Rock Paper Scissors*
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Rock Paper Scissors* LAURIE MONAHAN I feel sorry for those who have not, at least once in their lives, dreamt of turning into one or other of the nondescript objects that surround them: a table, a chair, an animal, a tree trunk, a sheet of paper. They have no desire to get out of their skins. To remain at ease with oneself, like wine in a wineskin, is an attitude contrary to all passion, and consequently to everything that is really worthwhile. —Michel Leiris1 Rock It begins with rocks: rocks that petrify, rocks that form ruins, rocks that “betray a despair that paralyzes like a cramp.” Thus art historian and critic Carl Einstein describes the seventeenth-century landscape engravings of Dutch artist Hercules Seghers in the September 1929 issue Documents, the avant-garde journal he coedited with Georges Bataille. According to the critic, Seghers’s images are “a narrow, isolated revolt against everything that can be called Dutch.”2 To effect this revolt, the artist produces scenes that are like sheets of stone, whether these be jagged cliff faces or crumbling stone structures. Ostensibly revealing broad vistas, Seghers’s landscapes instead form a stony wall of impenetrable material, confounding view with picture plane. The viewer is not meant to enter these spaces. Instead, one observes an immutable landscape of rock, such that, Einstein tells us, “the organic continuity of * With thanks to Mick Taussig, who first suggested to me the magical properties of stone. I am especially indebted to Sally Stein and Todd Porterfield for their invaluable suggestions in the preparation of this essay. 1. “Dictionnaire critique: Metamorphosis,” Documents 6 (November 1929), p. 333, translated in Encyclopaedia Acephaelica, Atlas Arkhive 3, ed. Alistair Brotchie (London: Atlas Press, 1995), p. 60. 2. Carl Einstein, “Gravures d’Hercules Seghers,” Documents 4 (September 1929), pp. 202, 204; English translation by Charles W. Haxthausen, “Etchings of Hercules of Hercules Seghers,” this issue, pp. 154–57. All references given hereafter refer to this translation. OCTOBER 107, Winter 2004, pp. 95–114. © 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228704322790917 by guest on 26 September 2021 Top: Hercules Seghers. Ruins of the Abbey of Rijnsburg. Reproduced in Documents 4 (September 1929). Right: Seghers. Mountain Gorge Bordered by a Road. Reproduced in Documents 4. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228704322790917 by guest on 26 September 2021 Rock Paper Scissors 97 Dutch art congeals into a kind of oppressive, petrified horror; or else it dissipates into a flight of planes that lacerate an eye wearied by flaccid, aimless parallels . the eye collides with densely crowded rocks, with piles of prisons.”3 These rock formations, representing the physical features of a landscape but also the surface of the composi- tion itself, are the means by which Seghers depicts his own state of immobility: unable to transcend the world in which he lived, the world in which he felt trapped. For Einstein, these are not ordinary landscapes but images of “troubled paths leading the eye into the interior, from which it is quickly expelled.”4 In the artist’s hands rock is made to break apart structures: the abbey in ruins, the fragments of rubble scattered throughout the landscapes, the piles of rocks at the foot of impervious cliffs. Seghers’s images work against serene views of the country- side, replete with details that delight the eye. His detailed, broken surfaces offer no picturesque escapes, only fragmented scenes. These represent what Einstein identifies as the artist’s experience of Dutch culture, a culture “that affirmed all objects with perfect contentment and mastered the observation of the external world with extraordinary virtuosity.”5 Unable to endure Dutch society, Seghers makes it over into stone, using the material to stand in for both the cause of his symptoms and their effects. Seghers deploys rock, in this account, like a magical talisman for the psyche, warding off the perils of the social, providing a protective barrier between the internal and the external, the invisible and visible. It is not a strategy designed to beat the system, but simply to survive it: When he represents the dead matter of the rocks, he seeks to dupe death by preempting it—a classical motif, if we recall the anticipation of death in tragedy, in the initiation of adolescents, in the hysterical catalepsies; and if we recall insects simulating death in order to escape peril.6 Seghers’s rock, Einstein contends, resolutely resists the affirmation and celebration of the artist’s material world. This artist does not eschew the meticulous detail of Dutch imagery but uses the close scrutiny characteristic of northern painting against itself, employing details to decompose the totality of the whole. In these landscapes of a shredded baroque, planes have been ground up into tiny pieces. This technique is a “zero-technique”; a dialectic of forms under the sign of death, a reciprocal destruction of parts. In this instance totality results not from one element augmenting the other, but from their mutual extirpation.7 Each material element is meticulously articulated only to form a dense and confusing surface within the composition. Massive stone cliffs are broken up by lighter areas 3. Ibid., p. 154. 4. Ibid., p. 155. 5. Ibid., p. 156. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., p. 155. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228704322790917 by guest on 26 September 2021 98 OCTOBER meant to indicate trails or roads through the scene. Yet the means of traversing the landscape or escaping through it are occluded, the pathways appearing as solid rock formations rising out of the landscape. Einstein likens them to lava: what had once been a molten flow is now encrusting an already barren landscape of stone. From tiny church steeples to the lone figure in the foreground of the abbey of Rijnsburg, any signs of life in the landscape are only nominal markers. All these are entombed by the carefully articulated fragments that form the ruins of the abbey. Seghers’s detailed observations serve as obstacles that obscure rather than reveal. They speak to an inability to master nature rather than the plea- sure of possessing it. What remains is only “the process of decomposition in the tiniest elements . it is within this order of the miniscule that he ranks the human being. His figures seem to be the product of geological chance. Man is an inferior thing.”8 For Einstein, Seghers’s landscapes invoke an earlier time, when man was incidental to nature. These compositions represent a reversion and transformation. Seghers subordinates man to nature, just as he seeks refuge in rock. Einstein’s approach to Seghers’s work means to document an experience rather than establish facts, and the distinction is crucial not only to Einstein’s account, but to Documents’ aim of turning the “art journal” on its head. Like most of the essays appearing in Documents, Einstein’s idiosyncratic reading of Seghers’s work avoids art historical exegesis. There is no formal analysis, no artistic techniques, no 8. Ibid., p. 157. Seghers. River Valley with Waterfall. Reproduced in Documents 4 (September 1929). Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228704322790917 by guest on 26 September 2021 Rock Paper Scissors 99 precedents and subsequent innovation. Art historical training notwithstanding, the critic has no interest in recounting the site locations or the artistic influences on the motifs.9 Rather, Einstein uses Seghers and his work to suggest relationships between object and image, individual and society, viewer and view. The essay is as much about alienation as it is seventeenth-century Dutch pictorial practice. These connections are suggested but never explicated. In this regard Einstein’s practice could be likened to that of the chronicler, as described by Walter Benjamin a few years later in his 1936 essay “The Storyteller”: It will take no effort to gauge the difference between one who writes history (the historian) and one who narrates it (the chronicler). The historian’s task is to explain in one way or another the happenings with which he deals; under no circumstances can he content himself with simply displaying them as models of the course of the world. But this is precisely what the chronicler does . [he has] lifted the burden of demonstrable explanation from [his] own shoulders. Its place is taken by interpretation, which is concerned not with an accurate concatenation of definite events, but with the way these are embedded in the great inscrutable course of the world.10 For Benjamin, a surfeit of information has supplanted the experience of story- telling because the historian has displaced the chronicler. Both Einstein and Documents exemplify the impulse of Benjamin’s storyteller. The journal’s title speaks not to a pretense of objective reportage, but rather an attempt to present material in order to evoke connections and associations in the reader.11 With Seghers’s example, Einstein takes the artist’s personal state of alienation as wellspring of both his story and the artist’s imagery, stating outright that the 9. Very little had been written on Seghers prior to Einstein’s piece, and he relied heavily on Wilhelm Fraenger’s short monograph, Die Radierunden des Hercules Seghers (Erlenbach-Zeurich: E. Rentsch, 1922). Almost all the subsequent literature on the artist seems to compulsively catalogue these features. References to the artist’s lack of success or to his “imaginary” landscapes are made only in passing and without commentary. See for example Willem van Leusden, The Etchings of Hercules Seghers and the Problem of His Graphic Technique (Utrecht: A.