Ainda sobre jornalismo, dois livros da série “compras inacreditavelmente baratas na Amazon”. O primeiro, de Calvin Tomkins, é Off The Wall – A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg, ótimo livro sobre a vida do artista norte-americano. É uma biografia de tom jornalístico, fluída e objetiva, mas repleta de mergulhos importantes. O primeiro capítulo, por exemplo, é basicamente uma reportagem sobre o prêmio conquistado por Rauschenberg na Bienal de Veneza em 1964. Está tudo ali, as vaias para o espetáculo do power-trio Rauschenberg, John Cage e Merce Cunningham, as festas de Leo Castelli e a confusão em torno da premiação.

O mais interessante é que o livro também procura contextualizar as grandes figuras que trocaram idéias (e algo mais) com Rauschenberg, como Wilhelm de Kooning, Jasper Johns e o próprio John Cage. Ali descobri que a famosa composição 4′33, mais conhecida como “silêncio”, foi feita imediatamente após o músico conhecer as pinturas em branco de Rauschenberg. O livro também põe em foco um período emblemático da arte norte-americana, o momento de transição entre dois fortes estouros, o Expressionismo Abstrato e a Pop-Art.

O outro livro, esse uma pechincha absurda (atualmente há exemplares por menos de 5 dólares), é um item obrigatório para quem gosta de música e jornalismo. All Yesterday’s Parties: The Velvet Underground in Print – 1966-1971. Organizado por Clinton Heylin, o livro apresenta mais de quarenta reportagens sobre a banda nova-iorquina. Tem de tudo, desde textos de fanzines até matérias publicadas em grandes jornais. A última,  sobre o final da banda, é assinada por ninguém menos que Lester Bangs.

Curioso ver a primeira reportagem sobre o Velvet Underground, publicada em janeiro de 1966 no New York Times e intitulada Andy Warhol and His Gang Meet The Psychiatrist. A banda ainda era coadjuvante do Explosing Plastic Inevitable de Warhol, naquela ocasião aterrorizando um congresso de psiquiatras com Gerard Malanga e Edie Sedgwick no palco sob projeções e o caos sonoro do Velvet. Quem também esteve lá foi Jonas Mekas, que registrou alguns momentos de apresentação e inseriu trechos em seus filmes sobre Andy Warhol. Definitivamente um momento histórico.

New BBC 4 radio programme  called ‘art attacks’  covering the destructive nature of art – it was pretty interesting and informative all round, but particularly great for Robert Rauschenberg’s account of meeting Willem De Kooning. 

Series investigating the history of attacks on art works, from the earliest times to the present day.

When does destruction become an act of creation? Lawrence Pollard explores what lies behind some of the more bizarre assaults on contemporary art, including an exploding shed, an artist who destroyed every one of his possessions and art that has been both urinated on and whacked with a hammer.

Sourse BBC Website:

Listen to the Programme now on the BBC Iplayer:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nk2xr

Only available until Monday 9th Nov

On Saturday I participated in Jennifer Sullivan’s Fall Collection event as part of The Classroom.  The Fall Collection fashion show was a launch party for issue one of Threads magazine which Jennifer edits along with artist Jenn Brehm.  I hope to do an interview with Jennifer and Jenn about their magazine in the next few months.  Here are some photographs of the fashion show:

(Clockwise: Jennifer Sullivan, Jenn Brehm, Rachael Morrison, Nathan Richard Wagner, and Ryan Roth)

One of the highlights of The Fair was the Triple Canopy event in The Classroom.  This included a visit from special guest “Robert Rauschenberg,” (even though he died in the spring of 2008) at The Invisible Grammer: A Tribute to Aspen’s ” Time Silence and Reduction, and Language” issue on its 42nd Anniversary. “Rauschenberg” in conversation with Andres Laracuente told the story of his famous drawing Erased De Kooning, 1953.  The story was told beautifully.

In my final tour around PS1 I walked past familiar magazine vendors ZingMagazine, Art on Paper, mono.kultur, the journal, Frieze, Gagarin,…  At the Golden Age stand I found these two new magazines: Proximity Magazine from Chicago, IL and Evergreen from Melbourne, Australia.  I hope to get my hands on them again and give them more attention on this blog.

I also checked out FOIL and IANN, two magazines published by FOIL from Asia:

In addition to all the magazines I perused, I looked at artists books on the tables of some of my favorite independent publishers Regency Arts Press Ltd., and Art Resources Transfer (A.R.T.) Press.  I didn’t get anything from Regency Arts Press this year, but I did speak with Lauren Wittels who told me about two exciting upcoming events.  Open Book is going to be an interactive online catalogue of books made by artists and independent publishers.  The site will be launched in early 2010 and the first open-call for submissions took place on Saturday Oct. 17th X-Initiative in Chelsea.   Also coming up is the Art Book Swap at The Museum of Modern Art on Saturday Feb. 6th, 2010.

The Daddy Magazine Room / Installation

Josh Smith takes over the wall behind his outfit: 38th Street Publishers

Farewell to another great Art Book Fair.

all material has history.

so said painter, sculptor, photographer, performer, art prankster robert rauschenberg. fitting for this random word spew for two reasons.

one: his (re)construction of collage.  two: he painted simultaneously pieces titled factum i and ii.  factums.  see?  possibly.  anyway his use of collage, incorporating found things, trash, newspapers, glories in the disparity on canvas.  fuck unity.  appropriate, agglomerate and present.  draw yr own conclusions.  dada or pop art or proto-neo-whatever.  his work represents a capturing of whatever’s to hand.  the factum paintings incorporate oil and ink and pencil and fabric and newspapers, photos, pictures, calendars.  they were painted sided by side.  they appear the same but obviously they’re not.  they have in common the tools and methods but beyond that they’re neither alike nor unlike one another.

which of course brings me to factums.  who revel in this collage creativity, melding and melting and layering and chucking a bunch of shit at the wall to see what sticks.

there are obvious nods – throbbing gristle, the fall, cabaret voltaire, residents, chrome in particular (everybody’s digging chrome these days…).  but the pleasure lies in the theft, the recontextualising, the stitching together of noises found and made, using pieces of aural sketches, soundtrack textures and actual proper song structures, exploring all these things then churning them into a whole (of sorts).  like the factum paintings the composition seems as important as the completed article.

so what is the completed article?  reduced it’s a cacophonous clatter of mongular rock.  deranged jump cuts of post-post-something throb and stumbling gonzo punk and nouvelle vague futuro-moves.  all interspersed with fucked spook house ambience and auto-detuned radio noise.  part whirlwind heat bass spazzery, blank dogs sci-fi chug, pop :zoviet*france:)  and pocket rocket from the tombs sprawl.

none of these pseudo- mutterings should put you off what is probably factums most straightforwardly listenable record.  split screen is a kindof coachwhips at their distorto blooze best, all unintelligible vox and swoops of feral sax.  and there is a garage-y vibe to the whole affair, just one oxidizing under a deluge of wet fuzz and permeated by a funked nightmare of machine skronk.  just some kind of mutant retro-future vision caked in new zealand geetar apocalypse and kraut dystopia.  as much plastic as it is metal.  as much of the past as the present as the future.

myspace / sacred bones / kill shaman / siltbreeze

Beginning in 1994 and now hosted by the Equality Forum, GLBT History Month is celebrated every October, featuring 31 GLBT icons living and dead. Focusing on their achievements and contributions to the GLBT community, each day we learn a little bit more about the history and courage of those who have gone before us. With such well known figures as Suze Orman and Rachel Maddow, this year’s GLBT History Month also features three hometown heroes from our own state of Texas.

Continue Reading October is GLBT History Month

First there was a detour. I was on my way to the festival, I had just stopped and gotten my mocha at Peet’s, not the half dozen Starbucks I had passed to get to an open Peet’s, and the next block was San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. I had already seen that a Richard Avedon exhibit was on display, and had been trying to figure out when I could make it to see it, perhaps Monday after the cleaning part of my volunteering for the festival was over. It wouldn’t give me much time, but I could see it and the rooftop sculpture garden, with a Louise Nevelson piece up there. When I got to the museum, there were people milling about, and obviously something was happening. Me, and my sign reading rather than people asking skills, figured out that it was a Target sponsored family day, and the museum was free, except for the Richard Avedon exhibit. And even that was subsidized, as it would only cost me $5 today. No decision to make at that price, in I went. Now what to do with the piping hot mocha it would take me at least an hour to consume?

I asked the coat check girl if she would check my coffee, and she agreed. Along with my backpack, which also wasn’t allowed. And off I happily went to see Richard’s photographs!

It was a retrospective. The final area was a commissioned series he did of Western workers, like coal miners and oil riggers, waitresses, children, snake skinners, carneys and drifters. Some of these were the most riveting of all the photos in the exhibit, I found. The one of the drifter was amazing, not only for the obvious exposure to the elements etched in his skin, but how charismatic and piercing his eyes were. Was he in person? Had he once been someone, or had he always been anonymous and easily dismissed?

Then there was the continuing series he had of famous folk, frequently artists, musicians and writers in the New York City area. I liked the fact that many of the writers and composers looked completely like anybody else’s grandparents, old and having lived life. Dorothy Parker was a huge shock to me. She looked sad and fatigued. The artists and actors more often took better care of themselves, even as they aged. The well maintained appearance and look of slight haughtiness of Willem de Kooning did not surprise me, given his angry paintings of women struck me as painted by a man who thought highly of himself, but the Robert Rauschenberg portrait took me a bit to figure out why it threw me. He was clearly happy, and had dry cleaning slung over his shoulder while standing on a snowy sidewalk, with another artist whose attention was on Robert. I have only ever seen interviews and movies of Robert Rauschenberg looking extremely serious, and all his most famous works, the combines like Monogram and his painted quilt, had to do with how desperately poor he had been as an artist, and used anything on hand to create. Obviously he could now afford dry cleaning, and thus must not be poor, was what had confused me.

Off to the next floor, where the sculptures and new works were laid out. A tall stack of plastic white brains was one piece, pink stretchy fabric making a private see-through tent another, next to a round, white, thing that looked like it could be an apple, or made of tapioca. And a video of a performance of an artist who had been trained as an economist, who began his piece as if lecturing, stringing together scientific words complete with drawings, but made to mean nonsense.

And to the sculpture garden. The Louise Nevelson piece did not disappoint. I am used to her wooden boxes, but it was her machine I saw at a Washington, D.C. exhibit, that seemed like merely two enormous pipes, one inserting in the other in a tight, darkened room, with a pneumatic something moving the pipe, filling the room with sudden noise, but instead was made to be understood as a rape or molestation that got me fascinated by her. It was the experience of the piece that had you understand how a pipe moving could be a rape.

So this sculpture was a spider, made of metal, and larger than life. Much larger than life, thank goodness. It was not malevolent, but still managed to be creepy in a well-lit, sun filled room. It was as if it were a giant elephant in the room that no one really wanted to talk about. “Oh, you know, Bob and I are doing fine,” conversed neighboring wives catching up at a cocktail party, all the while ignoring the enormous spider standing on 80 legs in the corner. Yes, 80, not the standard 8. Perhaps that was what made it creepy.

Louise Nevelson Sculpture

Out on the actual rooftop, more pieces abounded, but the one I liked best was the one the children immediately played in and around. It was two parallel pleated rusted iron walls, and the children decided it was great to play hide and seek with, or just run through like a tunnel. None of adults did any such thing, and merely stood around and observed the static rusted walls, as if we knew that was the appropriate thing to do. But I think the kids had it more right: what’s the point of something so immovable and static if you can’t add some movement to it?

Accordian Pleated Metal Standing Sculpture

And oh this roof! So here you can see through glass walls into the pavilion that had Louise’s spider, and a couple other pieces and a cafe, and through to the other side was a small narrow outdoor seating area, complete with some greenery. Above the greenery were the towering buildings of downtown San Francisco, whatever was more than five or six floors high on that side. On another side of the rooftop section was a raised gallery portion of some more, indoor sculptures. The third side was a wall. But the fourth? Was an enormous building of some age, perhaps the turn of the 20th century, ornate and stately, and looking far down to the roof of SFMOMA, perhaps sneering at the David Smith and other sculptures. It was a wonderful contrast.

There were more photos in another exhibit, on another floor, from China, Japan and Korea, while there were the classics of modern paintings further down, with at least one piece from my favorites, Yves Tanguay, de Chirico, Magritte, Mondrian, Clyfford Stillwell, Franz Kline, Motherwell, Rothko, among others.

And down on the ground floor, the entire time I was there, four dancers were doing yoga moves and dance movements on a small mat, and various parents and their children in strollers formed a circle around the dancers, and other onlookers gazed down from the various floors and staircase landings that had openings that overlooked the main foyer. Working my way down, they just finished when I reached their floor, just in time to easily cross and retrieve my cooled down mocha, to continue my walk on to the shuttle bus to the festival.

In today’s edition of the Daily Cardinal: Anthony Cefali and I collaborated on a review of the Robert Rauschenberg exhibit currently on display at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, and, lo n’ behold, after sitting on the backburner for a couple weeks now, it actually got published. It’s pretty lengthy as far as DC articles are concerned, but it’s also probably one of the articles I’m most proud of having written. Enjoy (maybe).

A 1961 Robert Rauschenberg work given to John Cage, part of Merce Cunningham and Cage’s personal collection.

{Source: NYTimes.com “Art Among Friends Is Up for Sale” by Carol Vogel, Sept. 21, 2009.}

Merce Cunningham in a photograph ca. 1950. (Photo: Larry Cowell)

Mr. Cunningham, dancing solo in “Changeling.” (Photo: Merce Cunningham Dance Company)

Mr. Cunningham in “Antic Meet” with design by Robert Rauschenberg, in 1958. (Photo: Richard Rutledge)

John Cage, left, Cunningham, center, and Rauschenberg in London in 1964. (Photo: Douglas H. Jeffrey/Courtesy of The John Cage Trust)

“Occasion Piece,” a duet featuring Cunningham and Mikhail Baryshnikov at Lincoln Center, on Merce’s 80th birthday, 1999. (Photo: Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times)

{Source: NYTimes.com slide-show accompanying “Merce Cunningham, Dance Visionary, Dies” written by Alastair Macaulay, July 27, 2009)

Robert Rauschenberg,

Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953

I really like the idea of this piece, there’s a great video on youtube with RR talking about the art and his experience behind it. A lot of people saw this as an act of attention but I believe it to be a very interesting work. It is as if he has erased a part of art history. This is I think quite similar to my own work with the elimination of the flies “work” and the appreciation we have for it. I will delete the existence of the flies attempts after spending so long recording its details and path. However I should not have control of the way its deleted, similar to the way the fly has no control over when it is released.

One idea is to create a self erasing pen, using the whiteboard and pen for whiteboards, I could attach an eraser to the back of the pen so that after i draw the line, it is quickly erased. In order to make it unclear as to when the line is going to be cleared. Maybe to make it impossible for me to determine the erasing, I could ask an external source to continuously erase my work, or even use chance (maybe roll a dice or flip a coin). The idea of brushing off the art by accidental means, maybe making the viewers destroy it? This way I have no control over who destroys it, or when it is destroyed. It may be destroyed in packaging to the gallery, this is an essential part to the piece. The fragility is similar to Eva Hesse’s pieces, which are very very fragile and have to be transported in hugely insulated cases. One of her works, a precursor to “contingent” is in the Fruitmarket Gallery at the moment.

After talking to the invigilator of the gallery about the method of transportation of the piece, it was interesting to find out that the piece had to be continually hung as to avoid it getting smashed. It was then bubblewrapped and kept in the safest of conditions. Although I really didn’t like the Hesse exhibition I found this very interesting. And also learned of how to apply for jobs there hooray.

I think I’ll go on to experimenting with whiteboard drawings, of chalkboard drawings where the art can easily be destroyed. Maybe placing the work out of the gallery so to avoid it being confused with art and have less respect gained for it.

SÃO PAULO AGENDA
Exposição Uma Aventura Moderna – Coleção de Arte Renault
no MAC USP Ibirapuera

Recurring dreams. I have one in which I keep on falling and falling. In a corner of Ann Veronica Janssens‘ Serendipity-exhibition at Wiels (Brussels) I suddenly found myself right in the middle of that nightmare. That’s why I love this Belgian artist: some of her work strongly meddles with your senses.

Isn’t it strange? Of some pieces of work you know exactly when and where you’ve seen them, and what impression they made on you. Why do they stand out? And why do you forget so many other paintings or exhibitions, even though they were truly great? On my list, for instance, are Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram in Brussels (‘81), Willem de Kooning’s late paintings in New York (‘97) and Pipilotti Rist’s Ever is all over-video in NY (2000). And I clearly remember stepping into Ann Veronica Janssens’ Blue, Red and Yellow, in front of S.M.A.K. in Ghent, a couple of years ago. 

For Serendipity, AVJ’s first major Belgian exhibition in ten years, that magical ‘container’ is reconstructed on the roof terrace of the Brussels’ Contemporary Art Centre Wiels. Don’t miss it, because it’s a quintessential piece of work. Inside that coloured box filled with mist, you lose all sense of time and space. And along the way this artist, who’s often been described as a sculptor of light, sound and space, seems to succeed in making colour and light tangible.

It’s what AVJ seems to be after. Interfering with your senses. Making visible/audible what is by definition invisible/inaudible. And be warned: your eyes and your ears will be put to the test, in Brussels, with stroboscopic lights and quite disturbing sounds. Sometimes the effects are even rather violent. Apart from Blue, Red and Yellow, there’s no mist. AVJ has used that element rather often, so she and the curator of this exhibition absolutely didn’t want there to be any in Wiels. Don’t expect a big retrospective too. There aren’t thát many works on display, and most of the work in Serendipity is new.

And not all of that is AVJ at her best. Frankly, Untitled (Golden section) is not really a piece of work to be put in a museum. This ’shimmering curtain’ works much better in the environment for which it was created: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s recent performance The Song (read review here). Some of AVJ’s video’s and prototypes look rather bland too, in comparison with her other work.

There’s one room in which she lets you ‘bathe’ in red and blue (Rouge 106, Bleu 132), another one in which she attempts to create an absolute silence (Chambre Anéchoïque), but I was really taken by surprise by her Son infini. Just a speaker and one sound coming from it: an auditory illusion of infinite descent.  By means of almost nothing – that one sound, seeming to get lower and lower and lower – she succeeded in having a really powerful effect on my body, my senses and my thoughts. By that, she just might have pulled it off: putting a second work on my ‘list’.

Oh, and do go and by yourself a beer or a coffee afterwards. Because there’s a possibility that you end up with a real Ann Veronica Janssens in your hands: for 9000 euros (Conversions), the artist put 9000 stickers on 1 euro-coins, thereby translating the monetary value of 1 euro into 9 other values, such as chance, ecstasy, oxygen, light and… stardust.

(photo credits:  ’Installation view’ © Pascual Mercé – Courtesy EACC;  Side (video still), Courtesy Galerie Micheline Szwajcer)

Well here’s a free lecture that sounds rather promising: UW history professor Jeremi Suri is giving a talk on Robert Rauschenberg tonight at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (located on State St., between Johnson and Dayton; the building literally cannot be missed). Suri’s going to wax historical on Rauschenberg’s work and milieu, as well as the influence that Raushcenberg has had on subsequent generations of artists, intellectuals, etc. The lecture begins at 6:30PM in the MMoCA’s main gallery.

P.S. Not quite sure what the hold-up is with the publication of the collaborative review I wrote with Daily Cardinal opinions editor Anthony Cefali of the MMoCA’s new-ish Rauschenberg exhibit, “Signs of the Times: Robert Rauschenberg’s America”, but trust that as soon as it gets published—if it gets published—I’ll have a nice blue link for all y’all to click on.

If you are going to be in Los Angeles after 15 November 2009 you may very well want to visit the exhibition at MOCA, 30 Works For 30 Years.  Here’s a link to the museum’s site: MOCA (online)

It seems that “Small Rebus” (1956) by Robert Rauschenberg will be part of the exhibition, and, in and of itself we believe that this merits the visit.

nothingisinvisible@live.fr

Art’s treasure is its immortality, a constancy with which it communicates with generations past, present and future. Assuming responsible custody of the work, one doesn’t just look at a painting or sculpture, but through its creator’s eyes. That thought was on my mind as I watched one of four sold-out shows by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Columbia College’s Dance Center – having passed away at 90 in late July, my focus was as much on the choreographer as on Chicago Event 1, which I saw Saturday afternoon before a large painting and silkscreen by Robert Rauschenberg. Click here to read the entire article at SeeChicagoDance.com

This review of Jean-Yves Jouannais’s Artistes sans oeuvres: I Would Prefer Not To appeared in the Times Literary Supplement dated 25 September 2009 (No 5556, p. 30):

Nothing At All

With his bovine-sounding surname, Félicien Marboeuf (1852-1924) seemed destined to cross paths with Flaubert. He was the inspiration for the character of Frédéric Moreau in L’Education sentimentale, which left him feeling like a figment of someone else’s imagination. In order to wrest control of his destiny, he resolved to become an author, but Marboeuf entertained such a lofty idea of literature that his works were to remain imaginary and thus a legend was born. Proust — who compared silent authors à la Marboeuf to dormant volcanoes — gushed that every single page he had chosen not to write was sheer perfection.

Or did he? One of the main reasons why Marboeuf never produced anything is that he never existed. Jean-Yves Jouannais planted this Borgesian prank at the heart of Artistes sans oeuvres when the book was first published in 1997. The character subsequently took on a life of his own, resurfacing as the subject of a recent group exhibition and, more famously, in Bartleby & Co., Enrique Vila-Matas’s exploration of the “literature of the No”. Here the Spanish author repays the debt he owes to Jouannais’s cult essay (which had been out of print until now) by prefacing this new edition.

Marboeuf has come to symbolize all the anonymous “Artists without works” past and present. Through him, Jouannais stigmatizes the careerists who churn out new material simply to reaffirm their status or iinflate their egos, as well as the publishers who flood the market with the “little narrative trinkets” they pass off as literature on the three-for-two tables of bookshops. In so doing, he delineates a rival tradition rooted in the opposition to the commodification of the arts that accompanied industrialization. A prime example is provided by the fin-de-siècle dandies who reacted to this phenomenon by producing nothing but gestures. More significantly, Walter Pater’s contention that experience — not “the fruit of experience” — was an end in itself, led to a redefinition of art as the very experience of life. A desire to turn one’s existence into poetry — as exemplified by Arthur Cravan, Jacques Vaché or Neal Cassady — would lie at the heart of all the major twentieth-century avant-gardes. “My art is that of living”, Marcel Duchamp famously declared, “Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral; it’s a sort of constant euphoria.”

Jouannais never makes the absurd claim that creating nothing is better than creating something: like Emil Cioran, he has little time for what he calls the “failure fundamentalists”. He does not dwell on the Keatsian notion (also found in Rousseau and Goethe) that unheard melodies are sweeter, or wonder why the attempts at a merger between life and art have so often resulted in death. Jouannais’s “Artists without works” are essentially of a sunny disposition. They are dilettantes, driven solely by their own enjoyment; cultural skivers who never feel that they owe it to posterity, let alone their public, to be productive. They let time do its work and are often militantly lazy — like Albert Cossery, the francophone writer of Egyptian origin who, on a good day, would fashion a single carefully crafted sentence, or the American artist Albert M. Fine who is quoted as saying: “If I did anything less it would cease to be art”. It is this divine indolence which differentiates Artistes sans oeuvres from darker essays on the subject.

Some of the most interesting passages in the book concern those larger-than-life figures (Félix Fénéon, Arthur Cravan, Jacques Vaché, Jacques Rigaut, Roberto Bazlen) who entered the literary pantheon as characters in other writers’ novels rather than through their own. Cravan, Vaché and Cassady — who embodied respectively the spirits of Dada, Surrealism and Beat — published virtually nothing during their lifetimes. Naturally, phantom works abound here, from Stendhal’s numerous unfinished novels to the unpublished manuscripts of the Brautigan Library (modelled on the library in Richard Brautigan’s The Abortion) through to Roland Barthes’s criticism, which provided him with the perfect excuse not to write the novel he dreamed of. Jouannais also considers summarizers such as Fénéon, whose “elliptical novels” were no longer than haiku, or Borges, who compiled synopses of fictitious novels so that no one would have to waste time writing or reading them. In fact, the Argentinian’s entire oeuvre — haunted as it is by the possibility of its own silence — is reinterpreted as a paradoxical “pre-emptive production” designed to spare the already overcrowded bookshelves of the Library of Babel. Borges’s Pierre Ménard (along with Bouvard, Pécuchet and Bartleby) is, of course, one of the patron saints of the copiers, another category surveyed in these pages. The destroyers (Virgil, Kafka, Bruno Schulz et al.) who seek to cover their aesthetic tracks only get a brief look-in, Jouannais being more interested in the long line of erasers starting with Man Ray’s 1924 “Lautgedicht” (an obliterated poem) and including such works as Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning Drawing”, Yves Klein’s infamous empty exhibition or Walter Ruttmann’s “blind” film. The author argues convincingly — in a style both eloquent and elegant — that Cravan’s proto-Dadaist provocations, Rigaut’s suicide or Brautigan’s notorious kitchen shoot-outs should be construed as poetic gestures in their own right. Deliberately misquoting Flaubert, he concludes that the works of these so-called “Artists without works” are “present everywhere and visible nowhere”, which may explain why they are so often misunderstood.