While reviving an old 1981 text by Rosalind Krauss published in her MIT’s October journal touching on The Originality of the Avant-Garde, an eye-opening perspective on Rodin‘s reproduction processes and the mechanics surrounding his The Gates of Hell was cast into my thinking.
For all with a monolithic faith in Rodin’s uniqueness and originality I suggest to study the processes surrounding his finished-unfinished work The Gates of Hell. Krauss’ text is useful in this.
Yes, I refer to The Gates of Hell as being finished-unfinished; as being in a state of flux. A tiding state between finished and unfinished. Rodin never finished it, yet it (.. it is perhaps absurd to think of its “copies” as we know The Gates of Hell is contained within a cast medium) is simultaneously present at the Musée Rodin, at Stanford University’s Rodin Sculpture Garden as well as at Musée d’Orsay.
Did I miss any locales? Is it hereby proven that Hell’s gates are omnipresent? This simultaneous presence combined with the tension of being either a copy or an original reminds me somewhat of the quantum physical Schrödinger’s cat: simultaneously being and not being. The Gates are, yet are not. They are finished and yet not. They are unique and yet cast multiple times. These gates give access to a fuzzy state between being settled under the resting dust of Rodin’s plaster as a mold covers a moist wall in his sculpting studio, and the solid access by the French state to reproduce the work ad infinitum.
As Krauss hints, Walter Benjamin‘s concepts in regards to mechanical reproduction are surely not isolated to photography nor to new(er) media (i.e. newer than sculpting). The potential lives instilled in The Gates of Hell create wonderful analogies between the copy-paste questions so often raised surrounding new media art processes (as if the issues surrounding its production processes are as fresh as anything digital is claimed to be) and the solid multidimensional image of the hard labor and the uniqueness attached to the tangible art form of sculpting. In this sense sculpting is not positioned hierarchically but rather as yet another thread within the art’s media grid across spacetime.
That is as far as I’ll currently take the excursion to Rodin and shift to the topic within Krauss’ text that actually instigated my post here.
The Grid.
The grid is not only a key term in creative concepts surrounding virtuality (cf. Second Life, Tron), or in geography, urban design or simply in electricity networks. Krauss used the concept of the grid stating that the grid “possesses several structural properties which make it inherently susceptible to vanguard appropriation. Krauss states the grid does not allow language to fluidly pass through, “the grid promotes… silence.”
I agree with Krauss, the grid offers a tension between impenetrable domination and lack of hierarchy. I naively assumed the lack of the latter universally implied openness. Although there is openness found through the mesh of a grid, the perception of the grid is rather opposite and oppressively closed. Although the grid has no center and thus lacks hierarchy it is neither perceived as open. Not only fish are caught in it.
At the same time and ironically the grid implies an ultimate openness as if it were a border-less tabula rasa: all is conceivable when “superseding” the grid. The grid supports mapping. Mapping could support transition and association. The grid can be unlocked as an ultimate trans-coding catalysts for metaphoric thinking.
The grid is conceivably related with the digital: zoom into a digital image and its grid—as in: the collection of all its square pixels—becomes evident.
I felt the urge to put this to the test, give form to my sensation and to appropriate the grid (here ripped from Adobe Photoshop’s software grid) simplistically in an idea for a series starting off as follows:
The Purposeless Art Series | Object 001 a vanguard appropriation of cliché concepts
