TOMBEAU, Actes Sud

ZEN AND BAROQUE:
THE IMMATERIAL, THE VERTIGINOUS

Is there something like a specificity of Western art, a singularity that would define it in an absolute sense in relation to Japanese art? I believe¹ that if such a specificity means anything, then it is most effectively expressed in Baroque art. Japan is an island, as we all know, but we do not realize the extent to which that insular culture is impermeable to the very idea of the Baroque, to the permanent vital impulsion of the Seicento and to the issues informing the visual language of the Counter-Reformation. I myself would certainly never have discovered the value of the Baroque sensibility if I had not come to live in Europe.

How can a Japanese woman living in a Buddhist culture - a reserved, formalist culture - imagine this art of seduction, of profusion and dizziness? The exaltation of caprice and exception, the ornamental prodigality, the theatrical sumptuousness, the ostentatious eloquence, the shimmer and splendour of hyperbole, the decorative overabundance, the heroic emphasis, the voluptuousness of tumult, scattering, discontinuity - this Baroque imaginary is literally unimaginable for a Tokyoite. How, when one is in Tokyo, can one understand the monumental surging, the illusions of infinity, ellipse and instability, the frenzy, the oscillation, the swooning, the emotion, the disquiet that dazzle, disconcert, disorient and destabilize?

All the more so since, in these brilliant meanings of the culture of the image promoted by a triumphant Catholicism, nothing could be more radically opposed to the Shinto aesthetic of withdrawal and silence, to the concise minimalism of Zen Buddhism, to the strict formalism of the Way of emptiness and detachment. It is clear that there is nothing in the invention of the Baroque that comes close to this Japanese taste for fragile beauty and incompleteness, this quest for pared-down form and subtraction, this ascetic will to self-renunciation and effacement, this aptitude for inner illumination and letting go.

And so, inevitably, the discovery of the Catholic image stuns, the enchantment of Baroque profusion reaches deep down. The intact splendor of Rome captivates, that of Venice dazzles, the fabulous formal boldness, the continuous visual epiphanies, the volutes and voids that fill space mark a point of no return. Everyone is spontaneously swept away by these powerful cathedrals where everything is radiant - the frescoes, the sculptures, the paintings, the altars, the baldacchinos, the candelabras, the columns. The golds and the virtuosities culminate in the splendor of a visual feast to bespeak the greatest glory of God invisible. The curves, the countercurves, the broken lines, the folded and unfolded volumes, the holes and spirals cover with their vertiginousness this silent God, but throw over his silence a shadow in which speech remains without signs and without power - and I see in these cathedrals where everything is resplendent what they continue to be and what was the first thing they were, the resting place of the absence of God. Baroque art, in the vertigo that it provokes and for which it was conceived, speaks the mutism of the oracles, the dissimulation of an ineffable God, His disappearance, and speaks both of the object of its glory and of its glory without object. The Baroque church, which is the word of the God of glory, is the word of the absence of God. It is no doubt this ambiguity that compels me in these monuments of excess and dazzlement, the structuring of their golds and their principle of profusion that raised ambiguity to the highest ranks in the perfection of seduction.

This vertiginous compulsion of the Baroque, which surprises and seduces, is no less active in my art than the minimalist orientation of Zen and Shinto: an assured, constant minimalism, tautly formalist. This formalism that Western fantasies spontaneously associate with Japanese culture is very much a reality in every aspect of life. Indeed, it is there, at the meeting place of two cultures, that an aesthetic is invented, in a thinking that analyses and introduces into a dialectical relation minimalism and Baroquism: subtraction against saturation, effacement against profusion, spareness against seduction: the immaterial plus sensuality, emptiness plus the inessential, lack plus splendor. In what conditions might the "will to instability" of the Baroque become tied to the "not-seeking-to-grasp" of Zen? Art indeed is the only real enactment of this impossible knot. The work is that very knot, is that transformation that is invented only in emancipation from that which never ceases to be not written.

The almost-nothing plus vertigo, this is the gulf on which my work rests, and that which depends on it alone and belongs only to it, is being able to discover the absence that is its cause, to show the fault that it ekes out within, the gap where it is constituted, as if the image could suddenly be nothing, nothing but its own absence, the affirmation of the very absence that makes it exist. In my work, this fragility that makes the figure weakened, as if annulled, this obliteration that reveals the image to itself in its obscurity, leads to an art of clarity, to a luminous experience where absence is no longer privation, but affirmation. Privation, disappearance, effacement or absence are now no longer a failing of the image or a lack in the image, but the affirmation of the ever de-completed and sometimes threatening meaning of the image.

BAROQUE DEATH

As for what immediately concerns us, that is to say, the meanings of this seventeenth century of glory and splendor, it seems to me that we are quick to forget the enthusiasm with which the Counter-Reformation promoted a frantic taste for the macabre, the continuous questing for the morbid, in an unexpected movement that seems strangely contradictory of Baroque elevation and triumph. Between 1620 and 1690, the exaltation of the funereal is general, the indulgence of the spectacularly funereal becomes universal and everywhere the mortuary theatre constantly staged the deathly, the deleterious, the lethal. André Chastel gathered all this funereal theatricality together under the heading of "Baroque death": "It hardly seems excessive to say that the 'Baroque' sensibility manifested itself especially in a violent, unaccustomed and very striking deployment of 'funerary artifice'.² Paradoxical and provocative, this funerary artifice finds expression in the form of a typically Baroque oxymoron, which is simply a brazen modesty, an inverted ostentation: negative pomp. What we see through all this funereal strangeness is proud pomp engaging in a theatricalised form of grandiloquent austerity, arrogant asceticism, triumphant modesty, so apt for the expression of the Catholic faith. The new Baroque style, in a continuous explosion of Requiems and Leçons des Ténèbres, seeks only to present the spectacle of death in mortuary sculpture that deploys itself throughout with an irresistible magnitude. On the tombs and monumental catafalques, the dead are endlessly hailing eternity with heroic poses. The saints of Zurbaran, Caravaggio, Vélazquez and Philippe de Champaigne acquire the habit of meditating on death with a skull in their hand.

But the living themselves strike poses from beyond the tomb in funereal settings, meticulously affecting to soon be dead. Death is organized as an ordinary setting, constantly conforming to the arrangements of the Spiritual Exercises (1522-1544) of Ignatius de Loyola, that the Jesuits spread throughout Europe: "Consider myself on the point of death... Picture myself on my deathbed, crucifix in hand, candle lit, the assistants praying for me". The same exhortations punctuate Les Délices de la mort (1631) by the Frenchman Puget de La Serre: "Think at all times on your funeral... Think at all times of what you will think at this final hour."

In Rome, the pomp of the Vatican annexed the emblems of the Vanitas, in an ostentatious deployment of lugubrious symbols that had hitherto seemed the privilege of Protestant painting. No doubt meditation on death, in the Huguenot and Lutheran faiths, is more theological in nature, more reasoning, less literary, less concrete than in the Church of Rome. If the Jesuits and Papists, following the Baroque penchant of a delicious meditation on Salvation, multiplied the insignia of death, if they fed the dreams of the century with representations of death both cruel or feigned, lugubrious or joyous, they still did so to dazzle, to stimulate emphasis, simulate vertigo, shake up certitudes, insinuate illusion and uncertainty throughout. Is life anything more than a dream, than death in disguise?

Thus, in the audience chamber at the Vatican, Pope Alexander VII (1655-1667) always received visitors surrounded by skulls, next to an open coffin. He replaced his silver with earthenware dishes on which skulls were painted, and under his bed he kept another coffin. Just like his predecessor, the Pope commissioned from the great Bernini (1598-1680) the imposing funerary monument (1671-1678) that would be built for him in the basilica. On it we see the figure of the pontiff praying above his own sepulcher, covered with a marble shroud from which, in a perfectly Baroque dramatic tension, there springs forth a bronze skeleton brandishing an hourglass. The funerary spectacle spread throughout Europe. It was omnipresent at the Vatican and governed pontifical pomp throughout the century.

But the Pope was not the only Roman who fled the deathly pomp of the world into another inverted splendor, the vertigo of the memento mori. The Capuchins themselves now prayed only in theatrical, macabre chapels. Beneath the church of Santa Maria dell' Immmacolata Concezione, in a crypt adjoining the convent of the Capuchin friars, lies the incredible scenography of six clay chapels, completely covered with the bones of some four thousand Capuchins and Barberini princes. Skeletons hanging everywhere, raised up in niches, stacked on the floor, hanging from the ceiling like girandoles, walls covered with scapulas, altars standing on accumulations of skulls, bones piled high to form columns and crowns, lamps and garlands formed by a composition of femurs and vertebrae, false stucco and false rocaille formed by clavicles and tibias. "Baroque death" at its most extremely emphatic. The maximal, deathly theatre of funereal pomp.

But that is not the truly decisive point. Above the Capuchin crypt, in the church itself, we find the very austere tomb of Cardinal Antonio Barberini. This tomb, because it immediately banishes all trace of Baroque theatricality, establishes itself as the most eloquent negative monument of the paradoxical pomp of these very proud funeral orations. It is the exact emblem of insolent ostentation in macabre devotion, modesty, asceticism and renunciation. It is the radical absolute of all tombs.

In his response to these public commissions that would make him a rich man, Bernini, who under the previous pontificate had produced only small busts and decorative sculpture, would make a resounding contribution to the advent of the Baroque and acquire an authority that would dominate the century. In the basilica of Saint Peter, we find more of these buzzing bees. Along with other emblems of the Barberinis, the suns and laurels, they are present all over the twisted columns and bronze volutes that adorn the cornice of the gigantic Baldacchino. This marvelous monument, which Bernini built between 1626 and 1627 on the tomb of Saint Peter, along the central axis, under the dome of the basilica, was a spectacular statement of this new and triumphal Baroque style that inaugurated a pontifical reign of exceptional longevity - twenty-one years - whose theological and aesthetic foundations marked a key turning point in Western art. In 1627 - in the early years after his accession, therefore - the pope and patron commissioned Bernini to design for him a tomb: the imposing bronze effigy rises above a black marble sarcophagus on which there sits a bronze skeleton representing Winged Death writing the name of Urban. This grandiose memorial to the glory of the new pontiff was built during his lifetime and was visible to all, dominating the tribune of Saint Peter in an unprecedented act of self-celebration. We know that one of the successors of Urban VIII, Alexander VII, similarly wished to benefit from the authority of this theatrical funerary art, and commissioned from Bernini his own monumental tomb, a spectacular mausoleum that would also be built in the basilica.

Regarding our subject here and the urban environment of Santa Maria dell'Immacolata Concezione (also known as the Chiesa dei Cappuccini), the burial place of Cardinal Barberini, we must observe one more detail. At the end of the Via Veneto, at the centre of the Piazza Barberini, there is an imposing fountain, complete with the Barberini tiara and coat of arms, built by Bernini between 1642 and 1643 at the request of Urban VIII. This very virtuoso Fontana del Tritone encapsulates all the Baroque rhythms - movements that are enchanted, restless, twirling, vertiginous, tormented and tumultuous, the movements that make the Baroque style a dancing style. Surging, rising, collapsing, reaching and failing, leaping, flowing, unstable metamorphoses, scattering, eddying, rolling, dispersed in spray, drawn to the side, irregular reflections, overflowing, bursting cascades, enveloping spirals, sinuosities, twists, volutes, interlacings, turbulences, diverging vanishing lines, continuous spinning, sudden breaks...

THE TOMB OF CARDINAL BARBERINI & THE MAUSOLEUM OF JULIUS II

Inside the Capuchin church, we come to the tomb of Cardinal Barberini. On the floor, in front of the high altar, a very modest, very austere tombstone in grey marble. On this monument to asceticism there is no effigy or allegorical statue, no escutcheon or coat of arms, not even a name, not even a date, but simply this:

In these laconic words Barberini comments on his own death. The story begins with its end, in a gesture that is even more ascetic, even more iconoclastic than the Protestant asceticism and iconoclasm that all through his life he helped to drown out in the torrent of images and glories of the Counter-Reformation. Therein lies the troubling truth of this tomb: from the first, all images of glory have gone, the tomb is forever empty and the name buries itself under its own ashes. Thus, at the moment of death, the cardinal chose - as we can appreciate - the path of the greatest modesty, which, it goes without saying, is the greatest immodesty. The die is cast and all History's agitation is absolved. The night of the image has been restored, the absence of all things is consummated, the silence of vanities is pure.

And so everything has come to an end. Everything that the end must make manifest, everything that Barberini sought to create by renouncing his name is given in advance and becomes like the condition of this disappearance, its anticipated appearance, its eternal image. A strange bend backwards in the curve of Time. It is not the cardinal who disappears into death and makes his name disappear into silence, but the absolute presence of this disappearance, the paradoxical shimmering of that which is absent in its place that enables him to remain the master of chance and necessity, that usher him into impersonality in full light, into the neutrality where nothing is accomplished, the empty omnipotence that is eternally self-consuming. As if language were accommodating him, restoring him to himself at the very moment when it yet deprives him of his innermost being.

And this "and nothing"  whose supererogatory humility resounds through the marble with the dark and threatening modesty thrown back into the proud excess of the Baroque. This "and nothing" that carries this monument of negative glory, this monument of paroxystic Christian humility, into the most emphatic arrogance of the Counter-Reformation. "And nothing", meaning, quite the opposite: neither ashes nor dust, but an indestructible monument in the memory of men, in the century of centuries. Here (hic), extreme modesty meets extreme arrogance.

In this ultimate transformation, the name identified with the ashes becomes at last the shadow whereby light is radiant. Seeing this very discreet yet unforgettable tomb in the floor of this little Roman church, what I saw at work was subtraction; I found the clear form of obliteration, the immaterial that embraces the whole horizon of my art, of all art. Before this tomb, I sensed the work of absence from which all things begin, I grasped within it a presence, a power, as if the immaterial had a strange power of affirmation. I saw in that inscription a prodigious piece of language capable of uttering to the very end that supreme and silent voiding of the night where infinitely thunders the challenge that all things may not exist (Leibniz). That is why art, the trying and hearing of what lacks, must not be understood as anything other than poetic experience.

However, in this prodigious piece of language taking as its support a piece of marble that is itself nothing less than dust or ashes, I again saw that nothing, in language or in the image, is capable of representing the nihil of death or the void of jouissance.

Before this slab of funerary marble, this affirmation of paradoxical pure absence, an absence that in its affirmation eludes itself and yet makes itself present, I thought of the mausoleum of Julius II (also in Rome), under the imposing form of Michelangelo's colossal Moses, which was originally meant to consist of three tiers of forty monumental statues. In Carrara, where he spent eight months choosing the huge blocks of marble from which this monument of monuments was to burst forth, Michelangelo dreamed of sculpting the mountain itself into one gigantic statue...

It is precisely against this impalpable and perpetual disaster of Time promoted by the funerary tradition, against the gradual sliding of the name towards obscurity, against its slow disappearance into the indefinite substance of eternity, that this epitaph asserts itself and lights up the vain vacancy of nothingness:

Everything has already happened here in the indifferent distancing of nothingness. Barberini pushes the images far away from the "here lies" of his remains, as if seeking in a beyond-death, in a more-than-death, the transfigured total state in the peaceful paradise of Time regained, where the real annihilation of being, the symbolic erasure of the name, the imaginary perishing of the body no longer count because they have forever already occurred. This arrogance in the extension of the domain of annihilation concentrates all the paradoxes of Baroque vertiginousness, by inventing a paradoxical exaltation of mortification, an extreme will to withdrawal, a deep decision to erase all profusion and all decorum. This arrogant affirmation of Catholic asceticism, beyond the infinite inhibition of the Reformation, overturns all the presuppositions of the Counter-Reformation that, in their lifetime, the Barberinis, with Bernini, managed to assert over and against Protestant austerity.

Through thought, Barberini reaches that absolute, secret heart of the image that is, indeed, absence, the intimacy of absence and silence. The disappearance of vanities: it is here that we can hear the true presence in which there remains only the substance of nothing - dust, ashes and nothing. This conjuring of the void, this paradoxical folding of Time, this absolute de-realizing of the power of the visible as it becomes invisible potential, this lightening of the weight of universal conventions - this is in reality the centre of the Baroque image, of Baroque sculpture and architecture, in which the true heroes are emptiness, the virtual and the immaterial, disguised in the form of profusion.

LAZARUS, VENI FORAS

Thus Barberini seeks to be the absolute master of the impersonality of death by dying in the certitude of the name made eternal in the pure dream of a present that has itself disappeared, the dream of a present absolutely lacking where nothing of forgetting is accomplished, where the omnipotence of silence is abolished.By erasing his name at the moment of disappearing, Barberini conquers, as if in that peaceful night, access to a totally transfigured, unfindable present.

By erasing the dates of his birth and his death, the cardinal ensures that he will remain forever in the memory of men, there where nothing of forgetting is ever again accomplished. His name has already disappeared, everything is already accomplished, the end has already occurred in the indifferent morning of Time, at the time when forgetting has already been restored to itself, where absence is consummated and silence is pure.

Barberini thus approaches the depth of forgetting that is created when we die, he approaches the silence that forms when we disappear. By the effacement of his name, which is as if unpronounceable, he makes that name forever impossible to efface, rather than ineffable. The disappearance of the name is what in truth enables him to ward off the disappearance of the name.

By creating in negative this fabulous Baroque memorial, this negative monument of the Counter-Reformation whose silence overflows into the visual aphasia of the Reformation, the cardinal purifies nothingness by moving forward into the negative of the negative and transfigures the very meaning of the exile of death. His refusal to perish in the great indecision of immortality makes his own obliteration the promise of an unlimited future in the constant genesis of a perpetual blossoming.

By being the creator of his own nothingness and by obtaining, within the effacement of the self, the certainty of raising himself once again to the peak of his self, Barberini affirms in death what death claims to deny. By abandoning himself absolutely to absolute abandon, by giving himself over to the dispossession of dust, ashes and nothing, he denies by that very dispossession the devastation of death and chooses to enter into what Hegel calls the "life of the Spirit". He engages in a struggle and masters the chaos into which he was about to disappear and, in order to elude the immobile burial promised by the glory of Time, renders indispensable the name that he has just erased with such gravitas.

I see, in the ceremony of anonymity whereby Barberini invents a way of raising his own disappearance to the dignity of a timeless neutrality and impersonality, this kind of supreme manifestness wherein art manages to render itself eternally in the register of unanimity, of universality. This experience of chosen insignificance is worth meditating.

Blanchot : "Anonymous is the one who dies, and anonymity is the appearance in which the ungraspable, the non-limited, the non-located most dangerously affirm themselves to us. Whoever experiences them, experiences an anonymous, impersonal power, that of an event which, being the dissolution of any event, is not only now, but its beginning is always beginning again, and under its horizon everything that occurs recurs. From the moment when "one dies", the moment is revoked; when one dies - "when" does not designate a date, but any date, just as there is a level of that experience where death reveals its nature by appearing not as the decease of a given, determinate person, nor as death in general, but in this neutral form: the death of someone. The dead person is always nondescript."

Barberini, now a nondescript corpse in the anonymous crowd of nondescript corpses, is not only sent back to the impersonal and modest violence of anonymity. He becomes a presence without a name, and by his transparent affirmation he ceases to be that passive, interchangeable, insignificant corpse kept for him by death. On his own, with an infinitesimal writing, much more modest than would be the page of a book, he does what neither the wind nor the sea nor the sand can undo. His presence without a name becomes a present cut free in space, a piece of vertical Time, a vertical fragment fallen from the sky, without a past, without a future, an infinite spacing in duration, an obliteration of the moment that eludes disappearance and oblivion. The fact of having lived an ephemeral life and being dead remains an eternal fact and the name that is absent on the stone remains unerased in the unwork of Time - the power without content of the nihil is exhausted here before the universal power of the symbol.

The gaze seeks to thin and make transparent the stone of this tomb and dissolve it in a desire to see that leaps beyond. I want to see that which yet has no image, nor even a name, and it is in that which eludes the gaze that the desire to see is sustained. It is indeed in that with which it admits it is not satisfied that the gaze discovers the cause of its desire. It is because this stone and this tomb constitute the presence, that is yet hidden, of that which must appear, in the call to its liberating signification: a Lazarus, veni foras. This Lazarus three days dead, this cardinal dead perhaps since forever, this presence without a name answers us and speaks to us, to the very heart of our selves, like the appeasing silence that is in the eye of the storm.

Thus, where nothing appears but where dissimulation becomes appearance, Revelation springs from the torn intimacy of the Baroque Age's antagonisms - measure and measurelessness, form and the infinite, decision and instability - which are both irreconcilable and inseparable; a Revelation that is set forth in a disappearance that is also a presence. It is through this Revelation that the meaning present at all times in the Baroque experience is communicated: where lightness is not lacking, there we are given depth.

He who declares he has no more hope save in the depth of the void created in death is the greatest affirmer of the present; he is wagering on the absolute instant, the only one that will absolutely triumph over the future; he is wagering on the apotheosis of the instant that will not pass and will not be exceeded. Barberini's absolute instant is the spark of the proper name, which retains that exceptional power of affirmation, escapes debasement, and surpasses the premeditation of obliteration and oblivion. The sovereign clarity of such an abnegation of the self is akin to the Hegelian balance, which sees in death a possibility of purifying emptiness, and finds in extreme negativity the measure of the absolutely positive. Such, again, is the meaning of art for Kafka, "a breath of cheerfulness lent to the emptiness".⁶

What one calls revelation is that: the invisible become appearance. Revelation says precisely that when everything has disappeared and everything is lacking, the lack shows that something is still there. It makes clear that the essence of being is to continue to be where it is lacking, to be there as something concealed. When everything is concealed, the image finds its condition there though it tends to disappear. The image presupposes the absence and disappearance of what it represents; it is identified with the remainder that subsists in the absence. What makes the image possible is the limit where it disappears. That is the ambiguity it displays and conceals, the ambiguity that is the foundation on which it continues to assert things in their disappearance, it shows what remains when there is nothing.

To depict oneself through self-portraiture is to enter the affirmation of the negation where disappearance threatens. It means to surrender to the risk of disappearance, where anonymity reigns. To depict myself is to disappear beneath an image and, in that manner, to enter into contact with absence becoming image. To disappear in a single color is to arrange things so that the color that alludes to a figure becomes an allusion to what is without figure. The image, which is that form drawn on absence then becomes the formless presence of that absence. The single color becomes the opaque opening to what is when there is nothing more than the void.

Why would depicting have anything to do with that essential absence, that absence that is such that in it alone disappearance appears? It happens that an image captivates us when it concentrates in itself the blinding inexhaustible radiance of what it is lacking, that ontological lack that is present in every image and which sparks the desire to see, the catching of the gaze, fascination. When the gaze is captivated, what it sees in the image isn't what it looks at; what takes hold of it, fascinates it isn't in the image it looks at but rather in what it lacks and what fixes the cause of the fascination in a place beyond what the image displays.

Fascination is fundamentally linked to the neutral contorless presence of an indeterminate figureless opacity within the figure. When it is caught by the gaze, that absence produces a kind of anxiety and attraction, provokes the desire to see. One senses then that with the aspiration to disappear in the sole color, absence becomes visible, the invisible becomes appearance and it is that revealed absence that eroticizes the gaze, in the endless search for what is missing from the image. There we see how the image is always at fault vis-à-vis itself and that is indeed why one looks at it.

What gives the image its value is indeed what it is lacking, what gives it all its value is that it leaves the gaze unsatisfied. By its essence the image leaves something to be desired. There, in that essential failure, lies the impasse where all my experience as an artist runs up against a difficulty - and it is there, in that essential failure, that the work of art is realized. The image does indeed have the power to make beings disappear, to make them appear as something lost, to make them appear in their absence, to lend them an appearance that is that of a disappearance only, appearance of a presence that speaks only of absence. From the first my Self-portraits show that the image, having the power to summon appearance and absence, also has the power to disappear there itself, to fade away amidst what it accomplishes, to annul itself there while proclaiming the fullness of what it endlessly shows and obliterates.

When it came time to record the engraved words of Barberini's epitaph, I chose to lighten the asceticism of the funerary text with the fragile delicacy of blown-glass letters, to re-enchant the formal minimalism of my project with the grace of Murano glass. By choosing to borrow this sovereign epitaph, I decided to turn to the most dreadful affirmation of obliteration and oblivion. With this Tombeau^8, I am pursuing the reflection I began through a series of my earlier Self-portraits (2000-2006) and L'Instance de la lettre (2003-2005),⁹ an in-depth reflection on obliteration and disappearance of the figure, on the revelation of the figure beyond its obliteration in color.

The letters, which I designed in a size that matches my own face (21 cm) after characters engraved by Giambattista Bodoni in Parma between 1771 and 1788, were fashioned from blown glass by Pino Signoretto, master glass-blower in Murano.¹⁰ These letters speak of the fragility of being: they articulate that through both the text (pulvis, cinis: "dust, ashes") that they form and the glass forming them, which surrounds a central inner void (et nihil, "and nothing"). Dust that covers the caput mortuum of being, ashes that covers the fire, provoking the fusion of the simple sand which it transforms into glass, and nothing, where the central void at the heart of the glass letter condenses. As for the glass' deep red, a color containing gold that has made a name for Murano for ten centuries, it is for Venetian glass-blowers a challenging color, the color of maximum difficulty, the most instable color, which varies so much that it is almost impossible to guarantee that you will find the same red the next day.

An ostentatious color, red is an imperial insignia, an attribute of force and courage. It's associated first of all with the color of fire ”which Leon Battista Alberti doesn't fail to point out in De Pictura (1436). In Western iconography, it is the blood of Christ's passion and the torment of martyrs. Red, the color of blood, is essentially seen as the color of life, the color that is supposed to ward off death.¹¹

We know that the Latin coloratus has two meanings, both "red" and "colored". In Latin, then, the word for "color" is "red" and red is understood as a synonym of "color": it is the color of colors. In fact, "red" also means life (blood, fire) and death (blood of the martyr, the flames of Hell). The symbolism is ambivalent, divided; its value is inverted: the regenerative value of red (the blood shed by Christ brings with it redemption and eternal life, the tongues of fire of Pentecost transmit the power of the Holy Spirit to the apostles and mark the beginning of their evangelical mission) is inverted in a deadly meaning (crimes of blood, the flames of Satan that consume and destroy).

Furthermore, in the seventeenth century red was the color of Papists. Beginning in the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries, popes and cardinals adopted this color, meaning that they were willing to shed their blood for Christ. For the Protestant Reformers, however, red was a call for condemnation. It is the sign of damnation, immorality, the color that had to be driven out of the temple, because in the Apocalypse, the color red is the one worn by the great whore of Babylon ridden by a beast from the sea... The ever impeccable clear-sightedness of Protestants when it came to interpreting what went into the Vatican's power and justifying a contrario the Papists' artistic undertakings: one quickly catches on to the dramatic, tragic and epic scope of a color that is so erotic, satanic, infernal... Since then, red has remained associated with eroticism and passion, celebrations and luxury, spectacle and revolution. It has also continued to be the symbol of power since the Roman Empire.

Besides the Tomb of Glass I have created a photographic Tombeau. Self-portrait.¹² These photographs form a series of eighteen red self-portraits - which I printed out for the first time on a 1:1 scale (28 cm x 28 cm), in other words an exact life-size reproduction of my face. Each glass letter becomes the tombstone that literally subjects my face to the "instance of the letter". With decisive emphasis Jacques Lacan stresses "the fateful exchange by which the letter comes to take the very place from which desire withdraws." The psychoanalyst rigorously formulates the letter's function in its lethal import, "The signifier lets the meaning of death in. The letter kills but we learn that from the letter itself. It is that by which every impulse is virtually a death impulse."

The epitaph taken from Barberini's tombstone becomes the epitaph of a tomb where, beneath the blown-glass letters, pure absence is asserted (I am dead); an absence that, by slipping away from itself (this is not a corpse), is still rendered present in the form of a presence hidden in the image that is not abolished (hic jacet).

Concealment is a negation (I am not here) in which an assertion (I is another) is nevertheless concealed. My work, through concealment (beneath the letter), transformation (as corpse), obliteration (in the color), asserts that there is something that is nothing that may want to substitute itself for negation. When there is nothing and nothing can be denied, nothing remains and, remaining, still asserts something like the lack-of-being, the idleness of the gaze, the obliteration of the visible in a place beyond the image. The power of not being seen is of course the very essence of the visible. By connecting with the purity of the negation, the work of art can in turn assert itself in the certainty of its original lack-of-being.

In this new series of self-portraits, in which I am seen lying on the ground with eyes closed, the meaning is literally that of the final disappearance. It is a fact that here, as in my preceding works, my art, the whole of my art depends on a connection with death; it has meaning only in an essential relationship with the meaning of death. Tombeau: death is there, present, its appearance is brought to the fore, this absence is asserted with greater authority than in any of my earlier works.

Tombeau. Self-portrait makes what disappears in representation appear. This figure of disappearance does't only tend toward the disappearance of the figure, it is still that from which the figure, making an image, becomes the depth of the rift on which this image opens and yet is closed. The image shrouds this absence on which it has to close and which it must preserve in a way, as if the lack, the disappearance were its profound truth, the meaning under which it is up to the image to make itself present to itself in its own form.

Death, which is the silent intimacy of the living, the death impulse that Freud was the first to be able to see as being the radical intimacy of desire, must be put to the account of the libido itself, must be identified as the sure heart of the life impulse until death, so that death for an instant lets itself be grasped as the unavoidable present of presence, becomes an accepted, desired presence as an incessant present. The mortal presence of this absolute present, far from being a suspension of the future, an alteration of what is to be, is the unbroken, living umbilical cord of Time, the overflow of all duration, "since death is the supreme future and the future of all futures"¹⁶. The continuous present of death is the necessary heart of the living, for "our life is nothing but an eternal death".

The central point of my art is this loss as cause, the loss one cannot reach, the only one that is worth reaching, the one that is in the direct aim of the image. This central point is ambiguity, the sovereign requirement, that which one cannot really approach through the realization of any work of art but whose very approach constitutes the work of art.

This duplicity in art cannot be foiled. It is deeply felt here as a happy game that invites one to a concealment that is itself concealed. The concealment that relinquishes all sacrifice and all pathos opens onto the negation of the negative. Art is essentially determined by this measure of duplicity where everything lapses once again when the impossible is attenuated. The experience of that vague and vain disaster is affirmed in plenitude, in the instantaneous balance in which the lack becomes a work of art, where the disappearance becomes revelation.

When the image sets itself the task of grasping in its essence the meaning of the unrepresentable, the impossible to represent, the work of art is only realized in that original adherence to what is lacking. What is peculiar to the lack is to be forever veiled by what it is it is lacking, which endlessly leads the work of art in its search for art outside of art to confront what can be rightly called the dread of having to realize the unrealizable.

What the Tombeau. Self-portrait clearly states is that art belongs to semblance because the work of art is itself what eludes the criteria of truth. By some aspect or another, the image always dismisses the true, slips away from its meaning, pointing first to that region where nothing is verified, where what begins anew has never yet begun, where what exists nevertheless does not exist, a place of ambiguity from which nothing arises save in the form of an outer shadow, where every meaning is put to the proof of what the true must deny to become possibility and reveal the "error of our death".

Disappearance appears in a kind of sovereign casualness, an alliance with the revelation of the invisible to exclude the visible, a pact with the inverted negative. This will to advance without pathos towards the disappearance of my own figure corresponds to the unreality of the ego, its multiplicity and division. "I" always seems, in the fullness of its unity, in a position to act supremely and attain itself by itself, and yet the one that is represented disappears, is no longer me, is another, such that when "I" represents me, I must needs disappear since I am not the one I show. In a way, the work comes to settle in that vacancy. Whence there arises an appeal that draws it towards what puts it absolutely to the test, an essential instability, where identity is no longer identical to itself, where nothingness slips away, where everything is played out on the right to fade away, the possibility to disappear, the power to die.

My Tombeau. Self-portrait is thus both a work of art that is hidden in the profoundly silent presence of the invisible, and a work that is present and visible through the absence and obscurity of the immaterial. It is both the cause and division of its own lack-of-being, and what it shows by lending form to the immaterial and giving it a name (dust, ashes - and nothing) is the fight against the shadow and the silence becoming the guardians of that which slips away from the gaze and shuts itself off from the image. By giving the immaterial (the immaterial as the unnamed) an image in a series of portraits and letters, the work of art represents what is invisible in a figure, its immateriality, before figuring itself as a figure of disappearance.

With this Tombeau. Self-portrait, I have approached art as a beginning that has been turned around to the native lack, an invaginated beginning, turned inside out towards what is impossible to represent where it is liable to disappear. My Self-portrait is the language in which disappearance is expressed and where that disappearance itself ceases to appear. This suspension of the disappearance, this overlooking of the lack is all that is displayed from now on. That is the radical inversion where that which is at work in death and which, perpetuating being in the form of nothingness, makes absence a fascination, obliteration an illumination, disappearance an image, and the gaze the empty centre of the unfillable of desire.