Lucienne Bestall traces an object’s transmutation from historical detritus to contemporary artwork, reflecting on preservation and destruction as twinned impulses.

Part of What Time Tells, an ongoing series on time and the problems we face today. Published in conjunction with Countering Time, AAA’s exhibition about archival time and the idea of afterlives.

^{Image: Danh Vo, Your mother sucks cock in Hell (2015), included in his solo presentation, mothertongue, at the Danish Pavilion for the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. Courtesy of Andrea Liuzza.}

To be preserved, you must first be broken. The damage metered against you has made you precious. This violence is twofold: first, you are wrest from your proper place; then, a cutting blade is set to your form that you might be made to fit the wooden box with which you have been paired. Pared down, abbreviated, summarised. Much like your history, given only as France, seventeenth century. Of your previous life, there is otherwise silence.

            In order to be saved, you had to be removed, singled out by chance and circumstance. You have been called back from obscurity, from junk shop stockroom or auction catalogue. Once consigned to the past, you have returned to time’s thick flow.

Your provenance is precarious, a genealogy given in the broadest terms. What of your origin? Of the very beginning? Small seed in dark earth. Later, a tree—all growing greenness. Then: the first rupture, the first saw. And the first maker. But what does it matter who made you? Some artisan of trite decoration. Nameless now, forgotten.

            Once, you were an adornment of gilded opulence. But, in truth, you were unremarkable, an object among a thousand others shaped by convention. Soft cheeks, rosebud lips, loose ringlets. Art history is lousy with your likeness, all pink flesh and little substance. You and your kind go unmentioned in scripture. A company of earthly infants playing at being angels; the imaginings of childless men.

Putti. As if the word was made to be spat, the Italian cousin of a French cuss. I am told there is a distinction—forgive me my imprecisions. Cherubs are the province of Christianity, putti of classical mythology (a corruption, no doubt, of Cupid). By either name, both naked babies sent to tamper the erotics of baroque breasts; to sanctify, to seduce. In your face, I read passive impiety.

            Love or licentiousness? What is it you desire? And what of the desire that first shaped you? Carving the small O of your mouth with chisel and mallet, did the artisan dream of promised paradise or promised paycheck?

            I would I could tell you that you were once beautiful. Let us settle on pretty.

To be preserved, you must exist in two times at once: then and now, the abridged past and the lengthening present. To be preserved, you must appeal to the collector’s desire for material history, must appear a unique manifestation of distance.¹ You are all aura and no specificity.

            You have been saved from the oblivion to which the dead are invariably destined. No, not the dead, the merely object. Not merely—the absolute object, that which serves no purpose.²

Arranged in architectural emptiness, crate set on the limestone floor, you are given to be mistaken as a metonym of History. This is the artist’s intention. The particularities of your past are disregarded. Such is the conceit of the collector: since only the uniquely genuine will do for him he must cleanse the chosen object of everything that is typical about it.³ This conceit marks you as special—you are mis-seen as an artefact of rare value rather than an object of kitsch ornamentation.

            At the same time, you are reduced to equivalences.

To the artist—neither fabricator nor fabulator but a gleaner of detritus—you offer yourself as history-as-readymade.⁴ Once, you were legible as heavenly shorthand; now, as an oblique icon of contemporary discontents. You cannot recite your journey from there to here, remaining mute and impassive. Your past is recalled only by your worn surface, once garish polychrome, bleached by four hundred summers past. History depletes itself,⁵ the art historian writes of the predicament you share with all the other objects to which the artist has applied his dispassion.

            History is hysterical,⁶ the philosopher offers in turn. Historic or historical? Grammar designates you the latter, the softening suffix cementing your status as flotsam. The artist’s iconoclasm is forgiven. His blade was kind. Salvaged only to be wounded, you have been remade.

            Lobotomy or autopsy? The second from the Latin—to see for oneself. (There was nothing inside, but sunlight made matter; no soft tissue, only oak.)

            A photograph of the catastrophe exists, metal teeth moving through weathered wood. Don’t look.

            The artist, the critic writes, returns the favor of the cultural vandalism that is a colonialist privilege.⁷ An eye for an eye. And a wing and an arm, fat fists, small feet.

Somewhere, the crown of your head rests in anonymity, in a workshop or artist’s studio. In my imaginings, it has been hollowed out, is drunk from or ashed in. A utility tax owed to the victor.

Your title performs another desecration. But what does it matter to you, persisting in your static objecthood? You, who have no mother. The words, borrowed from a horror film and spoken by a possessing demon, cast no shadow on your sweet countenance. Saccharine heaven knows nothing of hell. Or cocks. Heaven is, by all accounts, all neutered good-naturedness and canned choral music.

            How sweetly insensible you are—or are you? Do you feel yourself changed? Do you understand the particular attention your new designation has lent you? Torn from your first place, you are repaid in privilege, in the attention reserved for few objects.

            —Or do you feel yourself damaged?

To be preserved, you must submit yourself to this vocabulary of dissection.⁸ The artist, the historian writes, is concerned with the vicissitudes of the object—its transitions and restorations, its vulnerability to destruction.⁹ With anxiety’s logic, he destroys in anticipation of time’s slow decay. In the end, it was neither worm nor beetle, not spreading damp or general rot, but an alchemical violence, a categorical shift. From found object to art object—by way of the slicing blade.

            Disinterested in novel intimacies, the artist instead pursues estrangements. Estranged, you appear as a quotation pulled from its context without citation—interrupted, disrupted, corrupted. Your compositional pairing is all confluence and incongruence, given without sentiment: broken body in a small box.

            What does Johnnie Walker know of cherubs? And you of walking? In cleaving together two unlike parts, the artist presses disparate narratives into proximity, tracing a connection between imperial mechanisms and global capitalism.¹⁰ (That you have been reduced to a symbol of European cultural patrimony might surprise you—and if not you, being without affect, then the artisan who first made you.) Where once you attended the good and godly, you now stand as a metaphor for possession and its antonym.

            Devotional object or decorative folly? Accessory to allegory or parable flourish? In the end, neither—in the crate, none.

To perceive the aura of an object, the philosopher writes, is to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.¹¹ But you do not look back, turning instead towards a scene from which you have long been absent. Womanly folds, a vision of heaven, white unblemished clouds.

            I remember you as I first saw you, set in your box, guileless. Our eyes did not meet.

You will be isolated again, in time, removed to a different storeroom. This is, after all, the fate of all objects, however prized. To be forgotten or overlooked, consigned out of mind. But you, unlike many others, returned—at least this once—and in returning gave yourself to be preserved as treasure.

Lucienne Bestall (b.1992, South Africa) is a curatorial researcher and writer. She holds a degree in Fine Art and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. Lucienne has contributed to several surveys from Phaidon, and her essay “All the Dead” is included in the anthology Our Ghosts Were Once People (Jonathan Ball, 2022). Another essay, “A History of Fire,” was published by Raritan (Rutgers University, 2021) and is listed among the notable essays and literary non-fiction in The Best American Essays anthology (HarperCollins Publishers, 2022). Her debut collection, Except for Breath: Reflections on Image and Memory, is forthcoming from Karavan Press. Lucienne works at A4 Arts Foundation.

Notes

^{1. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1973 [1955]), 190.}

^{2. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (Boulder: Paladin, 1973 [1957], 85.}

^{3. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1973 [1955]), 45.}

^{4. Claire Bishop, “History Depletes Itself,” Artforum, September 2015.}

^{5. Ibid.}

^{6. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 65.}

^{7. Roberta Smith, “Where History and Diary Meet,” New York Times, March 9, 2018 (New York edition).}

^{8. Katherine Brinson, “Little or Nothing but Life,” in Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away, ed. Katherine Brinson (New York City: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2018), XLVI.}

^{9. Claire Bishop, “History Depletes Itself,” Artforum, September 2015.}

^{10. Katherine Brinson, “Little or Nothing but Life,” in Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away, ed. Katherine Brinson (New York City: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2018), XXXIV}

^{11. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1973 [1955]), 190.}

^{Banner image: Danh Vo, Untitled, 2015. Installation view at Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art for Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015 (7 March–10 May 2015). Photo: Norimasa Kawata. Courtesy of Parasophia Office.}