The question of artist studios keeps coming back. This is what I’m thinking about at the moment:
In 1964 Lucas Samaras moved the contents of his studio-bedroom into a gallery space where it was displayed as an artwork entitled Room #1. Every component of the original room was transferred into the gallery with their original arrangement exactly reconstructed in the new space, creating what the artist called “as complete a picture of me without my physical presence as there could possibly be”. Provocatively, he has described the gesture as “the most personal thing that any artist could do” [1].
It’s a provocative statement because it implies that the flesh and blood intimacy of the original room has accompanied the room’s material components into the gallery space, and that it maintains currency there. On the contrary: what is presented in the gallery is intimacy suspended, intimacy in inverted commas, intimacy under display – and under display, the replication of casual disorder presents the dead weight of deliberateness. Here the physical business of packing, shipping and unpacking literally isolates the room from the surrounding ground with which it was once continuous: the original building, the man’s life, the daily passing of time. Samaras’ statement serves in the end to highlight the annihilation of what was once personal about the room. What shows is not personal, it is the word for something personal.
Considered as an act of naming, Room #1 offers tools for opening up the relationship between word and thing. Blanchot writes:
A word may give me its meaning, but first it suppresses it. For me to be able to say, ‘This woman’ I must somehow take her flesh and blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost being – the very fact that it does not exist. [2]
When Blanchot says “this woman”, the word gives him the woman deprived of her being. He has possession of the word in lieu of the thing. Meanwhile the thing – her being – still exists in all its flesh and blood reality and remains at large, resisting absorption into discourse. At the point of naming, the thing-in-itself recedes out of view into its “unnameable otherness” [3]. The word stands in for the absent thing, and allows the thing to sustain the integrity of its otherness outside of discourse.
With Room #1, meanwhile, the word (the display) stands in for the absent thing (the studio-bedroom) and yet both are composed of the very same material substance. For the duration of the gallery installation the studio-bedroom remains dissembled and, unlike the named woman, it does not physically exist at large elsewhere in its original state. At the point of naming, although the word operates as a trace denoting the thing’s absence, thing and word are visibly conflated in a singular form.
I’m preparing an article this month for a performance writing journal and these things are going to come into it one way or another. I want to bring in broken things/machines/utensils (Blanchot, Heidegger, Breton, Barthes) but it might be too much of a stretch this time given the word count.
[1] Lucas Samara, quoted in O’Doherty, B., Studio and Cube. FORuM, New York 2007: p. 4.
[2] Blanchot, M., The Gaze of Orpheus. Station Hill Press, New York 1981 (first published 1943, translated Lydia Davis 1981)
[3] Schwenger, Peter. (2001). Words and the Murder of the Thing. Critical Inquiry, 28(1), pp. 99-113: 102.
