Disappearance

In this issue on the theme of disappearance it is no way our intention to announce the death of art, which has been repeatedly predicted for ­several decades.  At most we will, once again, confirm the ­recurrent ­tendency to forego the art object in favour of the artistic device, ­encounter or experience, an attitude which certainly marked our ­previous thematic issues (“Waste” and “Fragile”) and which we could have combined with this one to form a trilogy. Do we thus dare to ­proclaim the disappearance of the object or more precisely the end of the art object’s reign? It is notably this question that some authors took up in their reflections on many artists’ choice “of producing no tangible object while remaining within the system” (Desmet). This is perhaps the first observation to be made here: with or without an object, visible or ­invisible, or promoting the ephemeral, the so-called artists without works persist in taking a place in the system, in leaving a trace, an image, a story. Furthermore, the following pages are not without works; for the most part, very high definition digital photographs. If there is not always a presence of “objects” (in many cases one is indeed confronted with empty rooms), this is not any less proof that artistic acts were carried out. Nobody questions that these traces, which artists or dealers take great care of, now serve as artworks to be displayed in various exhibition places after the experience has dissipated. The inevitable process of the preservation of memory is such that the intangible is inexorably materialized in the archive. The art object thus resists its disappearance.

The theme of disappearance has not only been explored in terms of the absence of works or objects, but also in relation to the ­immaterial, impalpable and evanescent. Devices that work on perception, works erased before the gaze, poetic fictions on death or the decomposition of matter are part of the propositions, which in this issue, refer rather to the disappearance of the subject. Moreover, aside from the main thematic we here include a more politically informed and consequently more ­disturbing essay on the disappearance of the citizen in totalitarian regimes (Vera). However, in this case, not a trace has been left.