works excerpt

a book describes works that the author has conceived but not brought into being andor the world is drawn from memory andor there are missing countries, altered borders andor proust’s head is drawn on a page of in search of lost time andor the words tracing out the contour of his face form a grammatically correct sentence andor man-sized aluminium mannequins are dropped at different heights from a crane andor metamorphosed by folds, they adopt the pose to which they are constrained by their new morphology andor an exhibit displays pieces unalike in spirit, style, and technique, but with the same origin: their author saw them while dreaming andor entomological boxes contain invitation cards to exhibitions that didn’t take place andor the reasons for their cancellation are written below the cards andor the boxes are hung on the walls like a collection of insects andor a woman’s voice describes the shapes she sees in the static snow on the television screen after the end of broadcasts andor geometric forms, windmills, ghosts andor the video is shown on a monitor posed on a low table at the foot of a divan couch andor the visitor lies down and compares what he sees to what he hears andor museum of nobodies andor instead of the usual celebrities, a wax museum displays unknown characters andor chosen at random from the telephone book, the models are representative of neither an epoch, nor a region, nor a profession andor at its inauguration, the museum shows thirty statues andor two new models are added to the museum’s collection each year: as the years go by, an evolving, sculptural, and hyperrealist memory of society emerges andor every year in january, a painting is made from memory of the same photograph, which represents a square in bangkok during a time of affluence andor neither the model image, nor the preceding paintings are looked at andor after ten years the paintings are revealed and exhibited alongside one another andor a film scene is shown backwards to actors so they can learn to act it in reverse andor once they succeed, they are filmed anew andor the new scene, in turn projected backwards, becomes strange: reversing the inversion doesn’t get you back to where you started andor the friend of an artist selects descriptions of artworks from press reviews of exhibitions andor the accompanying photograph is cut out and the text sent to the artist to draw the work based on its description andor the final work is a triptych composed of the drawing, the description of the work, and the photograph accompanying the article andor there are four authors, direct or indirect, voluntary or involuntary: the artist who created the referenced work, the writer of the article, the friend who chose it, and the artist who drew it andor a scene reflected in the retina of an eye andor photograph andor a sculpture represents a man whose extremities, instead of jutting out, extend into the interior of his body andor the head, hands, feet, and genitals are folded in andor the man sits on the ground, legs spread and arms folded andor marble andor the floor of a cage is littered with pages from the old testament andor for a month, a record is kept of the words upon which a hummingbird comes to rest andor a text is written using only these words andor a leather jacket made from a mad cow andor a hundred pictorial or sculptural representations of a biblical character, from different times and countries, are photographed using the same framing andor a print is made by superimposing the negatives andor appearing in a halo are the average faces of adam, eve, mary, jesus, and god andor a litre of molten lead is poured out in zero gravity in a vacuum andor brought back to earth, it is exhibited in the form into which it has hardened andor the mimic andor in a yellow hall lit by yellow light, the voice of an artist is heard telling his life story in the form of an anamnesis, from his birth right up to the day of the exhibition andor the voice is not his, but that of a professional mimic andor yet nothing gives this away andor a butterfly is released into a room, hidden from sight andor every night, its flight, detected by laser beams, is transmitted to a mobile machine equipped with an hourglass andor by morning, the imprint of the nocturnal flight is drawn in sand on the floor andor in the united states a voyage is undertaken to photograph towns with names that are homonyms of towns in other countries andor the itinerary, which connects them by passing through each town only once, goes around the country in thirteen thousand kilometres andor the trajectory commences in new york, follows the coast to the south, heads west up to the pacific, climbs back up north, and follows the canadian border to the north-east before returning to the starting point andor the route is traversed by car andor the towns crossed are, in alphabetic order: amsterdam, bagdad, belfast, belgrade, belleville, berlin, bethlehem, bethune, bristol, calais, cambridge, canton, carlsbad, carthage, clermont, cuba, delhi, dublin, florence, frankfort, glasgow, heidelberg, jericho, johannesburg, lima, liverpool, macon, madras, madrid, manchester, melbourne, mexico, milan, milo, montevideo, naples, odessa, oxford, panama, paris, peking, potsdam, rome, rotterdam, saint-cloud, seville, stockholm, stuttgart, syracuse, toronto, toulon, versailles andor in these towns, photographs are taken of places that are ‘common’ in the double sense of being banal and being gathering spots for the community andor each photograph is accompanied by a title: cuba’s town hall; a bar in berlin; supermarket in rome; hair salon in paris; a street in versailles andor descriptions that are misleading, without being false andor a pillow is filled with feathers lost by birds at the moment of taking flight andor on the white pillowcase is embroidered: ‘flythms’ andor paintings combine contradictory techniques, formats, styles, or modes of presentation andor a grey monochrome in a gilded baroque frame andor a geometric painting with matter-painting impastos andor a large-scale miniature andor a chinese scroll depicting paris andor a blurry hyperrealist picture andor a pop art portrait of the cardinal de retz andor during a film shoot, the actors don’t open their mouths, but inwardly speak their lines andor they are then dubbed using their own voices andor though synchronic, the sound and image remain dissociated andor a house designed by a three-year-old is built andor a lunette before a window, inside an exhibition space situated on an overhang, allows one to see works installed in a village a few kilometres away in the background andor their positions (in gardens, on rooftops, behind walls) make the works invisible from the village itself andor a building is transformed into a cemetery andor the rooms become vaults andor cello pieces written by amateurs, with the aid of an arranger and a cellist andor the former musically translates suggestions by the amateur, which the latter plays for him to judge and correct andor a professional soloist plays the finished pieces andor a record is released andor the number of works in a museum is added to without the knowledge of its employees andor false modern and contemporary pieces, or ones that are authentic and donated by living artists who are in on the ruse, are deposited in the storerooms andor three people make appointments with a curator to consult artworks kept there andor while two of them distract the curator, the third plants a small parasitic piece in the collection andor a picture is painted andor a detail, copied onto another canvas, acts as a point of departure for a second picture andor a detail, copied from the second picture, different to the preceding one, is copied onto a third canvas, on which another picture takes shape around it andor and so on andor the series is a chain, of which the pictures are the links, and the details the points where they meet andor a house is built without the use of measurement andor each measure is intuitively estimated andor the materials are contemporary and the banal style is that of mass-produced houses andor at first blush, the house seems normal andor looking closer, one sees numerous errors andor the partitions are poorly joined andor the steps are poorly assembled andor the flagstones are not parallel to the walls andor these, along with the windows and the doors, are not set square andor the roof is not watertight andor veterans of joy andor aged hedonists, men and women more than sixty years old, are photographed in their homes andor old rock stars, clubbers, demimondaines, swingers, porn stars andor the instruction manual of a piece of translation software is subjected to translation, twice, by that same software, from a foreign language and back again andor the work consists of a copy of the original guide alongside the pretty different, doubly translated text andor the noises heard in a landscape are written on the walls and floor of a room andor the size of the lettering is proportional to the intensity and distance of their sounds andor their position on the wall corresponds to where they appear in the landscape andor ‘crickets slow shrill birdsong the buzz of a fly children playing in the distance bird whistling, several shrill notes bird shrieking, tapering off children speaking in the distance crickets shrill bird whistle an adult addressing the children in the distance slide of a ballpoint pen over a sheet of paper the moo of a cow shrill bird buzz of a fly, it comes to rest, its legs knocking against the plastic table flight of a bumblebee scratching of my nails on my shoulders i sniff i breathe shrill bird cuckoo i swallow i move the notebook, scraping against the plastic table airplane far off wasps around the nest they’re building fly on my left arm i chase it off: the bones in my shoulders creak telephone andor’ the hanging of a museum’s permanent collection is changed for the duration of an exhibit andor the choice of works remains the same, but the order of their appearance in the flow of halls changes andor they are ordered by decreasing size andor fake drawings by artists from the early twentieth century are folded up and inserted into books in provincial libraries andor the books are chosen for the coincidence of their dates of publication and the supposed dates of the drawings andor at an undetermined date, a reader discovers the work andor not imagining that it might be a fake, since the usual motive for forgery – the financial enrichment of the forger – is not operative here, experts authenticate the drawing andor the artist’s body of works is augmented andor wrongly so andor music for a single instrument is written by transcribing texts into musical scores andor for each letter there is a corresponding note andor the spaces between words mark rests andor the choice of notes corresponding to letters determines the tune andor a photograph of a man’s face is cut down the middle from top to bottom andor one half is kept protected from the light andor the other is taped to the man’s place of residence, exposed to the sun and elements andor one year later, the photograph is reconstituted by reassembling the two pieces andor an artist is filmed under hypnosis andor the videotape shows the beginning of the session, the wait, and then his passage into a hypnotic state andor the hypnotist’s voice accompanies the images andor his awakening is not recorded andor watching the video plunges the artist back into a state of hypnosis that only the hypnotist can bring him out of andor the hypnotist not being present, the artist cannot take the risk of watching the tape andor having chosen to show it, he is the only one who cannot watch it andor