Epilogue

“These things hardly existed at all,” remarked Robert Irwin of his untitled columns, begun in 1969.1 In Blink and You’ll Miss It, Irwin described how his transparent cast-acrylic sculptures inhabit a gallery space austerely, how they appear to “sit on a delicate edge” between absence and presence....

The thing that is not a thing

Chapter four introduces the example of the Momart warehouse fire, in which large amounts of art—including high profile Young British Art—was destroyed when a thief apparently broke into an adjoining space and set the complex on fire. Works such as Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (lost in the fire) are examined, as well as accounts of the public backlash and media attention surrounding this event. In addition, the implications of Jake and Dinos Chapman’s exact remake of Emin's piece as The Same Only Better are considered, along with the event's legacy and the expectation that these works of art will endure.

Art and permeable moments

Chapter two endeavours to define art amid a portmanteau—starting with Jean-Luc Nancy’s understanding of art and the image in The Ground of the Image, Bataille’s ideas concerning art as a rupture or fissure, Jean Baudrillard’s Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, and Paul Virilio’s The Accident of Art—to understand better the accident, disappearance, and destruction that art courts. Next, it proposes that through this art houses a solvency—in a sense undoing, yet at the same time securing or making fixed—as conflicting and resistant tendencies within the object formed. This chapter also puts forward a correlation between Bataille and Virilio and their ideas regarding the negative or reverse miracle (that they suggest gives art its form), which is similarly made visible through loss or destruction.

The destruction of art

Chapter one surveys examples from news articles, books, and exhibitions that take the destruction of art as their starting point, and attempts to gather these approaches and accounts as a framework for the book. Solvent form looks to recent examples such as critic Jonathan Jones’s concept of a Museum of Lost Art—a place where all the destroyed and lost artworks might hang—poet Henri Lefebvre’s book The Missing Pieces, the Tate Modern’s recent virtual exhibition Gallery of Lost Art, as well as literary parallels taken from Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Georges Perec’s character Bartlebooth in Life A User’s Manual. From here, it considers Georges Bataille’s concept of the negative miracle from The Accursed Share in relation to thoughts from Giorgio Agamben and Paul Virilio, while providing examples such as Rachel Whiteread’s House, Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, and Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York.

Things lie

In Chapter five, art is examined through the image of a house ravaged by fire, put forth by Giorgio Agamben’s The Man without Content and in relation to the destructions of art explored previously and the Momart Fire specifically (perhaps here made literal). It also builds on examples such as Thomas Hirschhorn’s work Crystal of Resistance and its accompanying texts, in order to understand an operation in art that is made visible through these events. It additionally returns to ideas from Tom McCarthy’s Remainder as well as Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Through these examples and events, one might begin to understand something more of art. In attempting to represent an affinity—to coax or draw it out—the text forms a portrait of sorts (in the Jean-Luc Nancy sense), and through it we might begin to see something that has disappeared through an operation of art.

Solvent form

Chapter three examines the notion of solvent form in more detail, in which art—while attempting to make secure or fixed—simultaneously undoes and destroys through its inception. This is examined through narratives such as Sarah Winchester obsessively building the Winchester Mansion in San Jose, California, or similarly as an object that Scheherazade attempts to hew with her stories in One Thousand and One Nights—seen here as a method for forestalling a verdict and extending her moments against foreclosure, maintaining their permeability. Within this context, works such as Jeremy Blake’s Winchester Trilogy, Urs Fischer’s untitled melting wax sculptures from the Venice Biennale, Louise Bourgeois’s Couple II, examples from contemporary art, and ideas from Agnes Martin’s writings are applied in order to understand these solvent operations within art.