Paraphernalia: the Stanza of Photography
Things are not outside of us, in measurable external space, like neutral objects (ob-jecta) of use and
exchange; rather, they open to us the original place solely from which the experience of measurable
external space becomes possible. They are therefore held and comprehended from the outset in the topos
outopos (placeless place, no-place place) in which our experience of being-in-the-world is situated. The
question "where is the thing?" is inseparable from the question "where is the human?" Like the fetish,
like the toy, things are not properly anywhere, because their place is found on this side of objects and
beyond the human in a zone that is no longer objective or subjective, neither personal nor impersonal,
neither material nor immaterial, but where we find ourselves suddenly facing these apparently so simple
unknowns: the human, the thing.
- Giorgio Agamben 1
In fall 2012 Wim Wauman invited fellow artists and cultural practitioners to contribute a meaningful
object to his new project titled Paraphernalia. The object could be basically anything as long as it
inspired, affected, or enthralled the invitee: a dog's coat, an indigenous sculpture, pieces of paper,
supermarket food, a color chart, photographs of the person in question and her entourage, or of his/her
studio, a fragment of an artwork, and so on. The resulting collection is varied to say the least: some
objects are ordinary and banal, while others are rare and precious; some are object trouvées that have
been lying in the respective atelier for years, whereas others are produced specifically for the project;
and some are not even objects at all, but scores to manufacture or acquire such-and-such an object.
Some objects are accompanied by detailed instructions in terms of their manipulation, while others are
surrendered to the whims of Wauman's imagination. In the end, the collection of collectibles counts an
impressive 171 objects (including Wauman’s personal additions) from more then 120 participating
artists. Relatively few of the addressees were reluctant to partake in the project, and declined the
invitation.
At first sight, the donated objects have little to nothing in common: they were selected on a
personal and often also highly emotional basis, each resonating with a particular artistic voice and
concurrent aesthetic practice. As one artist described his contribution, a postcard depicting a bearded
woman that was sent to Madrid by the artist's former lover in Belgium, the object 'is full of histories
and emotions that perhaps can only be seen by myself.'2 Such memories and projections maybe strike
chord on an individual and predominantly private level, yet in and by themselves they are hardly
relevant for the project. What is at stake in Paraphernalia - and, for that matter, in any other artwork is not the personal meaning of an object (a particular memory of a particular lover) but its general,
public resonance ("memories of lovers"). It is not the individual link of different objects and subjects
but the shared nature of inspirational objects that is here the issue. By means of their pick these objects
have all somehow gained something "extra", something that perhaps was and perhaps was not there
before. In this sense, the grouping in a coherent system of these objects can be read as an experiment
to extract general meaning on the nature of inspirational objects and on their oneiric relation to the
subject. The archive of gifts and donations shapes a representative cross-section of contemporary
artistic culture by which to explore the artist's items of identification and, by extension, his or her
specific mode of association within the realm of material things.
Paraphernalia thus is like a time document presenting a (selective) overview of those objects
that inspire and render productive artists today. In principle, almost every object could be related to
the persona, aesthetic production, or methodology of the donating subject in question. Aside from
offering an insight into the network of contemporary art and its diverging modes of reference and of
inspiration, however, the collection of contributions first and foremost suggests different "types" of
objects at work. Each of these object types issues a certain intrigue or some form of attraction. By
photographing the objects both in ostensibly neutral portraits and in scenic constellations based on
formal and symbolic relationships, Wauman explores such intrigue through the medium of
photography. It is this combination of the intriguing object and photography that makes the project
both complex and challenging.
*
In his 1977 book Stanze Giorgio Agamben forwards an epistemology of "unattainable things":
phenomena 'in which desire simultaneously denies and affirms its object, and thus succeeds in entering
into relation with something that otherwise it would have been unable either to appropriate or enjoy.' 3
For Agamben, the material and discursive model of the stanza, a capacious dwelling that denotes a
strophe and a decorated chamber, symbolizes the phantasms that have dominated Western culture
from Aristotle to Yves Klein's 1958 exhibition "La Vide". Representing something that is seemingly
within reach but eventually appears inaccessible, stanza stands for the mystery and elusiveness of
poetry, that 'nothing (that) safeguards unappropriability as its most precious possession.' In the second
and more philosophically oriented part of the book, the author delineates three such elusive concepts:
the fetish, the commodity, and the toy. Each with their historical and theoretical background, these
concepts demonstrate the 'presence of an absence' in a simultaneously concrete and immaterial, or a
both tangible and intangible phenomenon. 'These objects,' Agamben writes, 'apparently properly
belong neither to the internal and subjective nor to the external and objective spheres, but to something
that Winnicott defined as "the area of illusion", in whose "potential space'' they will subsequently be
able to situate themselves both in play and in cultural experience.'4 Toys, fetishes and commodities in
other words suspend the ranks of everyday, profane matter. By oscillating between phantasmatic and
non-transcendent object they refuse to be self-identical, like a carousel of ontic indetermination.
Paraphernalia, too, are never truly themselves: they are always both more and less than a thing.5
They shift between obstinate materiality and those meanings and connotations projected upon them by
their donors. The abundant presence of dolls, toys, and miniatures is striking: an assemblage aspiring
to surrealism with a fitness mannequin and fishing hooks (156); a female doll rubber-strapped to a
piece of rock appealing heavily for Freudian analysis (1); a miniature railroad switch (78),
wheelbarrow (161), silhouette of a horse on a crown cap plus seated woman (165), and football (143);
a K’NEX-like structure that dissolves from a contracted sculpture to a quasi-transparent globe, and
which was given to the respective artist and then passed through (38); a set of marbles (109); toyflags, birthday cake candles and carnival spiders speaking to the exotic and audacious imaginary of
little boys (91); a dart (24) - which ties into the notions of both the game and chance; a fragmented and
reassembled bowling pin (122); a piece of billiard chalk (62) plus miniature billiard table (89); a
Rubik's cube (128); and, finally, a performative toy clown (33). Purchased at a secondhand bookshop
and thrift store, this last contribution was described by its donor as an escapist object that both negates
and potentially overturns reality: 'The wobbling clown (yes, it can wobble!) (is) the one who points out
the fun in a sad situation - or the absurd in the real. ... And he can wobble and spins his mind away
from it all.'6 Enthralled by the game of clowns and toy miniatures, we too "spin our mind away from it
all", opening as it were a topos outopos in between reality and the imagination. The clown
incorporates the spatial nucleus between subject and object described by Agamben, and radiates a
parallel and phantasmatic world from there. 'The mysterious globe is indeed a toy,' Virginie Baily
commented on her contribution, as if describing an analogous universe, 'but for me it also expands on
the cosmos, the world, and the essence of the space-time continuum.'7 The miniature staircase (or
pyramid?) by Renato Nicolodi (68) even further emphasizes the link between miniatures and
"another", spiritual world by referencing the small-scale effigies of buildings that were put in Egyptian
graves.
Commodities are fairly marginal among contributions; yet the fetish is present in different
guises. Fetishes are combinations of objects and their denial: they make us desire that which is
implied, yet not "there". Examples abound: a cast of the inside of the artist's mouth (155) or ear (140),
showing the negative of the absent subject; a folded map substituting for the actual terrain (12);
helpless instruments that require an operator - a brush (28), ink pen (43), marker (72), putty knife
(130), or unit of paint (51); the mirror (14) and reflective steel sphere (8) that recast their surroundings
in an illusionary heterotopia; their art-historical twin, the cunning trick of the trompe l'oeil-jambon
(64); working gloves that seem deflated (45) or uprooted (15) in the absence of their "master". These
items each stage the longing for something absent, manifested in something present. They do not
advocate an imaginary hallucination that denies perception, nor renounce the phantasm in favor of an
immanent reality, but do both simultaneously. As a consequence the core of these objects remains
secret and foreign to us, like 'the path of the dance in the labyrinth, leading into the heart of what it
keeps at a distance.'8
Other contributions are variations on the mechanisms of the fetish. The enigma of invisibility,
for instance, evoked by "secret" or partly blocked-out objects, nurtures our desire to see and
understand the unseen: an unproductive yet equally alluring "peek" into a book (158); a two-fold piece
of painted wood that contains a hidden pencil (57); an invisible scroll of a cash register (39); an
enigmatic decorated tube (129); a toy-like version of the mythical box of Pandora - normally closed to
avoid misfortune, yet here displayed in an open version (123); and a rolled-up document silently
waiting to be exposed (9). In a similar vein, the substitution of part for whole in the pars pro toto or
synecdoche is omnipresent: a twig (7), a sectional cut (35), a piece of bark (137) or a cut-off piece of
wood (152) bring to mind an entire tree or branch; a pillar of brick and concrete as a sample of a wall
(4); a slice of concrete structure and finishing representing a floor (99); the front paw of a broken
animal sculpture (56); a skeleton rendered through a part of the scull (84); and an arm rest standing in
for a plastic chair (13). Also manifest is the topos of the metaphor, a designation of one thing by
putting another in its place. Obviously, this concerns all paraphernalia: all contributions somehow
stand in for the personae and/or aesthetic practices of their donors. Still, some objects effectuate this
strategy more productively than others: the communist version of Coca-Cola, the Kofola bottle (81),
shapes for Karin Hanssen the onset of a story leading to her grandfather, the South Bohemia District
of the Czech Republic, self-brewed beer, mixed heritage, the fall of the Eastern bloc, and corporate
mergers within the capitalist food industry. All the while, the straightforward meaning of the object is
buried - and to some extent negated - underneath layers of historical facts that stretch from the
millennium to the foundation of the brand, in 1959.
As emblems of unappropriability these objects each in their own way shape a nexus of absence
and presence. They compose a system in which art and artist are portrayed through the inexplicable or
the inappropriable, the "in-between" of things. As a consequence, they situate the germ of artistic
production in the sphere of myth. The age-old legend of the artist as bricoleur, a proto-scientist who
evokes some type of "savage thought" or embodied knowledge, is repeatedly brought into play: some
artists feed directly into the notion of the hermetic or the alchemical by contributing stones (59, 102), a
self-produced crystal (136) or, simply, "matter" (144); others address the experiment or the laboratory
in a biosphere holding microorganisms (6) or tools for the testing or mixing of substances (45, 85 and
117).9 Three artists commented on their objects via cryptic statements that similarly testify to a schism
between art and science: Bernard Willhelm through non-related answered to Wauman's questions;
Christophe Terlinden in a random assembly of Latin words as a nugatory statement; Honoré d’O in
beautiful yet loose associations that concern the passing of history, dreams, and the law. Such willful
obscurity suggests that art is esoteric and hermetic by default, and that the artist is endowed with
"magic" powers to conceive and analyse it. In some cases this mythology is incorporated by means of
a joke, rendering humor the primary form of artistic inspiration. The inspirational object then complies
with the mythology of the (contemporary) artist, and gives way to either ironic or romantic views on
the inexplicability of art.10
Nevertheless, Paraphernalia does not endorse nor deconstruct such mythology. By collecting
and photographing the objects sans preset criteria or a posteriori selection procedures, the project does
not criticize or assess. It does not ask what and why these objects represent - which connotations and
myths they evoke, how they relate to the artistic subject and his/her practice, etc. - but rather, how they
represent in the first place. The project assesses the objects, not their meaning. In the compositional
still lives, this issue is addressed by grouping objects in the tableau: a colored stick does not rhyme
with a piece of a chair, and a measuring triangle is not a typewriter key - yet all of them implicitly or
explicitly appeal to something like the drawing or tracing of a perimeter ("Accident (At the Boundaries
of Coincidence)"). The objects are not identical yet they share some strange, underlying feature that is
explored in the diverging scenographies. In the mise en scène, this oscillation between proximity and
remoteness of objects echoes the aforementioned in-between nature of inspirational phenomena: the
composition makes clear that each of these objects is not, and will never be, grasped. Yet how do the
individual portraits tackle the same question? How does one demonstrate the nature of the
inspirational object when this object is closed-off, isolated, alone?
*
As an appendix to the project and addition to this catalogue, Wauman photographed each object
separately within the confines of his studio. Set against a white background and shot mostly from a
slight top and side angle, the objects appear in isolation, detached from their everyday, material
surroundings. They reveal their sculptural bodies to the viewer in monochrome and in a similar
tonality and diffuse lighting, only to shirk those notions of use, connotation, and interpretation
haunting them in the real world. As the focus is direct and neutral, the photos accumulate to an archive
of seemingly objective portraits, in which the subjectivity of both Wauman and the donor has almost
disappeared. The object is here, untouched, alone; and the camera is the machine that depicts it closerange. Even more so than the compositional shots these images ostensibly issue no critique or
judgment, nor shape any straightforward analysis: they record the material "as it is", crude and simple,
through a rational and documentary-scientific gaze. This aesthetic is reminiscent of product
photography garnishing advertisements, packages, and labels, and implicitly draws upon the work of
artists which emulate such aesthetic, like Christopher Williams's or Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij's.
In Wauman's portraits, too, the object does not come out manipulated but is seemingly thrown back
upon its pure, naked self.
Object no. 141, a small statue contributed by Kati Heck, symbolically makes tangible such
bareness. One of two small sculptures that had long been lying around the atelier, it depicts a mother
who holds the head of her child protectively, as if draping the head with her own hair. Below the haircovered heads and shoulders are exposed the derrières of both figures. Not surprisingly, Heck was
enthralled by the banality of the object: 'whenever my eyes randomly explore the studio they would
stop at this figure and often left me wondering: how can such an ugly thing exist? Why would
someone buy it (I got it from a friend)? How come it’s here?'11 Inspired by the figures, she drew from
the object to produce several drawings and a wooden sculpture. Yet these small-scale bottoms attract
our attention, too: they catch the gaze unwarned, luring us in the position of the voyeur. The candid
gaze of the camera reveals the overt nudity of the thing, and we ourselves gaze back at it in a similar,
crude way. Still, the image is not all exposition: the face, chest, and attributes of the figures - the child
seems to carry a prop in its right hand - remains both visually and epistemologically hidden. From a
rear position we see and perhaps understand the booty-based voyeurism that speaks to Heck's
imagination - yet by means of this photo we shall never decode the entire inspiration. As its front is
invisible, the object remains foreign to us, suspended dialectically between a "bare" and "secret" side.
The photo depicts the inspirational object as both present and absent, evading our view precisely when
we think we see it bare, nude, as it is.
Obviously, object no. 141 explicitly bears this feature; yet my point is that all of Wauman's
object portraits embody the dialectic between presence and absence. From invisible documents to
folded maps and from a photographic flash that impedes view (139) to a camera both pictured and
doing the framing (3), these objects are never fully "in view", but always visible and invisible at the
same time. They are visualized strictly on the condition of partly warding off that same visualization.
Precisely for this reason the appendix of Paraphernalia documents inspirational objects precisely "as
they are": by bringing into focus an invisible side of objects, the quasi-scientific gaze of the camera
defines them as tangible and intangible, material and phantasmatic at once. Object no. 141, for
instance, may well be transposed onto drawings or paintings that fully evoke the banality or sexuality
of the thing - as in the shadow games or scalar play of Pittura metafisica - yet unmanipulated
photography could never accomplish this. Photography does not depict the metaphysical. What the
camera can succeed in, however, is to demonstrate precisely the impossibility of decoding these
objects. The individual portraits expose the unappropriable nature of inspiration precisely by not or
only partly visualizing the object. In this way, then, the inspirational object and photography operate
in analogous ways.
*
Here, then, the simultaneously self-reflective and analytical agenda of the project fully comes into
view. For Wauman the medium of photography and the nature of inspirational objects are congruous:
precisely by depicting phenomena that are enigmatic and hazy, that are ontically unclear, photography
demonstrates its epistemic faculty to depict things "as they are". Photography visualizes objectively
only those phenomena that are impossible to objectify. As such, Wauman's photography does not
account for the full meaning of objects nor uncovers their absolute appearance, but shows the
impossibility of doing both. It brings into focus, through photography's intrinsic operations and
conventions, the unappropriable, secretive, enigmatic spirit of things. 'From the outside,' Agamben
enlightens us once more, 'this situation of criticism can be expressed in the formula according to which
it neither represents nor knows, but knows the representation.'12 In the Paraphernalia project such
"knowing of the representation" is staged twice: once in the analysis of an inspirational object
category, and once again in the reflection on photography.
Stefaan Vervoort
Giorgio Agamben, Stanze: La parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1977). Here taken from the
English translation Stanzas: Word and Phantams in Western Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 59.
2 Carlos Aires, letter to Wim Wauman, November 2012.
3 Agamben, xvii-xviii.
4 Ibid., 59.
1
This complies with Paul Chan's definition of the artwork. See: Paul Chan, "Where Art is and Where It Belongs", e-flux journal
10 (2009), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/what-art-is-and-where-it-belongs/.
6 Sam Vanderveken, e-mail to Wim Wauman, July 2013.
7 Virginie Bailly, translation of e-mail written in Dutch to Wim Wauman, August 2013.
8 Agamben, xviii.
9 One such definition is to be found in Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée Sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962).
10 See, for example: Camiel van Winkel, De mythe van het kunstenaarschap / The Myth of Artisthood (Amsterdam: Fonds BKVB, 2007),
especially 21-24.
11 Kati Heck, e-mail to Wim Wauman, August 2013.
12 Agamben, xvii.
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