EIN BILD ROMAN STÜCKEN A Pictorial Novel In Pieces - Captain ...

commissioned, at bottom, to foreground individual
contributions would yield a positive farrago of the most
diverse pictorial conceptions, concrete formats and special
idioms of painting, individual signature styles, and
of course also standards of quality.
And there is no need to wonder why the desired homology
between novelistic narrative and painterly pictorial
novel, the conceptual and playful arm-wrestling
contest between textuality and iconicity would yield the
most striking results in terms of ‘difference’ and ‘fragility’
as criteria of comparison. What appears at the end
of the chain of heteronomies this show so wantonly produces,
from the novel as the screenplay as the subject of
an exhibition, as a fable to be illustrated in a collaborative
tableau, to the pictorial novel in the form of a curatorial-artistic
patchwork made up of more or less painterly
pieces, etc., is the picture contaminated all over
by all these circumstances, the picture with its forever
specific, and hence irreducible, radius of operation.
This effect, and the fact that it is achieved by means
of what is, from the perspective of the artists, a positively
over-affirmative deployment of the economy of
curatorial methods, is the special kick I get out of this
miserably flimsy pictorial novel and the individual set
pieces of art and exhibition dramaturgy that, to the best
of their inability, constitute it. Why I think that that is
great right now certainly also has to do with the fact
that the show’s curatorial-artistic false bottoms help it
turn our attention to the historical conditions of art, but
also to the way its business currently operates; to a great
number of individual pictures, but then also to universally
binding arguments, whether in favor or against. We
are, after all, still in an era of immense excess capacity. A
few providers, catering to a small prospective audience
on the basis of a supply industry that protects its exclusivity,
orchestrate a view of what is art that would seem
capable of general consensus, without having to expend
the least reflection on the legitimacy of this view. And
so these engagingly argued false bottoms are not such
a bad thing after all, also because there is, still, not the
slightest trace of a moral lesson to be seen anywhere.
1 In addition to shorter novelistic works, the author had already
published the serialized novel Le Capitaine Paul in the journal Le
Siècle in 1838. Dumas had produced this work on the basis of an
older drama, Paul Jones (1838), that had remained a sketch unfit
for performance; in a manner fairly typical of him, this adaptation,
a sort of literary recycling, was a collaborative workshop project
involving the active assistance of the painter Adrien Dauzat.
2 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art. Genesis and Structure of the Literary
Field, trans. Susan Emanuel, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1996, 50.
3 In this context, Balzac’s famous Lost Illusions (French: Illusions
perdues, 1837–43) must be read not only as a literary treatment
of the theme of the (failed) literary career, but also as a historical
document, motivated throughout by personal experience, of
the developments in the literary business during the Restoration,
with all its war zones in the salons, theaters, editorial offices, and
cramped attic apartments, with its soldiers of fortune and desolate
existences, its visionary literary entrepreneurs and hopeless
idealists.
4 Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 49.
5 Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846,” in The Mirror of Art. Critical
Studies, trans. Jonathan Mayne, New York: Phaidon, 1955,
126.
6 Ibid., 125.
7 If you didn’t know: both Gunter Reski and Marcus Weber primarily
work as artists with a focus on (representational) painting. This
point is not entirely irrelevant to the disposition of the exhibition.
8 Daniel Buren, “Exposition d’une exposition” [1972], in Les Écrits
(1965–1990), vol. 1: 1965–1976, Bordeaux: capc Musée d’art contemporain,
1991, 261–62.
9 Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 139.
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