I wrote this piece a couple months ago under commission from a fancy-pants art magazine. I submitted it and they sent it back, completely changing it around so that the piece ended up praising this ridiculous show and stressing its fundamental importance. As I couldn't disagree more strongly with that point of view, I just pulled the review entirely. This wonderful story about the installation of a giant butt plug in the Place Vendôme prompts me to share the piece here, which is probably the right venue anyway.
* * *
Like French lit,
English litter derives from Latin lectus, bed. A portable bed or the stuff
to make beddings, litter acquired its familiar signification—trash—by the
1730s. Such a bed made from trash was constructed by the Paris Commune on the place
Vendôme in May 1871. Built of sticks, straw, and manure, this litter would protect
surrounding buildings from a militaristic column erected in the square by
Napoleon and toppled by the Communards on May 16, 1871. It is this same bed that
David Gissen’s exhibition tracks and proposes to reconstruct.
Displaying thirteen prints and period photographs from the Canadian
Centre for Architecture’s collection, the exhibition organizes time spatially.
The first of four tables holds the earliest material: an engraving from 1822
depicting a sculpture of Caesar-like Napoleon, which capped the column. Reading
left-to-right on each table, time is additionally indicated by black blocks with
white characters dating the images—blocks cued to exemplify the column’s
orientation. After May 16, 1871, the blocks align horizontally indicating the
column has fallen, a miniature performance reversed on the penultimate table as
the Commune itself falls and the column is re-erected. Imagined futures for the
site show on the walls and a final table. Two light-box photographs offer
digital renderings of the mound restored; black text reads against white
gallery walls petitioning for reconstruction. A maquette of the column stands
on the last table beside an odorless mound of “manure and organic moss,” which
looks more like tobacco.
It is thus the exhibition makes its case for rebuilding this
“earthwork” as a “counter-monument,” the latter phrase recalling a conversation
about monuments and memory now some decades old. Stating terms in black and
white, horizontal and vertical, the exhibition addresses the viewer as a reader
asked to see the mound’s restitution as an inexorable conclusion to its story. However
rousing a rhetorical strategy, this simplifying narrative also dashes past many
of the key details. Absent from the gallery guide, for example, are names for
several of the images’ makers and publishers—a disservice given the differences
of interest they materialize so potently. If Bruno Braquehais’s 1871 photograph
(above) suggests sympathy with its camera-facing guards who tower over the felled column,
a page-spread from the Illustrated London
News tells a different story.
The column appears cocked at forty-five
degrees, a huge wedge cut from its base. Ropes drape from its lantern as teams
of men strain against capstan and windlass, mustering an encyclopedia of engineering
techniques to gratify what this staunchly bourgeois newspaper called “the rage
of the Communist Dictators.” More devastating is an albumen silver print from
1871 by Jules Andrieu shot gazing down to the bomb crater of the toppled column
detonated in the square. Since he included this image in a series called Désastres de la guerre (following Goya,
amending Callot), might Andrieu not have held a more complicated position than simply
considering the demolition a “pointless act of irreverence towards the army,
its leaders and veterans” as the catalogue glosses all dissent?
[This post received the following response from David Gissen, dated Oct. 21, 2014]
I have to say that I have read many things about my work,
but this is the first time I have ever felt compelled to reply. Besides your
various points (a few of which I actually agree with), my desire to write this
to you has to do with the anonymous way that you published this. You’re an
editor of a major academic journal and a professor at a major university; so, in
addition to the relative power those positions provide you in academia – places
that have reviewed and published my work —I don't understand why you couldn’t
stand behind this essay with full authorship.
To the various points you raised about our “ridiculous”
exhibition:
In 2012 I was approached by the CCA to transform my petition
regarding the Mound of Vendome into an exhibition. I believed that displaying
my materials related to the petition in concert with the archival documents
held by the CCA would be a powerful way to consider the archive’s relationship
to experimental historical work. I agree with you that there is danger in
instrumentalizing history towards some teleological message. If the exhibition
conveys that the history of these events ends with the reconstruction of the
mound, then I must work harder to separate archive and proposal in future
iterations of this exhibition. In fact, when developing the renderings and
model for this version of the exhibition, I tried to remove many signifiers
that they were contemporary images – cars, signage, etc – so that they could
potentially be seen as rendered reconstructions of the original.
You wrote that we did not identify the authorof the various
images, but we clearly identified the author and source of each historical
image in the accompanying booklet. I admit that I did not address the
representational politics of Andrieu vs. Braquehais, among the other
photographers and printmakers. I am not
necessarily interested in decoding the sympathies of the photographers towards
the subject, but rather wanted to emphasize the quantity of representations of
the events and their circulation. In the accompanying web videos I recall
discussing the way the archival images circulated, which I think is more
critical and in some ways worked against the authors’ original intentions. For
example, Braquehais’ images were ultimately absorbed into anti-communard
writings. And some of the most anti-communard photographs were republished by
the Situationist International as illustrations of their pro-commune tracts.
As for your proposal to make the mound out of trash – that’s
an interesting idea. But I see my project as situated within the history of
urban landscape. We are witnessing an incredible moment in which historical
urban landscapes are being reconstructed and renovated in contemporary cities
and in many ways these establish narratives of urban history that I find
troubling. I actually don’t see my proposal as a “counter-monument” – the staff
of the CCA chose that term. Rather, I see my project as a “radical” landscape
reconstruction. Not that the landscape of hay, manure and dirt is or was
radical in and of itself (there were actually many constructions like it around
Paris at the time and most were used as fortifications); but it is part of the
radical history of the city that I hope to recuperate through the difficult
politics of reconstruction.
As this project approaches realization perhaps there will be
a way to address some of your comments above.
Thank you again and sincerely, David Gissen