forms emerging from haphazard folding were there to structure our imaginations and that of the emptiness of the screen.”
Haphazard folding . . . why have I never stared at this word, “haphazard", until now? The happenstance of hazard. The just-so-happens hazard. But in French, “hasarde” is closer to something like surrealism’s ‘chance’ or happenstance.
4
Then I watch the light move across the plastic lingerie.
Sunlight is fleeting, always carved in relation to time. (It flees duration and fleeces instants.)
Sunlight speaks to the physical object by building a shadow around it.
“Allegories are in the realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things.”
— Walter Benjamin, “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” Origin of the German Trauerspiel
“Surrealism toppled the images of antiquity from their Platonic heaven. In Max Ernst's work they roam about like phantoms among the late 19th century middle class, for which art, neutralized in the form of a cultural heritage, had in fact become a ghost.”
– Adorno in Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt
The wisps, the loose parts of my hair–the rifts I don't see until I snap the photo.
The unpredictable and unplanned and ungroomed and me reaching towards the composition.
We are always reading the walls . . . and trying to make sense of the room we are in.
Even when the walls are absent, we know they exist, and we live in relation to that knowledge. There will be walls. And boxes. And rooms. And expectations.
But the book is open . . . the line races the fire to its conclusion.