Contents
List of Figures vii
Notes on Contributors xi
Acknowledgementsxv
Introduction: Involuntary Sculpture: Process, Photography and
the Ephemeral Object 1
Anna Dezeuze and Julia Kelly
1 Voluntary and Involuntary Sculpture 13
Steven Harris
2 The Found, the Made and the Functional: Surrealism, Objects
and Sculpture 39
Julia Kelly
3 Close-Up on the Object: Attending to the Films of Man Ray 59
Samantha Lackey
4 Kaprow’s Vector 77
Martha Buskirk
5 Richard Wentworth’s Making Do, Getting By and the Elusive
Everyday 99
Anna Dezeuze
6 In Formation: On Terry Fox’s Children’s Tapes 119
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
7 Documents, Dreams and Fantasies: Passages through the
Involuntary from Photography to Sculpture in the Work of
Mike Kelley 137
John C. Welchman
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vi Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art
8 Chance/Lens (Subversive Translation) 157
Simon Baker
9 Involuntary Photography 171
Margaret Iversen
Bibliography185
Index195
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Introduction
Involuntary Sculpture: Process,
Photography and the Ephemeral
Object
Anna Dezeuze and Julia Kelly
Involuntary Sculpture
At first consideration, sculpture might be thought of as the most willed of artistic
media. Requiring serious physical commitment, sculptural activity is marked
traditionally by labour-intensive processes like hewing, hacking, welding and
casting, both on an individual and an industrial scale. The mythology of direct
carving certainly carries associations of hard physical graft, clearly linked to
personal volition, the sculptor locked in a ‘heroic’ struggle with stone, wood
or marble. The fact that sculpture is seen to engage directly with the material
world reinforces this, making it an activity devoted to ‘taming’ the obdurate stuff
around us, shaping and bending it according to our will.
This anthology, however, presents a very different vision of sculptural
processes. What happens when sculpture ceases to be quite so controlled, when
it lets itself be dictated by principles of chance, determined by its environment
or by the circumstances of its reception and documentation? For the brute
activities listed above we could substitute a different set of much less ‘voluntary’
ones: fingering, fiddling, propping and shuffling, to which should be added the
instantaneous snapping of the camera lens. Where sculpture is ‘found’ and not
‘made’, or indeed exists somewhere between the two, it can also become less
material and more obviously contingent – a form of a thing, or a formation of
things, captured at a specific time. If ‘voluntary’ sculpture suggests the production
of a deliberate material configuration, set forever in hard matter, ‘involuntary’
sculpture points to its own transience or its role as part of an ongoing process,
where it exists beyond a serendipitous photographic image.
This volume takes its cue from a selection of photographs by Brassaï with
captions by Salvador Dalí published in the surrealist periodical Minotaure in 1933
and bearing the title ‘Involuntary Sculptures’ (Figure I.1). Scraps of everyday
debris – including rolled-up bus tickets, a piece of bread roll, a curl of soap from a
sink and a blob of toothpaste – featured in photographic close-up as ‘automatic’
sculptural configurations. These banal and non-artistic objects (one of the tickets
was allegedly found screwed up in the pocket of a bank employee) were intended
at least in part as a riposte to the prevailing perception of sculpture at the time,
represented in the same journal by another selection of photographs by Brassaï
Dezeuze Book.indb 1 2/13/2013 10:15:48 AM
Introduction 3
of the studios of Aristide Maillol, Charles Despiau, Alberto Giacometti, Jacques
Lipchitz and Henri Laurens, as Steven Harris’s essay in this volume makes clear.
There was no agreed definition of ‘surrealist’ sculpture, however: indeed, such
a thing could be argued to be impossible in itself, while surrealist interests in
three-dimensional production became much more closely oriented towards the
complex category of the surrealist object.
Brassaï and Dalí’s photo-essay provides a tantalising evocation of sculptural
possibility, where forms are both shaped by human hands, sometimes with
little conscious thought (the rolled bus ticket), and subject to ‘organic’ growth
(the piece of bread rising and changing shape in the oven). It also freezes its
array of objects at a given moment, before they are discarded, swept or wiped
away, dissolved or eaten. Nevertheless, their photographic capturing does
give them a certain solid presence, particularly through Brassaï’s characteristic
use of dramatic chiaroscuro. In this sense their effect is unlike that of another
surrealist image on a related theme, Man Ray’s photograph Moving Sculpture
for La Révolution surréaliste in 1926, a film-still-like scene of pale-coloured
washing fluttering on the breeze. The title of Man Ray’s photograph, originally
taken in 1920, suggests that this is a record of a particular phenomenon: the
drying laundry as kinetic sculpture, its soft fabric billowing and bulging. In both
images, though, the parameters of ‘sculpture’ are challenged and expanded,
while photography fulfils simultaneous (and potentially contradictory) functions
of auratic reproduction and quasi-scientific documentation. In her essay in this
volume, Samantha Lackey argues that the film from which this image of washing
was drawn, Le Retour à la raison, was a crucial example of a specific mode of
cinematic distraction, where the constant progression of moving object-tableaux
and fragmented scenes served to disrupt rather than focus the spectator’s
attention.
Rather than looking to avoid or resolve them, this volume seeks out the
contradictions and pressure points inherent in the concept of ‘involuntary
sculpture’, and in the relations between sculpture and photography that often
accompany it. It is here, we argue, that modern and contemporary sculpture
can be of continued and renewed interest, by operating against the grain of
established categories and conventions.
Sculpture and Photography
Sculpture’s relationship to photography has become a focus of scholarly interest
since the late 1990s.1 The two media at first seem to have little in common,
one dealing with three-dimensional presence, the other with two-dimensional
image. While the interrelation between painting and photography tended to
be antagonistic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as each
competed with and fed off the advantages of the other, sculpture seemed to
provide, however, particularly successful subject matter for photography from its
emergence in the late 1830s. Like the still life, a sculpture did not move and thus
lent itself well to long exposure, as exemplified in images of antique statuary
and busts by Hippolyte Bayard and William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1840s. Such
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4 Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art
images carried further symbolic resonances: sculpture’s traditional associations
with death and the deathly found a parallel in the immortalising processes of
the photograph, a central concern in photographic theory from the writings of
Walter Benjamin to those of Roland Barthes.
Sculpture also, especially in the case of antique copies and casts in white
plaster, stone and marble, had exceptional photogenic qualities, setting
up striking contrasts of light and shade as well as nuances of texture. In this
sense, both media share a manipulation of effects of light, as well as a concern,
potentially, with framing and apprehending an object from specific points of
view. Through photographic representation, sculptures can take on another
life, eternalised as images in their own right in what André Malraux would call
the ‘museum without walls’. The ways in which Auguste Rodin’s sculpture was
photographed by Eugène Druet, Edward Steichen and others around the 1900s
set a particular precedent for this, while the play of light on polished surfaces and
the use of photography to explore interrelationships between sculptural pieces is
associated above all with the experimental photographic practice of Constantin
Brancusi, as several scholars have pointed out.2 The work of these two sculptors
and its photographic representation can be said to have established certain
paradigms in the relationship between sculpture and photography, extending
beyond the concerns of materiality, light and volume to those of sculptural
installation and the conceptualisation of the work of the sculptor him- or herself.
In the interplay of sculpture and photography, the physical practices
normally associated with making sculpture and the ‘mechanical’ processes
of the photograph clash and challenge one another. This volume treats such
tensions as generative, as ways of complicating historical distinctions and
categories. Thomas McEvilley, in his analysis of the growing prominence of
sculptural tendencies in art from the 1960s onwards, characterises what he sees
as sculpture’s ‘ethical’ superiority as follows: ‘Painting means escapist fantasy;
sculpture means direct dealing with the material world.’3 This volume, however,
seeks to complicate such oppositions, taking its starting point from surrealism
(perhaps the modern movement most readily associated with ‘escapist fantasy’),
but also exploring the multiple roles of photography as both artwork in its own
right and documentation, as object and image, as material evidence and the
dematerialising frame for the absent, the lost, the imagined.
Surrealist Object, Surrealist Photography
Surrealist practice in three dimensions is most commonly understood in terms
of the surrealist object, whose radical hybridity and innovative engagement
with everyday commodities have made it a seminal precursor for contemporary
three-dimensional practices as well as installation art. The surrealist objects
that have attracted the most attention are those which manifest a fetishistic
concern with the body or a confusion of animate and inanimate elements, such
as Meret Oppenheim’s famous Fur-covered Cup, Saucer and Spoon, or Dalí’s
Lobster Telephone. Accordingly, the legacy of surrealism in later twentieth- and
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Introduction 5
twenty-first-century art has been seen predominantly in terms of expressions
of visceral eroticism and ‘uncanny’ physicality, in the work of Louise Bourgeois,
Robert Gober, Cathy de Monchaux and Sarah Lucas, amongst others. However,
this emphasis has obscured the more subtle ramifications of surrealism’s
concerns with objects and sculpture. The surrealist object itself presents a
tension between chance encounters with and of unfamiliar things on the one
hand, and the artist’s processes of intervention and control on the other. In
fact, there are many types of surrealist objects, including natural objects, the
Duchampian readymade, as well as found objects known through photographs
(in André Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja for example), and collaborative, ephemeral
constructions. While both Simon Baker and Margaret Iversen return to Breton’s
use of photographs in this volume, ephemeral constructions are central to Anna
Dezeuze’s and Martha Buskirk’s essays, and an interest in natural geological
configurations appears to link practices as different as Giacometti’s (discussed by
Julia Kelly) and Mike Kelley’s (the focus of John Welchman’s essay). In the proofs
for the project, Brassaï actually refers to the Involuntary Sculptures as ‘automatic
objects’, blurring the distinctions between found object and photography,
while referring to the surrealist practice of automatic writing as a means to
channel unconscious thoughts. As a repository for unconscious psychic urges,
the surrealist object as a whole sets in motion an interplay between artist and
creator, and between object and viewer, whose encapsulation within a discrete
physical thing can only be ambivalent.
The crucial role of photography in surrealism has been increasingly
acknowledged and studied, starting with Rosalind Krauss’s 1981 essay, in which
the Involuntary Sculptures are discussed as typical of the surrealists’ use of the
camera as a privileged means of accessing the ‘surreality’ of the world, that
is, its nature as representation to be probed in search of the marvellous. ‘As it
signals that experience of reality the camera frame also controls it, configures it’,
explains Krauss: in the Involuntary Sculptures, it is the close-up that extends the
capacity of the eye and brings into being these hitherto invisible ‘sculptures’.4
Dalí himself had pointed out as early as 1929 that ‘the mere fact of photographic
transposition [of the world around us] already implies a total invention: the
registering of an UNKNOWN REALITY’.5 As Dawn Ades and Simon Baker have
suggested, the very practice of the photographic close-up embodies the historical
ambivalence of photography between scientific objectivity and defamiliarisation
or disorientation. While the glass shelf used by Brassaï to photograph the
Involuntary Sculptures recalls the glass slides used in the microscopic preparations
that were the subject of early scientific photography,6 the enlargement of such
small objects robs them of their recognisability, triggering powerful ‘alienating
effects’.7 The new modes of attention required by the cinematic close-up are
extensively discussed in this book by Samantha Lackey, while Carrie Lambert-
Beatty refers to their performance of a child-like view of the world.
For Margaret Iversen and Simon Baker, writing in this volume, the interaction
between the found object and the surrealist photograph is crucial. Where
Baker sees the photograph as participating actively in the introduction of the
found object into a ‘perceptual regime’ that will guarantee its significance as a
meaningful find for viewers to come, Iversen goes one step further and directly
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6 Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art
compares the operation of the found object to that of photography itself. The
‘involuntary’ nature of photography, she argues, exists at the moment in which
a detail in the most banal photograph – what Barthes has called the ‘punctum’ –
can unexpectedly reach out directly to the viewer’s unconscious, just as an object
can be found to answer its finder’s most intimate desires and fears. In theories
of photography, this ‘involuntary’ account counters the simulacral model of the
photograph as a blank, free-floating, empty signifier. In artistic practices, Iversen
demonstrates how Christian Boltanski and Gabriel Orozco bring together the
found object and the photograph in order to complicate the relations between
reality and simulation. In this way, Iversen is returning us to what Robin Kelsey
and Blake Stimson have described as the original ‘dream of photography’ – a
desire to reconcile the extremes of a ‘seemingly unconditional transcriptive
fidelity’ and ‘seemingly unconditional inner revelation’.8
Process and ‘Dematerialisation’
Elusive desires and intimations of death are captured in the web of relations
between surrealist objects, photography and autobiographical narratives.
Along with other surrealist techniques such as automatic writing or the practice
of the exquisite corpse, this type of process is what constitutes, according to
Simon Baker, one of the most important legacies of surrealism in contemporary
art. If Baker refers to the specific contemporary practice of Melissa McGill, in
which the creation of physical sculptures is mediated through photography, the
notion of process became a particularly significant characteristic of sculpture
and conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, the ‘process art’ of Richard
Serra involves, as Anna Dezeuze points out, the very gestures of tearing, spilling
or rolling involved in the creation of the Involuntary Sculptures. Other, more
everyday processes were evoked in Terry Fox’s Children’s Tapes (discussed by
Carrie Lambert-Beatty in this volume), in which the artist recorded simple physics
experiments using humble household objects in his kitchen.
Other conceptual artists interested in process turned to spaces outside the
studio and the gallery in their desire to engage with natural landscapes or the
urban everyday. In all these forms, photography and video became essential
tools for documenting process, whether ephemeral constructions in the studio
or site-specific interventions in the landscape. Douglas Fogle has celebrated
the Involuntary Sculptures as forerunners of conceptual photography, which is
used as a means to an end rather than an end in itself, thus evading the two
dominant categories in the history of photography: ‘photographic Pictorialism’
and documentary photography.9 An ‘extraphotographic impulse’ which disrupts
modernist notions of photography does indeed characterise a certain type of
surrealist photography as well as conceptual practices such as Terry Fox’s or
Mike Kelley’s, along with those of Robert Smithson and Dan Graham. As Dezeuze
suggests, Richard Wentworth’s series of photographs Making Do, Getting By,
started in the 1970s, is indebted to this kind of understanding of conceptual
photography as a tool to document other overarching concerns – in his case, the
‘sculptures’ that we spontaneously create in everyday situations.
Dezeuze Book.indb 6 2/13/2013 10:15:48 AM
Introduction 7
The emphasis on process naturally led artists away from the production of
objects and sculptures and towards a combination of photographic and textual
documentation which Lucy Lippard described as a ‘dematerialisation of the art
object’ in 1968. ‘Dematerialised’ practices involved a general ‘de-emphasis’ of the
‘material aspects’ traditionally associated with artworks, including ‘uniqueness,
permanence, decorative attractiveness’.10 The Involuntary Sculptures bring
together two forms of ‘dematerialisation’: the emphasis on the ephemeral, and
the use of photography as a record of these impermanent objects. In this sense,
they also relate to a variety of ‘dematerialising’ practices at different historical
moments. As Martha Buskirk’s essay shows, ‘proto-conceptual’ artists such
as Allan Kaprow developed photography alongside ephemeral environments
using junk materials. Though aware of their intrinsic connection, Kaprow
never privileged photography over the material creation of the environments,
unlike the conceptual artists who would follow him. Kaprow’s work embodies
a transitional moment before photography established itself as the language
of dematerialisation. Some 20 years later, Mike Kelley returned to Kaprow’s
suspicion of the documentary function of performance photographs, but set
out to explore the very relations between reality and fantasy through the use
of found and accidental photographs, sometimes in parallel, and sometimes in
dialogue, with his performance and installation practice. Kaprow’s and Kelley’s
practices thus appear to bracket a seminal moment of conceptual photography
in the 1960s and 1970s, in which the model was the figure of the amateur
photographer, and the medium was considered to be untainted, so to speak, by
the history of art, thus facilitating a more direct access to reality.
This turn to new fields of everyday life was not so much a dematerialisation,
as an ‘expansion or diminution of art as a solid structure’, as Lawrence Alloway
suggested in 1969, as the ‘interface’ between art and other fields became
‘blurred’.11 Whether interpreted in an ‘expansionist’ or a ‘reductivist’ model, to
use Alloway’s words, this shift served to radically challenge the fetishisation of
the art object – after all, as William Pietz has explained, the fetish is premised
on a ‘irreducible, untranscended materiality’.12 Rather than negating materiality
in itself, then, the cross-overs between process art and conceptual photography
discussed in this volume recast the materiality of both the fetish and object-
based sculpture, traditionally defined as stable, if not monumental. In this sense,
the precarious balancing acts involved in Fox’s Children’s Tapes, in Wentworth’s
Making Do, Getting By series (Figures 5.1 and 5.2) or in Orozco’s more recent
ephemeral arrangements, all serve to dramatise a materiality that is both literally
and ontologically contingent.
Re-Reading the History of Sculpture
Where Douglas Fogle’s study of photoconceptualism outlined a new trajectory
of conceptual art within the medium of photography, Helen Molesworth’s 2005
exhibition, Part Object Part Sculpture, sought to retrieve a ‘space of fantasy and
desire’ within the production of sculpture and painting from the 1950s to the
present, through erotic logics of repetition and displacement.13 The present
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8 Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art
book can be situated in an intermediate space between these two projects. We
certainly share with Molesworth a desire to displace the dominance of minimalism
in ‘accounts of the scope and aim of late twentieth-century sculpture’, and its
attendant privileging of both Duchamp’s readymades as foundational models and
the emphasis on a ‘logic of industrial production’ (prevalent in minimalism and
pop art). While we also believe that reflection on bodily gestures and unconscious
desires can fruitfully be brought forward to counter these pervasive narratives,
the kind of works discussed in the present book do not evoke seductive or
repulsive body parts, sexual organs or skin in the same direct way as the sculptural
works of Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Yayoi Kusama, Lynda Benglis or Alberto
Burri. Tactility does figure prominently in Julia Kelly’s essay, for example, but it is
mediated by forms evoking archaic implements or imaginary inventions as much
as bodily shapes. The Involuntary Sculptures may share the ghostly presence of
absent bodies with Rachel Whiteread’s casts, but they are much less physical
and ‘resistant to words’ (as Molesworth would put it): the mediation of Brassaï’s
photography has the effect, as we have suggested, of introducing other types of
polarity between matter and the immaterial, between singular ephemeral event
and banal repetition, between form and formlessness.14 That Gabriel Orozco’s
practice figures as a paradigmatic project in both this book and Molesworth’s
show suggests how the two fields can be combined productively. Inspired by
Orozco’s ‘work tables’ scattered with objects, Briony Fer’s discussion of ‘sculpture
as leftover’ in Part Object Part Sculpture could usefully be brought to bear on
the Involuntary Sculptures themselves.15 Particularly suggestive is Fer’s analysis of
leftovers as ‘part objects in time rather than space’, thus highlighting a fractured,
discontinuous time. Her opposition between the ‘economy of leftovers’ and the
‘economy of collecting’, in the sense that the latter is a means of controlling a kind
of ‘dispersion’ that the former encourages, is also very fruitful.16
In Part Object Part Sculpture, it is Duchamp’s 1950s cast objects that provide
an alternative trajectory to his mass-produced readymades; in Fogle’s The
Last Picture Show the main reference is Dust Breeding, the photograph taken
by Man Ray of the dust gathered on Duchamp’s Large Glass, a ‘hybrid object
caught somewhere between the realms of photography and sculpture’.17 This
book explores the field of the surrealist object as it emerges at the intersection
of these different approaches to matter and process. Perhaps the connecting
link within the Duchampian field is the ‘infra-mince’ – this notion, developed by
Duchamp in his notes, seems to oscillate itself between matter and immaterial,
bodily presence and absence. The infra-mince can be found in the difference
between two casts from the same mould as much as in the ‘heat of a seat (that
has just been left)’; the folds in a pair of trousers are, according to Duchamp,
‘a sculptural expression of the person who has worn them’, in much the same
way, we may add, as the curled bus ticket found in his or her pocket … .18 The
more political dimensions of such infra-mince phenomena become clearer if
we follow Benjamin Buchloh’s suggestion that the ‘desire to demarcate one’s
somatic existence in space’ animating the Involuntary Sculptures can be linked
(in Orozco’s work for example) to an exploration of ‘the collective dormant
symbolic resistance against the total reification, if not the extinction, of subject/
object relationships’.19
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Introduction 9
Agency and Memory
Subject/object relations certainly lie at the heart of this volume, in which André
Breton’s concern with the ‘objectification of the subjective’ runs like a thread.
The Involuntary Sculptures ‘inhabit a space at once real and phantasmatic’,
concludes Iversen; they ‘act as attentional bridges between the everyday and the
fantasmatic’ according to Lambert-Beatty. As the aura of objects is challenged –
through an appeal to touch, as Harris and Kelly demonstrate, and through the
mediation of photography, as Iversen and Baker suggest – the very definition of
subjectivity is questioned.
In a late essay, Brassaï would argue that the photograph developed in the
darkroom acted as a metaphor for Marcel Proust’s well-known accounts of
‘involuntary memory’, a latent remembrance suddenly triggered by an everyday
object or experience, such as the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea. In that kind
of moment, past and present locations are telescoped, and, according to Proust,
‘our whole person … totters between them … in the vertigo of an uncertainty like
the kind we sometimes experience before an ineffable vision, at the moment
of falling asleep’20 – a state of demi-sommeil that Samantha Lackey relates to
experimental film techniques in this volume. This vertigo can be heightened
not only by alternating states of attention and distraction in film, but also by
the very slippery relation between photography and reality in which, as Buskirk
and Iversen point out, the photograph can shape, and even corrupt, our very
memory of an ephemeral object.
Memory involves collective as well as individual forms of agency. Dezeuze
relates it to biological instincts and everyday practices, while Kelly and Harris
invoke archaic encounters with nature. Welchman focuses on the vast collective
unconscious that Mike Kelley mines through his explorations of American popular
culture. In this sense, the ‘involuntary’ is identified with the ‘anonymous’ or the
‘impersonal’, as Paul Eluard would in his 1942 book of Poésie involontaire et
poésie intentionnelle, a collection that includes, alongside extracts from writers
such as Francis Ponge or Raymond Queneau, a selection of children’s tales and
questions, as well as found items including names of flowers, a description
from a magician’s catalogue, and a bizarre news item.21 Just as Eluard sought
to demonstrate that poetry has never been the property of poets alone, the
Involuntary Sculptures raise crucial issues of authorship and agency, and the
broader question of how exactly such individual and collective unconscious
desires can be embodied in objects and photographs. Whether approaching
them through anthropology or psychoanalysis, through educational theories or
studies of everyday life, the essays in this book probe these complex questions.
Rather than providing a final and unified answer, what we hope to demonstrate
is that the ramifications of the Involuntary Sculptures can extend from the
beginnings of sculpture to contemporary practices, and into fields outside the
history of art itself – a true testimony to the lasting impact of surrealism.
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10 Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art
Notes
1 Instances of this include Michel Frizot and Dominique Païni (eds), Sculpter
Photographier/Photographie Sculpture (Paris, 1993), Erika Billeter (ed.), Skulptur im
Licht der Fotografie (Duisburg, 1997) and Geraldine Johnson (ed.), Sculpture and
Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension (Cambridge, 1998).
2 See for example Hélène Pinet, ‘La Sculpture, la photographie et le critique’, Jacques
Leenhardt, ‘Au-delà de la matière: Brancusi et la photographie’, and Elizabeth A.
Brown, ‘L’atelier métaphorique’, in Frizot and Païni (eds), Sculpter Photographier,
pp. 85–91, pp. 33–9 and pp. 41–55; Paul Paret, ‘Sculpture and its Negative: The
Photographs of Constantin Brancusi’, and Hélène Pinet, ‘Montrer est la question
vitale: Rodin and Photography’, in Johnson (ed.), Sculpture and Photography,
pp. 101–30 and 68–85.
3 Thomas McEvilley, Sculpture in the Age of Doubt (New York, 1999), p. 42.
4 Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism’, October 19 (Winter
1981), p. 31.
5 Salvador Dalí, ‘Photographic Data’ [1929], quoted by Simon Baker in ‘Watch Out for
Life: The Conceptual Close-Up, 1920–2006’, in Dawn Ades and Simon Baker, Close-
Up: Proximity and Defamiliarisation in Art, Film and Photography (Edinburgh, 2008),
p. 78.
6 Dawn Ades, ‘Little Things: Close-up in Photo and Film, 1839–1963’, in Ades and
Baker, Close-Up, p. 48.
7 Baker, ‘Watch Out for Life’, in Ades and Baker, Close-Up, p. 95.
8 Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson, ‘Photography’s Double Index (A Short History
in Three Parts)’, in Kelsey and Stimson (eds), The Meaning of Photography
(Willliamstown, MA and New Haven, 2008), p. xvii.
9 Douglas Fogle (ed.), The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960–82
(Minneapolis, 2003).
10 Lucy Lippard, ‘Preface’, in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from
1966 to 1972 (London, 1973), p. 5.
11 Lawrence Alloway, ‘The Expanding and Disappearing Work of Art’, Auction, III/2
(October 1969), reprinted in Alloway, Topics in American Art since 1945 (New York,
1975), p. 207.
12 William Pietz, ‘The Problem of the Fetish, Part I’, Res, 9 (Spring 1985), p. 6.
13 Helen Molesworth, ‘Introduction: Part Object, Part Sculpture’, in H. Molesworth
(ed.), Part Object Part Sculpture (Columbus, OH, 2005), p. 25.
14 Ibid., p. 25.
15 Briony Fer, ‘The Scatter: Sculpture as Leftover’, in Molesworth (ed.), Part Object Part
Sculpture, pp. 222–33.
16 Ibid., p. 231.
17 Fogle, ‘The Last Picture Show’, in The Last Picture Show, p. 10.
18 Marcel Duchamp, Notes (Paris, 1999), pp. 21, 34 (our translation).
19 Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Gabriel Orozco: Sculpture as Recollection’, in Yve-Alain Bois (et
al.), Gabriel Orozco (London, 2006), p. 178.
Dezeuze Book.indb 10 2/13/2013 10:15:48 AM
Introduction 11
20 Brassaï, Proust in the Power of Photography [1997], trans. R. Howard (Chicago,
2001), p. 137.
21 Paul Eluard, Poésie involontaire et poésie intentionnelle (Paris, 1942).
Dezeuze Book.indb 11 2/13/2013 10:15:49 AM
5ashgate.com © copyrighted material ashgate.com
Richard Wentworth’s Making
Do, Getting By and the Elusive
Everyday
Anna Dezeuze
As an artwork, the status of Richard Wentworth’s series of photographs entitled
Making Do, Getting By is, in many senses, uncertain. Wentworth is a sculptor,
and it is alongside his sculptural work, rather than as part of it, that he has
been taking, since 1970, thousands upon thousands of photographs of human
interventions in their environment as he encounters them randomly in the street:
the headlight of a red Austin Mini kept in place by a diagonal piece of red tape,
a chair and broomstick used to reserve a parking space (Figure 5.1), a coffee cup
propping a window open (Figure 5.2), a lost leather glove arranged on the spike
of a London street railing (Figure 5.4). An early batch was first included in an
article for Artscribe in 1978 under the title ‘Making Do and Getting By’; a video
was made with them in 1985, many of them have been shown by Wentworth
in his talks and lectures, and they have even been exhibited in museums and
galleries.1 Yet Wentworth remains ambivalent about them – he refuses to see
them as artworks, but he often uses them as a way of speaking about his interests
without discussing his sculpture; he is frank about their low market value, but
admits they have acquired an ‘iconic’ status over the years.2
Brassaï and Dalí’s Involuntary Sculptures (Figure I.1) are similarly ambivalent
– anonymously published, they cannot be considered as ‘works’ by either artist
in the same way as their photographs or painting respectively. Dismissed at the
time as bad photographs (Paul Eluard had to plead to have them included in
Minotaure), they have also acquired a ‘mythic’ status, not least for Wentworth,
who included them in an exhibition that he curated.3 Rather than try to fix the
status of these works, this essay will explore these ambiguities by focusing on
a set of intertwined issues including the notion of automatism and our relation
to everyday objects. Although Wentworth’s sculptural practice will be referred
to, it is his photographs that interest me here, as I explore some of the ways
in which his photographic practice and statements shed light on his relation to
sculpture, found objects and the everyday. By presenting Wentworth’s Making
Do, Getting By series as an update of Brassaï and Dalí’s joint project, I wish
both to demonstrate the radicality of the Involuntary Sculptures and point
to their shared preoccupations. In turn, Wentworth’s series can be seen as
a forerunner for many artistic practices exploring the everyday since the late
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5.1 Richard 1980s and early 1990s.4 The specific kind of approach to the everyday will be
Wentworth, Kings discussed here in relation to theories of everyday life, in particular Michel de
Cross, London, Certeau’s 1980 Practice of Everyday Life.
colour print made
from transparency,
11 × 7 cm, 1978,
from the Making
Do, Getting By
Anonymous Sculptures
series. British
Council Collection Describing the Involuntary Sculptures, Wentworth immediately relates the
© Richard everyday objects to art: the image of the bread, he says, is ‘almost more like
Wentworth a photograph of a ceramic, because baking and ceramics are really the same
thing’ (C, p. 13), and the ‘twirls’ of the bus ticket are described as architectural
‘volutes’ (C, p. 13) (with this comparison, Wentworth is intuitively pointing to
the art nouveau architecture evoked in Dalí’s captions). For Wentworth, the
world is already full of sculpture. A wall is an ‘amazing piece of sculpture’, ‘worth
a lot of Henry Moores’ (C, p. 8) and he finds ‘empty cigarette packets folded
up under table legs more monumental than a Henry Moore’.5 The repeated
reference to Moore is not coincidental: Wentworth used to work as his assistant.
Unlike Moore, however, it is not in the natural world that Wentworth finds his
everyday sculptures but in the resolutely man-made field of the architectural,
the artisanal, and the do-it-yourself. Rather than reiterating the traditional trope
of life imitating art, Wentworth claims his motive for taking his photographs
extends beyond the field of his specific sculptural practice: ‘I think I’m just
trying to remind myself that the world is made’ (C, p. 16). The idea of the world
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as ‘made’ relates to two different ideas: that very little of the world has been 5.2 Richard
spared human intervention (even landscape, Wentworth reminds us, is a human Wentworth, South
invention), and that all our perceptions are culturally defined (we can see Pop West France 2007,
unique colour
art everywhere because it has infiltrated so many spheres of our lives). One- photograph, 29.6 ×
to-one comparisons of artworks and everyday objects are ‘babyish’, Wentworth 42 cm, 2007, from
admits (C, p. 16), and none of his photographs refer to specific artists or artworks the Making Do,
directly. Wentworth’s ‘reminders’ are more general: they point to the age-old, Getting By series.
infinite, teeming activity of humans coming to grips with the world. Courtesy the
This process is necessarily performative. Just as the bread in the Involuntary artist and Lisson
Sculptures was ‘flat at some point’ before being ‘rolled and … put in the kiln’ Gallery. © Richard
Wentworth
(C, p. 13), the pieces of paper have been ‘rolled’, and the toothpaste ‘spread’, as
the captions themselves suggest. The concrete, material actions embodied by
these past participles bring to mind American sculptor Richard Serra’s 1967–68
Verb List related to the kind of ‘process art’ that he was developing at the time.
Indeed, Serra’s list not only starts with the verb ‘to roll’, and includes ‘to spread’,
but also introduces infinitives that could describe other activities involved in the
Involuntary Sculptures, such as ‘to tear’, ‘to twist’, ‘to spill’, ‘to discard’ … In this
context, it is not surprising that Wentworth cites Serra’s series of works involving
molten lead being thrown onto the floor and walls of the gallery as an example
of ‘automatic sculpture’ (C, p. 15). (The series included the 1968 Splashing and
the 1969 Casting, both made at the Leo Castelli Warehouse in New York.) What is
‘automatic’ about Serra’s work, according to Wentworth, is its reliance on gravity
and the very physical process of change in the material itself. It is about the
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102 Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art
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direct relation between the human gesture and its material embodiment – as
Serra laconically put it: ‘It’s how we do what we do that confers meaning on what
we’ve done.’6
The Involuntary Sculptures may share the same vocabulary as Serra’s
monumental works, but are decidedly less spectacular: unlike Serra’s spilled
liquid metal (Splashing) or rolled sheet of lead (Thirty-five Feet of Lead Rolled
Up, 1968), the gob of toothpaste or rolled-up piece of paper in Brassaï’s
photographs are products of everyday activities which we hardly notice (let
alone produce wearing a ‘heroic’ working attire including leather gloves and a
helmet). Similarly, Wentworth’s description of how ‘“[p]utting” and “placing”
encompass a hierarchy of alignments – laying, leaning, propping, wedging,
chocking, jamming’ may evoke a range of ‘prop’ works realised by Serra (Figure
5.3), but he is in fact speaking of the ways in which we use objects in everyday
life, from the ‘out-of-work domestic broom’ casually propped in a corner, to the
apparently endless variety of objects wedged under doors and windows to keep
them open (MD, p. 23) (Figure 5.2).
By highlighting the physical qualities of each fragment, the close-up
photography of Brassaï brings out the close relation between gesture and object.
These photographs, argues Wentworth, are ‘like very good animation’ (C, p. 13);
they bring these objects to life, and suggest the movements of rolling, spreading,
baking. Rosalind Krauss has discussed the crucial role of photography in framing
reality and presenting it to our attention; she argues that the Involuntary
Sculptures only exist through the framing and enlarging activity of the camera.7
This is closely related to Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the way photography
reveals an ‘optical unconscious’ through such means as enlargement and the
slowing of motion which extend our perceptive capacities. As an example,
Benjamin suggests that only photography can tell us ‘what happens during the
fraction of a second when a person steps out’.8 Wentworth turned to photography
precisely because he was interested in such ‘momentary and fleeting’ gestures
which are ‘rarely “seen,” just caught in a glimpse’. The optical unconscious, then,
that the camera reveals in Brassaï’s and Wentworth’s ‘involuntary sculptures’ is
not only an extension of our conscious perception. As Krauss has put it, ‘what the
camera frames and thereby makes visible is the automatic writing of the world:
the constant, uninterrupted production of signs’.9 It is photography that ‘reminds
us that the world is made’, in Wentworth’s terms, that allows us to see ‘things
that are in the world, that are made by us, that we don’t quite see’ (C, p. 13).
In contrast to the dramatically lit and enlarged Involuntary Sculptures,
however, Wentworth’s snapshots are spontaneous, lacking according to him
‘any degree of control over lighting, and the other unpredictable context factors’
(MD, p. 21). They are more ‘banal’, and seek to ‘celebrate’ what they show rather
than impose a specific authorial style. These characteristics are inherent to
amateur photography, which models itself largely on the documentary tradition.
Wentworth’s photographs embody the point at which surrealist, documentary
and amateur photography coincide. As Ian Walker has suggested, surrealist
photography is characterised by a documentary impulse, which is predicated on
the belief that the marvellous is inherently present in reality, and hence needs
only to be revealed.10 The amateur photographer, according to Julian Stallabrass,
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5.3 Richard Serra, Prop, lead antimony, sheet, 152.4 × 152.4 cm, 1968, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Gift of Penny and Mike Winton, 1977 © 2011 Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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104 Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art
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similarly believes that ‘[t]he ideal is somehow brought out from behind
the real, producing a world of beauty, wonder and sense’.11 Unsurprisingly,
amateur photography made its appearance within surrealism, from Jacques-
André Boiffard’s deliberately deadpan illustrations for André Breton’s Nadja
to the many found images scattered throughout surrealist reviews such as La
Révolution surréaliste and Documents. Moreover, the image of the snapshot
(l’instantané), with its connotations of photographic immediacy, is referred to
more than once in surrealist writings. In the text on art nouveau architecture
which follows the Involuntary Sculptures, Dalí for example speaks of columns
which ‘emerge for the first time in the world of the hard undulations of sculpted
water with the photographic concern of the snapshot’.12 The ‘ornamental
automatism’ of these columns, like that of the bus ticket or the piece of soap, is
thus closely linked to the ways in which they seem to fix these energies as if in a
snapshot, thus emerging as the ‘realisation of solidified desires’.13 As Walker has
pointed out, a comparison was implied between the immediacy of the snapshot,
with its connotations of authenticity and innocence, and surrealist automatic
writing, which is written so quickly as not to be contrived.14 Similarly, despite
his awareness of photographic traditions, Wentworth insists that he remains
an amateur photographer who takes his pictures very quickly, in a mode that
cannot be ‘knowing’.15
If the amateur photographer appeared only sporadically in the context of
surrealism, (s)he would become a crucial model for the development of conceptual
photography in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Jeff Wall has argued, amateur
photography came to serve a variety of pivotal functions at that moment.16 In
terms of the history of the medium, the adoption of amateur photography broke
with both the avant-garde tradition of aesthetic photography and the canon,
developed from the 1920s to the 1950s, of what Wall calls ‘photojournalism-
as-art’. The adoption of this medium, untainted by any ‘high art’ credentials,
consequently acted as a more general avant-garde ploy to develop ‘mimetic
relationships with other social production processes’ in order to challenge the
autonomy of art.17 Wentworth’s photographic series, started in 1970, emerged
in parallel with conceptual photography and resolutely affirmed a relation to
‘social production processes’ other than either the history of photography or
the realm of autonomous sculpture. Like Dan Graham’s illustrations for his essay
on the new types of vernacular architecture (Homes for America, 1966–67), or
Robert Smithson’s parodic photo-essay celebrating a ‘rotting industrial town’
in New Jersey (The Monuments of Passaic, 1967), Wentworth’s photographs
occupy a grey zone between the documentation of existing places, objects and
activities, and works of conceptual art. If Wentworth’s snapshots thus easily
find a place in the photographic arena opened by photoconceptual works such
as Graham’s or Smithson’s, they are less concerned, however, with parodying
the photojournalist tradition. Where Smithson and Graham were responding
to American minimalism, Wentworth’s formal preoccupations focused on
general sculptural processes involved in everyday arrangements of found and
readymade objects. In this sense, he has been extending the conceptual artists’
project to locate ‘the impulse toward self-sufficient and non-objective forms of
art in concrete, personal responses to real life, social experiences’.18
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For Wall, the ‘amateur’ style appeared as the most appropriate tool for
undermining the ‘objectivist and positivist’ styles of both minimalism and
photojournalism because ‘[t]he pictures are, as reductivist works, models of our
actual relations with their subjects, rather than dramatized representations that
transfigure those relations by making it impossible for us to have such relations
with them’.19 The issue of ‘transfiguration’ is an ongoing problem of photography
– Benjamin himself complained as early as 1937 that German avant-garde
photographers could ‘no longer photograph a tenement block or a refuse heap
without transfiguring it’.20 This transfiguration operates at different levels:
making the photographed object look more beautiful than it is (in the aesthetic
picture), or making it stand as a symbol for a wider message (for example, in the
humanism of documentary-as-art photography), and generally transforming the
object into the expression of the individual photographer’s style. These processes
are encapsulated by the most basic term of framing – how you frame reality
will decide how it is transfigured. Wentworth’s refusal to ‘transfigure’ objects
was expressed in his vehement objection to psychologist Richard Gregory’s
suggestion that going around and leaning frames on found objects would be the
same thing as taking photographs (C, p. 17). For Wentworth, the photographs
are only interesting because they are not isolating objects from reality so
much as capturing the ‘involuntary sculptures’ as they are being produced in
everyday life. Since these sculptures are context-specific, any framing would be
a transfiguration; it would distort ‘our actual relations with their subjects’, to
use Wall’s terms. Brassaï’s Involuntary Sculptures, Wentworth remarks, seem to
float in ‘outer space’: in the process of being framed, lit and presented to our
scrutiny on glass plates, they have been wrenched out of their context.21 Finding
the marvellous behind the surface of the everyday may be the aim of both the
amateur photographer and the surrealist, but once the marvellous is revealed,
its dialectical relation with the everyday threatens to be forever lost.
In addition to its deadpan style, conceptual photography often focuses on
deliberately bland, banal, or trivial subject matter. If Wentworth’s photographs
share an interest in the trivial, their subject matter remains nonetheless less
aggressively boring, so to speak, than Ed Ruscha’s 1962 photographs of 26 petrol
stations along Route 66 between Los Angeles to Oklahoma City, for example,
partly because the processes that they record systematically introduce a
narrative within the image, however discreet. How far these narratives involve
the transfiguration of the everyday hinges on two issues that I shall examine in
the next sections: the ways in which objects are invested with psychic drives, and
the definition of everyday life itself.
‘Neurotic’ Objects
Wentworth’s world is filled with the murmur of objects. In the same way as
materials are handled to create objects, objects are named and arranged to
construct what Wentworth has called ‘a whole language of low-level message-
sending’.22 For example, buildings used to be inscribed with inlaid letters, because
‘people were very busy telling you who they were’ (C, p. 6); the names of four-
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106 Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art
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by-four cars – ‘Warrior’, ‘Shogun’, ‘Patrol’, ‘Cherokee’ – evoke the American and
Japanese military (C, p. 7); even walls ‘express different kinds of power’ (C, p.
22) (one need only think of the wall built in Israel). In contrast with these very
public statements of power, Wentworth’s photographs tend to focus on the
equally talkative ‘mundane improvisations’ of everyday life (MD, p. 21) by which
a ‘discarded cardboard box’ – or a household chair (Figure 5.1) – positioned in
the middle of a parking place may be too flimsy to physically prevent someone
from parking, but ‘by deliberate placement it can form a sign which matches any
neon directive’ (MD, p. 23).
Speaking about the Brassaï and Dalí Involuntary Sculptures, Wentworth
exclaimed: ‘the one that I really adore is a kind of neurotic furling of a bus ticket’
(C, p. 13). Other comparable everyday ‘neuroses’ according to him include the
‘area of the chewed pencil’ (Krauss, for her part, evokes ‘those pieces of eraser
that we unconsciously knead’).23 Dalí’s ironic introduction of the term ‘débile
mental’ (‘mentally defective’ person) into the caption for the rolled-up piece
of paper belongs to the range of pathological vocabulary that he mobilises in
his text on art nouveau architecture. Amid pseudo-scientific references to such
psychoanalytical terms as megalomania, hysteria, onanism, coprophagia, and the
‘sadistic-anal complex’, Dalí seems to define ‘débilité mentale’ as the opposite of
‘the act of reason’ (l’activité raisonnante) and sets up a connection, established in
studies of the art of the mentally ill, between ‘pathological communications’ and
an ‘ornamental exacerbation’.24 These seem to be brought together in the comical
phrase ‘positive lyrical imbecility’. Though not following Dalí’s exaggerated use
of psychoanalysis, Wentworth’s reference to ‘neurosis’ in its contemporary
vulgarized sense brings to the fore the psychological dimensions of our relations
to objects. Like Freud’s ‘psychopathology of everyday life’, Wentworth and Dalí
find evidence of unconscious behaviour in our most banal actions. Indeed, in
some everyday scenarios described by Freud, people’s relation to objects speak
volumes – a mislaid bunch of keys postpones a dreaded departure, while an
acquaintance’s overcoat thrown on the back of a chair proclaims to Freud:
‘There’s no room for you here, you’re superfluous now’.25 Evidence of what
Wentworth describes as everyday ‘psycho-sexual’ behaviour is given by the artist
as he ends his discussion of the Involuntary Sculptures by describing the way in
which one of his teenage sons used to put the remote control in his mouth when
he watched television (C, p. 14). The ‘little teeth marks’ on the remote control
betray an oral fixation which, we imagine, is only slightly more unusual than the
compulsion to chew the end of a pencil. Indeed, for Wentworth, it seems that any
object can be potentially psychologically charged as long as it triggers a reaction
in what he calls his ‘nervous system’ (C, p. 3). When his other son phoned him to
say that he had found an abandoned wooden staircase, Wentworth admits that
the description was ‘quite erotic’ but that once he saw the object he realised it
‘was absolutely no good’ for him because he hadn’t found it himself (C, p. 18). In
the same way, Wentworth explains, ‘you don’t want people sent to you because
somebody says “this is your kind of sexual treat”’ (C, p. 18). What this suggests
is that a general field of desire brings together actions as apparently different
as chewing a remote control and holding a pencil in one’s mouth to free one’s
hands to do something else.
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The potentially erotic nature of the found object was most strikingly
celebrated by André Breton in his 1937 L’Amour fou, in which he recounts how
he purchased a wooden spoon decorated with a tiny shoe at the flea market,
only to realise that it provided an unexpected resolution to a whole string of
desires (see Figure 8.2).26 The surrealist belief in ‘objective chance’ as an external
phenomenon that revealed internal repressed desires certainly opened up new
ways of perceiving everyday objects. Unlike Breton, however, Wentworth never
explains exactly why this wooden staircase was ‘no good’ or why, conversely,
this or that other object fulfils a quasi-erotic desire. The nature of this desire
may be as idiosyncratic as Breton’s personal associations of the spoon and its
slipper with Cinderella and with genital imagery, but it remains enigmatic. In
contrast, the series of photographs by Wentworth, which show the results of
people arranging and placing objects in the world in response to functional needs
rather than personal obsessions, seem to map out more transparently a web of
collective ‘neurotic’ desires and anxieties through the repetition of patterns of
behaviour. But to what, then, do these desires and anxieties relate?
Wentworth himself points out that certain aspects of ‘fiddling’ can lead to
a ‘rather sexual’ kind of pleasure. ‘Discovering that things fit’ – like a bottle cap
on the bottom of a walking stick – is a case in point for him (C, p. 20). This kind
of fiddling evokes an image discussed by Breton in relation to his slipper-spoon –
that of Cinderella’s foot fitting perfectly into the glass slipper presented to her by
Prince Charming.27 For Breton, the sexual content of this image evokes the bliss
of being united with the ‘lost object’ that he had been longing for, thanks to the
encounter with the ‘unique’ woman who could love and be loved by him (according
to Hal Foster, this woman is ultimately revealed to be the phallic mother).28 If
Wentworth clearly distances himself from the surrealists’ quasi-mystical belief
in the conjunction of love, ‘objective chance’ and the marvellous, the avowedly
‘sexual’ nature of his interest in objects could be situated in the area of a similarly
pleasurable construction of meaning within the chaos of everyday life. I would
suggest that in Wentworth’s universe, the trouvaille that perhaps comes closest to
Breton’s purchase of the slipper-spoon is the instance in which an artist friend of his
once threw down to him, from her window, the keys to her flat concealed inside a
rubber glove: ‘as it fell to earth it looked like a greeting or the hand of God smiting
me from on high’, he recalls.29 Conceived as a simple device to deal with a broken
door buzzer, the ‘key-glove’ object becomes a new entity, bringing together the
ideas of ‘hand, warmth, salute, entrance’, and creating, according to Wentworth, ‘a
visual event with a metaphorical charge which is inevitable, dense with meaning’.
Wentworth’s notion of ‘inevitability’ seems to be a version of Breton’s ‘objective
chance’, stripped of any belief in fate or of a longed-for return to a state of happiness.
The surrealist trouvaille is not, however, only related to the fulfilment of
desire. As Foster has pointed out, its uncanny characteristics reveal an undertow
of irretrievable loss and, ultimately, death. If the lost object signals an impossible
return to the womb, it is necessarily condemned to be sought again and again,
and never found. Similarly, while Wentworth celebrates the pleasures of ‘making
do and getting by’, his photographs also point to the precariousness and fragility
of these endeavours, as human constructions are constantly destroyed. ‘I like to
be near things that are falling – actually sometimes physically. I like to be near
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5.4 Richard things at the end of their social life’, explains Wentworth (C, p. 18). Describing a
Wentworth, flea market in Berlin, Wentworth finds himself thinking of refugee camps during
London the war, before returning to the topic of how one can rescue ‘that plate lying in
1994, unique
photographic
the gutter’ or let it disappear into the landfill, and then evoking his fascination
print, 43.5 × 51 × with cemeteries (C, p. 19). Many photographs show objects caught in a perilous
6.5 cm, 1999, from balance – a cup keeping a window open (Figure 5.2), a leather glove impaled
the Making Do, on street railings (Figure 5.4), a whole choreography of ‘resistance to gravity’.30
Getting By series. Falling is of course associated with death and destruction. ‘One of the primary
Courtesy the things about being alive is trying to stand upright, which is why the act of falling
artist and Lisson over is really quite a catastrophe’, explains the artist (C, p. 24). From this basis
Gallery. © Richard
Wentworth
Wentworth relishes the possibility of balancing objects audaciously and ‘getting
away with it’, while acknowledging that this exhilaration operates at this brief,
transient moment that reminds us that ‘we’re all going to die’ (C, p. 25).
With the idea of the ‘falling object’, Wentworth thus brings together two
characteristics of both his photographic and sculptural work: the frequent
inclusion of (metaphorically fallen) used, outmoded or discarded objects, and the
recurrent gestures of spilling and dropping objects (which have literally fallen).
The sculptural activities of propping, balancing, spreading, and rolling materials
relating to the Involuntary Sculptures and Serra’s process art thus become
laden with the psychological connotations associated with the precarious birth
and death of forms. Moreover, in the photographs, objects are often found on
pavements and floors, in corners or at the interstices of windows and doors,
squeezed between railings or behind a drain, suspended in spaces of transition
between value and junk, between existence and disappearance.
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The ‘neurotic’ behaviours described by Wentworth and Dalí merge with the
background noise of the everyday activities with which we engage with the
world of objects. Just as Georges Perec spoke of the written traces that we all
leave behind in our daily shopping lists, tax returns and scribbles on ‘a metro
ticket, the margin of a newspaper, a cigarette packet, the back of an envelope’,31
the sculptures unearthed by Wentworth or Dalí and Brassaï are residues of our
existence in the world. Like Perec, who considers the empty page less as a tabula
rasa than as a space of inscription, Wentworth resolutely locates the sculptor’s
activity in a world already teeming with man-made objects and interventions, as
compulsive as fiddling, biting a remote control or kneading pieces of erasers. ‘The
constant, uninterrupted production of signs’ associated by Krauss with surrealist
photography is the very texture of the everyday, and Wentworth the sculptor/
photographer, rather than working in the isolation of the studio, eagerly joins in
the general conversation. As Maurice Blanchot put it, the everyday is ‘the soft
human murmur in us, around us’ which disappears as soon as we try to listen to
it, but can be heard when we also start to chatter.32
Ways of Doing
‘I feel very strongly they don’t belong to me’, Wentworth explained about his
photographs, ‘it’s a linguistic space, if you like’ (C, p. 16). This definition of the
everyday as a linguistic space was most systematically pursued by Michel de
Certeau in his Practice of Everyday Life. Just as Certeau argues that our ‘ways of
doing’ are comparable to our ‘ways of speaking’,33 Wentworth explains that an
arrangement of objects in order to hold a parking place is ‘like somebody who
just puts together a really decent sentence and you think: “well, I actually liked
hearing that”’ (C, p. 11). The linguistic theories that Certeau deploys focus on the
performative nature of language. Language is shared by all but used differently by
each; what these theories emphasise is the ways in which each speaker operates
within this field, appropriating it for his or her own purposes, situating it in a
specific context (which includes a place, a moment and an audience). Similarly,
Certeau focuses on the new ‘ways of using the products imposed by a dominant
economic power’.34
‘Making Do’ (‘Faire avec’) is, in fact, the title of chapter 3 of The Practice of
Everyday Life. In this chapter, Certeau develops his most important contribution
to studies of the everyday – a definition of the fundamental characteristics of
everyday life as a ‘practice’. Wentworth’s series of photographs share more than
a title with Certeau’s work: the sculptor’s succinct definition of what ‘making
do’ means – ‘[p]redicaments will always provoke idiosyncratic responses
and solutions’ (MD, p. 22) – constitutes the very starting point for Certeau’s
conception of everyday life. For Certeau, everyday life is indeed a ‘predicament’
to which people react, as they ‘tinker with and within the dominant cultural
economy to obtain innumerable and infinitesimal metamorphoses of its law into
their interests and their own rules’.35 The French term used by Certeau is bricoler,
which is related to bricolage, the activity of repairing or constructing objects
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by using whatever parts are at hand, in the way of handymen or do-it-yourself
enthusiasts. Bricolage is of course what Wentworth’s ‘fiddlers’ do, as they use
the odds and ends around them to respond to a specific situation. Wentworth’s
idea of resourcefulness is the equivalent of what Certeau calls ‘ruses’ – the tricks
employed by users of a given order to make it their own. Bricolage is a site of
pleasure: the ‘erotic’ thrill of fiddling mentioned by Wentworth echoes the plaisir
and jouir that Certeau associates with everyday practices.
The central distinction introduced by Certeau to describe the relations
between producers and bricoleurs/users, between language and individual acts
of speaking, is his well-known opposition between ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’.36
Strategies operate in a space that has been circumscribed as an isolated whole to
be defended against exterior threats, whereas tactics exist within a space which
is not their own, and need to fight this more powerful entity from within a space
over which they have no control. The only means, then, for tactics to counter this
imposed order lie in taking advantage of specific moments in which ‘breaches’
open within the architecture of surveillance and strategies. Tactics thrive in a
temporal, rather than a spatial, sphere – they require agents to be nimble, alert,
quick to seize opportunities as and when they arise.
The temporal dimension of these practices lies at the heart of Wentworth’s
photographs, which capture ephemeral, transient situations, in a given context.
As a photographer, he himself has to take notice of what is presented to him and
turn it to his advantage. Strikingly, the ‘out-of-work domestic broom’ leaning in
a doorway mentioned by Wentworth was a favoured motif for the nineteenth-
century British photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot, who used it
as an illustration of the photographer’s skill at spotting an interesting visual
arrangement in his everyday surroundings. As Robin Kelsey has suggested, the
propped broom evokes the gnomon of a sundial, visualising the precise moment
in time at which the photographer encountered his composition.37 While Kelsey
suspects that Talbot in fact deliberately arranged these brooms in their doorways,
Wentworth’s photographs appear to be more genuinely spontaneous, and the
sculptor never directly uses the arrangements and ‘events’ that he witnesses in
the street, either by exhibiting them as his own artworks, or making works based
on them. As Certeau explained, the temporal order of tactics never allows any
gain to be kept, as there is nowhere to ‘stock’ any new ‘benefits’. The snapshot
captures the practices at the very moment when they operate a tactical move, as
they are ‘hijacking’ found and readymade objects to fulfil an urgent function, just
as a guerrilla fighter organises punctual raids, kidnappings and targeted attacks
(‘to hijack’ is one of the more dramatic translations of détourner, the French
term used by Certeau).
The relation between tactics and guerrilla fighting suggests a political dimension
of resistance in everyday practices. If Certeau sees political ramifications to
practices of everyday life – in particular with the turn to ‘punctual actions’, ‘local
operations’ and ‘ecological groups’38 – his notion of ‘tactical’ behaviours remains
a far cry from any traditional political activism. Indeed, most ‘tactical’ activities
described by Certeau are hardly subversive – shopping, cooking, walking are things
that most of us have, after all, little choice in doing. It is only within constraints
that ruses can emerge. This process is captured by a paradoxical term used by
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Certeau as he speaks of a ‘common and silent, almost sheeplike subversion’ (une
subversion commune et silencieuse, quasi moutonnière).39 Wentworth, for his
part, has couched his interest in the ‘rub’ between what he calls ‘formalism’ and
the ‘ripostes to formalism’ as a general form of ‘resistance’.40
Notions of agency and intention appear central to our understanding
of Certeau’s politics and Wentworth’s photographs. Certeau goes as far as
comparing everyday tactics with the ‘simulations’ and ‘tricks’ of fish and plants –
the ‘art’ of ‘making do’ goes back beyond ‘the institution itself of consciousness’,
it has survived through ‘a memory without language, from the bottom of the
oceans to the streets of our megalopolises’.41 In his conversation with Wentworth,
brain scientist Mark Lythgoe introduced a similar kind of reasoning as he
suggested that the artist’s photographs relate to a survival instinct ‘laid down
in our genes’.42 According to Lythgoe, when you make a good decision based
on resourcefulness, your brains generate ‘a few chemicals, giving you a buzz, a
little rush’, as a ‘reward for getting it right’. This encourages us ‘to remember a
good move or ingenious act, just in case we might need it in the future to help
our survival strategy’. What Wentworth finds in the everyday practices that he
photographs, Lythgoe suggested, is this very ‘buzz’ or ‘rush’. Wentworth agreed
with him, and suggested that this sounds ‘as near a metaphor for an orgasm’ as
he has ever heard. This would seem to add an evolutionary spin to the pleasures
and perils of bricolage recast as a metaphor for survival itself.
The issue of agency certainly lay at the heart of surrealism and its
definitions of automatism in particular. Automatism is defined by Breton in
‘The Automatic Message’ as a passive stance, an attempt to ‘grasp involuntary
verbal representation and fix it on the page without imposing on it any kind of
qualitative judgement’.43 In the same text, Breton cites a 1910 article from The
Occult Review which argues that any act, whether it is to write or ‘to toss one’s
hair back’, can become ‘habitual, and therefore outside of the thinker’s control’.44
This seems to outline a grey area of automatism in which the unconscious seems
to be closely linked to habits, reflexes, and even natural instincts such as ‘to
satisfy an appetite’.
As Laurent Jenny has pointed out, Breton’s emphasis on a ‘passive automatism’
posed a challenge for surrealism in as much as it could not easily be reconciled
with a revolutionary programme. In order to be politically and socially viable,
automatism had to become ‘active’, it had to emerge ‘from solipsism, recognising
itself as a symbolic manipulation, engaging collective values’.45 If Dalí was the main
protagonist of the shift towards ‘active automatism’ through the development
of his ‘paranoiac-critical method’, Jenny suggests that Roger Caillois also played
a role in developing the ‘collective values’ involved in symbols emerging from
automatism. With Caillois, for example, the dread felt by the surrealists towards
the praying mantis who consumes her mate during and after copulation was cast
as a universal fear rather than an individual phobia. According to Caillois, the
example of the praying mantis demonstrates that men’s ‘fear of being devoured
by a woman’ is in fact a ‘vestigial residue, in one species, of behavioural patterns
observed in many others’, which fully justifies any castration anxiety.46
If this ‘vestigial residue’ seems to brings us back to the world of instincts and
survival, the other component of Caillois’s discussion of the mantis in the pages
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of Minotaure complicates the picture substantially. For the other feature of the
mantis according to Caillois is its mimetic ability to merge with its background.
Where this is usually described as the animal’s ‘ruse’ to escape from its predators,
however, Caillois proposes that in fact ‘alongside the instinct of self-preservation
that somehow attracts beings towards life, there proves to be a very widespread
instinct d’abandon attracting them toward a kind of diminished existence’.47
This, as Steven Harris has explained, allowed the mantis to become an ‘emblem
of automatism’ itself: not only can the mantis be both active (it consumes its
partner) and passive (it is consumed by space), but its mimetic tendency allows it
to stand for an automatism ‘pushed to its most radical point’,48 the point at which
the identification with what is outside the subject results in the complete loss of
self, rather than the construction of an identity.
In their celebration of the bricoleur’s survival strategies, Certeau’s theory of
everyday life and Wentworth’s photographs lack the anxiety that accompanied
the blows that surrealism first dealt to the unified, centralised subject. The
reason for this, in my opinion, is that Certeau and Wentworth consider the micro-
narratives of agency to be inseparable from the meta-narratives of activities and
processes that take place beyond individual death and life drives. They focus on
what Certeau describes as ‘modes of operation or schemata of action’, rather
than ‘the subjects who are their authors or vehicles’.49 This is why Wentworth
can explain that ‘exactly the same forces are at work in the West as those in the
Third World, which generate shelters built of Coke cans, papered with old copies
of Life magazine’ (MD, p. 22); and why Certeau’s ‘practices of everyday life’ range
from the ruses developed by Latin American indigenous populations forced to
live under their European colonisers’ rule, to the ways in which North African
immigrants inhabit French council housing. The agents of these processes,
according to them, are constantly being redefined by specific circumstances.
Like Perec’s written traces, Certeau’s tactics do not occur in a void: ruses always
draw on a ‘practical’, ‘mobile’ memory ‘nourished by a multitude of events’.50
It is at the moment in which ‘the lightning flash of this memory illuminates
the occasion’ that the personal and the collective are brought together, and
that individual agency temporarily emerges from the murky field of reflexes,
habits, traditions and survival instincts through which it is constituted.51 The
‘occasion’ is the site of Certeau’s tactical ruses, and of Wentworth’s ‘ripostes to
formalism’, and ‘idiosyncratic responses and solutions’. It is in the occasion that
the previously mentioned ‘key-glove’ falling from above takes on its ‘inevitable’
meaning in a form of impersonal objective chance; that the praying mantis, like
the fish and plants mentioned by Certeau, stages its disappearing act, and a
‘sheeplike subversion’ is somehow possible.
Unlike the surrealists, or analysts of everyday life such as Walter Benjamin or
Henri Lefebvre, Certeau does not believe that there are any privileged spaces
that would give us a glimpse of a potential future. Indeed, the everyday always
harbours what Blanchot called ‘the corrosive force of human anonymity’,
which constantly threatens individual agency with dissolution in a general
indeterminacy and irresponsibility – a collective equivalent, perhaps, of the
praying mantis’s instinct d’abandon. If this premise makes it impossible for
Wentworth and Certeau to invest any gesture of resistance with the promise
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of revolution and transformation, it also forces them to develop an innovative
methodology to study these changing, elusive practices that exist at the fleeting
junction between agents and specific circumstances.
Ben Highmore has argued that ‘the relations between tactical and strategic
forms of everyday life’ in Certeau’s writings ‘are being imagined as something
like the relationship between the unconscious and the conscious “modes” in
Freudian psychoanalysis’.52 This methodological approach firstly allows Certeau
to cast the tactics of everyday life as permeating all spheres of the strategic order,
in the same way as the unconscious escapes through our conscious barriers with
everyday slips of the tongue and other psychopathologies of everyday life. The
two spheres – of conscious and unconscious, of tactics and strategies – are seen
to inhabit a common space, that of the everyday. Secondly, Certeau can claim
that tactics are constantly censured and repressed by strategies, in the same way
as the conscious seeks to contain unconscious drives. What emerges, then, is the
need to develop a set of tools – like those of psychoanalysis – to draw out the
suppressed practices of what could be called a ‘collective’, ‘cultural’ unconscious.
For if tactics are like the unconscious, the usual strategic taxonomies used to
study everyday life replicate the mechanisms of censorship and defence and only
serve to contain them further.
‘The challenge then of de Certeau’s work is to provide an archival practice
that allows such “tactical” material to proliferate, a practice that can “listen”
to the everyday and hear there the tales of repressed activity.’53 This analysis
by Highmore could also apply to Wentworth’s photographs. Both Wentworth
and Certeau can be seen as creating a ‘science of singularity’: ‘a science of the
relationship that links everyday pursuits to particular circumstances’.54 This is
of course what psychoanalysis also tries to do, as each case study presents an
intrinsically personal experience to be analysed with a range of tools. Where
Certeau privileged interviews and oral history as the sites where a repressed
‘cultural unconscious’ could surface, Wentworth turns to an amateur type
of photography which can let these gestures ‘speak for themselves’, without
the mediation of a ‘strategic’ discourse of interpretation and without, I would
add, transfiguration. Within these potentially endless archival collections, both
projects focus as much on lacunae and absences as on the facts themselves. Just
as Wentworth’s photographs are haunted by absent bodies, Certeau explained
that both tools and proverbs provide ‘imprints of acts or of enunciation
processes’.55 Wentworth himself is aware of the limitations of the archival
process, as he exclaims: ‘I am still amazed at how much information can drop
off in a photograph … as if the world is resisting’ (MD, p. 23). Conversely, with
the optical unconscious, the photograph also captures objects that were not
originally noticed by the photographer. As William Talbot noticed early on, close
examination of a photograph can disclose ‘a multitude of minute details, which
were previously unobserved and unsuspected’.56
The everyday, as Michael Sheringham’s excellent study has demonstrated, has
repeatedly been cast as the ‘unobserved’ and overlooked, which is simultaneously
‘resistant to codification’ and ‘dependent on forms of attention that grasp it as a
totality that only exists modally, at the level of practice or usage’.57 Philosophers
and artists have developed tools to address the opaque stubbornness of everyday
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life, its fundamental indeterminacy. Dalí and Brassaï’s Involuntary Sculptures
certainly present a new ‘mode of attention’ by combining the technique of the
close-up – an established means of bringing to light previously ‘invisible’ objects
– with Dalí’s tongue-in-cheek explanatory captions. Rather than testifying to
biographical obsessions, the performative processes embodied by each ‘sculpture’
evoke collective everyday behaviours, but the deliberate defamiliarisation that
accompanies the close-up stamps these anonymous acts with the authors’
intentions, thus isolating them from the temporality and intersubjectivity typical
of the everyday. The obdurate materiality of reality is hinted at in the sculptural
properties of the objects as traces or residues, and in Dalí’s supposedly explanatory
captions, which in their parody of scientific, sociological and art historical
vocabularies suggest an awareness of the self-defeating project of reading the
everyday through existing forms of knowledge.
Wentworth offers another type of attention, as he explains:
We become accustomed to natural partners – the door and its doormat. When their
positions are disrupted something fundamental happens. The displaced doormat has a
new identity, a shift of an inch or two changes it from passive to active. Such adjustments
invigorate tired and overlooked relationships, as the contradiction, humour and absurdity
of the new alliance presents itself (MD, p. 23).
While the ‘contradiction, humour and absurdity’ that Wentworth highlights can
also be found in the Involuntary Sculptures, amateur photography allowed him
to explore a new form of mediation of the everyday, highlighting its temporal
and intersubjective dimension. Neither bent on profit nor on artistic pride, the
amateur photographer, as Stallabrass explains, finds pleasure precisely in the
erasure of his or her personal investment in the photographed object – like
automatism, it is an actively passive stance, a voluntary renunciation of control.
Photography was able to frame the automatism of the world in general – as
its ‘optical unconscious’ reveals even the smallest gestures that are inscribed
in our bodies, a ‘cultural unconscious’ or ‘practical memory’ at the crossroads
of intent and reflex. But amateur photography is what allows the involuntary to
seep through the interstices of the voluntary gaze of productivity, surveillance
and autonomous art. Unsurprisingly, Wentworth has defined his very activity
of photographing as a kind of automatism: his photographs, he says, are
‘meaningless thoughts, a kind of intake’; he likens their relation to his sculptural
work ‘to the relationship between … appetite and food’.58
If there is a language of objects and a formal vocabulary of everyday
gestures and actions, it can only be grasped ‘at the level of practice or usage’,
as Sheringham put it, in its modes of operation. This is where new definitions of
sculpture as performance echo Certeau’s definition of the everyday, as Serra’s
quote reminds us: ‘It’s how we do what we do that confers meaning on what
we’ve done.’ As Wentworth tries to capture his involuntary sculptures as they are
being produced, in the form of singular yet transient arrangements, barely legible
among the chattering profusion of signs and objects which surround them, and
teetering on the verge of disappearance, he immerses his photographs in the
very rhythms and patterns of everyday experience, and lets them speak of its
endless variations and creative ambiguity.
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Notes
1 See Richard Wentworth, ‘Making Do and Getting By’, Artscribe, 14 (September 1978),
pp. 21–3 (hereafter cited in the text as MD); Michael Archer and Jenni Lomax (dirs),
Making Do and Getting By, videotape (London, 1985). See also Richard Wentworth/
Eugène Atget: Faux Amis (London, 2001).
2 Transcript of Richard Wentworth’s talk at the Manchester Museum, April 2005,
published in Papers of Surrealism 4 (Winter 2005), www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/
papersofsurrealism, pp. 1–26 (Hereafter referred to as C).
3 The exhibition was Thinking Aloud, a national touring exhibition (London, 1998). For
a discussion of the debates surrounding the inclusion of the Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaure, see Chapter 1 in this volume.
4 I will not be developing these comparisons in this text, although they will be included
in a book-length study provisionally entitled Almost Nothing: Precariousness in Art
since the 1960s. I would include in this grouping practices by Gabriel Orozco, Francis
Alÿs, Thomas Hirschhorn, and the duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Orozco’s work
is discussed by Margaret Iversen in Chapter 9.
5 Richard Wentworth, ‘Losing Battles: A Conversation between Richard Wentworth
and Stuart Morgan, May 1984’, in Richard Wentworth (London, 1984), p. 13.
6 Richard Serra, ‘Interview with Liza Béar’, Avalanche (Summer 1973), quoted by
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘Process sculpture and Film in the Work of Richard Serra
(1978)’, in Hal Foster with Gordon Hughes (eds), Richard Serra (Cambridge, MA, and
London, 2000), p. 16.
7 Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism’, October, 19 (Winter
1981), p. 31.
8 Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’ [1931], in One-Way Street, trans.
E. Jephcott and K. Shorter (London, 1979), p. 243. Samantha Lackey also refers to
Benjamin’s ‘optical unconscious’ in Chapter 3 of this volume.
9 Krauss, ‘The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism’, p. 31.
10 Ian Walker, City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in
Interwar Paris (Manchester and New York, 2002).
11 Julian Stallabrass, Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture (London and New York,
1996), p. 23.
12 Salvador Dalí, ‘De la beauté terrifiante et comestible de l’architecture Modern’style’,
Minotaure, 3–4 (1933), p. 72. Unless otherwise specified, all translations are mine.
13 Ibid., p. 74.
14 Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, p. 12.
15 Wentworth, ‘Making Do and Getting By’.
16 Jeff Wall, ‘“Marks of Indifference”: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual
Art’ [1995], in Douglas Fogle (ed.), The Last Picture Show: Artists using Photography,
1960–82 (Minneapolis, 2003), pp. 32–44.
17 Ibid., p. 35.
18 Ibid., p. 37.
19 Ibid., p. 43.
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20 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’ [1934], trans. P. Demez, in Brian Wallis
(ed.), Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York, 1984), p. 304.
21 Wentworth, text message to the author, 22 April 2005.
22 Wentworth, ‘Losing Battles’, p. 14.
23 Krauss, ‘The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism’, p. 31.
24 Dalí, ‘De la beauté terrifiante’, p. 74.
25 Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life [1901], trans. J. Strachey, vol.
6 (London, 1960), p. 211.
26 André Breton, L’Amour fou (Paris, 1937), pp. 47–57. For more about the ‘slipper-
spoon’, see Chapter 2 in this volume; on the importance of the found object for
Breton, see Chapters 8 and 9.
27 Breton, L’Amour fou, p. 54.
28 Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (London and Cambridge, MA, 1993), pp. 42–5.
29 Wentworth, ‘Losing Battles’, p. 15.
30 ‘There’s a hell of a lot of resistance to gravity [in Making Do and Getting By], and
I think my work has a lot to do with gravity.’ Richard Wentworth, quoted by Kevin
Henry, ‘Parallel Universes: Making Do and Getting By + Thoughtless Acts’ (2007),
www.core77.com/reactor/03.07_parallel.asp (accessed: 10 July 2009).
31 Georges Perec, Espèces d’espaces [1974] (Paris, 2000), p. 24.
32 Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris, 1969), p. 361. Translation by Michael
Sheringham in Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present
(Oxford, 2006), p. 20.
33 Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien, vol. 1: Arts de faire [1980], new edition
edited by Luce Giard (Paris, 1990), p. 64.
34 Ibid., p. xxxvii.
35 Ibid., p. xxxviii.
36 Ibid., pp. xlvi–xlviii and pp. 59–63.
37 See Robin Kelsey, ‘Photography, Chance, and The Pencil of Nature’, in Kelsey and
Blake Stimson (eds), The Meaning of Photography (Williamstown, MA, and New
Haven, 2008), pp. 15–33.
38 Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien, p. liii.
39 Ibid., p. 293.
40 Stuart Horodner, ‘The Language of Stuff: An Interview with Richard Wentworth’,
Sculpture, 20(3) (April 2001), p. 19.
41 Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien, p. 65.
42 Richard Wentworth and Mark Lythgoe, ‘The Prehistoric Smile’, in Richard Wentworth,
(London, 2004), p. 47. All subsequent quotations in the paragraph are from this
passage.
43 André Breton, ‘Le Message automatique’, Minotaure, 3–4 (1933), in What is
Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. and trans. F. Rosemont in (New York, 1978),
p. 107.
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44 Ibid., p. 103.
45 Laurent Jenny, ‘From Breton to Dali: the Adventures of Automatism’, trans. T. Trezise,
October, 51 (Winter 1989), p. 109.
46 Roger Caillois, ‘La Mante religieuse’, Minotaure, 5 (1934), trans. C. Frank and C. Naish
in The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham, NC,
and London, 2003), p. 81.
47 Caillois, ‘Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire’, Minotaure, 7 (1935), in The Edge
of Surrealism, p. 102.
48 Steven Harris, ‘Beware of Domestic Objects: Vocation and Equivocation in 1936’, Art
History, 24(5) (November 2001), p. 750.
49 Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien, p. xxxvi.
50 Ibid., p. 125.
51 Ibid., p. 125.
52 Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (London and New
York, 2002), p. 164.
53 Ibid., p. 165.
54 ‘Preface to the English Translation’, in Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday
Life, trans. S.F. Rendall (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1984), p. ix.
55 Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien, p. 39.
56 William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (1844), quoted by Kelsey,
‘Photography, Chance and The Pencil of Nature’, p. 21.
57 Sheringham, Everyday Life, p. 363.
58 ‘The Caledonian Road: a Talk by Richard Wentworth’ in Richard Wentworth,
(Freiburg, 1997), p. 36.
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