R.
What happens when our eyes meet what they cannot see? What happens when they encounter what cannot be encountered? In what way is sight essentially linked to an experience of ruin, an experience of ruin that ruins not only experience but sight itself? Why is it that, in his essay, “Mirror Travel” (1969), Robert Smithson suggests that it is the task of the artist to reconstruct our “inability to see”?

From the moment a technology of the image exists, these questions tell us that sight has always been touched by the night. It is inscribed in a body whose secrets belong to the night. Whether we encounter ourselves through photography, video, digitalized computer images, palimpsestic montages, or even the dust of industrialized pollution, as soon as we are captured by optical technologies that have no need for the light of day, we already belong to the night. We are already ghosts. Moreover, as we know that, once taken, such images can be reproduced in our absence, we also know that, in this world of images–a world composed of “ruins in reverse”–we are haunted by a future that bears our death. Our disappearance is already there.

The entire logic of the world is legible here, and it is legible as the logic of art. Like the world, the work of art allows itself to be experienced only as what withdraws from experience. Its experience–and if it were different it would not be an experience at all–is an experience of the impossibility of experience. The work of art tells us that it is with loss and ruin that we have to live. It is this exposure to the abandonment of sense that composes our lives. The work of art that would remain faithful to this abandonment of sense–and therefore to the world from which it withdraws–would disengage the senses, or the world, from signification. It would expose us to a whirlwind of images–none of which are ever one–in which we could become utterly lost, in which we could no longer find ourselves, in which art could no longer find itself. Refusing to remain a single art–the works of this exhibit, for example, often take place at the intersection of painting, photography, video, sculpture, literature, music, and several other media technologies–it would expose us to a proliferation of multiple and fragmentary views, which refer to nothing. As soon as it takes place, the work of art, consenting to its own disappearance, vanishes–and, in vanishing, in prohibiting its representation, it tells us that it never appears without its shadows, without its hidden features, without the night to which it always returns.

U.
To encounter a work of art means to be exposed to time and images. But if the encounter withdraws us to the necessity of the disappearance into which art withdraws and from which it emerges, it is because works of art refer to time. What we call time is precisely the artwork’s inability to coincide with itself. Exposing the work of art to the movement of its disappearance, it exposes it to ruin, to damage, to destruction. It prevents it from being merely “itself.” This is why a work of art is never already constituted but is always in the process of its constitution. This is also why every work of art is a ruin, and, in particular, a “ruin in reverse.”

This is what Smithson tells us in his essay on the monuments of Passaic. Viewing the temporal and imagistic strata of the New Jersey landscape, he writes: “That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is–all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built.” While ruins may embody time, he suggests, they do not belong to the memory of a past. Instead, they constitute the future. As Smithson explains in his essay “Entropy and the New Monuments” (1966), citing the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, “the future is but the obsolete in reverse.” To be more precise, as a structural feature of any construction, artwork, or image, ruin is the medium of art, of any future art. It is from ruin that art arises. Always in reverse, Smithson’s ruins–unlike the ruins of romanticism (in reverse, that is, of romanticism’s efforts to idealize the ruin or fragment)–seek to remain faithful to the experience of ruin, to the ruin of experience. Rather than reverse the process of ruin, then, the Smithsonian artwork intensifies ruin. It tells us that ruin is irreversible, that there is nothing but ruin.

This is also what the works of Kim Abeles, MANUAL, Robert Flynt and Chris Packard, and Renée Green tell us. Abeles’ smog plates use the dust of industrial pollution as a recording medium; MANUAL re-reads Poussin’s image of death in Arcadia in terms of the many ways in which nature itself has become a ruin; Flynt’s and Packard’s Blind Trust begins from the ruin of bodies in the age of AIDS; and Green’s Partially Buried is mediated by Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed. Green’s project especially, articulated as it is in relation to ruins of all kinds–artistic, historical, political, personal, and so forth–tells us that the ruin in the work of art is the law that forbids its own presentation. This is why, she explains, history can only be viewed as a kind of fragment.

Like the work of art, time is never identical to itself. It can only be what it is by leaving itself, by abandoning itself. Nevertheless, as Kant reminds us, everything passes in time but time itself. Time repeats itself endlessly. It begins in repetition. But what is repeated in time is a movement of differentiation and dispersion–and what is differentiated and dispersed is time itself. This is why what is repeated in time is what is never simply itself, what is always incessantly vanishing. If time is a matter of repetition, it is a repetition only of its own unrepeatability.

This aporetic exposition of time and the work of art prevents a linear, unbroken representation of history. The works of art in this exhibit tell us that, without interrupting the historical continuum, without blasting the techniques of representation, there can be no historical time. No history without the interruption of history. No time without the interruption of time. No work of art without the interruption of the artwork. If, however, this interrupted work of art is still a work of art, then “work of art” means the ruin of the artwork. It means that every work of art offers us ruin.

I.
What would it mean to assume responsibility for a work of art, for a history? How can we respond, for example, to the work and history inscribed within these works of art–especially when, before our eyes, they ruin the distinctions they propose? They bequeath to us a series of images in which we can no longer know what an image is–in which the image, temporalized and filled with history, never appears alone. They offer us a time in which we no longer know what time is–since it has been encrypted and broken within these fragmented, scattered texts and images. We know neither what remains inside or outside the violated images, inside or outside the interrupted time, nor what images and time can be when they are ruined in this way. In exhibiting and archivizing remains, these works remain bound to the survival of the traces of a past and to our ability to read these traces as traces. That these traces are marked historically does not mean that they belong to a specific time, but that they only come to legibility at a specific time. This is why they include reference to the past, the present, and the future, and in such a way that none of these can be isolated from the other.

How are we to interpret these works? How are we to imagine them–within the space of this essay, within the walkways of this gallery? What would responding mean here? Each detail of these works has its force, its logic, its singular place. A condensation of fragmented histories, images, and texts, these works, each in their own way, remain linked to an absolutely singular event, and therefore also to a date, to an historical inscription. They open a space for time itself, dispersing it from its continuous present. Looking both backward and forward, they ask us to think about “context” in general in a different way. (Many of them, in fact–especially the works of Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock and Brian McClave, and Green–make the question of context not only a central concern but also a means of reconceptualizing Smithson’s concept of the relation and difference between site and nonsite specificity.)

What could responding mean here? How can we respond to the experiences commemorated, displaced, and ciphered by these works? How can we respond to what is not presently visible, to what can never be seen within them? If the structure of these works can be defined as what remains inaccessible to visualization, this withholding and withdrawing structure prevents us from experiencing them in their entirety, or, to be more precise, encourages us to recognize that these works, bearing as they always do several memories at once, are never closed. The altering borders of the works are permeable and open. They belong to a process of transformation whereby the works, changing in response to how they are viewed, withdraw from themselves in order to mark their changing relation to their several futures.

N.
This is why, if these works evoke a moment of crisis and destruction, part of what is placed in crisis is the finitude of the context within which we might read them. This is why the effort to determine and impose a meaning on the events transcribed in this or that work, to stabilize the determination of its context, involves both violence and repression. This is also why whatever violence there is in the attempt to establish the context of a particular work remains linked, because of this repression, to an essential nonviolence. It is in this highly unstable and dangerous relationship between violence and nonviolence that responsibilities form, responsibilities that have everything to do with how we read these works, with how we encounter them. Suggesting that there can be no reading of an image that does not expose us to danger, Walter Benjamin warns us of the danger of believing that we have seen or understood an image. For him, the activity of reading is charged with an explosive power that blasts the image to be read from its context. This tearing or breaking force is not an accidental predicate of reading; it belongs to its very structure. History involves the capacity to arrest or immobilize historical movement, to blast the details of an event from the continuum of history. If, for Benjamin, history breaks down into images, however, for several of these artists, these images break down further into the shattered remains of multiple memories.

S.
In what way do these shattered and multiple images provide the grounds for a practice of recollection? Can we say that the palimpsestic superimposition of several forms of inscription that characterizes so many of these works is still a form of anamnesis? What can memory be if it can only appear through the medium of repression or forgetfulness?

The human figures that appear in the work of Carol Flax or that of Flynt and Packard remain anonymous, related to the images or anatomical diagrams that, set beside them, form their background. Beginning from the reproducibility of the human form assumed by photography, they multiply the images with shadows, with the superposition of texts and other archival materials, in order to distance them from their capacity to represent, to distance them from themselves, to make them strange, to expose them as a kind of secret. It is this secret that preserves our human figure as a sign, that presents our strangeness. It is what makes us monstrously similar to one another. To say this is not to penetrate a secret–to discover ourselves as a sign, for example–but rather to be exposed as a secret. We begin, it would seem, in the intersection of body and sign that makes us who we are–in our essential and fragmentary relation to otherness.

This is why these works are so often traversed and pierced by fragmented elements. Ruins and fragments, it would seem, are the truth of the work of art. That there can be neither truth nor art without ruins means that both take place in a state of decay, in a state that moves away from itself in order to be what it is. Like the photograph that tells us what is no longer before us, truth can only be read, if it can be read at all, in the traces of what is no longer present. That history is to be read in its transience means that its truth comes in the form of ruins. This is why, these artists suggest, there is no work that does not reduce its “subjects” to ruins. This is why, for them, encountering works of art means encountering the ruins left behind by a shattering and blinding explosion of light. This is why, for them, ruins and traces await us.