A Liminal Mimesis of the Infra-Thin

catalogue essay by Richard Dyer, for ‘Infra Thin’ solo exhibition

Between the object and the space that surrounds it there is another space, of molecular thickness, almost not there, almost not existing; a thin skin of absence, a liminal integument of inter-relational ur-matter, that which separates the gaze from a true intimacy with the object of its attention. This attenuated territory can be posited as that which is not ‘that’ or ‘this’ but that which is, a presence which exists literally ‘beneath’ perceptibility. Nothing ever touches anything. The closer objects approach toward each other the less of their substance is manifest in the world. That is to say; the nearer an object approaches to the edge of its integrity the less it is itself; at some point it becomes less of itself and more of that which surrounds it, in this caesura we enter the universe of the ‘infra-thin’.

Within a house certain objects are ‘of’ the house rather than constituting the house itself: doors, windows, piping, light switches, and such like; they are between that which is, and that which is not, or is yet to be; ‘the possible, implying the becoming – the passage from one to the other takes place in the infra-thin’, as Duchamp put it.1

Valérie Jolly’s delicate and fragile casts of everyday objects, echoes of the interstices between the object and the world, elevate the ordinary and overlooked to the level of a precious artefact. Like the cast-off skin of a snake, a liminal, interstirtial membrane, that which is between the seen and the unseen, a tranquil tissue of transparency, the sculpture exist as a barely perceptible visual trope of the original object, an ultra-thin simulacrum, weightless and etiolated, a dermal exoskeleton, haunting the space of the real.

As a door is a portal between two spaces, so Jolly’s door sculptures, poetic signifiers of the Duchampian ‘infra-thin’, read as a liminal volume which separates not only an object from the space around it but also the observer from the unknown space beyond. As French philosopher Gaston Bachelard observes, the door represents a special order of architectural space, a threshold between possibilities and memories, dreams and desires.2 The recurring motif of the door in Jolly’s work has a strong resonance with Duchamp’s obsession with the same motif. His significant late work, made over a twenty year period when he had supposedly given up making art and was only playing chess, Étant Donnés: 1. La chute d’eau 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall 2. The illuminating gas), is installed in The Philadelphia Museum of Art behind a crumbling wooden door which the artist specially imported from Spain. The work can only be observed by the viewer pressing against the door and looking through two tiny holes at the strange scene beyond. Duchamp ‘gives’ (literally donnés) us the figure and landscape on which to rest our gaze, whereas Jolly maintains the secrecy and sanctity of the mysterious space beyond the portal, providing us with a Bachelardian zone of reverie.

Although there is a superficial resemblance between the work of Jolly and British sculptor Rachel Whiteread, they in fact exist at opposite ends of the sculptural spectrum. Whereas Whiteread’s casts are heavier than the original objects from which they are cast, emphasising their quiddity, Jolly’s are effervescent, and do not so much deal with the physicality of the object but rather with its fleeting imprint on the world, a trace of an actuality, like a three-dimensional X-ray. They are a cast of the space which lies between the object and the volume of a conventional cast, the infra-thin, the resting place of the gaze, the point where an object ceases to be itself.

Freud’s notion of the uncanny, (Das Unheimliche – literally, ‘un-homely’), endeavours to index the notion of an object which is at once familiar and at the same time strange, its strangeness arising from the fact that it is not quite ‘right’, that there is a slippage between the original and the copy. Imagine a stage-set of a room; the furniture, doors, windows and objects, appear real but on closer inspection are found to be fake; the door handle does not turn and the door does not open, the windows look out onto a scene which is painted on the other side of the glass and the shelves hold books which are merely hollow cases printed with the titles of real books. Jolly’s works are similarly suffused with a miasma of the uncanny, almost, but not quite mimetic facsimiles of the objects they allude to. The half-open doors remain shut, windows, like Duchamp’s Fresh Widow (1920), remain ‘blind’, light-switches will never illuminate the room. It is this mediation of the uncanny which invests the sculptures with the power to gently disturb and subtly disrupt our perception of reality.

When different physical elements are transposed into the same ultra-thin material the equivalences between the organic and the mechanical, the man-made and the natural, become all the more evident. Armatures for automatically closing doors, with their jointed mechanisms, take on the ghost of skeletal arms, and pipe junctions bulk space like skulls, the whole spectral scenario a vanitas (in Latin, appropriately, ‘emptiness’) to our own demise, and that of every object, reminding us of the inevitable entropy of the universe. Jorge Luis Borges’ map on a scale of one to one, a map that exactly fits the territory, is a fitting metaphor for the complex processes at play in this work.3

Due to the precise method of casting – thin veils of tissue softened into the original object with Polyvinyl Acetate, carefully pushed into every crevice with a brush – even the most microscopic detail of the original is reproduced in the sculpture. This ‘uncanny’ simulation of the real is redoubled in the new series of photographs of the sculpture, which exist as artworks in their own right, removing the image from the original by a further degree but paradoxically bringing it closer to reality. This Baudrillardian ‘precession of simulacra’ is further emphasised by the use of pencil on the tissue surface before it is photographed.4 We are left uncertain as to the true nature of the image – drawing, sculpture, photograph? – just as we are fundamentally uncertain as to the true nature of reality. What we experience as reality is merely an approximate ‘model’ of the world, we can never encounter reality directly, the brain constructs a virtual world based on the restricted amount of sensory input which the body is able to decode; in effect we ‘dream the world’. In Valérie Jolly’s aesthetically nuanced sculptures we are able to dream between the nano-spaces of the real.

Richard Dyer© March 2010

1 See Marcel Duchamp, Notes, arranged and translated by Paul Matisse, G K Hall, Boston, 1983.

The first appearance of Duchamp using the term infra-thin was in the special issue of the Surrealist magazine View, published in March 1945. Duchamp designed both the back and front covers. One of his many examples of the infra-thin (infra-mince in the original French) was: ‘When the tobacco smoke smells also of the mouth which exhales it, the two odours marry by infra-thin.’ And further: ‘Fire without smoke, the warmth of a seat which has just been left, reflection from a mirror or glass, watered silk, iridescent, the people who go through [subway gates] at the very last moment, velvet trousers, their whistling sound, is an infra-thin separation signalled.’ p 45

2 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, [1958], Beacon Press, Boston, 1969, p 222, section v: ‘How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect. If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life.’

3 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Of Exactitude in Science’, in A Universal History of Infamy, Penguin Books, London, 1975, ‘...In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography. From Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658) by J. A. Suarez Miranda.’ (Complete story.)

4 See Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman, trans, Semiotext(e), Inc, 1983. p146: ‘The very definition of the real becomes; that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction… the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal.’

Richard Dyer is News Editor and London Correspondent for Contemporary magazine, Art Editor of Wasafiri and Assistant Editor of Third Text. His critical writing has appeared in Frieze, Flash Art, Art Review, Art Press, Third Text, The Independent, The Guardian, Time Out and many other publications. His latest publications are The Descent of Man: Wolfe von Lenkiewicz (All Visual Arts, 2009), Screen Memories: Picturing Lost Time in the Watercolours of Clement Page (Kuckei + Kuckei, Berlin 2009), ‘Road Signs’ for the Phenomenological Highway: The Aesthetics of Relational Minimalism in the Work of Sébastien de Ganay (onestar press, 2010), and Demi-Monde: Alexander de Cadenet: The Artist as Digital Flâneur of the Urban Dreamscape (F-ish Gallery 2009). He is also a published poet and fiction writer; his first poetry collection, A Western Journey, was published by Arlen House (2006).