Authority to Remove marks the final chapter of American artist Jill Magid's long involvement with the Dutch secret service, the AIVD. In 2005, she was commissioned by the AIVD (De Algemene Inlichtingen en Veiligheidsdienst) to create an artwork for their new headquarters. This unlikely-seeming invitation came about as the result of a stipulation under Dutch law that a portion of the budget for the new building be spent on an art commission.
In her notes, the artist recounts the process of becoming art thus:
We want you to think of the book as an object of art. We will redact it and put it inside the vitrine with your notebooks where it will remain, permanently.
You want me to put it under glass
so that it will no longer function
as a book but as a sculpture?
Yes. He blinks his eyes rapidly.
It becomes an object of art.
The Director follows this in a soft,
imploring voice.
Will you consider that, Jill?'
(from the Epilogue p. 187)
By displaying her novel as a sculpture on a plinth,
in compliance with the Dutch secret service's
request, Magid's book is transformed
from a narrative into an art object.
Displayed in this way, it can no longer be read,
its secrets secure. The body of the book ripped
from spine becomes a metaphor for the
artist's experience – she has surrendered her first
novel but how can she surrender her memory?
The exhibition got me thinking about the gaps, the missing bits
in our text of life, the things we don't understand, the photographic
negatives - the black silhouettes of experience, I guess we could say.
Hence the weather vane. (The word hence indicating a very
solipsistic logic...apologies. If we think differently, just enjoy
the weather vanes.)
When I first began to think about stories, and how we encounter narrative within a physical dimension, I was in Milan, and I was working in theatre. Nowadays the narrative I work with is not told or acted, but displayed andobjectified.
So when the story is an artwork that reflects on the missing bits - as in Magid's Becoming Tarden (subtitle The secret itself is much more beautiful than its revelation)... well, it is, like all the great epics, all great theatre, all great television plots, ultimately a reflection on death. The negative of our life is by definition - and since hundreds of years before Christian times - exemplified by the concept of death.
Death has been the most tremendously effective tool for narrative plots and myths across all cultures - and a scientifically proven fact for just as long.
Follow me once again down the path of BT-logic, if you will.
Scientists seem to reflect less on death than storytellers, artists and humanists. (I am sure this is a controversial statement, but I admit to not being enough of a scientist to know for sure - let's say this is my impression). But what scientists do just as well as artists, is reflect on possibilities. And hence my other inspiration for the New Year comes from David Eagleman's book Sum, forty tales from the afterlives,a neuroscientific exploration of 40 scenarios of the afterlife - all imaginative, all provocative, and funny.
I will, for 2010, define myself as a possibilian, following in Mr Eagleman's footsteps and attempting to see the afterlife and death as the other side of the coin of life, a way of enriching every living moment and offering us a lens through which to view our shared condition humaine.
Best wishes for the new decade.
