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 third in this trilogy is presented here. 

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With the participation of Stéphanie Deschamps-Tan, Chief Curator, Department of Sculpture, Musée du Louvre, Alain Vanier, psychoanalyst and Hala Wardé, architect.

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Stéphanie Deschamps: I lived a rather unsettling experience in 2024, which resonates with this subject: I saw faces that had disappeared reappear, I was able to look again at works, in particular sculptures, that were no longer viewable, that had become invisible and even lost their raison d’être.

I’m referring to the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, a monument of great importance to me, both personally and professionally.

I’ve been passing this monument for years. When you’re a student at the Ecole du Louvre, you’re used to running, getting out of the metro and pass by this monument, glancing at it quickly.

Eventually, you stop seeing certain sculptures that are essential to understanding it.

It’s a landmark of Parisian urban planning, designed on the orders of Emperor Napoleon 1st. A major restoration project carried out in 2023 and 2024 was completed just in time for the Olympic Games in Paris.

This arch was born of a promise made by the emperor to his soldiers. The day after the victory of Austerlitz, he declared, “You will only return to your homes under triumphal arches.” In 1806, the first stone was laid, and the work was entrusted to Fontaine, Napoleon’s official architect.

There was a debate over the positioning of this monument and, above all, its axis, i.e. whether it should be centered on the Pavillon de l’Horloge or on the main pavilion of the Palais des Tuileries, and a struggle for influence ensued, between Dominique Vivant Denon, who was director of the museum and personal adviser to the emperor in terms of artistic policy, and the architect Fontaine, who was to prevail. It was decided to set the monument on the Palais des Tuileries’ axis, the seat of power in Paris and the emperor’s residence when he was in the capital—a palace that has now disappeared.

The Carrousel Arch is the gateway to a ghost palace. It is inspired by models from antiquity, notably that of Septimius Severus, but in much smaller proportions. The ancient model was used by the emperor to enhance the value of his empire, to compare himself in some way to a Roman emperor, and to show off himself and his soldiers.

This project was carried out in an exceptional manner, and very quickly: in just two years the arch was built and decorated, sometimes using salvaged materials, such as the beautiful Languedoc marble columns originally destined for the Grand Trianon in Versailles.

Vivant Denon played a fundamental role in the sculptural decor, as he devised a program that portrayed the emperor as a kind of peacemaker for the empire: moments of encounter with the German and Austrian armies, moments of peace, moments of treaty-making, of surrender, of life, but never of bloody battle.

Above all, it was decided to create large statues of soldiers, four statues on each side of the arch, to celebrate the valiant soldiers who accompanied the emperor on the battlefields.

All the subjects were approved by the emperor, and Vivant Denon supervised the production of the sculptures. He asked Charles Meynier, a painter, to make drawings, which he supplied to the chosen sculptors, who had to conform to these models to give the exact representation of the soldiers of the great army he had decided.

At the time, these works were scorned for their realism. Given the academicism of the time, showing real soldiers was unacceptable, and this highly supervised work produced sculptures of the highest quality by major artists.

Two hundred years after their creation, they were in an extremely degraded state. The statues still in place could no longer be seen in the overall context of the monument. They had become like sugar loaves, high up and difficult to appreciate, even though this was one of their raisons d’être.

How can we explain such a degraded state? They had suffered from the elements, but that doesn’t explain everything. The marble was perhaps originally of very poor quality, and we know that they were consolidated in the 1930s with products that caused more disorder than improvement.

Some were still in acceptable condition, but others were truly close to a state of ruin. Only the silhouettes remained, but the faces had disappeared.

The most striking examples transform these statues of soldiers into broken faces, gueules cassées, introducing a loss of meaning for these sculptures : instead of the great heroes who were supposed to be magnified by art, we are faced with the great wounded, who speak of defeat rather than victory.

The scientific committee overseeing the restoration decided to replace these sculptures, to remove them and put them away, as a sort of vestige, an original idea of the spirit, then replace them with copies in Carrara marble.

This choice was possible because we had casts made in the 1900s and 1930s that enabled us to restore them.

We had a document that enabled us to make copies from these casts, which we also restored, then digitized 3D prints, and then used these 3D prints to create a polyurethane foam model that was used to make the sculptures in indirect size.

The final copy was made in the workshop that had been set up at the foot of the arch to accommodate the sculptors.

The sculptors worked using traditional methods of carving, with a machine that enabled them to make an exact copy of the model.

It was also decided to leave the originals on site for a while, so that the sculptors could observe them. Despite their advanced state of deterioration, there were still perceptible tool marks, and above all, the sculptors told us that they needed to immerse themselves in the original sculpture to better realize the copy.

It was decided not to make digital copies. We could very well have decided to partly machine these works and entrust their creation to machines. But in this case, the chief architect of the historic monuments really wanted to reproduce the working methods of the 19th century, to rediscover the gestures of the sculptors and, above all, to entrust a particular work to a sculptor, as was the case on the site, so that there would be an intentionality of gesture that would lead to the creation of an original work, even if it was a copy.

It was really a case of restorative surgery, as some of the casts were already too badly altered in the 1930s.

Layer by layer, volume by volume, we reconstituted the initial model, in an attempt to recover the face of this sculpture, where the sculptor was ultimately led to read the lack, the absence, the sacrificed surface of the marble in order to interpret and restore it.

As a curator, it’s fascinating to watch the sculptor looking at this work. He considers the sculpture, looks at it, observes it, to give it a new gaze that we, as art historians and visitors, will be able to appreciate.

The result is quite disturbing. In the end, the faces imagined from drawings and old photos are overtaken by reality.

The sculptors who made these copies have also succeeded in recapturing the individuality of the original sculptures. The decision to make such strong, authentic copies, using a marble with a slightly different tonality, with a dominant blue hue that stands out even more on the restored arch, is also a real eye-catcher.

What is the status of these final objects? The idea was to make copies of the originals, but the original was so destroyed that we had to go in a different direction, and the copy exceeded the original and gave us something else to see. The artist’s original idea of power and monumentality has been restored and made visible to visitors.

Hala Wardé: This triumphal arch is a familiar monument. I often walk past it, but I’d never really noticed the figures. Until recently, when I was struck during a very early morning walk, when it was still dark, by their gaze, which strangely caught my eye. I hadn’t seen them, they saw me, as if this restoration had really brought them back to life.

For my part, I’d like to evoke a sketch I made a few years ago for a proposed Accident Museum, based on an idea by Paul Virilio.

This project in the making questions the very notion of the museum, eludes all commonplaces, and whose content and container will surprise. In the meantime, I’ve designed the first piece: A library, mirroring the accident, which reveals it and accompanies each of its appearances, preserving its thought. I’m reminded of the Trinity College library in Dublin, where most of the books are bandaged, like wounded men who have been treated and saved.

When war broke out in Beirut in 1975, we wanted to protect the works in the Beirut National Museum. The largest of them were encased in thick concrete blocks, and thus survived fifteen years of war, resisting bombardment and fire. The emotion was great when we opened these sarcophagi of sorts, and found these objects that have stood the test of time and events, remaining virtually intact. One might ask: are these objects the same?

As a Lebanese, I can’t help thinking today of what is happening in southern Lebanon and Gaza, a veritable urbicide. Like the archaeological sites of Baalbek and Tyre, which have also been targeted, and for which we can already begin to wonder whether they will ever be repaired.

There can be something both terrible and salutary for the architecture of a city going through war, and for the life that inhabits it.

The question of emptiness in architecture is of particular interest to me. In 1990, after the war, Beirut gradually lost its gardens and stone houses, as the city became denser due to real estate speculation, gradually turning its back on the sea.

Following the explosion of Beirut’s port in August 2020, and the gaping wound it caused, the city suddenly found itself once again open to the sea. Should we see this as the hope of a rebirth in the light of this reconstruction, of finding a new horizon, new urban and architectural forms in the city? If the job of architects is to build, my job is to build emptiness.

This need for emptiness resonates with my exchanges with Paul Virilio, who theorized about emptiness, which he defined as the depth of time, and which inspired his paintings of anti-forms, where he made the invisible visible.

Despite this context of densification, a parallel approach remains possible. So, at the outset of each project, the question can be asked: What is the largest void that can be preserved?

The void could be gardens, courtyards, all those spaces that are places for breathing, for encounters, where we can connect with other forms, physical and metaphysical, that come to use the natural elements that are there: light, dust, sound, but also silence... to create emotions.

Kader Attia: The gaze is a missing object. The gaze is a movement of the soul, an ontological movement—a gaze towards the object, towards the work of art, towards the Other too. It’s not a Bergsonian movement of time, it’s a movement in space, without moving, and this lends itself very much to architecture. In particular, we were talking about time and how, in the end, looking is not just an ocular action, but also a bodily action: the body looks into a museum.

This question of emptiness, very different in the way Hala Wardé talks about it as an architect, takes on a major dimension, because it involves the fundamental experience of art, which is above all physical.

People sometimes complain that museums are too crowded. For me, the fact that there are people in museums is a positive thing, because there could come a day when techno-liberalism offers technical capabilities that enable people to stay at home.

Collective individuation will then be completely bypassed. As Bernard Stiegler points out, we’re living in a time when all these individuation behaviors are short-circuited by techno-liberal governance, in order to exploit our behavioral data, which is sold online at the speed of light.

In Le Havre, you could see the sea from the station.

I came to Le Havre very late in life, and something always worried me: the idea of having reached the end of something. This idea materializes a very theatrical dimension of the gaze.

You go to Le Havre, not through it.

Alain Vanier: The museum is the step forward of Western cultures, with their destructive effects. The museum was born during the Enlightenment, it’s a place for restoring aura, it’s a place of worship, we come here as if to a temple, a secular temple.

This dimension of irreparable reparation is the burden of each and every one of us.

We are all born of an irreparable act that we are constantly trying to repair.

Freud compared the analytical method to the work of a sculptor, something that is organized around a fundamental lacuna, and at the same time the impasto that attempts to fill these original gaps is never quite right.

The starting point for the paradigm of the relationship to the image is what Lacan called the mirror stage, narcissism. In the mirror stage, there’s an investment in the image that is the body image, and at the same time it’s an image that contains a lack.

If you look at yourself in the mirror, you don’t see yourself looking. Either you see your gaze, or you see your body.

Today, with cameras, images, etc., it’s different. When I was little, I remember going into a store where there was a three-sided mirror. You see yourself looking. And you have this impression of Freud, who describes this moment when he sees himself reflected in a window on a train, and experiences an impression of uncanny. When the gaze returns, when it re-enters the image, there’s a very paradoxical effect, which can also be found in certain forms of delirium, in heautoscopic hallucinations, which we don’t see much of today, but which fascinated the 19th century, Musset, Maupassant and so on.

That’s what’s missing from the image.

Human beings are supposed to be the only ones capable of recognizing themselves in images. This is not entirely true, but the only particularity of the human species is its passion for its own image. Very quickly, they lose interest in the monkey or the elephant.

There’s an enjoyment in this relationship with these images. What I manifest in front of the image is that I’m offering something to a gaze that’s external to me. I’m under the gaze.

When I got up this morning, I told myself I was going to the Louvre, and didn’t come in my pyjamas. All social codes mean that you have to present yourself in a certain way; you wouldn’t speak in the same way to your creamer or your department head. This regulation of the gaze is an extraordinary element. It’s a dimension we have to appreciate.

In this world, we offer a very powerful effect of capitalism, which is to have created beauty. Artists were quick to realize that this was a trap. An artist like Duchamp, with his urinal, broke this necessity of beauty on the side of art. In this relationship between beauty and the blocking of the image, this way of dealing with the gaze outside, the strength of the artist is to be the one who shows and hides at the same time. He approaches this irreparable dimension, this dimension of loss, and at the same time, he creates beauty.

Maybe we can’t reach it, maybe the fragment won’t fill the gap.

Seizing an emotion, an affect, that you can’t articulate, or share with an articulable element, it has touched something. In the work of art there is something that is not there simply to satisfy the appetite of the eye. As Beckett would say: “I believe that to be an artist is to fail as no one else dares to fail.”

Kader Attia: Alain Vanier suggests that we are all born of something irreparable, and that, through the reflections we can have around the object, we have reflections on gazes, not only ocular, but also spiritual, corporeal, physical, temporal, which are anything but muscular. The non-ocular character of art is important.

Working on injury from a human and architectural point of view is important.

The notion of collective individuation is not the annihilation of the individual; it’s a set of individuals creating a collective individual. Not in the immediate future, but through all the traces we are in the process of leaving. This is what Edgar Morin says about the subjective life of objects. Ultimately, objects are the gaze we cast upon them.

In a gathering like this, around a question, it is important not to hesitate to speak from your own position and point of view, and therefore to create a collective trans-individuation.