Martin Szekely

Martin Szekely

JRP|Ringier Publishing
2010

MSz, A Practical Science of the Singular

Élisabeth Lebovici

It took a lot of fumbling to find an ordinary word that accurately describes the impression produced by each of Martin Szekely’s tables, desks, shelves, chairs, and boxes. It is a challenge to find a term for the M.L. table and P.B. table (2002 and 2005) or the K.L. console (2003) that can describe these fully reflective entities as cohesively as they reflect the disparity of the world around them. The same is true for the side tables Bing One and Bing Two (2007), that resemble monolithic blocks of solid crystalline energy. How can I give a simple description of the feeling of “one,” of unity and resolution, created by the discretion and evanescence of the objects in question? How to describe the feeling of plénitude without sounding too mystical?
Martin Szekely doubtless encounters no such terminological difficulties, and is maybe more willing to discuss his work in terms of unity. But he is an artist, a producer, a thinker—and once again, I run into the problem of inadéquate labels. What other terms can I use to express the sense of compact monumentality and elementary radicality that seizes me when I look at des étagères (2005) which open the present book, or the S.A.M. boxes (2005) and the F.P. desk (2002), photographed in an abstract studio setting or in situ in someone’s home. Martin Szekely has described l’Armoire (1999), made of a single sheet of Alucobond®, cut and folded like origami, with no nuts or screws, as an “incompressible object, because it is doubtless the counterpart to the body.” Even the resin-treated plywood set of N.G. step (2002) becomes an object of vital necessity in its setting: it consists of three boxes, forming an irrevocably connected set of steps, providing access to bookshelves. The steps provide access to the full height of the shelves, enabling the user to choose a book, sit down, and read it. To meditate. The American Donald Judd, who was a significant art critic as well as an artist, used the term “singleness,”[1] echoing Michel de Certeau’s “practical science of the singular.” And, for want of a better term, I shall describe Martin Szekely’s furniture in terms of a singular absence of duality. The pièces appear all in one homogeneous block, often as an enigma, and always as a noun: chair, table, desk, cupboard, box, console table, armchair, footstool, mirror. In most instances, these common nouns are their necessary condition. They do not lend themselves to being dismantled into a composition, as doing so would dilute their concentration, although some do indeed combine different materials; the N.G. table (2006) or the F.P. desk, for example, or the tables Stonewood One, Two, and Three (2005), whose steel legs jut through the stone top like bolts, throwing the field of probabilities into upheaval. In fact, these items of furniture cannot be dismantled or destabilized, either literally or metaphorically. There is the 00 table (2000), of course, whose corners show that the tabletop and the seats are one single unit, just like the parts of the body that fit into their gaps. In a more playful, or perhaps more warlike, sense, there are also the Slim table and the S.L. table (1999 and 2003) in aluminum honeycomb, sheathed respectively in ebony and Corian®, which discreetly flash their core, or the furniture Concrete (side table, round table, desk, and table, 2008), in Ductal® fiber-reinforced concrete, barely thicker than skin. Then there are the Fake side tables (2007) in the shape of logs “that aren’t logs.” These parallelepipeds, with their opaque surface and metal trim, open up a range of questions about what it means to see right or to see wrong. These pieces play their cards close—a game that requires an extreme mastery of technique to create a visual effect of utter simplicity. To try and point toward these qualities rather than fumbling around, I could turn the idea on its head, so that rather than thinking about what I can see, I ask myself what is looking at me, [2] thereby taking as my starting point not the impact that such and such an object has on me, but the emotion that prompted its creation.

Martin Szekely—in this text MSz—experienced just such a reversal of the gaze toward the end of the 1990s. The moment was doubtless propitious for such an inversion of poles. The spectacular entrance made by minorities (particularly sexual minorities) in the “little theoretical theater” [3] of reality led to a similar reversal of the thesis of repression in their discourse, paving the way for the radical shift toward the study of mechanisms of power and power relationships at play in gender roles, as noted by Michel Foucault. For example, queer theory argues that reclaiming insults is a way of reversing the effectiveness of hate speech by means of repetition, which serves to remove its sting and displace its power. Similarly, shifting or returning the gaze is a fundamental metaphor of postcolonial theory, signifying the appropriation of technologies, discourses, and forms of culture used by dominant institutions to maintain supremacy in their power relationship with subaltern identities. Recognition and reversal. This figure, involving the gaze and altering its point of view, thus designates a mutual exchange and transformation between subject and object, with a proportionate impact on the play of artistic creation, where, as MSz says, his aim is now to “connect with the title of the piece”—in other words, its culture. Although my aim is not to establish a form of determinism between social movements and the identity of the artist’s work, this brief retrospective glance may nonetheless serve to explain the change in MSz’s attitude and preconceptions, leading to a shift in his career when he invited his partner Rossana to take part in a collective work about what it means to work collectively.
This shift is both the cause and content of the présent work, which presents the resulting images and narrative.

What led MSz to totally rethink his approach and reconfigure his gaze was (among other things) the set of opérations involved in hand-throwing a flowerpot. The process consisted of throwing a ball of raw clay on a potter’s wheel. The transformation of the material involved horizontality and verticality, regularity of movement, and gentle pressure from the fingers, stained with clay in their turn. From one skin to the other. MSz watched this simple, common process, a constant of man-made pottery, without origin, and repeated untold millions of times; he observed it taking place, describing his own viewpoint as “distant.” The creative process took place not within him, but in front of, or even prior to, him. It took place based on certain facts entirely unrelated to the intensity of his passion as an artist or what he calls the “egocentric state created by an expressive design acting as signature to a project. ” This reversal of the gaze thus marks the beginning of his desire to learn how to move away from Romantic attitudes to rediscover the “taste for the anonymous and innumerable germination.”[4]
Observing an age-old, impersonal process, such as that behind the flowerpot, implies identifying a construction that can be termed performative, producing what it describes: the plant is isolated from the sun inside the pot and maintained at a certain degree of moisture, thereby becoming autonomous and de-naturalized without becoming totally artificial. MSz simply optimizes the elementary, geometrized construction of his brique à fleurs (1998) by firing the plain three-dimensional cylinder in three different sizes. As he wrote in his own notes, included in this publication, “It holds a standard flowerpot halfway between the base and the lid. The flower brick délinéâtes a given volume, maintaining a moist environment, as the surplus moisture collects in the enameled bottom when it is watered. A micro-climate, for the well-being of the plant.”
MSz’s artistic practice thus grew more radical at the dawn of the 21st century, not by using a two-dimensional form, style, or manner of movement to signify three dimensions, but by cultivating the detachment of an “epistemological divide,” which distanced the work from the artist’s stream of consciousness and asked questions such as “What?” “For whom?” “How?” The referents move away from recognized styles toward data in the public domain, which he calls “commonplaces, the public arena.” He explains, “Previously, my projects were based on the idea that design is a matter of drawing, and that drawing, like writing, is an incontrovertible clue to the individual author’s personality. In brique à fleurs I found the uses, function, and material, and the way the material was transformed, to be self-evident elements that were both tangible and, above all, external to me; they were ‘hard stones’ placed in front of me. I drew nothing. All I did was indicate the subject.”

Similarly, MSz uses the expression “shifting the gaze” on several occasions in his notes, for example in the solution he proposed in 1999 to a challenge thrown down ten years earlier by the Centre International de Recherches sur le Verre et les Arts Plastiques. As he wrote to Françoise Guichon, the Centre’s director, “The new period promises to be more open to experiments and, where possible, to micro-inventions produced by tiny shifts in the gaze that we bring to bear on things that we already know.” Refining and reversing a procedure designed by Gaetano Pesce, he suggested making a dish by projecting a fine spray of molten glass into a hollow mold, a technique that would be impossible in traditional glassmaking. MSz shaped the dishes by guiding chance, playing with the plasticity of the medium by using a strip of métal to define the edges, rough on the outside and smooth on the inside. The paradox of mastery: as he wrote, “The idea is to delineate a perimeter that is not pre-drawn. Starting with this limit, we can imagine thousands of works. I cannot claim to be the originator of this idea, which draws on the notion of elasticity and Duchamp’s Standard Stoppages.” The reference to Marcel Duchamp, repeated in the photograph of the dish, indeed evokes a procedure devoid of consciously processed thought or the intervention of intentionality through the master glass blower’s virtuoso hand and sovereign mastery of airflow. What are Duchamp’s three Standard Stoppages (1913–1914), if not randomness at work, the haphazard effect produced by dropping three meter-long pieces of thread from a height of one meter? Once the lines thus formed had been cut into three ordinary meter-length planks of wood, they were put away together in a croquet box. As Duchamp explained: “My 3 Standard Stoppages is produced by three separate experiments, and the form of each one is slightly different. I keep the line, and I have a deformed meter. It’s a ‘canned meter,’ so to speak—canned chance.”[5] The throw of the dice, movement itself (in this case, falling), and the laws of gravity are the new co-ordinates “marking” the beat.

Flaubert once wrote, “No matter: for better or worse, it is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself, but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.”[6] For a designer such as MSz had been hitherto, what greater ambition— literally without measure—can there be than to leave things to chance? What more dizzying feeling than not drawing the object before making it? The requirement of impersonality, such as is found in Flaubert’s conception of authorship (“one must not write oneself”), implies measuring oneself against shared experience, where objects are considered in terms of their end uses: cookery, serving, storage, and a whole host of other, more surprising, uses yet to come. The photograph of Szekely standing on a table or set of bookshelves shows him in an incongruous performance, not merely testing the work’s strength, but also proving it—in other words, documenting it. Of course, his aim was to experiment with the plasticity and viability of the work and to test the solidity of an item (such as a table, desk, console table, or set of shelves), destined to stand on its feet, and to measure it against human strength.
Yes, but it was also a question of resistance. Resisting the imposition of a human body and human strength; resisting the uses ordained for it. Becoming the user of an object also means the potential to adapt its use. The aim is thus to make the most of uses that are not yet known. People use tables to eat, work, read books, write in notebooks or type on keyboards, look at their computers, sort through documents, play cards, chat with people on the other side of the world, talk, jump, dance, and have sex. Further uses of the body can be negotiated at will. The artist Rémy Zaugg expressed his wishes for the furniture he designed to showcase Herzog & de Meuron as follows: “Tables ready and waiting. Tables ready to receive and welcome people, to demonstrate the pursuance of research. Tables turned not toward what has been done, but toward what will be done. Tables reaching out to becoming and the future. Prospective tables that serve to foreshadow. Tables whose void heralds and calls for the pursuance of research. Tables that are not nostalgic, but rather charged with hope. It would have been marvelous.”[7] It is marvelous.

Leaving design behind involves a method referred to as “substractive,” if the absence of design is to be understood as a form of renunciation. However, leaving design behind also means using drawing, or rather the absence of a drawing, to abolish a form of duality and a traditional division of labor that had grown out of a system invented at least as far back as the Renaissance, whose success and gradual expansion eventually led to the establishment of a capitalist economy. The art historian Jacqueline Lichtenstein[8] has argued that “disegno” was a key artistic concept during the Renaissance. The term, meaning both “design” and “project,” covers both the drawing and the intention behind it. It refers to the intellectual dimension conferred on manual activity by the label of artist— the cosa mentale that elevates the condition of the individual; the artist moves on from the condition of the worker and the mechanical arts, rising to the level of the “liberal artist,” a term referring to individuals who thought and took decisions about what they drew. The single word “disegno” combines two functions for which French and English both use two separate words.[9]
However, the two meanings have been reunited in the modern term “design,” which all these languages use to refer to an industrial art form based on the Bauhaus tradition, and, by extension, the process involved in producing everyday commodities, from initial planning to manufacture. Design and drawing are firmly linked in the Western view of art, connecting drawing to an entirely new field of meaning in addition to the one in which its physical characteristics place it. It is indeed but a step from the drawing to the ideal, albeit a paradoxical one, bringing together a pure act of thought and its visible result, in which the hand has also played a part. The reversal was the work of the French Academy under Louis XIV, which skillfully argued in defense of “dessin,” rather than “dessein,” as the key technique in imitation, as it was shared by both painting and sculpture and was likewise dépendent on manual skills rooted in technical knowledge. In other words, it was theory fully realized through practice. Drawing as the “chief” of the arts, including the applied arts—those held in the hierarchy of arts to be part of mere practice—thus distils an entire history in its name. Is this not what Matisse meant in a jotting dating from 1945, when he was studying the results of his research into the possibility of moving from drawing-as-outline toward the direct impact of color? He claimed that, “to say that color has once again become expressive is to write its history.”[10] For him, this meant appreciating the same reversal and noting that the history of color in Western art is the history of its marginalization. Like Rousseau, Derrida[11] clearly demonstrated that when color is held to be secondary to drawing, the interdiction placed on the body and the historical link between color and femininity render it suspect: “Venetian! all thy colouring is no more / Than bolster’d plasters on a crooked whore,” as William Blake wrote in 1808.[12] “Renouncing” drawing as the chief of all arts means adopting a deviant discourse. For Matisse, color is a pleasure principle that disrupts representation. It is significant that MSz’s flowerpot and dish formulate two motifs of sensorial jouissance, which he would later draw on as a method. So much for the so-called “austerity” of MSz’s works, which are more about issues of rules and transgressions than they are about a mythology of sober style.

So let’s return to our “singleness,” to tried-and-tested, inexpressible unity, consisting not of an accumulation of signs indicating the artist’s signature, but of collective data drawing on social customs and shared behavior. MSz finds the preconditions of his art in the notion of customary use, just as he seeks out its potentialities in experiments designed to test textures that are increasingly resistant—in other words, less burdensome for the gaze. The notion of customary use is what allows him to move away from beautiful shapes and drawings and art defined as such. The Domo armchair (2004), for example, consists of wood, metal, and a complex assemblage of foam pieces upholstered in leather. It has a straight back and cube-shaped seat; the gap separating them and the varying density of the pieces of foam make for a variety of comfortable sitting positions. “If a chair or a building is not functional, if it appears to be only art, it is ridiculous.

The art of a chair is not its resemblance to art, but is partly its reasonableness, usefulness, and scale as a chair. These are proportion, which is visible reasonableness. The art in art is partly the assertion of someone’s interest regardless of other considerations. A work of art exists as itself; a chair exists as a chair itself. And the idea of a chair isn’t a chair.”[13] MSz likes this quote by Donald Judd, who regularly highlighted what he saw as the fundamental difference between fine art and applied art. Although Judd blurred the boundary between the two in his own aesthetic undertaking, this distinction is nonetheless at the heart of his functional works, such as his mid-1980s plywood chair, inducing what the critic Alex Coles described as “a meddling sense of déjà-vu—only natural considering how the material they are constituted from (plywood)—has an extensive history in furniture design from Charles Eames onwards.”[14]

MSz is not so much interested in that which is “déjà vu” (literally, already seen) as “déjà là” (already there), consecrated by use. Sharing a meal, reading, carrying out a task, thinking, sorting things out, and making a mess are all situations that compose a choreography of narratives and write a wordless guide to manners (or, in the case of many meditative situations, guide to wordless manners). In this sense, every one of our movements is a quotation. Of course, the notion of use encompasses that of being used: there is the individual body’s capacity for prehension, touch, and experience, but there is also the social body. In order to pick up an object, one needs first of all to have recognized it, and the movement indicates the recognition; the object then becomes the recipient of the movement as quotation. Judith Butler has clearly demonstrated that the body does not precede discourse: “The body posited as prior to the sign is always posited or signified as prior.” We can only access the body through discourse, although this does not mean that the body must be reduced to discourse, as if each had to be pitted against the other and “remain blind to the simple truth that all signs are themselves material.”[15] MSz: “The way we use tables in the West can be defined in other parts of the world as a material that separates us from the floor: a carpet, a rug, or a plank. Tables keep things off the floor. As objects, tables are an intermediary between the ground, people, and architecture. Structurally, tables have parallels with engineered architectural structures. An unstable table, like an unstable building, is not viable.” In this economy, where artists work by means of quotation, this means that the reality of objects in the world is not a natural occurrence, but is rather dependent on norms—in other words, rules that must be recognized, located, and no doubt replayed. The Concrete desk has three legs, yet it stands. Similarly, some tables push the notion of stability to the limit by playing with the sacrosanct placing of the legs, which is usually awkward for certain guests. MSz chose to place the legs closer to the center of the table, calculating their placement in terms of seating and comfort. The C.O. bookcase (2003) takes flight and glides, sketching out a space for books at head height, like a cloud, between earth and sky. The way the shelves are fixed to the wall (a secret revealed in the present book) is a powerful performance by the materials; stability could be the content of this performance, which takes place each time MSz sets out to create a new piece of furniture, launch a research project, or meet a new challenge.

The inventory of France’s monuments and artistic heritage set up by André Malraux and André Chastel in 1964 began by standardizing the principles of analysis and description and perfecting a vocabulary to describe the function of objects associated with food, flowers, medical treatments, hygiene, and so on. MSz evokes a more elementary use: he describes the function of des plats (2000)—making the word resonate— as “keeping food off the floor.” He sees furniture as extensions of the body: “bases, plinths—they should not be on display.” When it comes to keeping books tidy, the body itself imposes limits on the materials used. For example, each shelf in des étagères measures no more than 70 cm, although they could be longer. The reason why they are this length is because beyond this limit, the weight of the other books makes it difficult to take a book out or put it back. Use is what makes the project viable. However, use is also paradoxically what pushes the object toward avoidance and discretion and makes the gaze glide over it. One example would be making shelves out of aluminum used in the aviation industry, “taking the minimization of the need for structures to the limits of use,” so that the shelves appear to disappear when books are placed on them. Then there are the six constructions (2002), which keep “just a touch of the familiar (a table, a chair, a desk, a shelf)”; since they are not entirely codified in their role and do not wholly correspond to prescribed uses, the question of their use remains open.
Marginal materials mean marginal use. The flesh or skin of each piece represents an attempt at a synthesis, rather than distinction, of body and thought. The unity of each piece, its irreducible coalescence in the user’s home, consists not only in making the composition disappear, but also in playing with the usual Judeo-Christian dichotomies of body and soul, drawing and color, figure and background, decor and medium, form and content, beauty and usefulness, value and poverty. These “cultural” binaries in fact reflect relationships of power and subjection. The paradox of use consists in structuring both aid and constraint. The aim is to highlight the “minor” or major liberties taken with the codes and rules. As the philosopher Matthieu Potte-Bonneville has noted in his discussion of the work of Michel Foucault, “their use is to interrupt the evidence of use, and their efficacy resides entirely in what they make difficult. Not ‘everything is permitted,’ but ‘together with many others, to ensure that certain expressions can no longer be said as easily or that certain gestures can be no longer made, without at least some hesitation’; ‘to make all-too-easy gestures harder.’ In his discourse, a policy of uses may well conjure up the vocabulary of forces: yet it is constantly antiauthoritarian. Not by an excess of virtue, but because it neutralizes the effects of authority not only in one’s adversaries, but equally in oneself.”[16] There is doubtless a connection between these issues of authority and MSz’s lack of affinity with the word—and category—of functionalism. As he says, it is not a question of “bolting the form (aesthetics) onto the function,” of giving the here and now an unequivocal allocation as a pretext, but rather to free up the function based on what has already been said and done.
Take the case of the box, which, for purposes of demonstration, offers the major advantage of standing at the juncture of art and object, and of representing a number of civilizations, as the Chinese boxes (2004) remind us. There are Judd’s boxes and Szekely’s boxes, and by extension, MSz makes “the box” the principal metaphor of his oeuvre: he has stated that, “all furniture is boxes.” Both are possible; both are plausible. But in Judd or Robert Morris’ Minimal art—located geographically in 1960s New York and historically as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism—eliminating illusion and imposing objects that are to be seen only for what they are should simply produce tautological objects. And while Judd dreamed of the “thing as a whole,”[17] endowed with a quality itself taken as a whole and bestowed with a recognizable Gestalt, this undividable reality breaks or flees in the reality that is then produced. Wherever there is a cube—even in a work endowed with the minimum of artistic content—fullness and the void are present, and soon the meanings of volume are measured against the fullness and the void of the body, in other words the specter and loss of a body. This is the Pandora’s Box opened by Minimalism. Georges Didi-Huberman demonstrates this in his analysis of the spectral “black box” of the dead being. The stability of objects, which is the key issue at stake in Minimalism—stability both in space and time, where objects “simply need to be stable,” as Didi-Huberman writes—becomes a concrete, playful issue. The New York based artist Joseph Kosuth gave the game away by showing five transparent glass cube-shaped boxes with the title Box, Cube, Empty, Clear, Glass—A Description (1965). Five names and five contents for a single object repeated five times. So there you go: ceci n’est pas une pipe. Interplays of meaning exist, even though Minimalists reject them. Even if the sculptureis nothing but what the observer can see, the object’s force is still formulated in intersubjective utterances. Even a cube, designed to be devoid of history and intended to be perceived solely in terms of its own presence, unfolds meanings, even to those who are not seeking them. A cube is an object with a past and with secrets; it is almost magical, and fosters images. Forever fallen or forever built up, whether in cork or metal, it remains a figure of construction and metamorphosis. This adds a further dimension to the Minimalist understanding of visibility.

What is “self-evident” in American Minimalism here turns toward the most Promethean of constructions and challenges impossibility. As MSz writes, “No longer producing according to the ‘rules of art,’ and thereby creating disturbance.” When a cube becomes a box, the visible volumes may only have worth in terms of the desires they hint at: caskets with dark insides, which make their outsides mysterious. This creates a spectral aesthetic, as in Georges Seurat’s Pointillist practice and the dots that were the tangible, omnipresent unit of measurement in his painting.[18] In Seurat’s work, the dot evokes not only the painting of which it is a fragment, but also the cutting-edge technology of the day—photography. Seurat’s system reproduced the grain of photography in a manner that was never impersonal, however much it may have tended in that direction. This brief digression on Seurat could be applied in a contemporary context to MSz’s repeated laboratory experiments, drawing on the principles of a technique different to his own. Except that this difference is now inscribed not only in the flux, but also in the body of the experiment itself, since composite materials now reign supreme. The sandwich of “disinhibited material,” as MSz terms it—metal and plastic, wood and paper, even glass and paper—is indeed an example of future agglomerations.

Another class of specifications also forms part of the data for discussion. MSz’s commonplaces bear singular names, which refer to the object’s dedicatees. The initials in his titles attribute, or rather allocate, each of the constructions, which, having been commissioned, thereby find their use. The use has a price. MSz is very clear about the reality of such things, checking that each of the stakeholders involved in the production— each individual needed by a process of experimentation that must necessarily test the limits—is decently paid and is not involved in the sort of exploitation carried out daily on the pretext of keeping prices low. The laboratory pieces he produces with the Galerie kreo are necessarily acquired by well-heeled clients, but while such pieces certainly become part of an enlightened grande bourgeoisie lifestyle, it is far from certain that they form part of the outward displays of ostentatious wealth that can, on occasion, take the form of sobriety or even poverty. The Fine Art table-desk (2004) in glass and onyx, for example, scorns such codes. The ownership class long played on the dichotomy between the contemporary art on their walls and the antique furniture in their rooms—I remember Mary Boone displaying her collection of Jacob furniture in her gallery amid works by David Salle and Brice Marden, whom she then represented. Displaying her taste as a connoisseur meant combining avant-garde art with a Riesener chest of drawers, or, later, 1930s furniture by Jean-Michel Frank or Eileen Gray, who died in great poverty despite the fact that her chairs had come to be considered the height of sober, chic design, scorning the general trend for kitschy knick-knacks inherited from the 19th century.

Today, as demonstrated by photographs taken in situ, MSz’s works play with the particular characteristic that he grants to use, which either tends to make them disappear when in use or makes aspects visible that should remain invisible, as in the case of the D.L. desk (1998), made of extravagantly openwork Corian®, forming a lacework trellis that reveals the cables belonging to the computer on the desktop—in other words, accepting all the ugliness that should be hidden. Olivier Zahm rightly noted that l’Armoire was “a mixture of the extreme fragility of the folded form and the tough reality of business.”[19] The social meaning of the Fake—pieces that do not work within the rules of art, playing instead with what the gaze believes and what it sees—seems to counter ostentatious display and work toward uncertainty. Like the disappearing des étagères—all that, and nothing to see! All that for a plain cork box, albeit one that is perfectly put together and splendidly soft to the touch! The result is that the blend of radicality and impersonality affects all those that are incarnated in it. Barthes calls this attitude and lifestyle “the Neutral.” We must either look beyond the dull gray connotation of the word, or give the color back its intensity and lustre. According to Barthes, far from absenting the body, “the Neutral” enables the suspension of the “implacable binarism” of the system of oppositions in which the construction of meaning is habitually rooted: male/female, yes/no, and so on. The intensity of “the Neutral” corresponds to the violence of this suspension.

This is what I have attempted to do by concentrating the surname “Szekely” into a series of initials, MSz, which he himself actually uses informally, not to create a signature, but rather to veil his name with the same discretion as is found in his titles. It is doubtless a commonplace to say that it is not easy to make a name for yourself when you have inherited your surname from two well-known artists, who even created a few items of furniture together. But what is particularly striking is what happens in the case of a surname that is never “naturally” initialed as a single S, always adding the z that indicates how the surname should be pronounced. The Sz of his signature refers just as “culturally” to Roland Barthes’ S/Z. There is no Z in Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine,” which Barthes took as the basis for his case study: “The title raises a question: What is Sarrasine? A noun? A name? A thing? A man? A woman? This question will not be answered until much later, by the biography of the sculptor named Sarrasine,” where French onomastics would lead us to expect the spelling SarraZine. Phonetically, “Z stings like a chastising lash, an avenging insect; graphically, cast slantwise by the hand across the blank regularity of the page, amid the curves of the alphabet, like an oblique and illicit blade, it cuts, slashes, or, as we say in French, it zigzags; from a Balzacian viewpoint, this Z (which appears in Balzac’s name) is the letter of deviation.”[20] Furthermore, S and Z offer a mirror image of each other.

This could not fail to come to Martin Szekely’s notice, as he initially studied typography—the study of letters and their sound, meaning, and function in space. But again, in evoking an individual’s memories of his studies, the aim is not to build up an image of the artistic “I.” The point is not so much to paint a psychological portrait as to provide data, as they say in the digital world. One among others. The dual initial, highlighted here, like the circulation of his pieces and their recipients, their discretion with regard to the viewer’s gaze, their uses and the potential openings they create, their material on the verge of immateriality, their equilibrium teetering on the verge of collapse, their unity, even their sound (why not), and many more aspects, all constitute a set of constructive data.
In this context, MSz’s pieces give us their identity in the present, in a tense shared with music and dance and all the arts whose future will be characterized by a radical approach to technology and authority, underscoring how outdated the notions of signatures and style have become. Jérôme Bel noted in late 2009 that the field of choreography is still ruled by “the paradigm of the Romantic artist. It’s about time things moved on, don’t you think?”[21] MSz’s agency relies on this future.

1 Donald Judd, “Specific Objects” (1965), in Complete Writings, 1975–86, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 1987, p. 115–124.

2 See Georges Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde, Minuit, Paris 1992.

3 The expression is taken from the philosopher Louis Althusser.

4 Freddy Laurent, La Revue Nouvelle, March 1974, quoted in Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 2, Living and Cooking, trans. T. Tomasik, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1998, p. 155.

5 Herbert Molderings, L’Art comme expérience : Les trois Stoppages étalon de Marcel Duchamp, Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris 2007, p. 78. English translation in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett, Da Capo, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1987, p. 47.

6 Letter to Louise Colet dated December 23, 1853, in Gustave Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, trans. Francis Steegmüller, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1982, p. 203.
7 Rémy Zaugg, Herzog & de Meuron: Une exposition, Les presses du réel, Dijon 1995, p. 67.

8 See Jacqueline Lichtenstein, “Disegno,” in Barbara Cassin (ed.), Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies, Seuil/ Le Robert, Paris 2004, p. 322–325.

9 Respectively, “dessein” and “dessin” and “drawing” and “design.” French has used separate words for the two notions since the 17th century. The corresponding terms in German, “Zeichen” and “Entwurf,” have different etymological roots.
10 Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, “Les textes du peintre,” Critique 324, May 1974, p. 400–433. English translation in Henri Matisse, Matisse on Art, trans. Jack Flam, University of California Press, Berkeley 1995, p. 154.
11 See the chapter on Rousseau’s 1781 “Essai sur l’origine des langues” in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1997.
12 William Blake, The Complete Poems of William Blake, ed. W. H. Stevenson, Pearson, London 2007, p. 637.
13 “It’s hard to find a good lamp,” 1993, http://www.juddfoundation.org/ furniture/essay.htm, last accessed January 16, 2010.
14 Alex Coles, “The case of furniture-as-art,” in Parachute 117, January–March 2005, p. 30.
15 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” Routledge, London/New York 1993, p. 30.
16 Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, “Politique des usages,” in Vacarme 29, Autumn 2004.
17 “The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting.” Quoted in N. Serota (ed.), Donald Judd, Tate, London 2004, p. 89.
18 Meyer Schapiro, “New Light on Seurat,” in Selected Papers, Modern Art, 19th & 20th Centuries, George Braziller, New York 1978, p. 101–109.
19 Olivier Zahm and Bernard Joisten, “Opération Rangement/A Tidying up operation,” www.martinszekely.com/niveau3-ecrits.php?ty=de&id=1&ext=2. Last accessed January 15, 2010.
20 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, Blackwell, Oxford 1990, p. 106.
21 Jérôme Bel, interview with Gilles Amalvi, program notes, Merce Cunningham au Festival d’Automne, Paris 2009.