Beyond cratehood
by Nicola Cotton

There is something fascinating about an object which does not exist in quite the normal way. From the moment its travels began, 'The Consignment' has not been seen as itself—as a crate of earth one meter cubed —but as something either more than or less than it actually is. On leaving Romania via Hungary, it escaped inspection by customs and so did not receive a certificate of origin. Consequently on arrival in Vienna, it was deemed to be an illegal immigrant (more than it is), but also, technically speaking, to be non-existent (less than it is). From the outset, then, 'The Consignment' is both inadequate and overdetermined. On the one hand, it can be seen as a failed object—one that does not even accede to the modest demands of cratehood. On the other hand, it appears as something infinitely more than a mere crate. Its failure is offset by a kind of excessive 'success'. This makes of 'The Consignment' a paradoxical object which achieves success precisely by being a failure, or to put it another way, by being an object which through its deficiency leads to excess.

I will explain in a moment in more detail what I mean by this, but before doing so, it is important to establish two fundamental points. First, the argument put forward so far concerns 'The Consignment' as it exists in the field of representation. Indeed, it is based on the notion that 'The Consignment' is the starting point for an artwork which is all about the nature of representation; that is, about the way we construct meanings around objects which, in themselves, mean nothing at all. The inverted commas used in this text and by the artist (or rather 'The Artist') when discussing 'The Consignment' provide evidence of this. Neither the term, nor the object to which it refers can be taken literally. Rather, each draws attention to a place where meaning can either proliferate, or collapse altogether.

The second point is that there is a clear distinction to be made between 'The Consignment' (the crate of earth) and 'The Work' (the crate plus the multiple narratives it has generated). The failed object described above refers only to 'The Consignment' in so far as its physical presence is underwhelming, uninteresting and barely worthy of note—to customs officials and gallery visitors alike. There is nothing to look at. But, at the same time, there is everything to think about. This humble (non-)entity possesses a unique capacity to exist beyond itself in a limitless array of verbal and visual forms: for example, a special share issue to fund it, images of the excavation of its contents in Transylvania and subsequent vampire narratives, official documentation to accompany its progress, critical discourse about it. Suddenly an object which confronts us, quite deliberately, with an intellectual and aesthetic dead end becomes the source of an infinite number of engaging interpretative possibilities. In doing so, it establishes a relation between empirical reality (a dull box of dirt) and what is referred to in philosophy as the 'Thing-in-itself' (the transcendent realm of ideas which cannot be represented). In other words, it touches the sublime.

I return here to the idea introduced at the beginning of this essay that 'The Consignment' is a paradoxical object which through its own deficiency leads to excess. In Kantian philosophy, the sublime is characterised by unboundedness, by a sense of the infinite. We can see this too in the way 'The Consignment' sets off endless explanations, descriptions, speculations, theorisations, stories ... But our liking for the sublime, according to Kant, 'is by no means a liking for the object (since that may be formless), but rather a liking for the expansion of the imagination itself' [1]. This is true of 'The Consignment' also: there can be no active preference for a crate of earth—and to this extent it is a rather displeasing object—but its very dullness inspires us to weave narratives around it and this expansion of the imagination to create 'The Work' is pleasing.

As with the Kantian sublime, the pleasure here is negative, since the object that is its cause is disproportionately dull compared with the limitlessness of the ideas which it makes present. This is what is meant by my claim that 'The Consignment' is a paradoxical object which achieves success through failure. As Slavoj Zizek puts it: 'The paradox of the Sublime is as follows: in principle, the gap separating phenomenal, empirical objects of experience from the Thing-in-itself is insurmountable—that is, no empirical object, no representation [É] of it can adequately present [É] the Thing (the suprasensible Idea); but the Sublime is an object in which we can experience this very impossibility, this permanent failure of the representation to reach after the Thing.' [2]

For Kant the sublime, properly speaking, is not attributable to an object, but to the mind and its capacity to attune itself to the suprasensible Idea. There is no doubting the existence of that Idea. Following Hegel, however, Zizek argues against this position. What Kant fails to recognise, he suggests, is that if the feeling of the Sublime occurs when the phenomenal world of representation appears inadequate, the possibility must also exist that there is no Idea—no positive entity, or Thing, or God—beyond phenomenal representation. It may be that phenomenality is all there is. In this case the sublime is no longer a matter of successful failure in which an inadequate object (the crate of earth) points beyond itself towards the Idea (infinite representation), because the object ceases to be inadequate. It becomes entirely positive in that it is a tangible presence that fills the void left by the Idea reduced to the level of pure Nothing, or absolute negativity.

Hegel expresses this possibility by means of a series of 'infinite judgements', or phrases in which the subject and predicate are radically incompatible and incomparable: 'The Spirit is a bone', for example. At this point, the sublime is no longer concerned with boundless phenomena, but rather, to quote Zizek, with 'a miserable 'little piece of the Real'—the Spirit is the inert, dead skull'. [3]

The miserable little piece of the real is a triumphant something in place of nothing. Its very phenomenality acts as a kind of guarantee. In the present context, it might be argued that the crate, too, is a miserable little piece of the Real in the positive sense. Thus my conclusion takes the form of another 'infinite judgement', namely that 'Representation is 500 pounds of Common Earth, 1 metre cubed'.

Notes

1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (1790), trans Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), §25, p. 105.
2 Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 203.
3 Zizek, p. 207.

Nicola Cotton, Department of French, University College London, is a writer and curator working from London and was recently responsible for co-curating the touring group exhibition Nausea: Encounters with Ugliness.