If de Chirico is an apostle, then he is the apostle of denial. His gospel is not a proclamation but a retraction. We read him by not believing him – because the very content he insists upon in his later life (the academic pomp, the hostile refutation of his own early revelations) is given only to be discarded.
His tragedy is simple and metaphysical: he was once inside the most beautiful world painting ever opened – the world where space thinks, where silence leans forward, where objects glow with metaphysical pressure – and he was expelled from it.
Like Adam remembering Eden, he spends the rest of his life repainting the walls of the museum
to deny that paradise ever existed. Each denial is another confirmation that he felt the wound.
Surrealism, tapping into the unconscious, proved more venomous than Dada.
Not because it went further into revolt, but because it claimed authority over what cannot be ruled. When Breton proclaimed laws for dreams, he bureaucratized the very thing that makes the night impossible to police. The unconscious became doctrine, a party line, a style. The venom lies there: in the will to master what originally insisted without permission.
Dada had no such aspiration. Its refusal was not aimed at uncovering hidden meaning — it was a refusal of meaning’s tyranny altogether. Dada was not a method of access to the Real; it was an abrasion against the Symbolic. A tearing rather than an excavation. A hinge-event. A strike where argument used to be. Its laughter, its noise, its childishness — these did not interpret the unconscious, they interrupted the ego. If surrealism was the dream rendered legible, Dada was the shock that made legibility tremble.
Surrealism was venomous enough to destroy metaphysics by loving it too much. Breton’s conviction – that beauty must be convulsive or cease – was not merely a slogan but an ethical test. De Chirico failed that test by passing it once. His early paintings achieved convulsion so perfectly that he lost the right to remain in that state. No one survives the sublime unscarred.
The apostolic structure appears clearly:
Schwitters accepted the wound and built from it. De Chirico refused the wound and painted over it. Schwitters became the apostle of the crack that continues. De Chirico turned into the apostle of the sealed-over fissure.
Both answer to the same Real. But one does so in affirmation, the other in protest.
If Schwitters writes the Gospel of the Wound,
de Chirico writes the Epistle of Denial – which we must read against itself in order to retrieve the truth it hides.
It is not simply devotion versus resentment – both men suffer.
But one suffers forward while the other suffers backward.
The surrealists rejected de Chirico because they recognized the danger: he had seen the Real too cleanly. He touched the unconscious without narrative, without dream. He made desire appear with no alibi — and it frightened them. So they turned him into an Enemy of Surrealism, and he accepted the role, and the art became what resentment produces: ornament.
Yet the wound remains visible, even in the kitsch. Especially in the kitsch. Because only someone who has been burned by meaning tries so hard to paint without it.
Which is why to forgive de Chirico is to mistrust him. And to read him is always an act of disbelief.
And it is Breton who is guilty of beauty.
***
[from a conversation with ChatGPT,
while driving the car toward Weißensee]
Apostolic Reading in daylightwhile driving the car toward Weißensee]
a schnitzel, a table, thirteen voices
Daytime Theatre · @berlinartinstitute
with Edoardo Folli (Neukölln Syndrome)
Thursday, 4.12.25, 2 pm
“Two Apocryphs: Schwitters and de Chirico”
There are only two events that remain decisive for art today. They are not movements or doctrines, but fractures. The first concerns what happened to de Chirico’s early style. The second concerns what happened between Berlin Dada and Kurt Schwitters. These two sites mark the place where desire met the symbolic order with overwhelming force, and where art was compelled either to defend itself or to invent itself anew. Both events emit a whisper that calls for rereading. And both produce an apocryph – a text beneath the text, a logic beneath the archive – through which the contemporary scene can still orient itself.
The theme that binds them is alienation in the symbolic. On one side, Schwitters in Berlin, carrying the refusal as wound and turning that wound into method. On the other side, de Chirico in Paris, confronted by the surrealist circle that misrecognised him, disfigured his image, and pressed him into a dialectical corner from which he never fully returned. Each faced an intrusion into his desire. Each crafted a response. The responses, however, diverge.
Schwitters, receiving the wound of exclusion, affirmed his desire by passing through the break. He did not defend himself against Dada, nor did he attempt to withdraw from its turbulence. Instead, he remained in relation. His Merz practice is precisely that: a continuation after rupture, a fidelity to the cut that founded him. Schwitters invented a world from the wound – not a style, not a doctrine, but a site of production beyond reflection. Merzbau is not a monument to rejection; it is what emerges when a subject places his desire directly into matter.
De Chirico encountered a different fracture. His early metaphysical style, which had no precedent, was absorbed, claimed, and reinterpreted by the surrealists, who attempted to turn his images into a program. The misrecognition was acute. His later refusal of his own early work was not born from desire, but from defensiveness – a tangled relation with the Paris circle that pushed him into a negative dialectic. He produced a counter-imagery whose academic kitsch often obscured the luminosity of his beginnings, though the late suns still radiate something unmistakable. Some say he never lost it, and his novel keeps its metaphysical clarity intact. But the paintings – many of them – bear the trace of a struggle with the symbolic, a tension between affirmation and repudiation.
The plane of comparison is therefore not stylistic but ethical. It concerns the passage from alienation to separation. In Lacanian terms: whether one answers the symbolic with a new articulation of desire, or whether one remains caught in the gesture of rebuttal. Breton, ever the bureaucrat of the surreal, demanded ideological obedience. Berlin Dada had its own internal policing – swift, charismatic, often mocking – yet from that very milieu emerged the most radical separation of all: Schwitters’ departure without resentment, his invention of Merz as an inclusive impulse. Berlin was the site of his wound, and Berlin is now the site of the amends.
Both Schwitters and de Chirico, in different ways, speak to how art confronts symbolic alienation. One transforms the wound into world-making. The other resists the wound by turning backward, wrestling with the demand not to resemble himself. The academic kitsch of late de Chirico – except for the suns, which remain untouchable – shows how the defensive gesture can calcify into style. Merz shows how the wound can become a principle of composition, a method of existence. It is this difference that matters for us now.
The apocryph emerges in the gap between official history and lived desire. It answers a whisper that comes not from the archive, but from the tale everyone already knows. The avant-garde was never a purified field; it required bourgeois interiors, cafés, domestic tables. Monty Python understood this perfectly: subversion works best against good furniture. Dada needed its backdrop. Merz needed the wound. And the contemporary moment needs these tales not as myths to be verified, but as structures to be inhabited.
To do amends is to place Schwitters and Berlin Dada back in relation – not to domesticate their tension, but to reactivate its generative force. The ritual that looks like performance is the core. The artbook is the inscription into the symbolic that receives everything, even contradictions, even the unseen. And through this double apocryph – Schwitters and de Chirico – we trace a line from the wound to the emergence of a subjectivity that answers the call of es gibt, appointed by a Logos that has itself been touched, and therefore speaks differently.
Berlin Makes Amends to Schwitters #3 & #4
BAI, 27.11. & 4.12.25
BAI, 27.11. & 4.12.25
“he made him do it”
I went to the Berlinische Galerie to see Hausmann and to settle accounts. I had rehearsed my complaint on the way – a small grievance carried in the pocket, folded, ready to be delivered. I wanted to name something precisely, but the phrase kept shifting: half liturgical, half provocation. I let it stand. I was carrying a task rather than a grievance, something like a duty to make amends where Berlin once failed, but I doubted whether a major institution could rise to such a tone. Their cafés are sterilising machines; their bookshops strip aura as efficiently as disinfectant. The avant-garde dies there daily, in the hum of card readers.
And then the ship struck. Monira Al Qadiri’s enormous tanker at the entrance – HERO, red-bellied, horizonless – not an artwork but a didactic instrument, a pre-emptive strike. It was placed there to break my resistance before I even reached Hausmann’s room. BG knows he was the Bolshevik of Dada, the one who could detect bourgeois sensibility with a single raised eyebrow, and so they set a vessel the size of a state ideology at the door – an allegory disguised as spectacle. They feared his refinement, the sharpness of his ridicule; they sensed that his intellectual precision could still puncture the soft surfaces of contemporary culture, and so they neutralised the air before one even entered. A gallery café cannot muster that temperament.
Yet what followed was very good. Exquisite, even. And it shifted the whole intrigue. For I had also come to verify a rumour – the Café Austria anecdote, the little “he said, she said” that haunts the margins of avant-garde history. Schwitters arriving with his neat edges of paper; Hausmann watching; Huelsenbeck smirking; the phrase “too aesthetic” falling onto the table like an accidental verdict. We do not know who said it, or in what spirit. There is no reliable transcript, no notarised document. It is a ben trovato, but the avant-garde loved such rituals: acceptance, refusal, mock rejection, a wink, a slap, a joke turned foundational. Dada thrived on initiations and exclusions that were never fully meant yet completely consequential.
And so the gossip becomes part of the work. Hausmann’s greatest artwork might well be this rumoured refusal, an invisible piece not displayed in the exhibition, yet vibrating beneath every vitrine. Huelsenbeck is there too, the ghost at every Dada table – the diagnoser, the drummer, the agent of agitation. And Schwitters, in this tale, becomes the sacrificial lamb, expelled so that Merz could be born. But sacrifice is not humiliation: structurally it is the moment that inaugurates a destiny. Schwitters played the part beautifully. He made rejection into method; he turned dismissal into architecture.
Who made him do it – Hausmann, Huelsenbeck, Berlin, the café atmosphere, the avant-garde ethos itself – is the real intrigue. Not the historical accuracy, but the structural necessity. Someone had to refuse him so that Merzbau could exist. Someone had to say “too aesthetic” so that the world of fragments could begin assembling itself. The refusal is the hinge. The insult, the ignition.
What followed surprised me. The sequence of rooms was precise – not merely curated, but sharpened – as if the exhibition itself understood the stakes of bringing Hausmann into a major institution. The works were placed with such restraint, such quiet calibration, that BG managed something I had not expected: they avoided the easy temptation of staging Dada as noise. They refused the heritage-industry version of disruption – no false unruliness, no decorative subversion. Instead the show was clean, almost ascetic, as if the institution were attempting to wash its hands while holding on to the splinter. This, too, was telling. BG excluded the stylistic gestures of Dada, but they preserved its tension: the sharp, refined texture of someone who once cut language open and listened for its metal.
What had once been called too aesthetic – the neatness, the care, the trimming of edges – returned here in a different light. Hausmann’s domestication, nomen omen, was the very thing the gallery seized upon. They sublimated Dada’s matter, extracted the sass, cleaned the grit; they lifted the rough into a clarity almost classical. And yet, in doing so, they revealed something involuntary: an echo of the original wound that no institution can fully seal.
Because as we know: ruin is production beyond reflection. And ruin is what has duty toward Merzbau.
***
Apostolic Reading in daylight
a schnitzel, a table, thirteen voices
Daytime Theatre · @berlinartinstitute
Thursday, 27.11.25, 2 pm
“Fifteen Propositions on the Unconscious of Art Today”
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The unconscious of art is the zone where gesture precedes image.
It is not hidden content but the interval in which the mark appears before it understands that it is being seen.
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The unconscious is the unadministered line.
A line that has not yet been asked to perform, explain, represent or justify itself.
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The unconscious resides in surfaces not meant for art.
Receipts, envelopes, the back of printed pages – sites where the mark is unprepared and therefore ungoverned.
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The unconscious is the weak object.
Objects that behave like artworks without intending to: scraps, misprints, unframed pieces, domestic residues.
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The unconscious is produced through omission.
What the artist does not include, does not articulate, does not notice – these omissions form a parallel structure to the work.
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The unconscious is accumulated in the accidental archive.
Folders, phone galleries, desk piles, screenshots – the uncurated buildup that reveals more than the curated one.
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The unconscious is the unperformed image.
Images that have not negotiated with spectatorship – prior to editing, staging or self-awareness.
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The unconscious is the domestic remainder.
Children’s drawings, household marks, unintentional inscriptions – the home’s own production of form, without ambition.
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The unconscious persists as the unpayable gesture.
Anything that cannot be monetised, editioned or traded; gestures that escape commodification by their very weakness.
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The unconscious is the detail that escapes intention.
Smudges, misalignments, shadows, distortions – the elements that operate beyond correction.
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The unconscious is the unrecognised lineage.
Influences the artist does not acknowledge or perhaps cannot – the phantom genealogy inside the work.
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The unconscious is the affective leak.
Boredom, fatigue, insistence, avoidance – states that enter the work without being named.
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The unconscious is the remainder of time.
Durations not accounted for: hesitation, delay, drift – temporal structures that shape the work from outside composition.
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The unconscious is the pre-political image.
Form emerging before the decision to be form, before style, before position – the image before it knows it is an image.
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The unconscious is crystallised in the child’s drawing.
The clearest condensation of pre-capture gesture: a line that does not know how to behave, an image that precedes the image – the weakest and most exact operator of art today.
If we take art seriously as a historical practice, we must also take seriously the residues that escape its history. The child’s drawing is one such residue. It stands at the frontier where gesture begins to condense into form, yet refuses to accept the laws that form will soon impose. It is the image in its pre-political condition. And because of this, the child’s drawing is also the unconscious of art made visible before the image learns to behave. It reveals what the image wished to forget in order to mature.
Back to the unconscious, forward to desire.
The child’s drawing is the place where the symbolic has not yet hardened. At that stage, lines do not yet know what they are supposed to do. Figures drift without committing to form. Perspective appears momentarily and then recedes. Proportion follows desire rather than depiction. None of this signals naïveté. It signals pre-capture drawing, the moment in which representation has not yet tightened around the movement of the hand. The line remains unadministered, uninterpretable, still outside the adult’s need for coherence.
It is also the interval before style. Style presumes negotiation – a recognition that the image is being seen. The child draws from within the drawing rather than toward a viewer. What results is not expression but unguarded gesture. For that reason the child’s line is often more contemporary than contemporary art itself. It has not yet entered the economy of self-awareness that governs artistic production. The line has no interest in being contemporary; it simply appears as it is, without the burden of performing a sensitivity.
In this condition, the child’s drawing inhabits the Holy without naming it. Not as belief, but as the untouched zone where appearance occurs before calculation takes hold. It is the purest instance of the tactile interval – gesture as event rather than intention. There is no doctrine in it; only the immediate fact of something taking shape without asking for justification. This is the small holiness of the unburdened object.
Back to the unconscious, forward to desire.
The child’s drawing is also the unconscious of the home. Homes generate drawings the way forests generate spores: quietly, repeatedly, without hierarchy. They appear on envelopes, receipts, the back of forms, whatever surface is closest to hand. They float among objects rather than presenting themselves as objects. Their strength lies precisely in this low ontology. They are not artworks entering domesticity from the outside; they are domesticity expressing itself from within.
This brings us to the conflict we began to outline. Art threatens the home. It introduces a foreign plane and a tension into the air. But the child’s drawing is the single form of art that domesticity accepts without resistance. It does not pollute the home because it arises from the home’s own breath. In this sense, the child’s drawing is the purest remainder of what art forgets in order to become art.
At this point the difference with Dubuffet becomes instructive. One needs to be thinking of the child’s drawing again. Not Dubuffet’s child, not Art Brut’s triumphant primitive, not the myth of an uncorrupted line. The contemporary child’s drawing appears differently: not as innocence but as breach – a line that forgets itself while it is being drawn. A line that does not know that it stands inside an image. A line without aim. Dubuffet sought to rescue the child from culture; but we understand now that the child stands outside nothing. The child is already inside the chatter, the screens, the late-afternoon exhaustion. What arrives from the drawing today is not purity but interruption. A local incoherence that disturbs the adult’s habits of seeing. Not freshness, but refusal.
This refusal is what stitches Café Austria. The room is already divided: fogged windows, tilting mirrors, tables that produce their own soft occlusions. Café Austria behaves as a compound object in the Schwitters sense – a set of minor disorientations held loosely together. And the shadow of Berlin Dada is here as well: the child’s syllable “dada” as the first breach in adult symbolic order. Into this ground, the child’s drawing enters with precise affinity. It is not decoration and not sentiment; it is a hinge. It binds the room by not fitting the room.
A child’s drawing stitches Café Austria because it holds no correct relation to the adult scale of things. It does not acknowledge the symmetry of the table, nor the photographic discipline of the atmospheres you document. It introduces a weak force – weak in the Blanchot sense, weak as unprotected – that recalibrates the room. Surfaces become less certain of themselves. Repetitions loosen. The café exhales.
What Dubuffet described as an escape from culture becomes, in contemporary practice, an insertion into a specific culture: the café’s culture of paused time, half-work, overheard narratives, waiting. The
drawing threads through these layers. It becomes a local suture at the meeting point of the domestic, the intimate, and the stray. It does not instruct; it reorients. It opens a small displacement — gentle enough to belong there, sharp enough to change the room’s internal pressure.
This is why the drawing returns. Not for the myth of childhood but for the minor disobedience that appears when a line is made without wanting to be art. A line that does not perform. A line that does not know how to behave. This is where the stitching begins.
Back to the unconscious, forward to desire.
Nina, 6-year-old
“Fifteen Propositions on the Unconscious of Art Today”
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The unconscious of art begins where gesture precedes recognition.
It is not a hidden depth but the brief interval in which a mark appears before it knows that it has entered visibility.
The unconscious is the line before assignment.
A line that has not yet been instructed to signify, perform or clarify—a line without obligation.
The unconscious settles on unintended surfaces.
Scraps, slips, margins, packaging—places where the mark arrives uninvited and therefore unconstrained.
The unconscious takes the form of the weak object.
Things that slip into aesthetic function without aiming for it: misalignments, offcuts, minor fragments, domestic leftovers.
The unconscious emerges from what is left out.
Every omission—avoided element, overlooked detail, forgotten intention—builds a shadow structure parallel to the work itself.
(...)
ChatGPT
“Please upscale this image”
Schwitters, “Merz Barn”
Fred Brookes, Newcastle University
Fred Brookes, Newcastle University
“When Art Hears the Holy”
Today's work around The Sense-Organ of the Era and The Arrival and the Interval brings a structural clarity that now needs to be stated directly. When Lacan said “Back to Freud,” he was not calling for nostalgia or restoration but for a return that moves forward. The only way psychoanalysis could advance was by re-entering the original break—Freud’s foundational wound—and activating it under new conditions. The return was the method of continuation.
The same operation becomes visible here. The new good taste does not revive the avant-garde; it reactivates its generative wound. The avant-garde became an ism whenever its original pressure hardened into doctrine. An ism stabilises itself. It codifies, preserves, and eventually seals its own gesture. A -logy moves differently. It remains attentive, mobile, and capable of inhabiting what has not yet been resolved. It begins with a return because the return brings us back to the field of unfinishedness—the place where new coherence can grow.
This return is never restorative. It does not rebuild what was lost, and it does not stage a citation of what once happened. It steps back into the rupture itself. Where restoration seeks repair, and where modernist stylisation seeks posture, the new good taste seeks inhabitation. It stands where the world has already opened and listens for what continues to insist. This is how the return becomes forward-moving: it restores contact with unfinishedness, which is the only domain from which new form can emerge.
Schwitters is central precisely because he kept this unfinishedness active. Merz does not close. It does not codify. It carries the fragment’s direction without demanding that it resolve its origin. Schwitters preserved the splinter in an age that was already losing touch with the tactile world. To return to him now is to return to the last moment when the fragment still held its density. This is why ruinology grows from Merz in the same way that Lacan’s psychoanalysis grew from Freud: both are continuations that remain close to the original wound without turning it into doctrine.
The rigour of the interval, described in today’s récit, depends on this return. The interval is the space in which appearance becomes possible, where the world gathers itself without being consumed by representation. Heidegger calls this space the Holy in his later work; Blanchot asks what is at stake when something like art is allowed to exist. Their concern is the same: the interval must be protected so that appearance can arrive. The new good taste approaches this interval with discipline, preserving enough distance for form to show itself and enough nearness for tactility to remain intact.
Thus the movement becomes clear. Back to Schwitters is not a gesture toward the past but toward the future. It binds the avant-garde to a -logy rather than an ism. It reopens the unfinished wound so that a new practice can unfold. It keeps the interval intact so that appearance can continue. The new good taste lives in this practice. It responds to the call of the era by returning to what still insists. It advances by stepping back into what was never completed.
This is the method. This is the hinge that links today’s prologue and récit.
A return into the wound as the only way forward.
“ The Arrival and the Interval ”
Phenomenology has always sensed that artworks do not enter the world the way other objects do. They require a shift in the field of presence, a small amplitude in which matter acquires its own clarity. This shift is never guaranteed. It belongs to the world’s capacity to let something step forward. Heidegger described this as the event of presencing; Merleau-Ponty treated it as the advent of visibility. In each case, appearance is not given but allowed.
Traditionally, sacrum held this interval. The sacred marked the zone where appearance intensified and where approach demanded care. Touch was withheld not to elevate the object but to preserve the distance in which appearance could gather itself. Distance functioned as protection.
Kant’s notion of taste carries this intuition into modernity. Taste is not appetite and not tactile immediacy. It is the disciplined interval between desire and contact. It is perception held at a slight remove so that form may show itself. Taste preserves the opening through which appearance becomes possible.
This interval occupied the late Heidegger, for whom the Holy was not a theological category but a phenomenological one. The Holy was the dimension that sheltered appearance, the space where things could gather without being consumed by representation. In this sense, the Holy names the world’s capacity to hold something apart without isolating it.
Blanchot, approaching from another direction, asked what is at stake in the fact that something like art or literature shall exist at all. His question points to the same structure: why should the world produce works that do not serve, do not instruct, but simply stand in their own manner? His answer is discreet but forceful. Art exists because the world withholds just enough for appearance to occur. Without this withholding, without this interval, nothing could show itself as more than function.
The new good taste emerges from this lineage. It is not refinement or style but the discipline of attending to the interval in which appearance takes shape. It keeps enough distance for things to show themselves while staying close enough for their tactility to remain intact. It accepts the world’s thickness without letting it collapse into immediacy. It sustains the space in which presence becomes articulate.
This is where Schwitters returns with full relevance — a “back to Schwitters” in the spirit of Lacan’s “back to Freud.” Schwitters preserved the fragment because he sensed that the world was losing the conditions of appearance. Merz grants the splinter just enough space to gather presence without becoming an image and without dissolving into abstraction. It protects the tactile world at the exact threshold where the symbolic tends to swallow it.
This protection, this accompaniment, is also the work of -logy. A -logy grows only where the interval is preserved, where the fragment is not rushed into interpretation, where the world thickens before it is named. It listens to what appears and allows articulation to come after, not before.
Through this, the movement becomes clear. The miracle of appearance leads to the sacral interval; the sacral interval leads to the new good taste; the new good taste leads back to Schwitters; and Schwitters opens onto -logy. A single, centred line of thought, held in the composure of our style.
“Prologue—The Sense-Organ of the Era”
Every era has a sense-organ, and ours has driven the eye past its threshold. The image has been accelerated, the symbolic overexposed, and visibility has slipped into the economy of consumption. What once revealed now floods; what once appeared now commands. Meaning arrives too quickly, leaving little room for the world to gather its own presence.
Yet beneath this velocity, the world still insists. It insists in textures and residual surfaces, in fragments that retain their direction even after the cut. These remnants hold their course quietly, and their persistence forms the call of our era.
This call moves through touch. Not touch as sentiment, but touch as irreplaceable contact — the last sensorium in which matter keeps its dignity. Touch resists the abstracting pull of the symbolic. It cannot be thinned or replaced. It holds a tempo older than clarity.
The -logy emerges here. It responds to what insists by staying close to it. It forms a practice of attention and patience, a nearness to the tactile world that cannot be dissolved by explanation. A -logy is not a doctrine but a mode of remaining with what continues.
Schwitters heard this call early. In an era already sliding toward commercial enclosure, he recognised the thinning of the world. By preserving the splinter, he protected the tactile from disappearance. His fragments retain direction; they do not wait for permission to appear.
The ritual continues this work. It returns meaning to matter rather than extracting matter into meaning. It protects the slow presencing of things from the hunger of the symbolic and grants surfaces enough time to disclose themselves.
The new good taste lives in this fidelity. It commits itself to the thick part of the world — to the touch that persists, to fragments that continue to speak, to surfaces that have not been sterilised by visibility. It values what holds its depth.
This is why -logy belongs to our era. It is a response rather than a programme, an orientation rather than a doctrine. Above all, it is a way of staying close to what insists.
“Café Austria and the Future of -Logy”
When we speak of -logy, we begin with Logos and pass through it. Logos is the broad clearing of appearance – the open structure that lets beings come forward and take their place.
-Logy, on the other hand, is what happens when this openness tightens into specificity, when a particular presence begins to concentrate the field around itself. Logos provides the space; -logy forms a local logic. A fragment stands at this threshold – not as an exception to Logos but as a point where the world condenses into a small and insistent centre. This is the hinge where ruinography, the apostolic gesture, the Schwitters wound and the Heideggerian thing find themselves quietly aligned.
Hausmann belongs to the moment before such alignment becomes visible. In the early 1920s, Dada appears not as a system but as an exposure – a machia in the strict sense: forces meeting abruptly, refusing resolution, insisting on their imbalance. Hausmann works directly inside this tension. His photomontages, his optical cuts, his bursts of syllable and noise do not depict fracture; they enact it. He handles the world as something already split open, and his work keeps that split alive. This is the pure machia of the avant-garde – encounter without mediation, pressure without interpretation.
Hausmann’s stance in Café Austria is dialectical. He begins by striking – negation as the first move, dismissal as method. But negation places the one who uses it at a disadvantage. It binds the gesture to what it opposes. It lets the enemy choose the ground. Against this posture, the question concerning Schwitters’ collages is not whether they were “too aesthetic,” but whether their excess carried sovereignty – whether they opened a logic of their own rather than answering the tension imposed by Berlin.
Schwitters approaches from another angle. He treats the fragment not as a wound to be intensified but as a presence to be followed. His Merz practice is composed rather than explosive, patient rather than contrastive. He listens where others shout. His fragments are not provocations but continuations, they retain the trace of their previous world – bits of matter that endured the break and retained a direction of their own. He joins them not to repair them but to accompany their quiet insistence.
He also intuits that a -logy is itself a fragment. Just as Merz was cut from Kommerz – a stray syllable freed from commercial closure – a -logy is a splinter of Logos that has slipped loose from system. Only the ruin prefix – only ruinology – gives the suffix permission to move on its own. It allows the fragment to carry its logic without being drawn back into the stability of an ism. An ism is a position, a posture that settles; a -logy remains mobile. It cultivates a practice rather than a stance, an emergence rather than a program. This gentle distinction makes Schwitters appear not as a dismissed applicant to Berlin but as a prophet, someone attuned to the future – a figure who sensed that only fragments evade the commercial enclosure of the age.
This is the beginning of -logy: a presencing that becomes a field, a wound that becomes orientation.
*
A -logy begins this way – with something that calls before we know how to answer. First the thing presences. Then sensing arises. Sensing becomes duty. Duty moves into articulation. And articulation, once steady enough, crystallises into -logy. The -logy is discovered rather than constructed. It reveals that the world is not mute; it simply speaks in a slower register. Ruins, fragments, remnants, the vivid inside the morbid – they do not think, but they address. Their insistence becomes a kind of local Logos – something that sets the conditions for understanding before understanding begins.
This is the crucial difference between Hausmann and Schwitters. Hausmann performs the break; Schwitters lives inside it. Hausmann makes the fracture visible; Schwitters lets the fracture become a dwelling. One exposes the pressure of the world; the other holds a continuity that the break did not manage to erase. Between them, the history of the avant-garde moves from event to fidelity, from confrontation to accompaniment, from machia to -logy.
This distinction becomes sharper as one walks through the current Hausmann exhibition at the Berlinische Galerie – Raoul Hausmann: Vision and Provocation. The early machia of Dada is staged once more: the severed image, the broken syntax, the montage as immediate rebuttal to stability. And alongside this, in our own daytime theatre, we work in the quieter register that follows such an eruption. The cut belongs to Hausmann; the continuation belongs to the fragment; the -logy belongs to the thing that persists after the cut.
Seen together, they reveal the full movement:
Logos leaning into fragment, fragment leaning into duty,
and duty unfolding into the gentle architecture of -logy.
A -logy is nothing more than staying close to what insists.
Berlin Makes Amends to Schwitters
BAI, 13.11.25
”Where Painting Learns to Appear”
Before any painting, there is always a wall – not as background, but as the first surface that resists the world’s hunger for images. A painting asks the wall to disappear; a wall refuses. It offers itself without seduction, indifferent in a way that becomes instruction. For our era suffers less from a lack of vision than from too much of the visible: not too much seeing, but too much image, too much surface attempting to resolve what should remain open. Image and symbolic share this complicity. Both promise clarity too quickly, each helping the other to foreclose the slow work of matter. Language joins them in this narrowing; it explains before it listens, lifting things out of their density with a speed that leaves the world thin.
Good taste – the new good taste – moves otherwise. It stays close to the tactile world, to what keeps its grain and its resistance. It allows the surface to remain uneven, lets objects keep their own tempo. It listens before speaking. And in this listening, a small square begins to draw itself: machia, the dialectical, the discursive, and -logy. Machia is encounter without mediation, the raw pressure where things clash or expose themselves. The dialectical begins with negation – a stance that reacts, inheriting its tempo from what it opposes. The discursive gathers the world into clarity, risking sterilisation as it narrates. And -logy is the quiet logic that grows from the thing itself – a practice of accompaniment, not a position. These four do not oppose one another; they mark different pressures through which appearance becomes intelligible.
This square returns us to a simple but decisive question: does a painting swallow the wall, or does the wall teach the painting how to appear? A painting, when it wants too much, risks covering the very ground that gives it depth. A wall does not cover. It bears. It keeps the image at its limit. It teaches the painter the weight of surface, the patience of matter, and the ethics of not rushing toward meaning. This is why the wall must be approached first – because painting begins where the image loosens its grip and the world thickens again, because the wall is the last body that does not turn away, because to enter the square of machia, dialectic, discourse and -logy, one must first learn to stand where the wall stands.
Michael Hazell
Studio, 2025
Studio, 2025
Havier LaCulm
Studio, 2025
Studio, 2025
BAI, 13.11.25
Berlin Makes Amends to Schwitters
“At the Corner of Vision”
There is, in the ruin, a faint sense of something sentient – a presence that stands between matter and meaning, lending the fragment a composure that feels almost alive. We recognise this without naming it. It is the moment when debris seems to gather itself, when a remainder leans into its own presence, when the ruin addresses us without speech. Heidegger would say: the thing is thinging. It presences.
A thing, in this register, is never exhausted by its material attributes. It is not solely at hand either. It has a mode of appearing that holds together more than what can be counted or described. It gathers. It draws threads of world around itself. It is a presence with its own gravity, a concentrated stillness that draws the space into itself. The ruin inherits this gravity. It emits its own small field of attention. And what we sense as “sentience” is precisely this gathering force surfacing through the broken form.
This is why ruins draw appearances – the jinn, the white lady, the ghost of Hamlet’s father stepping forward when a world has not met what asked to be met – a figure sensed rather than found. The place feels inhabited, though no one is there. Something in the air seems to thicken for a moment, as if forming a brief contour. These figures appear because the ruin’s field exceeds its debris; the condensation of the thing briefly shapes a form that feels like occupancy without an occupant.
The ruin holds a presence that shows itself only at the corner of vision.
And something vivid takes form within the morbid – a presence that settles into the ruin with quiet insistence, steady and sure.
Berlin Makes Amends to Schwitters
BAI, 13.11.25
BAI, 13.11.25
“The Ruin’s Symbolic Presence: The Palpable Invisible ”
Duty, in this sense, names a relation that cannot be located in the empirical layers of the ruin, yet it passes through the tactile as its first medium. The fragment’s texture, its chipped edges and softened surfaces, are what allow the symbolic to become perceptible without ever becoming material. You do not touch duty, but the tactile gives it a form of entry: the body senses a remainder that exceeds its own material fact. The ruin’s dust, its temperature, its porousness – these are the ways in which the symbolic acquires a quiet surface, a veil through which it begins to be felt. Duty is not tactile, yet it leans on the tactile to disclose itself, much as a breath makes a curtain visible without ever becoming the curtain. In this sense, the tactile becomes the symbolic’s emissary rather than its source, the soft apostolic threshold where something immaterial first gathers presence.
From here, duty can be understood as the ruin’s way of acknowledging its orientation toward what is absent. It is not a product of its material state but of the direction in which the remainder seems to lean. Duty signals that the fragment does not stand in self-sufficiency; it gestures beyond itself, toward a relation it cannot complete yet cannot withdraw from. Only the symbolic sustains such a pull. It is the field in which an absent form still exerts its quiet pressure, and duty is the ruin’s admission of this pressure. In Lacanian terms: the Real wound generates a demand in the symbolic, and the ruin answers by inclining toward what it lacks. Duty, then, becomes the ruin’s way of showing that the absent continues to shape its presence, giving it a vivid orientation – for there is always something vivid in what first appears morbid.
A wound, after all, is never only a cut in matter; it addresses, however faintly, and leaves a trace that asks to be answered. What persists is not the injury but the call it carries. When the Real wound presses outward, it seeks the symbolic field capable of receiving it. Duty is that pressure rendered into an ethical inclination – a way of sensing that the wound asks to be met, and that attending to it is already a form of relation. Duty names this call. It marks the fact that the wound bears meaning beyond its torn surface, that something unresolved asks to be held rather than solved.
This orientation prepares the ground for the gesture we repeat at BAI: the ritual of making amends. For what is an amend if not the moment when a wound is acknowledged as having spoken, when something long displaced is granted its due, when the symbolic demand is received in an act rather than an explanation? The ruin leans toward Merzbau; the wound leans toward response; and the ritual leans into the same field, letting the act of amends become a way of entering the very demand that duty reveals.
And today, as we move through the Raoul Hausmann’s Dahlem exhibition, the weave thickens. The institutional residue of the avant-garde, its ritualistic handling of fragments, meets the present ruin’s inclination toward the absent. Hausmann’s gestures open a small corridor into what is still to come. The visit folds into the preparation for Art Institute, where the ritual of making amends will find its measure.
“Where the Ruin Leans: On Duty and the New Taste”
There is a particular definition of the ruin that asks for a slower attention, almost a listening posture: Ruin is what has duty toward Merzbau. The term duty does more here than stabilize the definition; it gives the ruin an inner inclination, a bearing that keeps the wound open while allowing it to persist. A ruin is never inert matter, and Gordillo helps us separate it from rubble, which is merely what remains when meaning falls away. A ruin retains its air, its inscriptions, its antiquated whispers, its genealogical threads that slip into the present. It carries tone, humidity, and a faint pressure of expectation. The word duty sharpens this presence, for it shows what the ruin leans toward, and what, in its quiet persistence, it refuses to abandon.
The general definition, that a ruin is a production beyond reflection, gives us its ontological stance, a form of ongoing activity that produces orientations without waiting for thought to catch up. Yet this speculative definition remains incomplete until we understand its vector. The particular definition answers this precisely: Ruin is what has duty toward Merzbau. Here duty is not obligation but vocation, the ruin’s own gravity, its tendency to move along a line that history has already begun to draw. Duty places the ruin back into its world, and each world is historical, shaped by its own forms of care and interpretation. Production tells us how the ruin lives; duty tells us toward what it lives. And in naming this orientation, the ruin binds itself anew to Schwitters, to the Merzbau’s ethics of inclusion, to the fragility and persistence of the fragment that Schwitters embodied after Dada’s rejection. Without duty, the ruin is simply structure; with duty, it becomes lineage.
Duty also performs a quieter, almost invisible labor: it keeps irony in check. Ruins attract ironic distance, the quick dismissal, the glib aestheticization of collapse. Irony is easy; duty is difficult. Duty insists that the ruin be met without the coolness of detachment, without the shield of cleverness. It enforces a tact that is neither sentimental nor cynical. This is why duty reveals the contours of a new good taste, a taste capable of taking the ruin seriously without turning it into a monument, capable of letting the wound remain visible without inflating it into drama, capable of maintaining poise where fashion would prefer a smirk. Duty gives taste its ethical undertone; it steadies it, prevents it from drifting into irony, and keeps it open to the ruin’s quiet demand.
Duty returns the ruin to Schwitters’s wound, to the Merzbau’s embrace of the excluded, to the instinct to gather what the world has rejected, to the gesture that says a fragment too has the right to persist. Duty means that the ruin remembers. It means that its collapse is not arbitrary. It means that something continues. Duty is fidelity rendered in material form. And because it is fidelity rather than nostalgia, it never attempts repair. Instead, duty aligns with mending, the delicate work that begins inside the wound and proceeds without denying it. Mending is not completion; it is tending, keeping, listening, staying with. It is the continuity of the break itself, not the fantasy of its closure. Duty holds this operation open with a firmness that is neither brittle nor soft.
So duty makes the ruin apostolic; it transmits what it cannot command, carries what it cannot repair, and lets the wound continue without demanding closure. Duty is the ruin’s way of sending its own unfinishedness forward, and in doing so it becomes the threshold through which the ruin enters a new -logy, a form of knowing that stands among its fragments without irony and allows the wound to think for itself.
4.11.25, Tuesday
“Penance of the Gaze: Rineke Dijkstra and the Elitist Sin”
The square opens with four corners: Disaster, Desert, Desire, Ruin – a geometry of our time, where creation proceeds through undoing.
Disaster, taught by Blanchot, names the instant when form fails, when every structure is shattered by its own excess. It is not calamity but revelation: that the work, if it is to live, must remain incomplete. The disaster teaches humility – the lesson that meaning survives only as fragment, that art begins again in the wake of its own impossibility. Where what endures and what is lost, presence and absence, have exchanged their roles.
Desert, taught by Jabès, follows as the field cleared by silence. It is the white page after the explosion, the horizon where the word must relearn how to speak. The desert invites us to unlearn possession. It strips, erases, burns away, so that what remains may finally receive. It teaches attention as a form of hospitality.
Desire, taught by the Ruined Subject, is the breath that returns once transcendence has failed. It is not conquest but care – the longing that moves from one remnant to another, binding what has fallen apart. Desire repairs the world through tenderness, not design. It is the erotic within the mundane, the pulse of the in-distinct.
Ruin is the flower that gathers the lessons. It is the site of insemination, where the sterile ideal becomes fertile through collapse. The ruin does not preserve; it produces. Its beauty lies in porosity, in its willingness to be entered by wind, light, and dust. It is the modern condition at peace with its own incompletion – the architecture of continuation.
***
Into this square enters Rineke Dijkstra. Her work is the confession of modernism after its exile: the camera once built for mastery now kneels before the ordinary. Her portraits transform precision into repentance. Every photograph wrestles with the sin of clarity – the elitist inheritance of the museum – and tries to atone through attention. The sterile light becomes the instrument of humility; the subject, carefully chosen, carries the texture that rescues the gaze from death. Sand, skin, fabric, fatigue – all speak against the mortifying perfection of the frame.
In Dijkstra, modernism performs its penance. It confronts its own disaster, walks into the desert of the image, rediscovers desire in the fragile stance of the body, and finds renewal in the ruin of its objectivity. Her light is chastened yet alive: a field where the ruin blooms again, and where art, having confessed its pride, learns once more to love the world.
Almerisa,
Wormer, The Netherlands, 23. June 1996
flipped
flipped
2.11.25, Sunday
Note to Mike:
(...) You know where this takes place, right? What we’re building towards? It’s Roadside Picnic. But not the event. Not even the Zone. It’s the bar they start in. It’s the mop bucket. The off-screen operator. We are staging a cut-out scene from Stalker. A deleted fragment from the bar – quiet, residual, unaccounted for. We bring it back as atmosphere. It’s the last, domestic moment of Stalker – but without climax. Just curtains. Let’s not be thematic, after all the struggle, right? It’s the cleaning lady of the numb thematic Muß.
(...)
That mythical scene.
There are persistent whispers about a “cleaning lady in the bar” in Stalker — a fragment that never made it into the final cut, though it may have existed as a sketch in Tarkovsky’s notes or early drafts.
It fits almost too perfectly into the film’s grammar: a figure of maintenance and humility entering the liminal, pre-Zone world of the bar — the place of transition, of weary men waiting for transcendence. Her gesture — sweeping, wiping, tidying what is perpetually unclean — would have punctured the masculine, metaphysical heroics with a quiet, devotional act.
Symbolically, she’s the anti-Stalker and the true Stalker at once:
– The anti-Stalker because she cleans, she remains, she doesn’t cross the threshold.
– The true Stalker because she tends to the residue of the sacred, to what’s left behind.
If that scene ever existed, its deletion is consistent with Tarkovsky’s intuition: the feminine, the humble, the cyclical work of care had to remain absent-yet-felt, spectral — much like the wife’s unseen labour, or the traces of water, rags, and debris throughout the film.
In that sense, the “cleaning lady” still haunts the film, invisibly.
She’s what keeps the Zone reachable.
1.11.25, Saturday
Berlin Art Institute, Block 11.
The Ruin Reading Group has solidified into a blueprint: for an institutional artwork.
Before we attempt a workshop, with participants reading closely a selected fragment, we consider other possible meanings of the notion “group” –one that stems directly from our curatorial practice. It prompted us to craft a shrine, its founding installation. “A Group”, precisely.
Things emerge. Half plan, half ruin – but we are moving on.
Aggregate:
A constellation of elements – works, gestures, presences – perceived as a whole only through proximity. Its unity is not structural but atmospheric; it binds without hierarchy. The aggregate includes artefacts, activities, and temporal residues. It cannot be fully totalized; every focus yields a different configuration.
Group:
A pronounced plurality within the aggregate. It emerges where relation becomes palpable – when distinct whispers echo one another. The group is dynamic, local, and transient; it forms through attention and disperses through time.
Difference:
The aggregate gathers; the group articulates.
The aggregate is a field; the group, a pulse within it.
One holds the continuity of matter, the other, the rhythm of encounter.
“Kantor”, a ceramic slate.
Emballaged.
Kantor stands here as one among thirteen: an emissary whose force changes with the host. In Breton, he carries the break from the purified image; in Wilkes, he carries the fragile, maternal handling of the overlooked.
Through these transmissions he stands as the structural predecessor of the institutional artwork — the early operator who showed that an object, once wounded, can still address us through its coverings.
Through these transmissions he stands as the structural predecessor of the institutional artwork — the early operator who showed that an object, once wounded, can still address us through its coverings.
The translucent wrapping is
an act of care and occlusion at once. It slows the gaze. It allows the fragile to produce.
It enacts an ethics of attenuation:
a calibrated distance
that refuses raw display
– but also, heavy protection.
a calibrated distance
that refuses raw display
– but also, heavy protection.