Blank & Empty Things 36: Sold Shadows and Fat Chairs (Peter Schlemiehl and Joseph Bueys)

JF Ptak Science Books  LLC  Post 535

On the heels of my last post on the usefulness of constructing geologies of wrongness and on the extraction by Creationists of something from nothing comes today’s bit, where something really does come from nothing, and where (again) nothing of something is extracted from nothing. 

1)  Something from Nothing

How old are shadows?  Or, really, how old is the depiction of the shadow in the history of western art?  The shadow predates the modern re-discovery of classical perspective by a thousand years—little bits of shadows pop up here and there in deep antiquity, certainly way before Uccello and Alberti and the rest came along.  On the other hand shadows do escape notice of many painters in the 15^th century (and during the period of being very comfortable with the century-old realignment of perspective), which is odd, unless all of those works were depicting scenes at high noon or thereabouts. 

The something-from-nothing part with shadows comes from the odd and somewhat creepy story of Peter Schlemihl (Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, "Peter Schlemihl's Remarkable Story") written in 1814 by the semi-ruined Franco/German aristocrat Adelbert von Chamisso.  In one adventure, Peter, unfortunately poor in a land of the wealthy, makes an agreement with a mysterious grey man (who is probably the devil) to sell his shadow for a bottomless purse of gold.  In an 1861 British edition of this work, the great George Cruikshank portrays the very moment when the shadow is being literally lifted from the ground by the mysterious grey man—the point of contact between his hand and the shadow just gives me the willies.  The grey man’s own shadow, arching behind him, is also very threatening and terribly offputting to me.  Perhaps it is just a  great wrongness, making the shadow something from its vast nothingness.  (And the story goes that the gold is never-ending, but people are so repulsed by Peter not having a shadow that it makes his life supremely difficult—so much so that the grey man returns with a new deal, offering to Peter his shadow and the endless purse if only he would relinquish his soul when he died.  Peter begs off, throws away the purse, and lives without his shadow and without money.)

Hans Christian Andersen also provides a scary fairy tale in 1847 called "The Shadow", in which a man’s shadow slips away and is replaced by another shadow which slips back (slowly) into the old shadow’s place—but it is not what it seems:  "I have gone through the most terrible affair that could possibly happen; only imagine, my shadow has gone mad; I suppose such a poor, shallow brain, could not bear much; he fancies that he has become a real man, and that I am his shadow.”

2)  Nothing from Something from Nothing.

Yes, this is terribly convoluted, but the title fits the subject, and the subject is Josef Beuys (1921-1986), a German artist (or perhaps he was a performer in art) who broadly dabbled in conceptual art.  He came to prominence in the 1960’s, when the acceptance of these art performances was as much a work of art as the art piece itself, and, I guess, he has remained, his appreciations now gaining an antique patina. 

I wanted to address his work, Fat Chair.  The title doesn’t quite describe the work, which is a chair with a wedge of fat on it.  Many a critic’s eyebrow has been plucked trying in deep intellectual desperation to see something in this work. Under the weight of these artistic appraisals of this work, I’ve just got to say, really, sometimes fat on a chair is just that.  I can appreciate Beuys as an artist and performer of his times, but the deep thought that has gone into Fat Chair is a bit much for my taste, praising observers biting off much more than can be chewed.  For example, from one website we see:

“ ‘Fat Chair’ (1964) is much more about the physicality of the human body. To Beuys, fat as a material could be considered before form was considered… Fat…appealed to Beuys b

ecause it was a composite with no internal structure…Beuys placed fat with its “chaotic organic energy”, symbolising warmth, in the cold, rigid, man-made form of a right-angle. This form, which represented the coexistence of instinct and intellect was placed in the right-angle of a chair between seat and back. The fat also occupies space on the chair that would be filled with our digestive and excretive organs if we were sitting on it.”

Another website states “Fat…was an ideal material for Beuys to use to sign

chaos and the potential for spiritual transcendence. Fat has the ability to exist as a physical example of two extremes: a flowing liquid when warm and a defined solid when cold. Beuys also believed that fat was psychologically effective, in that "people instinctively feel it relates to inner processes and feelings."

I’m sorry to not include the references for these opinions—it is just to painful, too embarrassing to ascribe them blame.  And they are hardly alone in this hagiographic myopia, pulling these strands of something from nothing about nothing. 

I’d prefer to leave it all at nothing in regard to the Beuys (or to Andres Serrano or Damien Hirst and so on),  thinking about lovely Ludwig’s self-abandoned seventh proposition (“Where (or of what) one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence”).  Better yet, better to apply the one of the last lines of the great classic “The Street of Laredo” (the Johnny Cash version of course)—when the young dying cowboy is asked about who shot and killed him, he simply says, in the best cowboy fashion, “speak not his name, and his name will pass on.”. 

Comments

[Jeff]

I shall rise slightly above the "My four-year-old can do better than that" response to say that I find this kind of art sophomoric at best. My reason is that one has no response to the thing until one knows either (i) that it is being presented as a work of some kind or (ii) that the slab on the chair is fat. Your response to (i) might be to intellectualize the matter until you have the information in (ii), at which point you'll likely have a visceral response, if only a brief one, that completes the experience at about the level of a sophomoric prank. Or, your response to (i) might be fury at the presumption on your time that kept you from a good book or a football game, and that fury is only fueled by the information in (ii). If the purpose of Art is merely to get a response, then Fat Chair is a work of Art, even if it looks at first like a chance assemblage from the attic. It's hard to go back to Fat Chair for anything after the initial confrontation. Many chance events are worth much more. So we have Art as something less than our normal experience. How lovely. OK, tea's gone ...

[John Ptak]

Jeff, that's a sharp piece of thinking, and I agree all the way down the line with it. I'm glad you did it because as I reread what I wrote I never did get around to the logic of why I thought Fat Chair was vacant and empty. I just got stuck, fuddled, lost, bored, something...I forgot. I DO thank you for your insight. One thing about me that bothers me is that if Damien Hirst (and his teams) was doing his "art" for medical/anatomical reasons, I'd find it glorious...I have a deep appreciation for medical illustration and so on. But since he is doing his work for the sake of art alone, or art first, I find it one-trick-ponyish, toyish, unappealing. What's up with that?

[Jeff]

I don't know, but I don't blame you. "Hirst" is more like a theater production company. But leaving him behind, I think we do distinguish between things done beautifully and Beauty, things done artfully and Art. It may be a conceptual failing. It may have to do with the perception of purpose. At what point does a beautifully done map become a work of art? I must go check the oven ... preparing to make a beautiful loaf of rye bread.