Conditions of the atmosphere are rarely thought of as form. The Kantian notion of form is measurable and calculable as an object which occupies space, has shape, volume and color. It is palpable. Atmosphere in turn is not measurable, does not offer a definite shape and it is impalpable, silent, almost absent. Nevertheless, it is –there– it exists and surrounds us. It consists of our digs. We live from it and in it. We could say it is silent form. It is not then a form that is subject of measurement and calculation, it defeats metaphysical boundaries, it crosses planes and perceptions. Silent form is pervasive as absence, takes the shape of its container as a possession. This very space of absence takes up a poetic form that has no definitive shape or volume but sifts and fixes everything it touches. Silent form is perhaps then an absence that through its continual density upon creatures engulfs and surrounds us, permitting right then and there, an apprehending through immersion. We are immersed in atmosphere and atmospheric conditions inhabit us. I argue that these atmospheric conditions “born of cosmological
pressure” as Ranciere writes, is present in the work of Teresa Margolles Vaporization 2001-2018. (28) I will refer to this piece through the work of philosophers Jacques Ranciere and his analysis of Bela Tarr’s films, Jean Luc Nancy’s Portraits and Michel
Serres’ Statues.
New York 2001, I am about to enter Teresa Margolles’ Vaporization chamber at PS1. I notice a small disclaimer written in a museum card which reads something like this: Attention, this work uses vapor of dead bodies, it may be hazardous to your
health. If you are allergic to human odors or fluids or believe you will be affected by such substances, do not enter. I decided indeed to not enter. I refrained from experiencing firsthand the putrefaction of cooked cadavers raining over me. Since then,
I have thought many times of my reaction to the work of this artist who creates in the liminality of forensics and art, with dead bodies as material, their humors, their rigor mortis, their plea and the innate violence their death purports. As time passes and I experience the diverse atmospheric conditions we are subjected to in our everydayness, I think more and more of the pertinence of Margolles’ Vaporization. As Ranciere writes: “[I]t is the external world that penetrates individuals, invades their gaze and their very being.” (28) In Vaporization Margolles works with the vapor that is obtained from the boiling of corpses that have been left at the morgue in Mexico city. Many corpses are never recognized; they remain anonymous, nobodies in life, nobodies in death.
Many result from drug related violence, so pervasive in Mexican society nowadays. The very form of her piece is silent, transparent, dense and rich with significance, grief and death. Like an atmosphere it penetrates whoever dares to go into the room, it invades, it fills their lungs as the dust of a desert, it fixes with obtrusive stubbornness the molecules of water gathered in nostrils and passed through cavernous passages until it reaches the soft tissues awaiting air. “You are not innocent” this vapor seems to asses.
Breathing it is an affirmation of ourselves toward death, silent form enters our bodies without permission. Michel Serres refers to the barriers that are set in place to defend us from the outside:
It protects the interior that it outlines from aggressions of all types, flora from weeds, parasitical and rapacious fauna, corruption or diseases roving the foreign expanse, enemy armies, pillagers and pirates, external desecrations; it defines
cleanliness, the right to property, even more, it constructs definition itself in practice and in theory.(29) Why would anyone cross this atmospheric boundary and enter the war zone of the dead? Serres says: “Do we live there? Where do we come from? From the land of the dead.”(31) Margolles seems to affirm this quote, for we do come from the dead and we live among the dead as we live among life. Life and death form an spiral concept.
Margolles’ works challenges us precisely in our core, we believe we are alive and different from the diseased, we refuse to let our bodies be corrupted by humors and vapors of the dead. Death is silence. Amorphous silence taking the shape of absence.
The apperception of the work of art as silent form in atmospheric conditions fixes our relation with it. As we breathe the air and vapors of anything the city gives us, we are given grief in the unknown molecules of earth that sediments in our lungs. We are not innocent of these lives taken as hostages by drug lords in their war for greed and consumption, so breathe, take it in, surrender to be polluted by death. “Here lies” the drops of death that fall from the skye, “[C]emetery, the first garden; necropolis, the first city.” (32) writes Serres, and I add: womb, the first atmosphere. In atmosphere we lie, we traverse, navigate, construct, love and hate, go to war and die. Rain, soil, plants and mycelium recover our bones and tissue and give it back to the atmosphere. Dust to dust.
Serres’ relates his encounter of Al-Qarafa’s cemetery in El Cairo, full of particles of death, inhabited by the living as proof of life, in his words: “He who no longer has anything lives in the place where death and life border each other, where being
begins.”(36) This place is that of silence, of air that seems to hang low and dense on the cemetery as well as in Margolles’ work.
In his book Portrait Jean Luc Nancy opens up the possibility of the work of art as a portrait of the artist, in that sense, every portrait is a self-portrait. In his own parlance:
“As with poetics and logic, mimesis bears within it the premise of autonomy. In this sense, every portrait –including, as we suggested previously, every representation, is a self-portrait.” (61) Thus, we could imply that the silent form that Margolles works in Vaporization is also a portrait, that of a society at odds with death and at war with life.
Her own visage silent and absent from the installation is present through the atmospheric form it portrays. Vapors of the death already possess us living terrans, they certainly emanate from the atmosphere we inhabit. These bodies “portrayed” in
Margolles work are not only in relation to an “interior” but instead towards a totality of exteriority through which it relates to other bodies. The interiority the cadavers boiled in Vaporization distill, belong always already to an exteriority that is in suspension until the first drops of vapor equate an atmosphere equal for all those present. In that sense it is the body of the artist and her self-portrait at the same time being given as proof of (tragic) existence. In this sense Margolles works also as mimesis not in the portraitive expression of her installation but in the interior-exterior relation that it creates from herself through the forensic work with corpses and into the atmospheric silent form it gives the spectator-recipient of the vapors. Hence: “What is playing here is a question of the “human,” a question of art, and a question of the “mystery” as such, that is, of the possibility of the expression of the impenetrable or the unpresentable –of a “soul,” if not of a divine secret.” (83) Which is what seems to be happening in such a “cosmological” countenance. This atmospheric imprint remains on the recipient, we are recipients of silent form, either in gesture or in trauma, for we are not able to forget the experience, even if it was not presenced.
Ranciere’s take on Bela Tarr’s films affirm this notion of imprint. He writes: “[…] it is not the individuals who live in places and make use of things. It is the things that first come to them, that surround, penetrate, or reject them.” (27) It all happens to the individual, not the other way around; the individual does not happen to things as dominator. Things have a way of happening, of making themselves present, showering the human animal with its presuppositions and positing. As the vapors from Vaporization fell on some individuals, they did not fall on me. I remained outside of the event but nevertheless could never forget it. The language written on the liability disclaimer of the museum, ejected me form the experience. However, that same lack or absence of corpse’s rain on me, remains attached to my surroundings.
As an atmospheric condition rain, which is capable of instilling romantic feelings, also has an ability to bring up the uncanny. “[…] the rain installs itself in Bela Tarr’s universe. It is the very stuff of which the film seems to be woven, the environment from which the characters emerge, the material cause of all that happens to them.” (28) affirms Ranciere. Rain has a way of penetrating lives, permeating them by way of persistence. As with wind, and desert sand storms, beings who live in harsh atmospheric conditions are accustomed to the catastrophic implications it brings. In Margolles Vaporization, the viewer, experiencing rain from the corpses, can escape this pervasive attack at the end of the viewing cycle. Not in other circumstances though. The human animal has had to withstand all kinds of atmospheric drama and survive or escape from it. Silent form could be persistent as well, pursue us in dreams, memories and sudden flashbacks. It is a kind of form that lives ubiquitously anywhere. It does not need to be captured in order to exist. It can be perceived outside of the object-subject relation. It has an ability to take the shape of any container, or to be displayed or contained at will; to be named and summoned at bedtime stories. From Serres we gather it may inhabit the immovable silence of Al Qarafa’s cemetery; from Nancy we might think it inhabits the portrait as nuanced signal of being. From Ranciere we could guess it lies on atmospheric conditions. I would suggest this atmospheric conditions are implications of the work of art in contemporary perception. We have moved from the notion of immovability of the object as measurable form and the story of the portrait as semblance of an individual. We are at the doors of silent form as perception that needs to be sensed, that can’t conform to binary notions because it is both form and content at the same time. Poetic form as silent form and vice versa. How are we to perceive an atmospheric event as work of art? How are we to listen to silent form raining over us? The very space of absence takes up a form –silent– that has no definitive shape or volume but sifts and pollutes everything it touches. It is in such imprint that we find an ecosystem of thought, an spatial paradigm that engulfs the very atmosphere it generously creates. It is not something perceptible that could be measured, it is invisible atmosphere that is installed in beings. It carries a subtle notion of death always acompanying it, an invariable certainty that everything is about to end. In Ranciere’s parlance: “Everything is over. It is all over. Nothing anymore. Never again.” (32) Perhaps only to begin again.
Bibliography
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Portrait. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.
Serres, Michel. Statues: The second book of foundations. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Ranciere. Jacques. Béla Tarr, the Time After. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2013.
Margolles, Teresa. Vaporization 2001-2018. Installation