1.Monster

If there is a single part of our collective madness to which the ultimate aphorism of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Filosoficus — “about that of which one cannot speak, one must remain silent” — clearly and evidently applies, then it certainly has to be the Loch Ness Monster. This mythical being, a source of rich speculation and wild tales, has been the object of the most divergent descriptions, precisely because of the evident lack of ‘revealing’ visual evidence. Despite all attempts, the Loch Ness Monster remains ‘indescribable’. This can be assessed in two different ways. On the one hand, the monster ‘itself’ cannot be described because each of the stories about it fails to put us in a position of being definitively able to understand the creature. Never is the impression aroused that a given reality is approached asymptotically or more closely. Details are incomplete and suggestive, and hence physically unverifiable. On the other hand, all the stories about the Loch Ness Monster succeed in giving us ever better characterizations of the Loch, the Scottish lake in which the monster is to be found. In every story about the intangible monster, Loch Ness itself is on parade: it is the lake that is the ultimate protagonist. The stories of the Loch Ness Monster are consequently endless re-descriptions of its Scottish context.

2. The De Beistegui House

In 1930, Le Corbusier completed the apartment in Paris that he designed for Charles de Beistegui. This rooftop villa is world-famous because of one photograph: the terrace as a large, open room, delineated by a white wall—characteristic of Le Corbusier’s purist style—that cuts the terrace room off from a view of Paris in the distance. Over the wall, above eye level, protrudes the top of the Arc de Triomphe, the only reference to the surrounding city. In the space of the terrace itself, on the frontal wall, is a false fireplace, complete with decorated mantelpiece. Around the fireplace are a couple of decorative iron chairs, loosely arranged. The terrace floor is a carpet of grass.

This house has always had an unusual position in the work of the Swiss architect. The seemingly mannerist touch is an exception in the work of this Spartan purist. De Beistegui, a bon vivant and collector of surrealist art, apparently had enough influence to convince the architect that the various frivolous additions would not diminish the architecture as such. The house seems to have been designed as a framework within which an ever-changing mise-en-scène of frivolities could take place. Pictures from the house’s interior confirm this suspicion. The different rooms present a far more powerful confrontation between context and content.Huge mirrors, baroque armchairs and peculiar sculptures inhabit the otherwise strictly organized space. In one of the photographs, the furniture is such a powerful presence that Le Corbusier’s spiral staircase, part of the context and thus the architecture, is left behind like some alien body. Objects and space engage in a relationship between content and framework. Within the rigid framework, the exuberant domestic objects become monster constructions. At the same time, it is the incomprehensibility of the exaggerated domesticity of the furniture that ultimately throws our eye back onto the space itself, the room.

Far more than a remarkable lapse in Le Corbusier’s crisp modernism, the de Beistegui apartment serves to make a broader intention more explicit. It is a stage direction in which a framework is very consciously created with something that is very sharp and quantitative. This is the opposite of the impalpable entities thatlie outside the things themselves and in that sense, it recalls Wittgenstein’s letter to the publisher, Ludwig von Ficker, in an attempt to get his Tractatus published: “My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.”

The de Beistegui home was once an accessible installation. The apartment was a frequently visited ‘public’ space, a meeting place for artists and collectors of the Parisian beau-monde of the 1930s. The apparent confrontation between the distinct, clean-cut framework and its exuberant contents was a set-up. Just as the framework of the terrace reduced the city to a precisely specified field of vision—the Arc de Triomphe cast as an isolated furnishing—the fireplace, as a perversely hollowed-out piece of furniture within this enclosure, provided the contours that clarified the contents of the framework. It was a mannerist outer skin, an excavated, decorated wrapping.

3. Patio and Pavilion

In 1956, Eduardo Paolozzi, Nigel Henderson and Alison & Peter Smithson created their Patio and Pavilion installation for the group exhibition, This is Tomorrow. A wooden pavilion built from leftover wood and equipped with a corrugated roof, stood in a right-angled space defined by wooden panels and reflecting foil. Both in the pavilion itself and in the space around it—the so-called patio—visitors found different objects: ‘brutalist’ sculptures and collages by Eduardo Paolozzi, photographs and photo-collages by Nigel Henderson, prehistoric archaeological finds, indefinable rubbish, photocopies, tiles, a bicycle wheel… The installation has sometimes been understood as a final site or refuge for a human presence in the nuclear age—an extreme interpretation, but it gives an indication of the confrontational inhumanity expressed by the remnants of human presence. The sculptures and collages are difficult to place. They seem like tribal objects, big boulders and post-industrial collages. Each object is messy, black-and-white, brazen and direct, but it is never presented as ‘itself’; it is part of a series. The installation is the collective whole of all the objects and collages, as if they had all been put in the space by accident. The series was created by the combination of the differences and the apparently shared characteristics of the individual objects themselves. Boulder-like objects and real boulders occupy the same space. Collages of human faces made with machine parts share the patio with coarse-grained illustrations of objects and processes from the world outside the patio. Because of its multiplicity, but also because of the inherent lack of definition of each individual object, the entire collection, which hovers somewhere between an archaeological discovery and the rubbish in our back yards, focuses our attention back onto the patio and the pavilion, the site of the discovery—the context.Like a post-nuclear nightmare, Patio and Pavilion created the framework for the actual collection of ‘human’ debris.

4. The Room and the Desert

If ‘the room’ represents the way we imagine the prototypical definition of space into manageable properties, then its opposite, ‘the desert’, seems to be the image of incomprehensible infinity. By putting it in a frame, a photograph of a desert seems to put the endlessness of that desert under pressure. Such infinite character can be represented or imagined only by showing unrestrained plenitude, making the unfathomable tangible. The framing, defining perspective, compels us to draw clever conclusions: the vanishing point of a ‘faraway’ perspective suggests infinity. Images of atomic explosions above the testing grounds in the Nevada desert in the 1950s and 1960s will resolutely implode that potentially unlimited character. The presence of a mushroom cloud, frontally placed in our field of vision, reduces that desert to a well-delineated room. The strange object, the reddish-gray, frightful cloud in the midst of ‘the unlimited’, gives the space a boundary. Our field of vision moves out from the single, defined cloud and succeeds in drawing a line around its context.The mushroom cloud becomes the vanishing point. Its image causes us to pay attention to the mechanism of the nuclear test. The domestication of a stretch of desert — a process that took place during the preparations for the test by way of the addition of the requisite equipment—is briefly visible. Here, the desert has become a ‘place’. The photograph of the nuclear test refers to a place, without dismissing its content. Visible but unfathomable, the irrational character of the nuclear cloud— the image of technology run amok—stands in contrast to the technical and rational framework of the photograph.

5. Presence

The Loch Ness Monster, like the mushroom cloud of the nuclear test, is a ‘natural disaster’. Disasters are comprehensible situations that are also exceptional and extraordinary. They are more or less describable, something that can be demonstrated, but not wholly understood. One cannot produce a definitive, conclusive description. This characteristic is specific to their exceptional condition. The monster and the mushroom cloud are representations of the ‘disaster’ as a thing in its own right: their contours can be precisely captured. Nonetheless, for widely varying reasons, the content cannot be completely understood: it is frightening.

The protagonist in Don Delillo’s novel, White Noise, tries in vain to drive his car and his family away from a toxic cloud that some, as yet undefined, disaster has left in its wake. Although the intrinsically poisonous contents of the cloud are never specifically demonstrated, it is enough to compel the protagonist to leave the safe cocoon of the automobile and to stand in direct confrontation with the toxic cloud, ‘in the world.’ – He thus aims to be definitively and fatalistically convinced that he has been mortally contaminated. The cloud (and the monster) exists as the location in which they find themselves: it is all about their ‘presence’. In an interview with Richard Hamilton, Paolozzi said about his work, “I’ve been trying to [...] go beyond the Thing, and trying to make some kind of presence.” Elements in the space are more than things as such. They populate the space. It is implicit that their presence is more important than their intrinsic characteristics. The puzzle of the thing itself is never solved. What remains are the relationships of the things’ contours with the space, or between the individual elements within that space. The thing itself, the focus of the work, remains behind as an enigma. As Karl Kraus has said, “Only he is an artist, who can make a riddle out of the solution.”

Here, A Monster of Loch Ness Feeling is comprised of four series, or chapters. Under a single, shared title, all the works exhibited—all are in fact images of sculptures—are presented not as themselves, as separate entities, but as part of a series. Only the total assembly of what is being shown comprises the work of art. The various ‘chapters’ seem to be cautious developments within comparable contemplations. In each separate segment, an elaboration specifically illuminates one single aspect of the relationship between object and context. Possible meanings of the objects are dismantled in the different steps or chapters. The relationship with the surrounding space is investigated in order finally to reveal the possible substance of the sculpture as an enigma.

In the first series, Desert and Bookshelves, the object is stripped of a precise (real) scale. By putting both rock sculptures and real rocks, natural ‘erupting’ stones and clay objects within the framework of the image, their respective ‘scales’ are equalized. Their relationship to the surrounding space is folded back into the plane of the image. As contexts, desert and bookshelf are made equal. The desert, with its monstrous dimensions, is the equivalent of a room furnished with books. The site where the erupting rocks were found marks out a specific area in the Egyptian landscape. The strange object makes sense of a specific part of the desert landscape. It becomes a reference point whose scale is of no importance. The title of the work, Desert and Bookshelves, only refers to the bearer or framework of the objects being presented. The things standing in the middle of the image—the rocklike objects—disappear in the frontal confrontation with that image.

In the second series, Stars and Sky, the canvas itself and the space are made equal. With the use of backlighting, the composition on the canvas becomes the composition in the space. The relationships between the individual point-like objects become a wider universe. In the broadest sense, the image becomes an astrological constellation: it is only the sum of the points that succeeds in forming a coherent image, albeit a disputable one, based on convention. At the same time, the ambiguity of the heavens and the canvas call our attention to the space as a framed context. The stars are objects in space, as well as points in our imagined composition on the plane of the firmament. It is not necessary to understand the actual content of the ‘points’—the stars themselves—in order to understand the constellation.

The third series, Strangers in the Night, investigates the contours of the object. The title is intriguingly ambivalent. What is shown is a ‘stranger’—an object of desire and fear. The title partly sends us on the wrong track because what is shown is in fact easy to describe: a ‘ghost’ and a paper airplane. But both designations are just empty shells. Like a cliché, they leave us all possible space to manoeuvre, providing every opening to fiddle with the form itself. These non-specific definitions of form designate only a contour. There are always hundreds of possible folded paper airplanes that, strictly seen, will be recognized as paper airplanes. An equal number of plaster forms can be made, of which everyone would accept without argument that they be referred to as ghosts. Still, the object itself remains foreign, a stranger defined only by an outline, its substance uncertain. This conclusion is put to the ultimate test. The final image of the Strangers series shows an amalgam of small objects, echoes of the larger individually presented sculptures, whose contours are echoed in ephemeral fashion, like the shadow of something with a surprise in store.

In the final series, Pedestals and Rooms, the recovered potential of the contour is fully exploited. The room and its pedestals (including the tables) are the theatre, the frame within which a series of drawings of sculptures are presented. Several sculptures echo the rock forms of the first series. Other objects present themselves as a distortion of one or another such form. One drawing shows only a cloth (a handkerchief, a ghost?) as the most direct variation of the contour in the space. It is perhaps not the most puzzling drawing. Just where the indescribable sculptures—apparently coincidentally—occupy the room, our insight grows into what, together and in poignant fashion, they want to ‘show’: the fearsome desire for domestic order in our contemporary interiors. Like a Fremdkorper in the living room, the lost sculpture confronts us with our blind domestication, which despite all our intentions has not made it any easier to survey our world. Strangeness has ultimately become internalized, but it is no less strange for that. The Loch Ness Monster represents what has been left behind in our own interiors of the fragmented debris of our public society. The intangible—the personal mystery—can only be made visible after that which can be described has predetermined the framework.

Translated from the Dutch by Mari Shields