The Brooklyn Rail

Kader Attia experienced his artistic epiphany at the Louvre. Alongside Elizabeth Peyton, he has been offered the status of “Hôte du Louvre” by the museum, acting as a fellow-traveller to the museum and holding a studio at the Pavillon de Flore. Amongst the many activities he has developed, including the Artist’s Lessons program, with a final sequence on September 25th, he conceived as seminar entitled What is Missing in the Object. This seminar was held at the museum’s research center, the Centre Dominique Vivant Denon, and brought together members of the curatorial team as well as leading figures from the contemporary world. The questions raised stemmed from both his work and the thinking inherent to the Louvre: how does the lack of an object, the lack in an object, the lack around an object, enable us to extend and clarify our perception of art, of the museum, and of our humanity?

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 Attia's seminar took place in three parts. The first in this trilogy is presented here. The second will be published on September 17, and the third on September 24.

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With the participation of Cécile Giroire, Director of the Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, Musée du Louvre, and writer Maylis de Kerangal.

Kadder Attia: Every encounter, every opportunity for collective individuation, deserves to be fully seized. In our narcissistic times, the individual is often perceived as an end in itself. Yet individuation is not a fixed state, but a process. It's a verb, a dynamic, a shared becoming. Together, we form a whole, and it is precisely this sharing of knowledge and experience that enables us to progress.

This is the perspective we're exploring in this seminar, the way in which the Musée du Louvre constitutes a space for individuation.

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My artistic journey has its roots in a curiosity awakened in childhood, during a first visit to the Louvre. I remember vividly my admiration for Le Nain's paintings and the questions they raised in me. These paintings, depicting human misery, with children in rags, were viewed with rapture by a bourgeois woman at my side. The distance between our two appreciations seemed incongruous: did we really perceive the same thing?

In those days, Sundays were free, and I regularly went there to contemplate the works I'd discovered in the books I'd borrowed from the Elsa Triolet library in Garges-Lès-Gonesse, not far from the shoe stall where I worked.

These experiences left a deep imprint on my imagination and have stayed with me throughout my life. During my two-and-a-half-year stay in Congo-Brazzaville, however, I discovered a different way of thinking about artistic creation and the artistic economy. The raffia embroidery of the Kuba craftsmen in Congo particularly caught my attention. These works combine a meticulous aesthetic (which may have inspired Paul Klee) with an ethic of repair. A friend, Armand, gave me a Kuba loincloth, yellow ochre decorated with colored, blue and white patches.

At first, I saw it as a purely decorative piece, but then, four years later, when I was moving house, I rolled it up and discovered the holes it was hiding, and realized that it was a question of solving a problem, of hiding a hole, and therefore of a restorative gesture.

This observation shows that inspiration comes from many different fields. A Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Serge Haroche, told his students that “a great scientist must have observation, intuition and imagination”, “in short, be an artist.”

This revelation led me to question Western conceptions of reparation that have prevailed since the advent of modern, rational thought during the Renaissance. In our culture, repair often implies erasing the wound, denying the accident. Conversely, in many pre-modern and non-Western societies, repair leaves a visible trace of the break. The wound becomes an integral part of the object.

This contrast between approaches reflects a modern obsession with controlling time, denying the vagaries of history. In fact, it is impossible to return to an original state. Repair and injury are interdependent, and stand in opposition to a form of reason, a certainty of control.

Repair is a creative act, a dialogue between the object and its history. It's also the idea of a starting point. When we carve wood or marble, we remove, with no possibility of going back. We remove fragments, which, taken separately, or if we found them in the middle of a plain, no longer represent anything.

So why do museums have entire collections of fragments?

Cécile Giroire: The study of fragments is a fundamental aspect of historical and, more particularly, archaeological disciplines. These fields are nourished by fragmentary knowledge, incomplete by nature. The archaeological collections of the Louvre's Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities illustrate this reality in two ways: they represent only a tiny fraction of what was produced in the past, and the majority of works that have come down to us are fragmentary due to the history they may have had, a corollary of damage.

The very term “fragment” comes from the Latin fragmentum which, according to the definition in the Robert dictionary, is a piece of something broken, torn, a debris, the remainder of something of historical or scientific interest, a piece of a work, a text. It is opposed to the notion of “lacuna”, which refers to a void or absence in a whole. Both concepts are intrinsically linked to the objects we preserve.

Very few ancient works have survived intact, and many have been restored over the centuries, notably by artists. When ancient sculpture was rediscovered during the Renaissance, statuary was quickly collected to adorn Italian and French aristocratic residences.

An emblematic example is the Venus d'Arles, found in 1651 in four main fragments—the head, part of the body, legs and feet with the base—in the ruins of the Roman theater in Arles, where it adorned the stage wall. Two restoration projects were quickly carried out in an attempt to restore it to its so-called “original state.”

As early as 1653, Jean Sautereau, the first “rajusteur” as he was known, stepped in, glued the fragments back together and reassembled them.

A second intervention in 1676 is known from a cast. A few archival documents preserved in Arles give us an idea of the statue's condition after these two 17th-century restorations.

In addition, a cast was made before the sculpture was donated to Louis XIV by the town of Arles in 1683 to adorn the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles, so that a replica of the statue would remain in Arles. Louis XIV felt that the work needed to be completed, so he called on one of the greatest sculptors of the time, François Girardon, to complete it.

François Girardon identifies the female statue with Venus, in particular because of the half-clothed body and the bracelet she is holding on her arm. He intervened on the statue, slightly reworking the surface and, above all, completing the right arm and making the statue hold the apple, which is that of Pâris's judgment.

It wasn't until the 19th century that attitudes began to change. Neoclassicism favored an aesthetic of the fragment. The Venus de Vienne, discovered in 1828 at Sainte-Colombe-lèz-Vienne, a spa complex in the city of Vienne, is a symbol of this. Contrary to previous practice, it was not entirely restored or completed, but only stabilized by plaster additions. This approach testifies to a change in the perception of ancient sculptures, accompanied, for example, by Prosper Mérimée, then director of historical monuments. He said of this sculpture: “The statuary has made the marble breathe; you can feel the skin, and you're surprised when you touch the marble that it doesn't give way under your fingers.” On the back is the hand of Eros, who stood behind the goddess and accompanied her: this also allows us to imagine and render as we wish this childlike presence behind the goddess.

The fragment itself was, at that point, valued as a work in its own right.

Maylis de Kerangal: The notion of phantom limb, though originally a medical one, has deep resonances in other fields. It refers to the sensation, in an amputee, of experiencing the presence and mobility of an absent limb. This phantom pain, defined in 1545 by Ambroise Paré, posits that phantom pain originates from a cerebral memory mechanism. This reveals a link between the body, memory and pain.

In the museum context, this notion enables us to think of missing objects. An incomplete work, or a fragment, can thus evoke a sensation of presence, of movement, as if it retained the memory of its lost integrity.

If we think of the museum as a body, with interactions between its members, if we consider the organicity of a collection, the porosities, the dialogues between works, the way they all live together, activate together, then we can ask ourselves what happens when one is missing? How does this trigger a memory mechanism? And how does this absence stimulate our imagination?

Isn't this emptiness a prerequisite for creation? Isn't it the prerequisite for creation? It's because there's an absence that a gesture of production, a birth, is activated.

I'd like to take the example of the ghost town as a starting point. In a dialectic of presence and absence, emptiness and fullness. I'm thinking of the city of Le Havre, destroyed in two days during the Second World War, on September 5 and 6, 1944. After the bombing, it was possible to see the sea from the train station: the city had disappeared. Flattened, razed to the ground. But Auguste Perret didn't rebuild the city; he built a new one, in place of the great void created by the ruins, which would also be known as Le Havre. Today's city bears the memory of the city that disappeared. There's the idea of a spectral city, of an underlying presence, of something that now exists only in memory, in stories, in documents. This example opens up a reflection on how emptiness, or lack, can become a driving force for renewal, the possibility of construction.

Kader Attia: This emptiness is perhaps the field of a reverie.

This hand of Eros on the Venus signals love gone. By not repairing, the museum leaves room for the imaginary. It's also a mature attitude towards visitors. Not just making room for the works, but also for the viewer.

By letting the fragments speak for themselves, without seeking to complete them, we offer visitors a space for reverie and reflection, where the imagination becomes an integral part of the museum experience.

Maylis de Kerangal: It's the idea of the metaphor of the body.

Do we conceive of collections as organisms that unfold over time, that have different lives over time? Is it a question of taking on the dispersal and convergence of works as so many ways of making a body, of remaking a body?

Cécile Giroire: From the 1960s onwards, there was a phase of de-restoration of ancient sculptures: we began to de-restore arms, heads and feet that had been completed at different times by sculptors or restorers of varying degrees of inspiration and talent.

For the past twenty years, we have been preserving these old restorations, considering them to be an integral part of the work's history. The restored arm of the Venus d'Arles, for example, has not been dismantled.

It's important to understand that works of art have had a life of their own in Antiquity, and a life of their own in modern times, and that these various interventions are an integral part of the work's history, which we must respect, especially when we accept that it is impossible or impossible to return to an “original” archaeological state.

We have to accept this past, this life of the works in the museum, because it's part of the modern history of these collections.