Exposition Read online

  EXPOSITION

  Originally published in French as L’Exposition

  in 2008 by Editions POL, Paris, France

  English-language translation © Amanda DeMarco, 2019

  First English edition published by Les Fugitives, London, December 2019

  First U.S. edition, 2020

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des Programmes d’aide

  à la publication de l’Institut français.

  The publisher wishes to thank Halley Parry and Irina Teveleva.

  ISBN: 978-1-948980-03-6

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-948980-04-3

  Art on cover:

  La Frayeur (1861–67) by Pierre-Louis Pierson

  Salted paper print from glass negative with applied color

  5 × 5 15/16 in

  David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1975

  Design and composition by Danielle Dutton

  Printed on permanent, durable, acid-free recycled paper

  in the United States of America

  Dorothy, a publishing project

  DOROTHYPROJECT.COM

  EXPOSITION

  NATHALIE LÉGER

  TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH

  BY AMANDA DEMARCO

  DOROTHY, A PUBLISHING PROJECT

  — But she’s nothing to you, why do …

  — No, Louise said.

  — She’s nothing …

  — No, she repeated submissively. But she continued looking at something in front of her which he could not see.

  — Then …

  — Then nothing, she said.

  CLAUDE SIMON, THE GRASS

  SURRENDER, PREMEDITATE NOTHING, WANT NOTHING, neither discern nor dissect nor stare, but rather shift, dodge, lose focus, and—slowing down—consider the only material that presents itself, as it presents itself, in its disorder and even in its order.

  It was said that her beauty was astounding, that she was still and ferocious. The Princess of Metternich confessed, upon seeing her make an appearance: “I was petrified before this miracle of beauty: marvelous hair, the waist of a nymph, complexion of pink marble! Like Venus descended from Mount Olympus! Never have I seen such a beauty, and never shall I see another like it!” In her ferocity, she settles onto a sofa and allows herself to be admired as though she were a reliquary, absent in the midst of the crowd, her gaze cold and impassive. She is hated for her power; her beauty—they said—puts other beauties to flight. At the height of the Crimean War, a marquise notes that her arrival posed itself “like a diminutive Eastern Question.” Those around her seek the shadow of a fault. They are delighted by her ostentation: “If she had been simple and natural, she would have turned the world upside-down … we are certainly fortunate that the countess had no such simplicity,” says Pauline von Metternich. They contemplated her beauty the way people enjoyed freak shows.

  It was by coincidence, at the top of a small wooden staircase in the dilapidated bookshop of a provincial town, that I came across her. I was dumbfounded, but not by the image alone. A woman charging across the cover of a catalog, La Comtesse de Castiglione par elle-même. I was chilled by the evil of her gaze, petrified by the violence of this figure bursting forth. I thought without really comprehending: “Myself by her against me” in a fit of mental mumbling that abated somewhat later when I overheard a woman on the 95 bus tell another woman a long, doleful story of jealousy. Just as she was getting off, she said: “You understand, my problem isn’t him, it’s her, it’s the other woman.” On the winding path of femininity, the loose stone you stumble over is another woman (l’autre—that’s what we called the woman my father left my mother for—Lautre became her name, a name that allowed her no identity of her own, connecting only to her function; Lautre, illegitimate, not the mother; Lautre, whatever she might do, you hate her, you want her).

  She enters. She is roused by anger and reproach. She bursts onto the right of the image as if it were a backdrop masked with curtains. One hand clutches a knife against her waist, which gleams obliquely across her belly. Her face is cold, her mouth thin, lips tight, eyebrows knit, her gaze is clear and hard, her hair is slicked into two little severely parted plaits. The knife, whose handle disappears into her balled fist, vibrates at the very center, its blade so white that it nearly disappears in the luminous satins of her dress. But its tip pierces the center of the image, its focal point. As if the fullness of her garments weren’t enough, she grasps the faille silk curtain, pulling it toward her in a strangely chaste gesture. It is not her body she wants to conceal, certainly not, but rather the faux backdrop, overfilled with a tinplate pedestal table whose foot threatens to invade the image. This woman entering, she wants to kill. Theatrical killing? Yes, no one would doubt it, she is definitely on a stage, pretending to ensure that everything has the semblance of truth. But like any great actress, she is pretending to be pretending. This woman entering, she wants to kill.

  I searched my library for the catalog on her, la Castiglione, which I had purchased and promptly put away. Immediately I sensed my old aversion toward the images, toward this ferocity, this melancholy without depth, this defeat. Nothing about the destiny of this woman who spent so many hours having herself photographed was familiar to me, yet when I opened this book of images, I had the strange feeling of returning home and, although the house was destroyed, of returning in fear, in recognition.

  Back then, I was working on a project about ruins—yet another—with carte blanche from Cultural Heritage. Their directive referred to “sensitivity to the inappropriable,” “erasure of form,” and “acute awareness of a tragic era.” Each project had to be based on a landmark historical work. They suggested I work with the museum in C***. I was to choose a single piece in their collection then “elaborate on its theme,” the cultural attaché advised me with a small embarrassed smile, as if he had just made a lewd joke. I was then to showcase the chosen piece with contemporary works borrowed from other museums. I first thought of the reportage of Roger Fenton, the British photographer who was sent by Queen Victoria to the front of the Crimean War. On a dim day in 1855, he created the strange and famous image of a dreary ravine strewn with cannonballs—or are they stones or skulls?—scattered regularly across a lifeless countryside. I dreamed of acquiring it one day. But that photograph wasn’t in the museum’s collections. And so, while awaiting the inventory list that the attaché had promised to send me, I’d sought out the catalog about this woman, Castiglione, the catalog I had bought and immediately put away, and that contained several documents belonging to the museum in C***.

  On the radio one day, I heard Jean Renoir’s pleasantly booming voice talking about The Rules of the Game: “The subject totally gobbled me up! A good subject always takes you by surprise and carries you away.” For years, I had thought that to write you needed, at the very least, to master your subject. Many reviewers, famous writers, and critics have said that to write you have to know what you want to say. They repeat, hammering it home: you have to have something to say, about the world, about existence, about, about, about. I didn’t know then that the subject is precisely what masters you. Or that the littlest thing could swallow you up. That day, I picked up a book at random; it was a book about pythons, how pythons devour things, the gaze of the animal taken by surprise, being swallowed, gobbled up by the still, ferocious subject that makes you spit out whatever you thought you knew; the enormous, hidden subject, incomprehensible, powerful, more powerful than you, tenuous, a detail, an old memory, seemingly insignificant, but it grips you, inexorably you merge with it until slowly you begin to spit out disturbing visions, elusive but insistent ghosts.

  Like death (and perhaps one or two other things), the subject is simply the name for what cannot be spoken. Its appearance is trivial, a word or phrase overheard in chance meetings—for example this one, which I either read or heard, I can’t remember: “We’re afraid to look upon shame.” What, what does that have to do with anything, why associate it immediately, brutally, with the subject, why think that this phrase could be essential to it? “My subject has an astonishing potential,” Truman Capote says in In Cold Blood. What subject? The story of two petty killers in Kansas? It doesn’t matter one bit. His subject, the power of his subject, is his hatred—not hatred for what they did, but for his own empathy, for the desire they awakened in him, hatred for that influence. The book is what matters to him. It is precisely as subjects of the book that he finds the killers intolerable. At the end, capital punishment releases the trapdoor, they fall through it, the subject is hanged there and then. Capote was constantly yelping: “I did all I could to save you.” From July 2005 to December 2007, as a response to a carte blanche about a ruin, I tried to exhibit a life: the life of this woman, Castiglione. I had been seized, swallowed up by the subject. I did everything I could to save it, which is to say, to rid myself of it, but it had already, surreptitiously, gobbled me up.

  “I recognized her without knowing her,” writes Robert de Montesquiou, recalling the day he discovered a little curled photo of her at the bottom of a box in an antique shop. “I would like to conserve and gather together, by means of assiduous research and treasured discoveries, those scattered and threatened features,” he continues. “I will do my utmost to draw out the unknown woman from this familiar figure.” I recognized her without knowing her. I only remember having forgotten.

  Seven double paper screens are hung on thin wooden frames spread some distance apart. Seven duplicate
partitions, six intervals, a contained space erected in the middle of the museum. The guests invited to this special evening are congregated all around. The artist, Saburo Murakami, appears: a little greeting, the body of a boxer, motionless in the face of the paper’s opacity. For a few seconds, everyone observes the artist in a moment of meditation. A man marshals his strength, ostensibly descending into himself. He descends into himself. The chattering of voices again, and then silence. A motion? No, he changes his mind, then yes, he throws himself through the screens, he struggles, engulfed and vanishing in a deafening din. Over the explosions of the paper, you can hear a large bulk crashing down, tearing it into long strips, the artist’s body advances laboriously, drilling ever deeper, tearing, crashing through, contorted in this thunderous collapse. Finally, he emerges from the battle. Exhausted, he staggers and falls, the guests step back, he stands back up, pulls himself together, salutes, it’s over. All that took just a few seconds. Behind him, the work is heaving, the torn paper deflating slowly into its inner sanctum. This is it, from now on this is the subject that swallows you up and spits you out. This ruin, this broken path, this punctured space, a work of art in a museum.

  One July day in 1856, the very young Countess of Castiglione appeared for the first time at Mayer & Pierson, a photographic studio for high society. We know that the studio was luxurious; engravings show its salons, antechambers, vast porticos, enormous bay windows bathing the galleries with light. But the photographs reveal only a rather mediocre parlor that looks like a hotel room (a bourgeois wardrobe in one corner, a rug with big flowers, and, in another corner, the little embossed velvet armchair posed awkwardly). One of the first shots of her is a group portrait with her child and nanny. She, Virginia Oldoïni of Castiglione, very upright, radiant, lacking any imagination except for that inspired by the confidence of her beauty; the child, seated in the center, absent; and the nanny, set slightly back, playing her utilitarian role to perfection, in a way even ensuring, by means of a highly acute sense of her social position, that her face is out of focus, nearly illegible.

  The photographer, Pierre-Louis Pierson, is thirty-four years old. He has photographed all of France’s most illustrious society people of the period. And since 1853, he has been the emperor’s official photographer. The court, the aristocracy, and the world of high finance all crowd into his rooms. It comes as no surprise that Nadar, the republican, severely condemned the activities of the Mayer & Pierson studio: “Without putting any thought into arranging the lines in accordance with the point of view most favorable to the model or the expression on their face, nor to the manner in which the light happens to fall on the whole scene, the client is posed in the exact same place and a single shot is taken, dull, gray, and haphazard.” There he is, third-rate photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson, who would create the most enigmatic photographic work of his time, a body of work at once secret and emblematic, by photographing this woman over the course of forty years, shooting, without batting an eye, her splendor and her fall. She has no need for him to be an artist, nor to do any soul-searching. She only needs his expertise and his discretion. People praised “the simplicity of the poses he gave, or rather that he let his models take”; it was said that he would simply let things happen, that he would direct from afar and with few words. As for the rest, the scene, the intention—in short, the art—it’s no use, there is nothing to be done, she takes charge of everything. And besides, one can’t help suspecting that the real reason she has herself photographed is not for the result, not the image, the elusive substance covering the little cardboard rectangles that she will later scrutinize in vain; no, she comes for the time spent posing. She is there for this respite, this moment of self-oblivion, achieved through sheer concentration.

  The librarian perched on her little wooden podium is very kind. She seems to like me. She even shows affection for my clumsiness with the registration process. Like she would protect me from all the administrative vicissitudes that inevitably crop up. She explains to me, smiles, explains once more, goes over it again slowly, calmly, nods kindly, replaces my regular library card with another that will give me access to another that should allow me to reserve my place (“and make sure to give me back the entrance card so that I can exchange it for the exit card, which will allow me to give you your user card”). From one visit to the next, I forget her directives, and so I abandon myself to her benevolence, to the infinite murmuring of her instructions. But eventually she loses patience. Maybe my absentmindedness exasperates her, my excessive reliance upon her kindness concerns her, my excessive affection, an emotional gesture troubles her. She has a sense of decorum but she’s become irritated, it’s obvious, by the hushed conversation we had about our childhood reading habits, a few sentences she tossed off, turning her head absentmindedly, or with feigned absentmindedness, as if it were all in passing, platitudes practically, generalities about the melancholia of books once you’ve read them, then, lowering her voice again and speaking more quickly: “The thing that saddens me the most is to have lost the emotions of those first readings forever, it seems. I remember that Grimm fairy tale, ‘The Goose Girl’—do you know it? When the little girl leans over the river to confide her sorrows and the three drops of blood shed by her mother on her little handkerchief to protect her can be heard moaning, alas, alas, if your mother knew, her loving heart would break in two. Well, this anxiety, the sweetness of her lament, the exquisite sentiment of sadness, it was useless to reread the book, everything had disappeared,” she slid the card with my seat number toward me, “and my sobs at reading Lassie Come-Home! Tears! It was simply impossible to keep reading, impossible, but today, nothing, there’s nothing left.” To ward off more confessions, I quickly tried to make an admission myself, but another patron had by then appeared and taken his card, throwing me a reproachful look. And now she takes everything back, her kindness, her murmurs, her avowals. She even neglects to tell me about the locker, indicating with a brusque gesture which card I should hand over. Henceforth her face is plunged into shadow, perhaps because of the splash of light falling from the high window. I take my entrance card and advance into the mingled whispers of pages turning, between the rustling and the flapping of paper, between the toppled sheaves. I advance among bodies hunched over heaps, faces turned away from the sky, turning toward it occasionally, as if rising back up from the depths, inspired, coming up to take a breath, but always blinded and with no desire to see.

  The pages are dry like the tiny desiccated skeleton of some long-dead insect. All of the documentation on the Countess of Castiglione is assembled in large notebooks, compiled, I am told, by Montesquiou’s secretary, a certain Pinard, a careful, meticulous man—each document pasted in and labeled in beautiful script: the will of the deceased copied out in a friend’s handwriting, obituaries that appeared upon her death in 1899, annotations from the sale of her belongings in 1901. There are also letters from those who knew her, and whom Montesquiou had questioned: “Her beauty was too great to be captured by any sort of likeness,” wrote Madame Odie in her beautiful sloping script; Élisabeth de Clermont-Tonnerre told the story of a ball at the Nadaillac home that ended in the dazzling light of a May morning, when “her face appeared whose beauty, owing much to artifice, caused a stir”; many wrote to say that they didn’t know anymore, that they’d forgotten, forgotten everything—there was no need to go stirring things up, old possessions, old relics at the back of a courtyard. Montesquiou pasted in blurry photos that show nothing more than vague silhouettes: “Curious, nearly indecipherable print. Depicts her aboard I don’t know what ship, naval officers listening to her reading, she bare-headed.” He conducted a veritable inquest on the woman, an investigation of an apparition, this so very beautiful subject that troubled him. He begins one chapter “Influence,” and on the page of a new notebook, he writes of “the urgent necessities that, at certain hours, drive us toward those subjects which seize hold of us and possess us, to the point that we can no longer breathe, that we hardly live, for as long as they still require our attention to bring them to fruition.” I raise my head toward the bay windows at one end of the high-ceilinged room. “But she’s nothing to you …” “No.” “Then …” “Then nothing.” Later, walking down the deserted streets, beneath a porch I overhear the end of a conversation, when, from the indistinct medley of voices, the peaceable brouhaha that settles in at the moment of parting, one final phrase rises, cast off like a quiet farewell: “We’re looking for something very, very small.” The other person laughs softly in the darkness. Each draws away. The door closes between them.