Composite image: left, "Socle du Monde" (1961) right, altered image of a security guard in a gallery (this is not the same security guard as the one in the text here).

The security guard tells me that there are figures hidden everywhere in the work, I just need to look closer to see them. “See this sculpture?” he says pointing to a minimalist cube, “It looks like rusted steel, but it is not. It is painted and in the paint are figures. See …there are faces everywhere. You have to look closer”, he says, “You have to analyze the details”.

It is March 4, 2009, I am in the Gagosian gallery in New York City at a retrospectives for the short lived Italian artist Piero Manzoni (1933-1963). Manzoni’s beautiful though irreverent conceptual artworks, such as cans of his own excrement and balloon sculptures activated by the artists breath, were hugely influential to a great many artists in Europe and American–this work preceded conceptual art by almost ten years–however, perhaps due to his short career (he died at the age of 29) this was the first time a retrospective of his work had been assembled.

After walking through most of the show, I find myself standing and looking at one of Manzoni’s most famous works, his “Socle du Monde” (1961) a pedestal cast in bronze with the words “Socle du Monde” written on one side and presented flipped upside-down so that the top of the pedestal is now resting on the earth or vice versa. This work belongs to a series of works that Manzoni termed “Magic Bases”, all small platforms that raise the person (or thing) standing on them into a work or art.

Because the title is written only in French, and even though I know the meaning of the piece, I cannot remember what the word ‘socle’ means, I decide to ask a knowledgeable looking security guard if he knows the definition of the French word. “Does it mean pedestal”, I ask? He answers, “yes, it means base”. And then a strange thing occurs. Coming closer the security guard tells me, almost in a whisper, that there are faces and figures hidden everywhere in Manzoni’s work. “Huh”? I pause, look at him a little quizzically and deciding to reason with him I say, “but don’t you see that the work is a pedestal flipped upside down, making the world the artwork?” He says, “yes, of course” brushing away my explanation with a wave of his hand, “but can’t you see the faces in it”. Curious, I half-heartedly agree and urged him on with an “OK” to see where this conversation is going.

With my interest peaked he begins to take me around the room and show me the faces in all the works. He says, “if you look closer and analyze the details the exhibition changes.” Pulling me by the arm he points me towards another work by Manzoni, a framed piece where long white fur has been affixed to a shiny fire engine red background, both placed inside a frame. “ What do you see?” he asks me and pauses to let me contemplate. “Now, step over here”. He continues beckoning me five feet forward and says, “look at the same work. Now what do you see. Ah ha, ah ha, right. See, I told you, do you see it now?” gesticulated wildly and pointing to the fur. “The figures are everywhere,” he says. “It is amazing. The artist is a Genius.” He gives this same explanation to two more pieces. When he asks me if I see the faces, I nod in silent agreement. When he is done, I thank him and move on.

This was one of the strangest experiences I have ever had in a gallery or a museum. No guard has ever taken me around a gallery to show me an exhibition in this way before and with so much excitement, conviction and engagement. Though I never once saw the figures or faces that that security guard had tried to show me, I did not refute his vision. When asked I would always answer him in the affirmative because somehow it did not seem appropriate to say no or to tell him that for me they did not exist. In one sense I think the security guards perception of this work was totally crazy. Despite the guard’s certitude, Piero Manzoni did not paint hidden figures and faces into the patinas of his minimalist sculptures, nor did he hide them in billows of fur or in any part of his works.

In “Restitutions: The Truth in Pointing” from his book The Truth in Painting, Jacques Derrida deconstructs an argument between Martin Heidegger and Meyer Shapiro concerning the origin of a ghost haunting a pair of shoes in a Van Gogh painting. Derrida analyzes both Heidegger’s position—who believes that the shoes are those of an unnamed peasant—and Mayer Shapiro’s—who believes that the shoes belong to the artist Van Gogh. Despite both thinkers very thorough arguments in the end Derrida resolves that neither Shapiro nor Heidegger are right, because there is really no way to know to whom the shoes belong. Everything is a presumption of truth. “nothing proves or can prove that ‘they are the shoes of the artist’”. Derrida says. “Each time you read ‘they are clearly…,’ ‘this is clearly…,’ ‘are evidently…,’ it does not signify that it is clear or evident, very much the contrary, but that it is necessary to deny the intrinsic obscurity of the thing, its essential crypt, and that it’s necessary to make us believe that it is clear, quite simply because the proof will always be lacking” (1), he says.

To close down individual interpretation, by claiming that the shoes can only be read in one way, seems to Derrida to be entirely against the purpose of the arts. Making them specific and prescribed rather than interpretive. He recounts the disenchantment he feels following these philosophers words. “One follows step by step the moves of a ‘great thinker,’ as he returns to the origin of the work of art and of truth, traversing the whole history of the West and then suddenly, at a bend in a corridor, here we are on a guided tour, as schoolchildren or tourists.” (2) The thinker has ceased to be a thinker for Derrida and is now simply dictating his own presumptions as fact, like the tour guide of the museum. There is but one answer, follow blindly the guide.

Here, I am reminded of a story told to me by a professor of mine, Joseph Tanke, about a boy who is harshly silenced and rebuked by a museum tour guide when he responds to her question what might have influenced the visual form of a certain Jasper Johns painting, that perhaps it was the floor of the museum, which looks very similar to the painting. Here the boy is as right about Johns as Heidegger and Shapiro are about Van Gogh. There is no way of knowing what Van Gogh or Johns intended and why bother anyway, why close our interpretations down. The truth of art is the boy, the museum guide, Shapiro and Heidegger all agreeing that there are multiple truths.

The shoes are hallucinogenic says Derrrida using a word which in Latin means to go astray with thought. The viewer of these shoes places his own vision upon them and makes them appear, as he wants them to appear. For the Security guard the work of Manzoni also offers hallucinations. “There are faces everywhere.” He see what he wants to see in the work. Perhaps this was his second month of policing the exhibition, and this revelation, whether premeditated or brought on by the boredom and the distress of the job, was his way of being continually interested and engaged in this work. I am finding that I can’t argue with the security guard’s assessment of Manzoni’s work and I am not sure that Manzoni would have argued either. In fact he may have been quite pleased with the guards claim.

Manzoni’s work was about playing with people’s expectations of the artist as some kind of magician and genius who can change his own breath into art or can claim the world as his work simply by building a pedestal for it. So, perhaps it is not too much of a stretch to imagine that he could make people and faces appear in his work. His art was about people after all and the world; it needed people. His “Magic Bases” possessed the potential for people to stand on them and make them active as artworks. Deflated balloons, called “Fiato d’artista” (the Artist’s Breath), could be, and at one time were, filled with Manzoni’s breath. Even old broken eggshells with a single fingerprint on them—remnants from a piece called “Consumption of dynamic art by the art-devouring public”, where Manzoni served boiled eggs signed with his thumbprint to visitors to eat—now placed inside glass cases, they still retained the potential for human interaction. Preserved and historicized in vitrines or protected from the visitors hands and feet by security guards, only ghosts of people remain. All we are left with are impressions of figures and faces. Is it untruthful, or a lie to say this about Manzoni’s work? Is this a fiction or was it the security guards way of seeing the artist’s intention through his own narrative of it. Is this is something we all do when we look at work.

In a long passage from the Politics of Aesthetics Jacques Rancier talks about the relationship between fiction and reality or perhaps it would be better to say, fiction as a form of reality. He says this,

Political Statements and literary locutions produce effects in reality. They define models of speech or action but also regimes of sensible intensity. They draft maps of the visible, trajectories between the visible and the sayable, relationships between modes of being, modes of saying and modes of doing and making. They define variations of sensible intensities, perceptions, and the abilities of bodies. They thereby take hold of unspecified groups of people, adhere to a condition, react to situations, recognize their images. They reconfigure the map of the sensible by interfering with the functionality of gestures and rhythms adapted to the natural cycles of production, reproduction and submission. Man is a political animal because he is a literary animal who lets himself be diverted from his ‘natural’ purpose by the power of words. (3)

The fiction told to me by the security guard was as much truth as it was a tale or a story. It was his political act. The guards is disrupting reality, offering an alternate perspective or a position. In a situation that has been divorced of human presence by time, money and preservation, he offers a new way to see the life that has been removed.

In one of his more poetic reflections on art, Theodor Adorno says, “What guarantees the aesthetic quality of modern art? It is the scars of damage and disruption inflicted by them on the smooth surface of the immutable. (4)” I would like to consider expanding this quote beyond simply modern works of art, to suggest that it is the function of all aesthetic acts to disrupt, or inscribe new narratives into the smooth surface of the immutable. The security guard is producing an aesthetic act when he makes the suggestion that faces can be seen anywhere. It is his way of etching the surface of this cold, sterile, boring gallery space. It is his way of disrupting and breathing life (like Manzoni’s breath) back into the exhibition.

——–

1. Jacques Derrida, “Restitutions”, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987). 364
2. ibid. 293
3. Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics (New York: Continuum 2004). 39
4. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1984. First published in German 1970). 34