102 IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 20, No.4 (2019)
Undoing Art
Jan BaetensMary Ann Caws and Michel Delville
Undoing Art
Macerata, Quodlibet, 2017, 93 p., b/w ill. ISBN 978-88-29-0072-2
Undoing Art is an essay in dialogue form on erasure art, a vital strand in twentieth and twenty-first century art
that relies on acts of deleting, wiping out, putting between brackets, overwriting or overpainting, censoring, destroying, etc. As the authors make clear, erasure art is not be confused with censorship (although censoring or silencing may be one of the mechanisms involved). Nor is it simple vandalism, destruction, or, more innocently, redoing (remediating or expanding a previous, allegedly less successful version – a draft if you prefer). Instead erasure art proves to be an authentic new art form whose significance is inextricably linked with the very action of abolishing one or more elements of an existing work (which is or is not a work of art itself).
In this regard, the strikethrough of the first word of the title helps reading the book. A strikethrough is not a typographical device that eliminates the sign it is imposed upon, but one that actually highlights what at first sight seems to be deleted as well as the very action of deleting. Thus “undoing”, the result of a double negation (first the negative meaning of the word, second the strikethrough sign) becomes a positive term whose result appears next to in the word-string of the title: art. In other words: erasure art is not the destruction of something (for instance, but not necessarily a work of art), it is the production of a work of art with the intervention of one or more deletion mechanisms.
If Undoing Art displays the whole range of erasure art – not in an encyclopedic way, but smartly using strategic examples to underline the manifold forms this way of working can embrace –, it challenges from the very beginning naïve and simplistic interpretations of “undoing”. The chosen format is not unlike that of the philosophical dialogue, although the intertwining of the two voices, one female, one male, does not resemble that of the platonic dialogue, where one finds a clear dissymmetry between the lead voice of Socrates and the searching and responsive voices of the pupils. What
103 IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 20, No.4 (2019)
makes this book a strong blend of theory and philosophy is the open structure of the discussion. Rather than obeying a stimulus-reaction or question-answer template, Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville build a kind of spiral, if not a kind of helix, each of their interventions – they are closer to the stanzas of a didactic prose poem than to the user-friendly packaging of an ongoing meditation – adding a new layer, a new perspective, a new medium, a new context, a new example, a new tradition, a new technique to the core definition of something that seems at the same time dramatically simply and dizzyingly diverse and complex.
These self-chose restrictions – no encyclopedia, no single grand theory, no acknowledgment of artist’s intentions – as well as the strong focus on the close-reading of actual actions in some of the best that has been said, made or thought in the field, make Undoing Art a great read. It is also a work that opens many windows to similar phenomena that have not yet been theorized under the umbrella term of erasure art, such as for example the notion of the “disnarrated” in storytelling (Gerald Prince) or the fear of stereotypes and ordinary language in what Jean Paulhan called Terror in literature.
More generally speaking, the book radically questions the axioms of some disciplines doing business with erasure, such as textual geneticism, where intentionality and teleology are key principles. And, even more generally, Undoing Art may tie in with larger questions such as unreadability (be it by lack of information or information overload) or technological obsolescence (where erasure is perhaps not explicitly sought after, but where it is at least highly present from the very inception of the work or item). Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville make important proposals to open these debates and one can only hope that their elegantly written and attractively illustrated essay will find a large and active audience.
Jan Baetens is Professor of Literary Theory and Cultural Studies at KU Leuven. Email: jan.baetens@kuleuven.be
