Introduction Involuntary Sculpture: Process, Photography ... - Ashgate

Introduction 

Involuntary Sculpture: Process, 

Photography and the Ephemeral 

Object 

Anna Dezeuze and Julia Kelly 

Involuntary Sculpture 

At first consideration, sculpture might be thought of as the most willed of artistic 

media. Requiring serious physical commitment, sculptural activity is marked 

traditionally by labour-intensive processes like hewing, hacking, welding and 

casting, both on an individual and an industrial scale. The mythology of direct 

carving certainly carries associations of hard physical graft, clearly linked to 

personal volition, the sculptor locked in a ‘heroic’ struggle with stone, wood 

or marble. The fact that sculpture is seen to engage directly with the material 

world reinforces this, making it an activity devoted to ‘taming’ the obdurate stuff 

around us, shaping and bending it according to our will. 

This anthology, however, presents a very different vision of sculptural 

processes. What happens when sculpture ceases to be quite so controlled, when 

it lets itself be dictated by principles of chance, determined by its environment 

or by the circumstances of its reception and documentation? For the brute 

activities listed above we could substitute a different set of much less ‘voluntary’ 

ones: fingering, fiddling, propping and shuffling, to which should be added the 

instantaneous snapping of the camera lens. Where sculpture is ‘found’ and not 

‘made’, or indeed exists somewhere between the two, it can also become less 

material and more obviously contingent – a form of a thing, or a formation of 

things, captured at a specific time. If ‘voluntary’ sculpture suggests the production 

of a deliberate material configuration, set forever in hard matter, ‘involuntary’ 

sculpture points to its own transience or its role as part of an ongoing process, 

where it exists beyond a serendipitous photographic image. 

This volume takes its cue from a selection of photographs by Brassaï with 

captions by Salvador Dalí published in the surrealist periodical Minotaure in 1933 

and bearing the title ‘Involuntary Sculptures’ (Figure I.1). Scraps of everyday 

debris – including rolled-up bus tickets, a piece of bread roll, a curl of soap from a 

sink and a blob of toothpaste – featured in photographic close-up as ‘automatic’ 

sculptural configurations. These banal and non-artistic objects (one of the tickets 

was allegedly found screwed up in the pocket of a bank employee) were intended 

at least in part as a riposte to the prevailing perception of sculpture at the time, 

represented in the same journal by another selection of photographs by Brassaï

Introduction 3 

of the studios of Aristide Maillol, Charles Despiau, Alberto Giacometti, Jacques 

Lipchitz and Henri Laurens, as Steven Harris’s essay in this volume makes clear. 

There was no agreed definition of ‘surrealist’ sculpture, however: indeed, such 

a thing could be argued to be impossible in itself, while surrealist interests in 

three-dimensional production became much more closely oriented towards the 

complex category of the surrealist object. 

Brassaï and Dalí’s photo-essay provides a tantalising evocation of sculptural 

possibility, where forms are both shaped by human hands, sometimes with 

little conscious thought (the rolled bus ticket), and subject to ‘organic’ growth 

(the piece of bread rising and changing shape in the oven). It also freezes its 

array of objects at a given moment, before they are discarded, swept or wiped 

away, dissolved or eaten. Nevertheless, their photographic capturing does 

give them a certain solid presence, particularly through Brassaï’s characteristic 

use of dramatic chiaroscuro. In this sense their effect is unlike that of another 

surrealist image on a related theme, Man Ray’s photograph Moving Sculpture 

for La Révolution surréaliste in 1926, a film-still-like scene of pale-coloured 

washing fluttering on the breeze. The title of Man Ray’s photograph, originally 

taken in 1920, suggests that this is a record of a particular phenomenon: the 

drying laundry as kinetic sculpture, its soft fabric billowing and bulging. In both 

images, though, the parameters of ‘sculpture’ are challenged and expanded, 

while photography fulfils simultaneous (and potentially contradictory) functions 

of auratic reproduction and quasi-scientific documentation. In her essay in this 

volume, Samantha Lackey argues that the film from which this image of washing 

was drawn, Le Retour à la raison, was a crucial example of a specific mode of 

cinematic distraction, where the constant progression of moving object-tableaux 

and fragmented scenes served to disrupt rather than focus the spectator’s 

attention. 

Rather than looking to avoid or resolve them, this volume seeks out the 

contradictions and pressure points inherent in the concept of ‘involuntary 

sculpture’, and in the relations between sculpture and photography that often 

accompany it. It is here, we argue, that modern and contemporary sculpture 

can be of continued and renewed interest, by operating against the grain of 

established categories and conventions. 

Sculpture and Photography 

Sculpture’s relationship to photography has become a focus of scholarly interest 

since the late 1990s. 1 The two media at first seem to have little in common, 

one dealing with three-dimensional presence, the other with two-dimensional 

image. While the interrelation between painting and photography tended to 

be antagonistic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as each 

competed with and fed off the advantages of the other, sculpture seemed to 

provide, however, particularly successful subject matter for photography from its 

emergence in the late 1830s. Like the still life, a sculpture did not move and thus 

lent itself well to long exposure, as exemplified in images of antique statuary 

and busts by Hippolyte Bayard and William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1840s. Such

4 

Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art 

images carried further symbolic resonances: sculpture’s traditional associations 

with death and the deathly found a parallel in the immortalising processes of 

the photograph, a central concern in photographic theory from the writings of 

Walter Benjamin to those of Roland Barthes. 

Sculpture also, especially in the case of antique copies and casts in white 

plaster, stone and marble, had exceptional photogenic qualities, setting 

up striking contrasts of light and shade as well as nuances of texture. In this 

sense, both media share a manipulation of effects of light, as well as a concern, 

potentially, with framing and apprehending an object from specific points of 

view. Through photographic representation, sculptures can take on another 

life, eternalised as images in their own right in what André Malraux would call 

the ‘museum without walls’. The ways in which Auguste Rodin’s sculpture was 

photographed by Eugène Druet, Edward Steichen and others around the 1900s 

set a particular precedent for this, while the play of light on polished surfaces and 

the use of photography to explore interrelationships between sculptural pieces is 

associated above all with the experimental photographic practice of Constantin 

Brancusi, as several scholars have pointed out. 2 The work of these two sculptors 

and its photographic representation can be said to have established certain 

paradigms in the relationship between sculpture and photography, extending 

beyond the concerns of materiality, light and volume to those of sculptural 

installation and the conceptualisation of the work of the sculptor him- or herself. 

In the interplay of sculpture and photography, the physical practices 

normally associated with making sculpture and the ‘mechanical’ processes 

of the photograph clash and challenge one another. This volume treats such 

tensions as generative, as ways of complicating historical distinctions and 

categories. Thomas McEvilley, in his analysis of the growing prominence of 

sculptural tendencies in art from the 1960s onwards, characterises what he sees 

as sculpture’s ‘ethical’ superiority as follows: ‘Painting means escapist fantasy; 

sculpture means direct dealing with the material world.’ 3 This volume, however, 

seeks to complicate such oppositions, taking its starting point from surrealism 

(perhaps the modern movement most readily associated with ‘escapist fantasy’), 

but also exploring the multiple roles of photography as both artwork in its own 

right and documentation, as object and image, as material evidence and the 

dematerialising frame for the absent, the lost, the imagined. 

Surrealist Object, Surrealist Photography 

Surrealist practice in three dimensions is most commonly understood in terms 

of the surrealist object, whose radical hybridity and innovative engagement 

with everyday commodities have made it a seminal precursor for contemporary 

three-dimensional practices as well as installation art. The surrealist objects 

that have attracted the most attention are those which manifest a fetishistic 

concern with the body or a confusion of animate and inanimate elements, such 

as Meret Oppenheim’s famous Fur-covered Cup, Saucer and Spoon, or Dalí’s 

Lobster Telephone. Accordingly, the legacy of surrealism in later twentieth- and


twenty-first-century art has been seen predominantly in terms of expressions 

of visceral eroticism and ‘uncanny’ physicality, in the work of Louise Bourgeois, 

Robert Gober, Cathy de Monchaux and Sarah Lucas, amongst others. However, 

this emphasis has obscured the more subtle ramifications of surrealism’s 

concerns with objects and sculpture. The surrealist object itself presents a 

tension between chance encounters with and of unfamiliar things on the one 

hand, and the artist’s processes of intervention and control on the other. In 

fact, there are many types of surrealist objects, including natural objects, the 

Duchampian readymade, as well as found objects known through photographs 

(in André Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja for example), and collaborative, ephemeral 

constructions. While both Simon Baker and Margaret Iversen return to Breton’s 

use of photographs in this volume, ephemeral constructions are central to Anna 

Dezeuze’s and Martha Buskirk’s essays, and an interest in natural geological 

configurations appears to link practices as different as Giacometti’s (discussed by 

Julia Kelly) and Mike Kelley’s (the focus of John Welchman’s essay). In the proofs 

for the project, Brassaï actually refers to the Involuntary Sculptures as ‘automatic 

objects’, blurring the distinctions between found object and photography, 

while referring to the surrealist practice of automatic writing as a means to 

channel unconscious thoughts. As a repository for unconscious psychic urges, 

the surrealist object as a whole sets in motion an interplay between artist and 

creator, and between object and viewer, whose encapsulation within a discrete 

physical thing can only be ambivalent. 

The crucial role of photography in surrealism has been increasingly 

acknowledged and studied, starting with Rosalind Krauss’s 1981 essay, in which 

the Involuntary Sculptures are discussed as typical of the surrealists’ use of the 

camera as a privileged means of accessing the ‘surreality’ of the world, that 

is, its nature as representation to be probed in search of the marvellous. ‘As it 

signals that experience of reality the camera frame also controls it, configures it’, 

explains Krauss: in the Involuntary Sculptures, it is the close-up that extends the 

capacity of the eye and brings into being these hitherto invisible ‘sculptures’. 4 

Dalí himself had pointed out as early as 1929 that ‘the mere fact of photographic 

transposition [of the world around us] already implies a total invention: the 

registering of an UNKNOWN REALITY’. 5 As Dawn Ades and Simon Baker have 

suggested, the very practice of the photographic close-up embodies the historical 

ambivalence of photography between scientific objectivity and defamiliarisation 

or disorientation. While the glass shelf used by Brassaï to photograph the 

Involuntary Sculptures recalls the glass slides used in the microscopic preparations 

that were the subject of early scientific photography, 6 the enlargement of such 

small objects robs them of their recognisability, triggering powerful ‘alienating 

effects’. 7 The new modes of attention required by the cinematic close-up are 

extensively discussed in this book by Samantha Lackey, while Carrie Lambert- 

Beatty refers to their performance of a child-like view of the world. 

For Margaret Iversen and Simon Baker, writing in this volume, the interaction 

between the found object and the surrealist photograph is crucial. Where 

Baker sees the photograph as participating actively in the introduction of the 

found object into a ‘perceptual regime’ that will guarantee its significance as a 

meaningful find for viewers to come, Iversen goes one step further and directly

6 


compares the operation of the found object to that of photography itself. The 

‘involuntary’ nature of photography, she argues, exists at the moment in which 

a detail in the most banal photograph – what Barthes has called the ‘punctum’ – 

can unexpectedly reach out directly to the viewer’s unconscious, just as an object 

can be found to answer its finder’s most intimate desires and fears. In theories 

of photography, this ‘involuntary’ account counters the simulacral model of the 

photograph as a blank, free-floating, empty signifier. In artistic practices, Iversen 

demonstrates how Christian Boltanski and Gabriel Orozco bring together the 

found object and the photograph in order to complicate the relations between 

reality and simulation. In this way, Iversen is returning us to what Robin Kelsey 

and Blake Stimson have described as the original ‘dream of photography’ – a 

desire to reconcile the extremes of a ‘seemingly unconditional transcriptive 

fidelity’ and ‘seemingly unconditional inner revelation’. 8 

Process and ‘Dematerialisation’ 

Elusive desires and intimations of death are captured in the web of relations 

between surrealist objects, photography and autobiographical narratives. 

Along with other surrealist techniques such as automatic writing or the practice 

of the exquisite corpse, this type of process is what constitutes, according to 

Simon Baker, one of the most important legacies of surrealism in contemporary 

art. If Baker refers to the specific contemporary practice of Melissa McGill, in 

which the creation of physical sculptures is mediated through photography, the 

notion of process became a particularly significant characteristic of sculpture 

and conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, the ‘process art’ of Richard 

Serra involves, as Anna Dezeuze points out, the very gestures of tearing, spilling 

or rolling involved in the creation of the Involuntary Sculptures. Other, more 

everyday processes were evoked in Terry Fox’s Children’s Tapes (discussed by 

Carrie Lambert-Beatty in this volume), in which the artist recorded simple physics 

experiments using humble household objects in his kitchen. 

Other conceptual artists interested in process turned to spaces outside the 

studio and the gallery in their desire to engage with natural landscapes or the 

urban everyday. In all these forms, photography and video became essential 

tools for documenting process, whether ephemeral constructions in the studio 

or site-specific interventions in the landscape. Douglas Fogle has celebrated 

the Involuntary Sculptures as forerunners of conceptual photography, which is 

used as a means to an end rather than an end in itself, thus evading the two 

dominant categories in the history of photography: ‘photographic Pictorialism’ 

and documentary photography. 9 An ‘extraphotographic impulse’ which disrupts 

modernist notions of photography does indeed characterise a certain type of 

surrealist photography as well as conceptual practices such as Terry Fox’s or 

Mike Kelley’s, along with those of Robert Smithson and Dan Graham. As Dezeuze 

suggests, Richard Wentworth’s series of photographs Making Do, Getting By, 

started in the 1970s, is indebted to this kind of understanding of conceptual 

photography as a tool to document other overarching concerns – in his case, the 

‘sculptures’ that we spontaneously create in everyday situations.


The emphasis on process naturally led artists away from the production of 

objects and sculptures and towards a combination of photographic and textual 

documentation which Lucy Lippard described as a ‘dematerialisation of the art 

object’ in 1968. ‘Dematerialised’ practices involved a general ‘de-emphasis’ of the 

‘material aspects’ traditionally associated with artworks, including ‘uniqueness, 

permanence, decorative attractiveness’. 10 The Involuntary Sculptures bring 

together two forms of ‘dematerialisation’: the emphasis on the ephemeral, and 

the use of photography as a record of these impermanent objects. In this sense, 

they also relate to a variety of ‘dematerialising’ practices at different historical 

moments. As Martha Buskirk’s essay shows, ‘proto-conceptual’ artists such 

as Allan Kaprow developed photography alongside ephemeral environments 

using junk materials. Though aware of their intrinsic connection, Kaprow 

never privileged photography over the material creation of the environments, 

unlike the conceptual artists who would follow him. Kaprow’s work embodies 

a transitional moment before photography established itself as the language 

of dematerialisation. Some 20 years later, Mike Kelley returned to Kaprow’s 

suspicion of the documentary function of performance photographs, but set 

out to explore the very relations between reality and fantasy through the use 

of found and accidental photographs, sometimes in parallel, and sometimes in 

dialogue, with his performance and installation practice. Kaprow’s and Kelley’s 

practices thus appear to bracket a seminal moment of conceptual photography 

in the 1960s and 1970s, in which the model was the figure of the amateur 

photographer, and the medium was considered to be untainted, so to speak, by 

the history of art, thus facilitating a more direct access to reality. 

This turn to new fields of everyday life was not so much a dematerialisation, 

as an ‘expansion or diminution of art as a solid structure’, as Lawrence Alloway 

suggested in 1969, as the ‘interface’ between art and other fields became 

‘blurred’. 11 Whether interpreted in an ‘expansionist’ or a ‘reductivist’ model, to 

use Alloway’s words, this shift served to radically challenge the fetishisation of 

the art object – after all, as William Pietz has explained, the fetish is premised 

on a ‘irreducible, untranscended materiality’. 12 Rather than negating materiality 

in itself, then, the cross-overs between process art and conceptual photography 

discussed in this volume recast the materiality of both the fetish and objectbased 

sculpture, traditionally defined as stable, if not monumental. In this sense, 

the precarious balancing acts involved in Fox’s Children’s Tapes, in Wentworth’s 

Making Do, Getting By series (Figures 5.1 and 5.2) or in Orozco’s more recent 

ephemeral arrangements, all serve to dramatise a materiality that is both literally 

and ontologically contingent. 

Re-Reading the History of Sculpture 

Where Douglas Fogle’s study of photoconceptualism outlined a new trajectory 

of conceptual art within the medium of photography, Helen Molesworth’s 2005 

exhibition, Part Object Part Sculpture, sought to retrieve a ‘space of fantasy and 

desire’ within the production of sculpture and painting from the 1950s to the 

present, through erotic logics of repetition and displacement. 13 The present

8 


book can be situated in an intermediate space between these two projects. We 

certainly share with Molesworth a desire to displace the dominance of minimalism 

in ‘accounts of the scope and aim of late twentieth-century sculpture’, and its 

attendant privileging of both Duchamp’s readymades as foundational models and 

the emphasis on a ‘logic of industrial production’ (prevalent in minimalism and 

pop art). While we also believe that reflection on bodily gestures and unconscious 

desires can fruitfully be brought forward to counter these pervasive narratives, 

the kind of works discussed in the present book do not evoke seductive or 

repulsive body parts, sexual organs or skin in the same direct way as the sculptural 

works of Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Yayoi Kusama, Lynda Benglis or Alberto 

Burri. Tactility does figure prominently in Julia Kelly’s essay, for example, but it is 

mediated by forms evoking archaic implements or imaginary inventions as much 

as bodily shapes. The Involuntary Sculptures may share the ghostly presence of 

absent bodies with Rachel Whiteread’s casts, but they are much less physical 

and ‘resistant to words’ (as Molesworth would put it): the mediation of Brassaï’s 

photography has the effect, as we have suggested, of introducing other types of 

polarity between matter and the immaterial, between singular ephemeral event 

and banal repetition, between form and formlessness. 14 That Gabriel Orozco’s 

practice figures as a paradigmatic project in both this book and Molesworth’s 

show suggests how the two fields can be combined productively. Inspired by 

Orozco’s ‘work tables’ scattered with objects, Briony Fer’s discussion of ‘sculpture 

as leftover’ in Part Object Part Sculpture could usefully be brought to bear on 

the Involuntary Sculptures themselves. 15 Particularly suggestive is Fer’s analysis of 

leftovers as ‘part objects in time rather than space’, thus highlighting a fractured, 

discontinuous time. Her opposition between the ‘economy of leftovers’ and the 

‘economy of collecting’, in the sense that the latter is a means of controlling a kind 

of ‘dispersion’ that the former encourages, is also very fruitful. 16 

In Part Object Part Sculpture, it is Duchamp’s 1950s cast objects that provide 

an alternative trajectory to his mass-produced readymades; in Fogle’s The 

Last Picture Show the main reference is Dust Breeding, the photograph taken 

by Man Ray of the dust gathered on Duchamp’s Large Glass, a ‘hybrid object 

caught somewhere between the realms of photography and sculpture’. 17 This 

book explores the field of the surrealist object as it emerges at the intersection 

of these different approaches to matter and process. Perhaps the connecting 

link within the Duchampian field is the ‘infra-mince’ – this notion, developed by 

Duchamp in his notes, seems to oscillate itself between matter and immaterial, 

bodily presence and absence. The infra-mince can be found in the difference 

between two casts from the same mould as much as in the ‘heat of a seat (that 

has just been left)’; the folds in a pair of trousers are, according to Duchamp, 

‘a sculptural expression of the person who has worn them’, in much the same 

way, we may add, as the curled bus ticket found in his or her pocket … . 18 The 

more political dimensions of such infra-mince phenomena become clearer if 

we follow Benjamin Buchloh’s suggestion that the ‘desire to demarcate one’s 

somatic existence in space’ animating the Involuntary Sculptures can be linked 

(in Orozco’s work for example) to an exploration of ‘the collective dormant 

symbolic resistance against the total reification, if not the extinction, of subject/ 

object relationships’. 19


Agency and Memory 

Subject/object relations certainly lie at the heart of this volume, in which André 

Breton’s concern with the ‘objectification of the subjective’ runs like a thread. 

The Involuntary Sculptures ‘inhabit a space at once real and phantasmatic’, 

concludes Iversen; they ‘act as attentional bridges between the everyday and the 

fantasmatic’ according to Lambert-Beatty. As the aura of objects is challenged – 

through an appeal to touch, as Harris and Kelly demonstrate, and through the 

mediation of photography, as Iversen and Baker suggest – the very definition of 

subjectivity is questioned. 

In a late essay, Brassaï would argue that the photograph developed in the 

darkroom acted as a metaphor for Marcel Proust’s well-known accounts of 

‘involuntary memory’, a latent remembrance suddenly triggered by an everyday 

object or experience, such as the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea. In that kind 

of moment, past and present locations are telescoped, and, according to Proust, 

‘our whole person … totters between them … in the vertigo of an uncertainty like 

the kind we sometimes experience before an ineffable vision, at the moment 

of falling asleep’ 20 – a state of demi-sommeil that Samantha Lackey relates to 

experimental film techniques in this volume. This vertigo can be heightened 

not only by alternating states of attention and distraction in film, but also by 

the very slippery relation between photography and reality in which, as Buskirk 

and Iversen point out, the photograph can shape, and even corrupt, our very 

memory of an ephemeral object. 

Memory involves collective as well as individual forms of agency. Dezeuze 

relates it to biological instincts and everyday practices, while Kelly and Harris 

invoke archaic encounters with nature. Welchman focuses on the vast collective 

unconscious that Mike Kelley mines through his explorations of American popular 

culture. In this sense, the ‘involuntary’ is identified with the ‘anonymous’ or the 

‘impersonal’, as Paul Eluard would in his 1942 book of Poésie involontaire et 

poésie intentionnelle, a collection that includes, alongside extracts from writers 

such as Francis Ponge or Raymond Queneau, a selection of children’s tales and 

questions, as well as found items including names of flowers, a description 

from a magician’s catalogue, and a bizarre news item. 21 Just as Eluard sought 

to demonstrate that poetry has never been the property of poets alone, the 

Involuntary Sculptures raise crucial issues of authorship and agency, and the 

broader question of how exactly such individual and collective unconscious 

desires can be embodied in objects and photographs. Whether approaching 

them through anthropology or psychoanalysis, through educational theories or 

studies of everyday life, the essays in this book probe these complex questions. 

Rather than providing a final and unified answer, what we hope to demonstrate 

is that the ramifications of the Involuntary Sculptures can extend from the 

beginnings of sculpture to contemporary practices, and into fields outside the 

history of art itself – a true testimony to the lasting impact of surrealism.

10 


Notes 

1 Instances of this include Michel Frizot and Dominique Païni (eds), Sculpter 

Photographier/Photographie Sculpture (Paris, 1993), Erika Billeter (ed.), Skulptur im 

Licht der Fotografie (Duisburg, 1997) and Geraldine Johnson (ed.), Sculpture and 

Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension (Cambridge, 1998). 

2 See for example Hélène Pinet, ‘La Sculpture, la photographie et le critique’, Jacques 

Leenhardt, ‘Au-delà de la matière: Brancusi et la photographie’, and Elizabeth A. 

Brown, ‘L’atelier métaphorique’, in Frizot and Païni (eds), Sculpter Photographier, 

pp. 85–91, pp. 33–9 and pp. 41–55; Paul Paret, ‘Sculpture and its Negative: The 

Photographs of Constantin Brancusi’, and Hélène Pinet, ‘Montrer est la question 

vitale: Rodin and Photography’, in Johnson (ed.), Sculpture and Photography, 

pp. 101–30 and 68–85. 

3 Thomas McEvilley, Sculpture in the Age of Doubt (New York, 1999), p. 42. 

4 Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism’, October 19 (Winter 

1981), p. 31. 

5 Salvador Dalí, ‘Photographic Data’ [1929], quoted by Simon Baker in ‘Watch Out for 

Life: The Conceptual Close-Up, 1920–2006’, in Dawn Ades and Simon Baker, Close- 

Up: Proximity and Defamiliarisation in Art, Film and Photography (Edinburgh, 2008), 

p. 78. 

6 Dawn Ades, ‘Little Things: Close-up in Photo and Film, 1839–1963’, in Ades and 

Baker, Close-Up, p. 48. 

7 Baker, ‘Watch Out for Life’, in Ades and Baker, Close-Up, p. 95. 

8 Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson, ‘Photography’s Double Index (A Short History 

in Three Parts)’, in Kelsey and Stimson (eds), The Meaning of Photography 

(Willliamstown, MA and New Haven, 2008), p. xvii. 

9 Douglas Fogle (ed.), The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960–82 

(Minneapolis, 2003). 

10 Lucy Lippard, ‘Preface’, in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 

1966 to 1972 (London, 1973), p. 5. 

11 Lawrence Alloway, ‘The Expanding and Disappearing Work of Art’, Auction, III/2 

(October 1969), reprinted in Alloway, Topics in American Art since 1945 (New York, 

1975), p. 207. 

12 William Pietz, ‘The Problem of the Fetish, Part I’, Res, 9 (Spring 1985), p. 6. 

13 Helen Molesworth, ‘Introduction: Part Object, Part Sculpture’, in H. Molesworth 

(ed.), Part Object Part Sculpture (Columbus, OH, 2005), p. 25. 

14 Ibid., p. 25. 

15 Briony Fer, ‘The Scatter: Sculpture as Leftover’, in Molesworth (ed.), Part Object Part 

Sculpture, pp. 222–33. 

16 Ibid., p. 231. 

17 Fogle, ‘The Last Picture Show’, in The Last Picture Show, p. 10. 

18 Marcel Duchamp, Notes (Paris, 1999), pp. 21, 34 (our translation). 

19 Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Gabriel Orozco: Sculpture as Recollection’, in Yve-Alain Bois (et 

al.), Gabriel Orozco (London, 2006), p. 178.


20 Brassaï, Proust in the Power of Photography [1997], trans. R. Howard (Chicago, 

2001), p. 137. 

21 Paul Eluard, Poésie involontaire et poésie intentionnelle (Paris, 1942).

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