Aurélien Mole — The young artist who decides to put a portrait of himself on his visiting card knows he is giving himself a clear advantage over the multitudes of other hopefuls considering an artistic career. It might be easy to remember the names of those who have already “made it”, but for those who have not yet “arrived” (which is the case for the young Pierre Leguillon photographed here in all his long-haired splendor), it is better to trust the plasticity of the mind, which is so much better at recognizing and remembering faces. By associating a face with a name, having a visiting card with its owner’s face printed on it is a first step towards some kind of recognition.

This, then, suggests a certain ambition ! But not only : underneath its apparent directness, this photographic calling card is more complex than at first appears. To begin with, this is not a “selfie”, the distance between the subject and the lens makes it impossible for a (film) camera to have been held at arm’s length. One can have a long reach, like Leguillon has, but there are limits. Someone, therefore, took the image, and that person was Céline Duval who, at that time, shared the artist’s life and interests. No selfies here ! We have slipped from narcissus to family photography, that weaves an intimate and heroic narrative around the ties that unite the taker of the image and the subject. This visiting card is the follow-up to an initial exchange, given that Pierre Leguillon created the image on Céline Duval’s visiting card. In cinema, this is called shot/countershot. Secondly, the artist is not placed in the middle of the image, he is pushed out to the left by what appears in the background : a sign that says that in 1858, in the Bièvre Valley, Nadar took the world’s first aerial photograph. In cinema, this kind of image is called a high angled shot. It should be noted however that the scantness of information provided means that had the sign been placed one kilometer further away, it would not have been any less accurate (or, indeed, any more wrong). To the weightiness of bronze monuments, Leguillon has always preferred the lightness of enameled plates that can moved around depending on the public event – including the clandestine bar/cinema La promesse de l’écran (The Promise of the Screen) screenings.
Leguillon (and his visiting card) shares this taste for advertising with Nadar, that 19 th-century figure mainly known for his work as a portraitist, but who was also one of the founding members of the Society for the Encouragement of Aerial Locomotion by Means of Machines Heavier than Air. On board his balloon named The Giant, he made the front page of the newspapers several times and his exploits inspired Jules Verne to write Around the World in Eighty Days. Co-Hains-idence ? It was also from a balloon that Leguillon photographed the Villa Medici where he would take up residence a few years later. On this image, the prestigious institution is reduced to the scale of a doll’s house, splendidly isolated from Rome. The Villa used this image on a card printed by Yvon for its communications, while Leguillon used it in a slide show related to an image of the librarian’s dog whose collar carries the name… Nadar !
But let us return to the visiting card you have in your hands. As a portrait of the artist standing next to a sign that pays tribute to a famous portraitist : the recipient of this card had to know that with this garrulous young man, it would be about images. And they’d be right.
Prophetic, this image perhaps provided clues as to the kind of work the young Leguillon would later produce. Against the teleological background of the illustrious photographer, journalist, caricaturist and hot air balloonist, one could in fact consider this nascent work, as it was then, as the desire to personally create a hall of fame : Nadar’s great unfinished work that was supposed to depict, as caricatures, a cast of the most famous personalities of his time in a Grand Eagle format. Indeed, in Leguillon’s work one comes across many artists, designers, choreographers and filmmakers… whose trajectories are roads that branch off from the great story of the history of art.
Many of these figures appear in the pages of Oracles, a project that asks : To what extent visiting cards can be considered a form of representation ? What kind of insight do these bits of card, which are like footnotes in the history of art, provide into the personalities of those who commissioned them ?
Again, therefore, this project is about images. A project that, twenty or so years later, calls on the young man having his portrait taken to take part in ; a portrait that was taken under a sign that labels a territory photographed from the skies by Nadar. In an irony of history, Nadar made no secret of his disdain for André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri’s portrait business that popularized visiting card-sized photographs !

Valérie Mavridorakis — In 1978, after graduating from the Massachusetts College of Art, Christian Marclay left Boston to study at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York. He enrolled in Hans Haacke’s class there, a place of lively exchange and debate about the works regularly presented by the students. But young Marclay did not have much to submit to his teacher – the reason being that he spent most of his time going to concerts by the likes of DNA, Mars, Lydia Lunch and Glenn Branca at CBGB, the Mud Club and The Kitchen. He devoted all his energies to discovering the punk music and performances that were shaking up the New York art scene. His art studies took a back seat and he eventually gave in to the temptation of becoming a musician instead. The call of the nascent DIY ethos was too appealing to resist. So at the last critiquing session in Haacke’s class, he confined himself to declaring this very intention.

Modeled on the conceptual art of the previous generation, Marclay’s work took on an assertive and formal form. And, not without humor, that of a business card indicating his name, occupation (“Art Student”) and contact information. Except for a particular tidbit of information that undercuts the conventional presentation of his professional status, which would “expire” on December 22, 1978, i.e. the last day of his first semester at art school. In other words, even before receiving a diploma certifying his status as an academically trained artist, Marclay was already announcing his early withdrawal. In putting an expiration date on his studies, he meant to kiss Cooper Union goodbye. No need to sacrifice birds to augur the consequences of such a move : either Marclay would learn some guitar chords, start up a band and get caught up in the punk frenzy, or his parents would succeed in nipping his rebellion in the bud. So he would end up becoming either a musician-with-primary-training-in-the-fine-arts or an artist-with-secondary-musical-experience like more than a few of his peers.

A fortuitous event was then to decide the matter, making him Christian Marclay, both artist and musician. Choosing the second option, in 1979 he returned to the Massachusetts College of Art to take his degree there, though without giving up his intention of making music. One morning he found a record on the street that had fallen out of a garbage can and been run over by passing cars. This well-known founding incident was to make him an experimental turntablist, “phonoguitar” player (he strapped the record player to himself), a virtuoso in the art of resurrecting recordings. It was also to orient his artistic explorations towards visual modes of expressing sound. A dialectic of hearing and seeing, in the gap between these sensory portals, made him an amphibious being capable of breathing as easily in the art scene as in the music world. Allowing for a slight delay, his business card had announced the truth : by picking up a broken record, the art student had indeed dropped out to become Marclay.

Victor Guégan — 1, Le grand art vit de moyens pauvres. (Great art lives on scanty means.) The Dutch graphic designer and museum director Willem Sandberg culled this line, which sounds like an anchoritic oracle, from Le Corbusier’s ruminations in L’Art décoratif d’aujourd’hui. Sandberg made fascinating, if somewhat surprising use of this and other inspiring quotes from various authors ranging from Goethe to Gandhi in his Experimenta Typografica, an oeuvre at once metaphysical and graphic, comprising a series of handmade booklets. Active in the Dutch resistance during World War II, Sandberg forged false papers for Jews and others wanted by the Gestapo, and had to go underground himself under an assumed name for fifteen months after he helped plan the bombing of the Amsterdam Public Records Office to stop the Gestapo from comparing the false documents with the real ones in the registry. Making the most of his long months of waiting and the meager means available, he set each of the inspiring ideas he’d found in a distinct typographical form. He used whatever he found to hand in his hideout, including scrap materials, which he collaged into typographical and poetic maxims to be viewed and read. There is no knowing whether Le Corbusier would have called these Experimenta Typografica “great art”, but during this forced reclusion Sandberg certainly had to make do with “scanty means” to express his creative urges. In a word, the designer had to build a discipline on an economy of materials.

2, Le grand art vit de moyens pauvres. The lines that follow this Le Corbusier quote were to prove highly prophetic: “Les rutilances vont à l’eau. Le moment de la proposition est venu. L’esprit d’architecture s’affirme. Que s’est-il passé? Une époque machiniste est née.” (Glitter is for water. The time has come for a proposition. The spirit of architecture is asserting itself. What has happened? A machine age is born.) In another commentary culled by Sandberg for his typographical meditations, Le Corbusier writes: “Il arrive un moment où les acquisitions techniques sont suffisantes pour qu’une esthétique architecturale puisse en naître […].” (There comes a time when technological attainments are sufficient to give rise to an architectural aesthetic.) What could be more worlds apart, however, than the scant means and artisanal methods of a Willem Sandberg reduced, in his underground hideout, to a shadow of his former self, on the one hand, and the stentorian proclamations of Le Corbusier, on the other, an author boldly heralding the dawn of a new age and advocating frugality, to be sure, but in a world of plenty – palaces for all! – and technological progress, thanks to the unfailing predictability of mechanized production? We intuitively sense, however, that these divergent approaches share a basic tension that constitutes the modernist enigma: to reject aesthetic and social conventions in order to ground a new art form in what is purportedly a more neutral principle of reality: an economy of materials that maximizes exploitation of the tools available in any given environment. Le Corbusier’s grand art no longer adheres to the canons of art, but to the constraints of a given production context.

3, What better way to test this hypothesis than to observe the treatment of one of our most standardized documents in terms of both social etiquette and graphic aesthetics: the common calling card. One such card, belonging to a Swiss icon of Modernism, Max Bill (1908–1994), has a bearing on our questions and merits some explanation. He designed the card around 1927–28 while studying at the Bauhaus in Dessau, or shortly thereafter. A lecture by Le Corbusier convinced the young student that the school was indeed worth his while, although he actually spent precious little time there. It is more of a business card than a calling card, on which Bill emphasizes his proficiency in painting, architecture and advertising as well as his presence in two different places: the Bauhaus in Dessau and his Swiss hometown of Winterthur.
There is nothing particularly unusual about this card for a professional typographer of his age. But a stuffed-shirt stickler for conventions, one of those German burghers George Grosz caricatured with such delectable and nightmarish ferocity, might well have deemed it far too casual for purposes of professional self-presentation. Besides the card’s fashionable sobriety, devoid of allegory and ornament, and its nonconformity to the symmetrical, aligned and centered layout of the traditional business card, there is an apparent offhandedness about the design or printing of the characters. I expected to find already here what would later become Bill’s favorite two typefaces in the 1930s, Akzidenz Grotesk and Monotype Grotesk. But the round letters – especially the “a” – are different in shape, closer to the typeface used in “a dripping French Grotesk”, as typographer Alex Chavot puts it, which is one way of saying the counters of these letters are abnormally “clogged” with ink. So it is chiefly a certain carelessness that suggests this card was hastily turned out by a printer more intent on maximizing the profitability of his machinery than upholding the grand and noble art of typography.
Should this casualness be called “style”, a little like the faded blue jeans with holes in them we wore as teenagers back in the 1980s and 1990s, much to our parents’ chagrin ? It is hard to answer this question anachronistically. On the other hand, although thoroughly conversant with the rules and various procedures of letterpress printing, Max Bill never identified with professional typeface designers and even picked fights with them – which would explain the mention of advertising and not typography on his card. When he did talk “about typography” it was not as a professional insider but, as he put it, “as an outsider, from the perspective of someone who focuses on the stylistic characteristics of an age” or who “conceives of typography chiefly as a means […] of turning present-day products into cultural documents”. In this 1946 article in The Swiss Printing Review, however, which is chiefly addressed to Swiss typographers, the designer even shows a certain disdain for specialized designers in this field : “Few guilds are as receptive as typographers to simple, schematic rules to work by with a great measure of assurance. Those who draft these ‘formulae’ and have a knack for assuming an aura of accuracy will drive typography in what will be the prevailing direction for a certain period of time.”
This attack was probably triggered by a major phenomenon that emerged in 1920s Germany, particularly in the teaching at the Bauhaus school in Dessau : the incursion of avant-garde artists into the domain of printing. A number of creative artists turned away from easel painting to colonize the processes of technical reproduction, both photographic and typographical. They sought to bring the figure of the brilliant artist down from his ivory tower and integrate him into standardized, mechanized industrial processes. In the composition of this card, moreover, we find the main characteristics of the avant-garde style championed by the Bauhaus and theorized under the name of the “New Typography”, involving the rejection of all ornament and using “geometric grotesque” letters instead, designed to render the cold mechanical aesthetic of the machine by eliminating every trace of handwriting, especially serifs, yielding an architecture of the printed document based on elementary contrasts in size, shape and color. The centered, “symmetrical” layout, condemned for being corseted by aesthetic conventions of a bygone age, gave way to an asymmetrical design touted as vibrant and organic in the sense that it sought to catch and guide the reader’s eye. Certain proponents of the modernist aesthetic (Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Karel Teige, Josef Albers, Otl Aicher et al.) were also intent on putting together what was to be a new, universal alphabet, which would do away with the distinction between upper and lower case : 1 sound = 1 letter.
Thus, the carelessness a professional printer might object to in Bill’s business card is actually only in appearance. To grasp how actually careful, how quasi-scientific, the card’s composition is we must hark back to Le Corbusier’s oracular proclamation quoted by Sandberg : “The spirit of architecture is asserting itself. […] A machine age is born.” What is remarkable here is not the poverty of the materials, but the respect for the new standards defined by DIN, the German Institute for Standardization. DIN A, which to this day governs paper sizes (A5, A4, A3 etc.) in Europe, is based on a constant ratio of height to width : the square root of 2. The dimensions of Bill’s card, 74 × 52 mm, are size A8. Its architecture deviates from conventional standards for this printed epitome of social etiquette, conforming instead to a new machine etiquette based on economic values and the standardization of industrialized production. Bill’s grand art here consists in using the humble materials of printing (ink and paper) to combine the new constructive aesthetic taught at the Bauhaus with the sizing specifications of the German Institute for Standardization.
A fussy typographer might find the card’s composition not quite accomplished or functional enough to bear out Bill’s professional claims. Indeed, according to Richard Kiencke and Otto Frank’s 1926 digest of DIN standards for printing professionals, a business card ought to be size A7, measuring 74 × 105 mm, not size A8. This recommendation follows from another DIN proposal to adapt filing cards and boxes to this standard ; “This size [A7] makes it possible to place business cards in a filing card box arranged in alphabetical or geographical order.” Bill, doubtless aware of the non-conformity to this rule of thumb, used a trick : since A8 width equals A7 height (74 mm), he repeated his name in a larger font and, more importantly, placed it perpendicular to the rest of the text. So when tipped over, the card is exactly the same height as the other cards and the name “Max Bill” can be read in the same direction as the names on the others. Thus, Bill’s layout and format do conform after all to the conventions of the standard filing box. This, then, might be deemed a kind of “civility”, a new etiquette for an efficient modern enterprise whose watchword is “Time is money !” For the rest, while Bill does take the liberty of derogating from the formulae of professional typographers, the card still satisfies the DIN prerequisites, including a “headpiece” stating the main information at the top of the card. Lastly, the choice of A8 for his card size, which is half as wide (less 1 mm for the printer’s guillotine) as A7, also saved the impecunious student some expense, printing two cards for the price of one. Yet another illustration of Le Corbusier’s dictum : art lives on scanty means.

2. *Le grand art vit de moyens pauvres*. The lines that follow this Le Corbusier quote were to prove highly prophetic: “Les rutilances vont à l’eau. Le moment de la proposition est venu. L’esprit d’architecture s’affirme. Que s’est-il passé? Une époque machiniste est née.” (Glitter is for water. The time has come for a proposition. The spirit of architecture is asserting itself. What has happened? A machine age is born.) In another commentary culled by Sandberg for his typographical meditations, Le Corbusier writes: “Il arrive un moment où les acquisitions techniques sont suffisantes pour qu’une esthétique architecturale puisse en naître […].” (There comes a time when technological attainments are sufficient to give rise to an architectural aesthetic.) What could be more worlds apart, however, than the scant means and artisanal methods of a Willem Sandberg reduced, in his underground hideout, to a shadow of his former self, on the one hand, and the stentorian proclamations of Le Corbusier, on the other, an author boldly heralding the dawn of a new age and advocating frugality, to be sure, but in a world of plenty – palaces for all! – and technological progress, thanks to the unfailing predictability of mechanized production? We intuitively sense, however, that these divergent approaches share a basic tension that constitutes the modernist enigma: to reject aesthetic and social conventions in order to ground a new art form in what is purportedly a more neutral principle of reality: an economy of materials that maximizes exploitation of the tools available in any given environment. Le Corbusier’s *grand art* no longer adheres to the canons of art, but to the constraints of a given production context.

3. What better way to test this hypothesis than to observe the treatment of one of our most standardized documents in terms of both social etiquette and graphic aesthetics: the common calling card. One such card, belonging to a Swiss icon of Modernism, Max Bill (1908–1994), has a bearing on our questions and merits some explanation. He designed the card around 1927–28 while studying at the Bauhaus in Dessau, or shortly thereafter. A lecture by Le Corbusier convinced the young student that the school was indeed worth his while, although he actually spent precious little time there. It is more of a business card than a calling card, on which Bill emphasizes his proficiency in painting, architecture and advertising as well as his presence in two different places: the Bauhaus in Dessau and his Swiss hometown of Winterthur.
   There is nothing particularly unusual about this card for a professional typographer of his age. But a stuffed-shirt stickler for conventions, one of those German burghers George Grosz caricatured with such delectable and nightmarish ferocity, might well have deemed it far too casual for purposes of professional self-presentation. Besides the card’s fashionable sobriety, devoid of allegory and ornament, and its nonconformity to the symmetrical, aligned and centered layout of the traditional business card, there is an apparent offhandedness about the design or printing of the characters. I expected to find already here what would later become Bill’s favorite two typefaces in the 1930s, Akzidenz Grotesk and Monotype Grotesk. But the round letters – especially the “a” – are different in shape, closer to the typeface used in “a dripping French Grotesk”, as typographer Alex Chavot puts it, which is one way of saying the counters of these letters are abnormally “clogged” with ink. So it is chiefly a certain carelessness that suggests this card was hastily turned out by a printer more intent on maximizing the profitability of his machinery than upholding the grand and noble art of typography.
   Should this casualness be called “style”, a little like the faded blue jeans with holes in them we wore as teenagers back in the 1980s and 1990s, much to our parents’ chagrin ? It is hard to answer this question anachronistically. On the other hand, although thoroughly conversant with the rules and various procedures of letterpress printing, Max Bill never identified with professional typeface designers and even picked fights with them – which would explain the mention of advertising and not typography on his card. When he did talk “about typography” it was not as a professional insider but, as he put it, “as an outsider, from the perspective of someone who focuses on the stylistic characteristics of an age” or who “conceives of typography chiefly as a means […] of turning present-day products into cultural documents”. In this 1946 article in The Swiss Printing Review, however, which is chiefly addressed to Swiss typographers, the designer even shows a certain disdain for specialized designers in this field : “Few guilds are as receptive as typographers to simple, schematic rules to work by with a great measure of assurance. Those who draft these ‘formulae’ and have a knack for assuming an aura of accuracy will drive typography in what will be the prevailing direction for a certain period of time.”
   This attack was probably triggered by a major phenomenon that emerged in 1920s Germany, particularly in the teaching at the Bauhaus school in Dessau : the incursion of avant-garde artists into the domain of printing. A number of creative artists turned away from easel painting to colonize the processes of technical reproduction, both photographic and typographical. They sought to bring the figure of the brilliant artist down from his ivory tower and integrate him into standardized, mechanized industrial processes. In the composition of this card, moreover, we find the main characteristics of the avant-garde style championed by the Bauhaus and theorized under the name of the “New Typography”, involving the rejection of all ornament and using “geometric grotesque” letters instead, designed to render the cold mechanical aesthetic of the machine by eliminating every trace of handwriting, especially serifs, yielding an architecture of the printed document based on elementary contrasts in size, shape and color. The centered, “symmetrical” layout, condemned for being corseted by aesthetic conventions of a bygone age, gave way to an asymmetrical design touted as vibrant and organic in the sense that it sought to catch and guide the reader’s eye. Certain proponents of the modernist aesthetic (Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Karel Teige, Josef Albers, Otl Aicher et al.) were also intent on putting together what was to be a new, universal alphabet, which would do away with the distinction between upper and lower case : 1 sound = 1 letter.
   Thus, the carelessness a professional printer might object to in Bill’s business card is actually only in appearance. To grasp how actually careful, how quasi-scientific, the card’s composition is we must hark back to Le Corbusier’s oracular proclamation quoted by Sandberg : “The spirit of architecture is asserting itself. […] A machine age is born.” What is remarkable here is not the poverty of the materials, but the respect for the new standards defined by DIN, the German Institute for Standardization. DIN A, which to this day governs paper sizes (A5, A4, A3 etc.) in Europe, is based on a constant ratio of height to width : the square root of 2. The dimensions of Bill’s card, 74 × 52 mm, are size A8. Its architecture deviates from conventional standards for this printed epitome of social etiquette, conforming instead to a new machine etiquette based on economic values and the standardization of industrialized production. Bill’s grand art here consists in using the humble materials of printing (ink and paper) to combine the new constructive aesthetic taught at the Bauhaus with the sizing specifications of the German Institute for Standardization.
   A fussy typographer might find the card’s composition not quite accomplished or functional enough to bear out Bill’s professional claims. Indeed, according to Richard Kiencke and Otto Frank’s 1926 digest of DIN standards for printing professionals, a business card ought to be size A7, measuring 74 × 105 mm, not size A8. This recommendation follows from another DIN proposal to adapt filing cards and boxes to this standard ; “This size [A7] makes it possible to place business cards in a filing card box arranged in alphabetical or geographical order.” Bill, doubtless aware of the non-conformity to this rule of thumb, used a trick : since A8 width equals A7 height (74 mm), he repeated his name in a larger font and, more importantly, placed it perpendicular to the rest of the text. So when tipped over, the card is exactly the same height as the other cards and the name “Max Bill” can be read in the same direction as the names on the others. Thus, Bill’s layout and format do conform after all to the conventions of the standard filing box. This, then, might be deemed a kind of “civility”, a new etiquette for an efficient modern enterprise whose watchword is “Time is money !” For the rest, while Bill does take the liberty of derogating from the formulae of professional typographers, the card still satisfies the DIN prerequisites, including a “headpiece” stating the main information at the top of the card. Lastly, the choice of A8 for his card size, which is half as wide (less 1 mm for the printer’s guillotine) as A7, also saved the impecunious student some expense, printing two cards for the price of one. Yet another illustration of Le Corbusier’s dictum : art lives on scanty means.

Pierre Leguillon — Absalon’s card was silk-screened onto rejected scraps of the same cardboard used to make the cover of the catalog for his 1993 Cellules (Cells) exhibition at ARC, the contemporary art section of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. This cardboard resembles the kind used for architectural mockups, and the six Cells presented at the exhibition were like 1:1 mockups, prototypes of small (4 × 9 m² = 14 × 30 ft) dwellings that Absalon had designed in minute detail according to his own physical measurements and personal requirements.
“The volumes are constructed in such a way that despite the relatively small size, I will not suffer from lack of space. In their quality, these Cells are more mental spaces than physical ones. As mirrors of my inner life, they will be familiar to me.
The Cell is a mechanism that conditions my movements. With time and habit, this mechanism will become my comfort.
The creation of prototypes allows me to observe my reactions as well as those of other people, and through them, to define possible future developments of the project.”
Once the Cells were built, out of wood, the artist planned to implant them virally in various big cities around the world : Paris, Zurich, New York, Tel Aviv, Frankfurt and Tokyo.
The address of the Crousel-Robelin/BAMA gallery representing the artist at the time is printed on the back of the card. He could be contacted at that address in future, as he was planning to do without a permanent address soon. This denotes the artist’s increasing “professionalization”, by the way, in the early 1990s. At only twenty-seven years of age, Absalon had already just taken part in the Istanbul Biennial and the Documenta 9 in Kassel, where the American artist Matthew Barney, who was only twenty-five, had caused a sensation – and made quite an impression on Absalon.

Absalon had been to the French Riviera to see Le Corbusier’s Cabanon at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin (1951). Within 15 m² (160 ft²) Le Corbusier had condensed a workspace, two narrow beds, a toilet, a sink and some fitted wardrobes. Absalon was already familiar with the architect’s work, having lived in the former studio and home of Jacques Lipchitz in Boulogne, which Le Corbusier had designed for the sculptor in 1923, and which a friend had lent Absalon in exchange for overseeing its renovation. Although influenced by the Swiss architect’s rationalist ideas, Absalon rejected the idea of architecture based on the measurements of a supposedly “average” man, which to him was merely a theoretical construct. Besides, at 1 m 90 (6 foot 2), he bumped heads with the harmonious anthropometric scale of Le Corbusier’s Modulor.
Born in Israel, Absalon gained early familiarity with the legacy of modernist architecture, since the planning and many buildings in Israeli cities and kibbutzim were the work of Bauhaus alumni : Arieh Sharon, Shmuel Mestechkin and Munio Weinraub were trained by Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Hannes Meyer, and other Israeli architects, including Richard Kauffmann, Samuel Bickels, Shlomo Oren-Weinberg and Malka Haas, were likewise influenced by the rationalist principles of the German school. Absalon would surely not have argued with Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer’s credo “Volksbedarf statt Luxusbedarf”, that architecture should meet “the needs of the people, not the need for luxury”.
Then, when he moved to Paris in 1987, Absalon explored the abundant library of his uncle, Jacques Ohayon, an art critic and teacher at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Cergy, a Paris suburb, where Absalon promptly enrolled. On his uncle’s bookshelves he could discover Malevich’s architectons and Manzoni’s Achromes, the Schröder house in Utrecht built by Gerrit Rietveld or the one Wittgenstein built for his sister in Vienna. There was also a book about Jean-Pierre Raynaud’s house in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, another Paris suburb, which the sculptor had covered in white tiles and then continually, obsessively, transformed and reinvented from 1969 to 1993. The photographs of this live-in artwork, whose walls the artist could tear down in the course of a single night, and which remained closed to the public, made a powerful impression on the budding artist.
Ohayon’s library was to follow him to the Villa Lipchitz in Boulogne, even though Absalon had intended to pare down his library to the fifteen or so books that really mattered to him at any given time and could fit on the shelf above his desk.

His business card, like the above-mentioned Cellules catalog, was designed by fellow artist Marie-Ange Guilleminot, his companion at the time, who gave it to him as a present. She printed his name entirely in lower case, in line with Bauhaus typographical principles, and in the universal typeface Herbert Bayer designed for Walter Gropius in 1925 to be used for all Bauhaus communications and publications. Guilleminot, trained at the Villa Arson in Nice, shared Absalon’s affinity for architecture, archeology museums and the applied arts.
Absalon – as the very use of a pseudonym suggests – did not want his biography brought to bear in interpretations of his work, and he was more than reticent about his past, preoccupied instead with asserting the vital necessity of his artistic projects with a determination to which all his curators attest to this day (Ute Meta Bauer, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Bernard Marcadé et al.). The catalog for a recent retrospective at Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2010) recounts that he left school in Haifa at the age of fourteen, then entered a military boarding school before doing his military service as a ground attendant in the Israeli Air Force. He had a particularly traumatic experience in the second phase of the Lebanese Civil War, after which his term of service was reduced from four years to three. When at last discharged, he went to live in a wooden hut he built himself on a beach south of Ashdod from 1985 to 1987. He made jewelry and sold it for a living, eventually managing to save up enough money to buy a one-way plane ticket to Paris.
So it was only inevitable that, over time, there should grow up around the figure of Absalon a sort of “individual mythology”, as Harald Szeemann called the section of the Documenta 5 (1972) in which Christian Boltanski presented his Souvenirs de Jeunesse (Memories of youth) and other recreated childhood items, Etienne-Martin his “coat dwellings” and other Demeures, Marcel Broodthaers the Department of Eagles of his make-believe Museum of Modern Art etc.
So when he first came to Paris in 1987, we can imagine Absalon finally leading the life he had chosen and promptly immersed in the artistic circle frequented by his uncle, who introduced him to Annette Messager, Christian Boltanski, Bertrand Lavier, Anne and Patrick Poirier and the photographer Alain Leloup. While studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in suburban Cergy, he often attended Boltanski’s classes at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, and the teacher encouraged him to exhibit with his friend Jean-Jacques Rullier. It was during this period that Meir Eshel took the pseudonym Absalon, referring to the biblical Absalom, third son of David, King of Israel, and reputed the handsomest man in the kingdom. Apparently, the inspiration for this nickname was a Renaissance painting by Giovanni Battista Viola at the Musée du Louvre. He identified no doubt with the figure of the rebel son who was murdered after his hair got caught in the branches of an oak tree – Absalon himself still had long curly hair at the time. The nickname was also inspired by the defiant protagonist of John Dryden’s 17 th-century satirical poem Absalom and Achitophel.
After graduating from art school in Cergy, Absalon took classes with Daniel Buren, Serge Fauchereau and Sarkis during the very first session of the Institut des Hautes-Études en Arts Plastiques, a graduate program founded by Pontus Hultén, first director of the Centre Pompidou. Meeting artists like Michael Asher, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Jean Tinguely, and architects Jean Nouvel and Renzo Piano must have been highly stimulating to young Absalon. And the seminars boasted a lineup of some of the most enlightened minds in their respective fields : Jean-Hubert Martin, director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, gave a seminar on museography ; Michel Chion on music ; Jean-François Lyotard on philosophy ; and Jean Douchet on film. Among the twenty graduate students attending the school on a scholarship, Absalon became particularly close friends with Jan Svenungsson from Sweden and his French classmate Christine Coënon. Fellow students during this first session of the school also included Eric Duyckaerts, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Philippe Parreno and Yan Pei Ming. With the latter and Jan Svenungsson, Absalon would later share a studio located underneath the piazza in front of the Centre Pompidou.
In October 1993, at the age of twenty-eight, Absalon died of Aids, a disease he had kept hidden from many of his friends, doggedly continuing work on his life-long project, struggling, often vehemently, not to give up and write it off as a utopia.
Within about five years he proceeded to produce a sizeable number of often gigantic installations, videos, drawings and of course his Cells project, forming a body of work of short duration but great consistency. Hardly an autodidact, Absalon made the most of the tutelage and contacts of his uncle Jacques Ohayon, on the one hand, and art schools on the other, during these years of single-minded pursuit of his artistic project in and out of school and the studio.

Pierre Leguillon — In 1998, immediately after taking his master’s degree in graphic design at the Royal College of Art in London, Daniel Eatock produced his first “contact card”, as he calls it, while interning for a year at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The Graphic Design Department there under Andrew Blauvelt was renowned for its bold graphic experiments, whether in the museum’s printed PR or exhibition catalogs or on its Gallery 9 website, an “online exhibition space” (from 1997 to 2003, under the direction of Steve Dietz) presenting works by over a hundred artists. Young Eatock’s card is an ironic “Pocket Size Curriculum Vitae”, printed in diminutive letters, of a still rather diminutive career, with only a few jobs in London and three works published in journals to show for himself so far. But his wide range of eclectic “Interests”, including penchants for collecting ephemera (“printed forms, labels & uncomfortable information design”), browsing record stores and “participating in & attending sound seminars & art/design events”, expresses a desire to break free from the narrow confines of commissioned work and conventional graphic design. The card also reflects the influence of the spirit and aesthetic of 1960s and 1970s conceptual art, opting for minimal graphics and maximum clarity, as on an administrative form or the patient information leaflet for a pharmaceutical drug, in the tradition of Swiss graphic design.

“Motto : Say YES to fun & function & NO to seductive imagery and color.” Eatock copyrighted the model of his “Contact Card”, which meant it could yield various iterations, like many objects he would later design, notably his famous Indexhibit, a pioneering CMS web application elaborated with Jeffery Vaska in 2006, which enables users to create their own functional open-license websites with uncomplicated design. Its success remains unabated to this day. Naturally, his own site, eatock.com, takes full advantage of everything the app has to offer.
Eatock photographed thousands of micro-accidents and incongruous configurations in the spirit of his compatriots Richard Wentworth, David Shrigley and Jonathan Monk and his French counterpart Claude Closky. The chaos of quotidian life is inventoried through a flawless formal or conceptual framework, even if the photos are snapshots. The simplicity and rigor with which this protocol is executed hits the nail on the head every time around, like John Baldessari’s scrupulous indexing of various specimens of green beans in 1972.
Part of the content of Eatock’s website became the subject of a book published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2008, Imprint. The cover shows a “typographic self-portrait” inspired by one of his former students : “On my first day at Ravensbourne College, each student had to create a typographic self-portrait. Thirteen years later I can only remember one, made by Richard Holley. His response to this simple brief is one of the best pieces of graphic design I have ever seen. I have been bugging Richard for about a year, asking him to find his original portrait. He is still looking.” In a spidery scrawl, Holley wrote a long autobiographical text that runs along the myriad fine curved lines of his thumbprint. Since then, Eatock has invited anyone who feels like it to send him a “Holley portrait” of themselves using the exact same approach.
Eatock put a second thumbprint, life-size this time around, on the spine of each copy of his book between the title and publisher’s logo. A short video posted on YouTube documents this performative gesture in a Princeton warehouse, an imprint that makes every single copy of the book (printed in China) unique.
This is, of course, a variation on Piero Manzoni’s thumbprint-signed eggs at the Galleria Azimut in Milan in 1960, “Edible Sculptures” that were then given away to gallery-goers for consumption. But long before that, in the fashion industry, Madeleine Vionnet used to sign each of her dresses with her fingerprint to buttress her demands for payment of royalties on her designs. That was back in 1923 when the Maison Vionnet, which fitted out the Paris smart set as well as plenty of Hollywood stars (Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford et al.), inaugurated its new premises in the Lariboisière town house at 50 avenue Montaigne. The news of the day showed Madame Vionnet, fed up with the pirating of her designs, dip her thumb in black ink and apply her thumbprint to the label on each of her creations. “I affix not only my signature and a serial number, but also my fingerprint, to every model produced in my house,” she said. “I also give the names of people I officially authorize to make several copies of my works.” Meanwhile, the fashion designer was putting together an impressive archive in which each model is photographed from the front and back and in profile at the center of a prism of mirrors.
For a century now, the practice of putting a fingerprint on mass-produced items – from designer dresses to eggs and books – has always been about the author’s seal asserting the uniqueness of presumably identical articles. Not only does this fingerprint mark the conclusion of a long process of production in which the author is far from being alone, but, along with the many different ways in which even mass-produced and mass-marketed articles are used, it makes each article unique.

Géraldine Beck — “ED-WERD REW-SHAY”. Edward Ruscha’s business card might have been born of the artist’s desire to correct the various deformations of his name as mispronounced by those unfamiliar with him – back in 1968, when this card was made, he was still an unknown “young artist”. But his name would soon call to mind his first artists’ books, Twentysix Gasoline Stations and Various Small Fires, which secured his lasting international renown. This card is actually the upshot of a lark, a practical joke between Ruscha and his artist friend Billy Al Bengston from the Chouinard Art Institute, the art school in California he attended from 1956 to 1960.

Edward Ruscha was raised a strict Roman Catholic in Oklahoma City, a city “with no room for poets or artists – absolutely no room”. As a boy he was a compulsive collector of stamps and newspaper clippings, a voracious reader of comic books and a big fan of cartoons, especially Walt Disney’s animated features, which would subsequently influence his own creative work. In his teens he drew a great deal and took an interest in printing and typography. After graduating from high school, it was only natural that he should go on to study art. His parents acquiesced on condition that he pursue a career in commercial art. So Los Angeles seemed the ideal destination – his one-way ticket out, at long last, of the Bible Belt of his childhood. After failing the entrance exam for the Art Center School, he enrolled at the Chouinard Art Institute (now called California Institute of the Arts), which, despite its “beard-and-sandals bohemian” reputation, was partly funded and administered by Walt Disney himself as a breeding ground for future animators at Disney Studios. The courses in painting and drawing and the teachers of these disciplines, Robert Irwin and Emerson Woelffer, respectively, left a lasting mark on the aspiring art student at this commercially-geared establishment.
Although he never had a class with Billy Al Bengston, he seems to have been heavily influenced by the latter’s progressive teaching and easygoing, nonchalant approach, as one of his classmates related to him : “He came into the class and had these students stretch this paper all the way around the room and tack it up. Then every person would just get in there and start painting on this thing. Bengston would just go off and have lunch all day, or hang out all day. Then he’d come back at the end of the day, ‘Okay, I guess that’s about it. Wrap it up. Tear it down and throw it away.’ It was the idea of, ‘Just get in and do the work, and don’t think that you’re doing a finished painting that you’ll sign your name to and put on the wall.’ It’s just the act of doing it. The biggest thing that I learned in art school was that I had to unlearn everything that I’d learned before – since my birth, literally.”

Ruscha eventually lost interest in a career in the entertainment industry or advertising, increasingly turning towards the fine arts : “I just gradually began to lean over to the hot side of life, the stuff that really was happening, like the fine arts and the painters. Being aware of galleries and the sort of things that were happening in the galleries. […] I couldn’t have been an ad man, I just couldn’t have done that.” Instead, thanks to his part-time student job at Plantin Press, printers of fine books, Ruscha learned the craft of making books, which enabled him to make a living as a freelance designer, and then to produce his first artists’ books – pioneering works in this genre – beginning in 1962. In 1968 he designed the catalog for a Billy Al Bengston exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum. And that year the two artists, who had become friends, set about making business cards for each other. After each had designed and produced a card for the other, they held a solemn exchange ceremony at the Bistro in Beverly Hills. Larry Bell served as witness to this semi-serious performance and took several Polaroid snapshots that evening, which were subsequently published in the book Business Cards. The only information on the card Ruscha made for his friend is Bengston’s full name in red Gothic letters. The card Bengston offered Ruscha, on the other hand, specifies the exact pronunciation of the bearer’s name, “ED-WERD REW-SHAY”, followed by the epithet “YOUNG ARTIST”. A painting Ruscha executed in 1959, while still a student, might provide a lead in tracing the formal origins of Bengston’s design : it features the artist’s name in the anagram “E. HARUSC”, painted in large capital letters that take up the entire canvas, with an arrow reversing the order in which the syllables “RUSC” and “HA” are to be read.
After graduating in 1960, Ruscha traveled to New York and then to Europe for several months. Upon returning to Los Angeles, he found himself at the heart of a burgeoning art scene centered on art venues like the Ferus Gallery, which was founded in 1957 by Edward Kienholz and Walter Hopps and then run by Irving Blum from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, or the bar called Barney’s Beanery, where he hung out with Larry Bell, Bengston, Bob Irwin, Kenneth Price and John Altoon, all artists, friends and influences. “[So all the talk about Los Angeles having no sense of community and no meeting place] was false. […] Barney’s was the only place we really met, a beer-drinking place, […] we’d all hang out at Barneys. […] It was like lifeblood. It was great.”
By 1968, the year of the business card exchange, Ruscha was not such a young artist anymore. Over the course of the 1960s he had been showing his paintings in several galleries (he sold his first painting in 1962 at his first exhibit, the group show New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum). Beginning in 1963, Ruscha came to be associated with the Pop Art phenomenon (chiefly as a result of the Six Painters and the Object/Six More show at Los Angeles County Museum) and had his first solo show that year at the Ferus Gallery ; he produced over a dozen artists’ books and hundreds of paintings, got married in 1967, and had the first of his two children in 1968.
If a business card suggests a (young) artist’s desire to promote himself and join a network of his peers, Ruscha and Bengston’s exchange may be seen as an ironic gesture for artists (voluntarily) living far away from the mainstream art scene, which was almost wholly concentrated in New York at the time. These artists were creating their own scene, with a certain degree of detachment and concomitant freedom – like their city, Los Angeles – from the defining artistic currents of their day : “there was a definite art community [in Los Angeles] that I was becoming a part of, and so I was just drawn back [there]. […] I wasn’t really even a Pop artist ; I wasn’t really even a Conceptual artist. I was nothing until gradually ; later, later, later.”
Bengston may have used the adjective “young” on Ruscha’s card to underscore the initial relationship between the two protagonists, at a time when the pupil was probably about to surpass the master, and the relative freedom of youth, anticipating his friend’s remarks thirty years later : “The rawest, rawest of nerves were exposed in the early 1960s when I was young and the world was brand new. As I developed, I was able to go through that period that a young artist goes through where you just ‘kamikaze’ things. You can throw out anything, and you have nothing to lose. But after you become more mature you see that your work is going to move along and develop in a certain way that is not going to contain the freedom that it once had.”

Dean Inkster — A spirited end-of-year party at Marcel Duchamp’s Paris studio in Montmartre in 1907, which spilled over to the next day, saw neighbors complain about the noise. Duchamp’s landlord, having got wind of the affair, gave the twenty-year-old six-months’ notice, in accordance with French law. By October the following year, Duchamp had moved into new lodgings at 9 rue de l’Amiral-de-Joinville in the suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the western edge of Paris. With the distractions of Montmartre behind him, billiards being high among them, Duchamp embarked on what would clearly be his most formative years. Indeed, during this time he completed what he winsomely called his “swimming lessons”.

Until then, Duchamp’s public exposure had been limited to cartoons he peddled to satirical newspapers, which he continued to do during his first two years in Neuilly. As he later claimed : “I wasn’t living among painters, but rather cartoonists… I wasn’t in contact with painters at the time.” Among his commercial forays as a cartoonist, is a depiction of his new-found surroundings : a suburban wife and husband – the former pregnant, the latter pushing a baby carriage – share the same mournful demeanor, in contrast to the pun of the drawing’s otherwise anodyne title : Dimanches (Sundays). In this instance, it would appear that the humor of Duchamp’s double entendre – “dix manches” (ten erections) and its marital consequences – held little appeal for his potential patrons at Le Rire or Le Courrier français. Indeed, it went unpublished. Dimanches is significant in that it testifies to one of Duchamp’s early literary influences : its title echoes Jules Laforgue’s similarly titled poems of sabbatical gloom, and betokens a series of sketches from late 1911 that quote Laforgue, including one that prefigures the Nude Descending a Staircase, inscribed with the title of the poet’s caustic paean to the sun : “Encore à cet astre.”
Ironically, Duchamp, who otherwise embraced Laforgue’s praise of celibacy and bachelordom (at least in theory), would soon see his suburban joke backfire : the following year, he begot a daughter with his neighbor and lover, Jeanne Serre, who was then working as an artist’s model. Born Yvonne Serre, Duchamp’s only offspring discovered her true progenitor in adult life, by which time she had unknowingly followed her father’s artistic lead. In 1966, Duchamp, having first met her six years earlier, helped organize an exhibition of her work at the Bodley Gallery in New York. Duchamp suggested the title, Peinture d’ameublement after their mutual interest in the composer Erik Satie. By then Yvonne was exhibiting under her married name Yo Savy, which allowed Duchamp, writing in the preface to the accompanying catalog, to pun on Savy, Satie, and Duchamp’s female allonym Rrose Sélavy.

While in Neuilly, Duchamp discovered another literary influence, one that would ultimately eclipse Lafargue and heighten his interest in wordplay and verbal games, Raymond Roussel, whose theatrical adaption of Impressions of Africa Duchamp saw in the company of Guillaume Apollinaire, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia and Francis Picabia in May 1912. Duchamp would later claim Roussel as the chief inspiration for his Large Glass, the first mechanical drawings which Duchamp completed just before leaving Neuilly in the fall of 1913. By the time of Roussel’s influence, Duchamp’s company had shifted, as attested by his newfound and henceforth lasting friendship with Picabia. Buffet-Picabia would later recall Duchamp’s “almost romantic timidity” – not least of all, his tendency to “enclose himself in the solitude of his studio in Neuilly.” That shyness would soon be sublimated in Duchamp’s romantic interest in Buffet-Picabia, while Picabia’s artistic irreverence and general aplomb would rub off, to indelible effect, on his younger friend.
Duchamp’s shift in allegiances from cartooning to art was also in large part due to his brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, who held more auspicious Sunday events than that of Duchamp’s previous parody of suburban life. Known as the “Puteaux Sundays” they brought together the two brothers’ Cubist peers in their studio in Puteaux, not far from Neuilly, for heady discussions that ranged from recent developments in science and mathematics to Marey and Muybridge’s experiments in chronophotography (those gathered included Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, and Sonia and Robert Delaunay, along with critics André Salmon and Apollinaire and neighboring artist František Kupka). A short walk away, Duchamp would no doubt cross the Seine via the site of Georges Seurat’s canonical A Sunday on the Grande Jatte. A rival to Roussel’s influence, Seurat was, as Duchamp later claimed, “the only man in the past whom I really respected”. That Duchamp admired Seurat for not letting “his hand interfere with his mind” is a clear sign of what he inherited from the Sunday discussions in Puteaux. In 1912, Duchamp famously resisted Gleizes and Metzinger’s insistence that he change what they perceived as the impudent title to his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2  ; he preferred to withdraw it from the Cubist group show at the Salon des Indépendants than cede to their demand. Yet he fully embraced, albeit in his own way, their disdain for an art in which “the retina predominates over the brain”, as they announced that year in their tract Du Cubisme. Unbeknown to its early viewers, including his Cubist peers, his descending nude’s irreverence extended beyond the title – and, indeed, the nude – to the staircase itself. After all, the set of stairs Duchamp initially had in mind were inspired by musical comedy. Was he thinking of Gaby Deslys, then the reigning diva of French music hall ? In 1912, Deslys became a cause célèbre across the English channel for her scantily dressed dance down a flight of stairs in À la Carte, and would, like Duchamp, receive acclaim across the Atlantic the following year.

In the fall of 1913, Duchamp returned to Paris, where he had recently found part-time work as an assistant librarian at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. By “taking an intellectual position, as opposed to the manual servitude of the artist,” as he described his day job, he had not only taken one of the many subjects of the Sunday debates among the Puteaux group to heart, but in so doing he immersed himself in activities that, although facilitated by his previous five years of “swimming lessons”, henceforth went well beyond the purview of his peers : the Bicycle Wheel, the Standard Stoppages, and the first written notations and full-scale mechanical drawing for The Large Glass all date from the months following his return to Paris and are all marked in one way or another by the discussions in Puteaux. Yet it was not in Neuilly itself that Duchamp would determine to swim on his own. In 1912, a four-and-a-half month sojourn in Munich would prove decisive, and lead not only to his last major foray into painting, but also to what Duchamp later described as his “complete liberation”, one that would ironically take the form of a marriage, albeit behind glass.
A decade later, Duchamp’s nondescript visiting card from Neuilly (he would return to settle there at the end of his life), had given way to a fully-fledged, albeit whimsical, business card :

Throughout the rest of his life, Duchamp would repeatedly toy with the world of goods and services – everything from salt seller (marchand du sel) to mere breather (respirateur). Yet the latter, along with his early swimming lessons, made him ultimately apt for the role of lifeguard. Or as Robert Lebel put it in 1959, “It is typical of Duchamp that the least effort is enough to prevent his ever being forgotten. He lets others do the work, and he inspires others rather than acts himself. That is why, in the fullest sense of the word, he is a ringleader. For thirty years his works have been mere visiting cards which he casually leaves here and there to remind us of his watchful presence.”

Ivan Ristić — Visiting cards like the one shown here were widely used back in 1914. Egon Schiele was only twenty-four, but no longer a newcomer to the scene by any means. And his works were being shown outside
the Austro-Hungarian monarchy for the first time, in Rome, Brussels and Paris. Yearning to move to Paris, he solicited wealthy acquaintances for financial support – but to no avail. Encouraged by writer and art critic Arthur Roessler, he took lessons in woodcarving and etching techniques ; after all, the production of multiple originals could prove remunerative. At first, Schiele did not have to worry about the outbreak of war in July 1914: called in for a physical twice, he was twice declared unfit for active duty. He was not conscripted till the summer of 1915, though soon assigned to a clerical job in a POW camp for Russian officers.
Schiele was at a crossroads in his private life in late 1914, when he began making overtures to both daughters of his neighbor Johann Harms, a respected master locksmith. Schiele saw his chance, as he later told Arthur Roessler, to marry “most advantageously” (postcard from Schiele to Arthur Roessler, postmarked February 16, 1915, Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, Vienna). In other words, befitting his social standing, for he was and would remain a bourgeois, however shocking the transgressive elements – which actually make for the depth – of his paintings. Wally Neuzil, his devoted muse and girlfriend since 1911, had no pedigree to offer : of humble origins, she eked out a meager livelihood modeling for painters from the age of sixteen – an occupation usually equated with prostitution at the time. Schiele held off for a while before breaking with her for good, which only made the breakup all the more painful for both of them.

Schiele, the great melancholic and rebel, was also an art manager who forged networks, planned to set up art societies, and liked to go out. This latter penchant is attested by the visiting cards made by Roessler, for instance, on which Schiele would sketch, in densely penciled lines smudged with his fingers, profiles of fur-capped women in smoky Viennese cafés. Schiele also used his cards for personal correspondence, penning missives on the back. The name printed in boldface on the front serves as an ersatz for his signature – and occasionally a cry for help : he was in particularly dire straits in late December 1913 when he beseeched his collector, Franz Hauer, for an advance on an unfinished painting. He would be much obliged to Hauer for 100 kronen up front, he wrote in his extravagant Gothic hand, for he had to “pay for some real necessities and just couldn’t get people off [his] back” (Schiele’s visiting card bearing a note to Franz Hauer, December 26, 1913, Albertina, Vienna). In June 1914 the impecunious painter wrote to Hauer again on his visiting card, this time asking to borrow one of his own pictures that was already in Hauer’s possession and generously offering to furnish a replacement for the duration of the loan. He also told Hauer to give the picture to the carter unframed, it would not get damaged in transit (Schiele’s visiting card bearing a note to Franz Hauer, June 2, 1914, Leopold Museum, Vienna). On that card, as on the one inserted in this book, the name is printed in a sober and softer sans-serif typeface than the sharp-edged letters on most of Schiele’s other cards. It is a far cry at any rate from the painter’s emblematic signature, which often seems to burst the narrow confines of the picture’s rectangular frame. This signature – a miniature artwork in and of itself that calls to mind a Japanese stamp – was reserved for the canvas.

Anaël Lejeune — Conceptual art, you say? Oh, you’ll readily understand. In mid-1960s New York, more or less when Adrian Piper entered the School of Visual Arts, contemporary artistic production was largely determined by the opinions (either pro or contra) of a handful of particularly influential art critics. Believing one could trust to the course of the history of painting, which, since the mid-20th century, had led, among other things, to the exclusion of representation and to an ever-greater economy of form (a trend whose most extreme refinement was exemplified by the New York School), the critics contended that all modern art was animated by a self-critical movement committing it to the exploration and revelation of the irreducible properties of its medium. Hence the hypothesis advanced by those same critics that the best paintings – or, generally speaking, the best works of art of any kind – were a “cognitive enterprise” aiming to further knowledge of art itself and of the standards and conventions that govern its workings. The persuasive power of the argument was such that not even minimalist art, although born of a fierce opposition to this theoretical stance, could elude this paradigm shift: the visual poverty of the impressive geometric volumes proposed by artists of this persuasion, such as Sol LeWitt’s structures, for example, promptly turned attention away from the objects themselves and towards the ways in which they appeared and were displayed – a reflection, in other words, on their own conditions of existence as objects of viewing, hence a cognitive enterprise. By this token, a work of art could with good reason be construed as a proposition which, whatever its visual effect, was nonetheless in keeping with every articulated statement or commentary about its content or nature. It became a tool of knowledge. Soon enough, moreover, some could even deem the phase of actual realization of the work superfluous, verbalizing it would suffice (on a business card, for example). Sol LeWitt, once again, who played a pivotal part throughout this story, wrote: “Ideas alone can be works of art ; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.” (Sol LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art”, 0-9, 1969).

So what did Adrian Piper have to do with all this ? Well, Sol LeWitt was her next-door neighbor at 32 (if I’m not mistaken) Hester Street on the Lower East Side. Not only that, but her friend and mentor. He’s the one who introduced her at the time to most of the avant-garde artists, including Carl Andre and Joseph Kosuth. Most importantly, she borrowed the vocabulary of her first works from him, subordinating the visual register to logical systems, diagrams and cards. In keeping with the nature of the material she handled, Piper showed a marked interest in space and time. At Kosuth’s request, she even wrote a brief essay setting forth her ideas on the subject. One of her friends, a philosophy student, read it and suggested she might want to read Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s critique was to stay with her for good, as was philosophy, which was to become her profession.
— Why the Critique of Pure Reason ?
— It contains the idea (which I relate roughly in Piper’s own paraphrase) that the ways in which a subject knows things are determined by the conditions in which she is able to access them in space and time. It is these conditions of perception and intuition, specific to each subject, that ground the objectivity in which she holds things. So, from an epistemological point of view, one might say that Kant’s lesson is that reason cannot exceed the limitations of what is given in experience. From an artistic point of view, the lesson Piper draws from the critique is roughly as follows : it is the subject, first and foremost, in her perceptual and cognitive specificity, who determines the modalities of the appearance of the world.
— Why “the subject herself, first and foremost” ?
— For an easily understandable reason having to do with the artist’s gender and ethnic origins. Adrian Piper is an Afro-American woman. Which, in the art world at the time, was quite unique. And yet Piper possesses a very fair complexion as well as an adolescent physique which, if she dresses and wears her hair accordingly, enables her to pass easily for a man.
When the Vietnam War spread to Cambodia and the Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed students at Kent State University protesting against the new US military invasion of Cambodia, Piper set out to gauge her own body’s political power. She decided to turn her body into a work of art (an alter ego she would refer to some years later as the “Mythic Being”). Profiting from the fact that her complexion and figure transgressed the categories of gender and race and that her mere physical presence consequently introduced a heterogeneous element, she availed herself of her body as a tool to challenge, upset and subvert the social, cultural and political workings of the art world (and more generally of American society as a whole). Strolling down the streets of Manhattan in a T-shirt spotted with fresh paint, dancing at a bus stop or blowing outsized bubbles with her bubble gum on the subway, she drew the gaze of onlookers, whose reactions reveal the cultural tropes and underpinnings of society (cf. her performance series aptly titled Catalysis, 1971). Among these previously unexamined underpinnings, she targeted one phenomenon in particular : racism, which tends to be publicly expressed only in the absence of any members of the community derided and discriminated against. Having gone undetected like an undercover agent who has infiltrated the enemy camp, and having witnessed an expression of primitive forms of racism, Piper would then reveal her racial identity by handing her card to the jeerers : “My Calling (Card) #1 : A Reactive Guerrilla Performance for Dinners and Cocktail Parties.”

Klaus-Peter Speidel — This book reproduces two different calling cards by Adrian Piper: a white card and a brown card, both developed for a specific recurring situation. This white card was created as a reaction to men’s presumption that she is available for them to talk to simply because she is alone.
These cards use a “passive-aggressive” approach. They are passive because of their polite language and the discretion and silence of the card format itself. This avoidance of an overt – and more public – verbal confrontation implies that such behavior is not worthy of discussion and denies the “perpetrator” the possibility of responding. Both of which could, in fact, be perceived as aggressive. Furthermore, by helping to avoid a direct, verbal exchange, the card allows Piper – or whoever else chooses to use it – to keep to herself and avoid engaging in situations she would rather not to engage in, which the card itself states she has a right to do. Philosophical considerations may be responsible for this choice of format: the silent, discreet card. Philosophers are trained to avoid contradiction: handing out a card that states a desire not to speak to someone avoids the contradiction that would arise if you had to speak to let the other person know.
To receive a card with such polished, polite language that starts with the words “Dear friend…” in response to behavior that could be considered harassment may be a source of added shame for the recipient on two counts. First, the stark contrast between the perpetrator’s intrusive behavior and the respectful politeness of the person handing out the card. Second, the fact that this is a printed, and therefore “mass-produced”, card shows that the behavior being pointed out is not a one-off but a fairly regular occurrence.
This card’s message still seems relevant today. Women who go to bars alone are still often perceived as looking for company, or when walking the streets are seen as fair game for comments and wolf-whistles. It is the idea that unaccompanied women are somehow available. Interestingly, a recent campaign to address issues faced by women who experience street harassment used Piper’s calling card idea. These so-called “Red Cards” are printed with different messages for responding to different types of harassment. One card, designed by Girl World Chicago, reads: “Your ‘compliments’ are creepy! If it’s unwanted, it’s harassment. I do not walk down the street for you.” At moment when this article was first written, cards could be downloaded from stopstreetharassment.org and cardsagainstharassment.com.