Disappearance
In this issue on the theme of disappearance it is no way our intention to announce the death of art, which has been repeatedly predicted for several decades. At most we will, once again, confirm the recurrent tendency to forego the art object in favour of the artistic device, encounter or experience, an attitude which certainly marked our previous thematic issues (“Waste” and “Fragile”) and which we could have combined with this one to form a trilogy. Do we thus dare to proclaim the disappearance of the object or more precisely the end of the art object’s reign? It is notably this question that some authors took up in their reflections on many artists’ choice “of producing no tangible object while remaining within the system” (Desmet). This is perhaps the first observation to be made here: with or without an object, visible or invisible, or promoting the ephemeral, the so-called artists without works persist in taking a place in the system, in leaving a trace, an image, a story. Furthermore, the following pages are not without works; for the most part, very high definition digital photographs. If there is not always a presence of “objects” (in many cases one is indeed confronted with empty rooms), this is not any less proof that artistic acts were carried out. Nobody questions that these traces, which artists or dealers take great care of, now serve as artworks to be displayed in various exhibition places after the experience has dissipated. The inevitable process of the preservation of memory is such that the intangible is inexorably materialized in the archive. The art object thus resists its disappearance.
The theme of disappearance has not only been explored in terms of the absence of works or objects, but also in relation to the immaterial, impalpable and evanescent. Devices that work on perception, works erased before the gaze, poetic fictions on death or the decomposition of matter are part of the propositions, which in this issue, refer rather to the disappearance of the subject. Moreover, aside from the main thematic we here include a more politically informed and consequently more disturbing essay on the disappearance of the citizen in totalitarian regimes (Vera). However, in this case, not a trace has been left.
The active participation of viewers is also one of the recurrent elements in this thematic issue. In order for the “disappeared” works to regain their status as artworks and find themselves within these pages, one certainly had to undertake a “reconstitution” task that was in several cases left to those who took part in the experience. Whether by walking through a work to make it effective (Schneider), by looking for it (Friðfinnsson), by memorizing it (Pope) or by literally inventing it (Tiravanija), the viewer has become the one through who the work has been granted existence. This Duchampian affirmation, which does not appear to be waning in twenty-first century art, perhaps confirms that if the artist tends at times to make the artwork disappear, s/he nevertheless entrusts others with the mandate to make it reappear.
[Translated from the French by Bernard Schütze]
