Currently Reading: Part Object Part Sculpture: The Scatter: Objects as Leftovers – Briony Fer. (2005). Pennsylvania State University Press
In this chapter (p.222) of Part Object Part Sculpture, Fer highlights a couple of key artists working with her notion of sculpture as leftover: Gabriel Orozco, Eva Hesse and Piero Manzoni.
She mainly discusses Orozco quoting him on his Working Tables (1996) and Various Models (1992-5): “Some pieces are more like finished sculptures, like the socks or the heart, and some of them are like models, like the car, the small DS or the little Yielding Stone which is the first one I ever Made. Then some of them are totally ready-made like the box of soap or the shoebox. Some of them are failed sculptures, models that didn’t work out but have interesting possibilities for the future, like nice leftovers.” – Gabriel Orozco interviewed by Benjamin Buchloch in the Clinton is Innocent exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1998, p.127
Fer denotes (p.224): “This constellation of terms is curious: failed sculptures, models, nice leftovers. They all refer to things you might throw out, but to Orozco they seem to be more interesting than some of the things you might keep. They are not quite waste products. They are kept on “standby,” as Orozco has put it, for future use.* They are left on hold rather than completely abandoned.
*Orozco in conversation with the author, Paris, November 2004
Furthermore on Orozco’s term: (p.225) “The ‘nice leftovers’ are the things you put aside but don’t jettison completely.”
Fer cites Benjamin’s notion of collections: “Orozco’s economy of leftovers differs from an economy of collecting […] However bizarre collections of objects might be, the drive is “to overcome the wholly irrational character of the objects’ mere presence at hand” through integrating it into a classifiable system as a form of practical memory.” Walter Benjamin – The Arcade Project. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999, p.211. (p.231)
On Hesse’s Untitled (1968), Fer cites Annette Michelson’s description; ‘part object to art object and describes; “They are both working parts and leftovers of other works, like relics without aura.”
Fer compares (p.227); “The turnover of objects [Orozco and Hesse] is reminiscent of what Karl Marx called the “perpetuum mobile of circulation”.
Fer goes on to define leftovers: “A leftover is a piece of something that has been remaindered – a part of something that has become detached and is now surplus to requirements or redundant. It is the flipside to the new commodity (the box for the shoes, but no shoes). Leftovers have history. The rise of the commodity has always gone hand in hand in the modernist imagination with the ragpickers picking over the debris of the city. As a cornucopia of the obsolete, the flea markets of Paris had fuelled the dreams of the Surrealists. The discarded could be generative and celebrated. Robert Morris’s roomful of detritus could hail antiform and process art”. (p.224)
“Leftovers come to stand not for what once has been but what will be. They suggest forever fluctuating possibilities […] Focussing attention on the leftover puts into question the value of what we choose to keep.” (p.228)
“Leftovers are part objects in time rather than in space. Leftovers suggest fractured rather than continuous time.” (p.231)
