CEAL FLOYER // 'Just Like That'
by Jeremy Millar
published by Ikon Gallery, Birmingham UK, January 2001

“A woman walks into a bar, goes up to the barman, and asks him for a double entendre. So he gives her one.” as told by Ceal Floyer

Ceal Floyer’s work often seems like a joke, funnily enough. At first we may simply recognise a classically minimalist aesthetic, itself simple, elegant, perhaps somewhat dry; it may not coincide with our idea of the humourous, which often seems dependent upon a certain excess. Perhaps they resemble a form of pun, then, rather than jokes as such, a playing with words, with their materiality, where the pleasure lies in the play itself rather than a punch-line resolution. It seems clear, I think, that word-play is central to Floyer’s work, as both a generative and an interpretative force (although maybe we shouldn’t emphasise the before-and-after of so circular a working process). Let us take one of Floyer’s more well-known works as an example.

Light Switch (1992) consists of a 35mm projection (that is, an image projected from a 35mm slide) upon a wall in a somewhat darkened room; also listed as part of the work is the plinth upon which the projector sits. The image projected upon the wall, near the door, is of a standard light switch. Of course, it is also a switch made of light, the title’s other meaning. Indeed, to the list of materials which make up this work perhaps we should add the title itself, as this too is material from which the work is made. Indeed, it is the title, and the inherent ambiguity of the words of which it consists, which to a large extent determines the form of the work, which has given the circumstances in which the work might come about. The words do not simply name what is there (as if that is ever simple) but actually enable what is there to be there. It is the space for play within the words (‘tropological space’ Foucault called it) which allows the space for play between the image and that of which it is an image. The words make pictures.

I think that we might recognise a similar process echoed in the work of another artist, that of Raymond Roussel. That Floyer has never, to my knowledge, acknowledged Roussel as an influence is not surprising, given his relative obscurity in the English-speaking world (he is hardly famous in France, where at least the wordplay is in its original language). However, that does not mean that his influence has not found its way into her work by other means. Perhaps the most important artist (certainly in this context) who has acknowledged his debt to Roussel is Marcel Duchamp. 'It was fundamentally Roussel who was responsible for my glass, La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even 1915-23)’ he commented in a 1946 interview. ‘Roussel showed me the way.’1 The wordplay of Roussel echoes throughout Duchamp's work, especially his Large Glass (indeed, any serious understanding of Duchamp's work is impossible without reference to Roussel). No doubt it also influenced Duchamp's own ‘morceaux moisis’, or ‘wrotten writtens’, such as the name of his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy (Eros, C’est la vie, a phrase which he appropriated from Robert Desnos, himself an ardent supporter of Roussel), 'Abominable abdominal furs', or the title of his 1926 collaborative film Anémic Cinéma, all of which might themselves be subject to Floyer's notion of 'opening up a can of words’. 2 Indeed, Michel Foucault’s comments upon Roussel’s work might usefully apply to Duchamp and Floyer also:

‘In the reading, his works promise nothing. There’s only an inner awareness that by reading the words, so smooth and aligned, we are exposed to the allayed danger of reading other words which are both different and the same. His work as a whole à systematically imposes a formless anxiety, diverging and yet centrifugal, directed not towards the most withheld secrets but toward the imitation and the transmutation of the most visible forms: each word at the same time energized and drained, filled and emptied by the possibility of there being yet another meaning, this one or that one, or neither one nor the other, but a third, or none.’ 3

The importance, more generally, of Duchamp’s work to any contemporary conceptual practice, such as Floyer’s, need hardly be stated (although it could hardly be overstated).

Raymond Roussel was born in Paris in 1877, the son of an extremely wealthy stockbroker and property speculator. At the age of nineteen he underwent an intense psychological crisis, which he later described to the eminent psychologist (and teacher of Jung) Pierre Janet who was treating him:

‘You feel something special when creating a masterpiece, that you are a prodigy… I was the equal of Dante and Shakespeare... Everything I wrote was surrounded in rays of light; I would close the curtains for fear the shining rays that were emanating from my pen would escape through the smallest chink; I wanted to throw back the screen and suddenly light up the world.’ 4

The book which Roussel was writing at the time, La Doublure (1897), is a super-realist 5,600 line poem of the failings of a theatrical understudy, who when called to take the stage fumbles his actions and fluffs his lines. Alain Robbe-Grillet, the primary writer and theorist of the nouveau roman in the 1950s, wrote of the unsettling descriptive methods of Roussel’s work (and perhaps we might let these words echo around our heads after we have finished reading them, as we look at Floyer’s works):

‘Empty enigmas, time standing still, signs that refuse to be significant, gigantic enlargements of minute details, tales that turn in on themselves, we are in a flat and discontinuous universe where everything refers only to itself. A universe of fixity, of repetition, of absolute clarity, which enchants and discourages the explorer….’ 5

Roussel published the work at his own expense and received only two reviews. The first described it as ‘more or less unintelligible’, the second ‘very boring’. As Roussel himself remarked, the book ‘plummeted to earth from the prodigious heights of glory’. The author scarcely recovered from the fall.

The book which would help confirm Roussel’s status as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century was a work about his own works. Published two years after the author’s death (by his own hand, in a hotel in Palermo in 1933) Comment j’ai é'crit certains de mes livres (How I Wrote Certain of my Books) sets out the various methods and procedures by which the author created the extraordinary scenes in works such as his novels Impressions d’Afrique (Impressions of Africa, 1910) and Locus Solus (1914), and the incredible complexity of his poem Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique (New Impressions of Africa, 1932). ‘I have always intended to explain the way in which I wrote certain of my books’, he writes at the beginning. ‘It involved a very special method [procédé]. And it seems to me that it is my duty to reveal this method, for I have the sense that writers in the future may perhaps be able to exploit it fruitfully.’ 6

As in Floyer’s work, it is the pun which lies at the heart of Roussel’s creative process. He provides a famous example of his procédé from the story ‘Parmi les Noirs’, written when the author was in his early twenties. Like other stories written at around the same time, such as ‘Chiquenaude’ and ‘Nanon’, ‘Parmi les Noirs’ begins and ends with phrases which are identical except for a single letter; however, each main word has a different meaning from its mirror image at the other end of the work. So, ‘Parmi les Noirs’ begins: ‘Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard’ (The letters [as of the alphabet] in white [chalk] on the cushions of the old billiard table), and finishes: ‘les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard’ (the letters [correspondence] sent by the white man about the hordes of the old plunderer). As Roussel remarked, with these two phrases found, it was then a question of writing the narrative which would bring them together.

The procédé was developed to create yet more bizarre effects, as words, even syllables, were split and reflected darkly, simple phrases becoming metamorphosised into a whalebone statue which moves along rails made of calves’ marrow, or the aerial pile-driver which creates a mosaic from human teeth. All written images and objects are, literally, made from words; however, with Roussel, they are only made possible through words, can only exist in the space which words create.

Floyer’s work also raises some important - and related - points regarding the notion of imitation within art. As a concept it is familiar to most people, whatever their familiarity with Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Poetics. We look through art, as if through a transparent pane of glass, onto the thing itself, the ‘goodness’ of the imitation dependent upon its likeness to that of which it is an imitation. So, thinking back to Light Switch, this would seem to qualify as a good imitation; it certainly looks like a light switch as opposed, say, to bowl of grapes or an Italian prince. Indeed, given the fact of its photographic reproduction it achieves a degree of verisimilitude which would have been almost inconceivable to the painters of Ancient Greece. However I think that we should consider it, and indeed a number of Floyer’s works, as something similar but different in a number of important ways, that is, as an impersonation.
It might be interesting to return to Roussel and Duchamp when considering the notion of artistic impersonation. Roussel, for example, was himself a skilled impersonator. Michel Leiris learned from Roussel’s companion Charlotte Dufrène that he ‘worked for seven years on each of his imitations, preparing them when he was alone, repeating phrases aloud to catch the exact intonation and copying gestures, and would end up achieving an absolute resemblance.’ 7 Indeed, it is certainly no accident that at the very end of Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres, just before he hopes for ‘a little posthumous fulfillment’, Roussel remarks, ‘I only really knew the feeling of success when I used to sing to my own piano accompaniment and, more especially, through numerous impersonations which I did of actors or of anyone else. But there, at least, my success was enormous and unanimous’.8 The writings, too, are full of impersonators, from the understudy in La Doublure to the boy Bob Bucharessas (bouche à ressasse: mouth to repeat) who performed, ironically enough, at the ‘gala of the Incomparables’ in Impressions d’Afrique:

‘With extraordinary accomplishment and talent, a miracle of precociousness, the charming infant began a series of imitations which he accompanied with expressive gestures; the different sounds of a train getting up speed, the cries of domestic animals, a saw grating on a free-stone, the sharp pop of a champagne cork, the gurgling of liquid as it is poured out of a bottle, the fanfare of hunting horns, a violin solo and the plaintive notes of a cello, all these comprised an astounding repertoire which, to anyone who shut his eyes for a moment, afforded a complete illusion of reality.’ 9

The trans-gendered impersonations within Impressions d’Afrique, of Carmichaël, who sings with a woman’s voice, and of the king Talou, who insists on being taught to sing in the same style and performs at the gala in a wig of blond curls and a plunging blue dress, would no doubt no doubt have interested Duchamp, with his bearded Mona Lisa and his female alter ego Rrose Sélavy (under whose name many of his puns were published, many playing with the shift between masculine and feminine nouns in French). I have chosen these examples because, in their exaggerated forms, they perhaps make it easier to recognise the impersonation within Floyer’s work. Although the examples just mentioned consist of men dressing as women, we would consider them less transvestites than female impersonators, the reason being, perhaps, that a transvestite would have us believe that he is actually a woman whereas a female impersonator plays on our understanding that this is a man pretending to be a woman (indeed, if we really believed that he was a woman, then the act would have in some important sense failed). Similarly, the sound of a train gathering speed is of less interest if we think that it is coming from a train rather than from the mouth of a four year old boy. The pleasure of impersonations derives from the fact that something is not what it is pretending to be, although it bears an obvious similarity to it.
So, perhaps we should think of the light switch in Floyer’s work as an impersonation rather than an imitation, which is why the means of its production are so obvious within the space, the projector sitting on a plinth right before it. There are many other examples amongst Floyer’s works: Carousel (1996), a record player which plays the sound of a slide projector moving through its carousel of slides, the circular movement in some ways mimicing it also; similarly, Glass (1997), a 7” clear vinyl record on which is recorded the tone produced by a finger moving around the rim of a glass. In this case, the stylus mimics the movement of the finger although once again there is no danger of it actually being mistaken for that original action. There’s Bucket (1999) too, which consists of a bucket in which is placed a CD player and loudspeaker, clearly visible. The sound which emerges is that of a water drop as it hits the bottom of such a bucket, and so we are tempted to believe that this is the case (I bet you look up at the ceiling above) despite the fact that we can see what is actually producing the sound. Everything is visible, nothing hidden.

‘The greater the accumulation of precise minutiae, of details of form and dimension, the more the object loses its depth. So this is an opacity without mystery, just as there is nothing behind the surfaces of a backcloth, no inside, no secret, no ulterior motive.’ 10

We can see this, also, in another work, Light (1994), a slide projection installation which consists, so we are told, of four 35mm metal mask slides, four projectors, and a matt white sprayed light bulb on disconnected flex. The bulb hangs from the ceiling, as one would expect, the projectors mounted upon the surrounding walls, equidistant to the bulb, at the corners of an imaginary square, each projecting their little bulb-shaped piece of light at the white-painted object hanging between them. And so it glows, this radiant light within a darkened room (like Roussel’s study perhaps, during his ‘crisis’?). But why is the room so dark if there hangs a light at its centre?

‘It was only natural that these contorted shapes and numerous mechanisms doing nothing gave rise to the idea of an enigma, a cypher, a secret. Surrounding this machinery and inside it, there is a persistent night through which one senses that it is hidden. But this night is a kind of sun without rays or space; its radiance is cut down to fit these shapes, constituting their very being, and not their opening to visibility: a self-sufficient and enclosed sun.’ 11

There is a trick, then we’re shown how it’s done. This is as true of Floyer’s work as it is of Roussel’s (who, after all, wrote that he’d always intended to explain how he’d created certain of his books). Roussel’s constructions might seem phantasmagorical, Floyer’s rather everyday in comparison, yet they seem to operate in a very similar way, in that the enjoyment we derive from them is dependent upon the play of impersonation and our role in recognising the deceit, such as it is:
‘Now this chain of extraordinarily complex, ingenious and far-fetched elucidations seems so ludicrous and so disappointing that it is as if the mystery were still intact. But from now on it is a cleansed, eviscerated mystery that has become unnameable. The opacity no longer hides anything. It’s like finding a locked drawer, and then a key, and the key opens the drawer impeccably à and the drawer is empty.’ 12

What is interesting with Light, and also Garbage Bag (1996), which consists of a black refuse bag, tied full of air, is that they are objects which are to some extent impersonating themselves, rather than another object. Indeed, what is the difference between two things, seemingly identical, but where one is impersonating itself? What would be the difference between an ordinary bin bag and Garbage Bag, for example? Or what of Floyer’s ‘Nail Biting’ performance at the Symphony Hall which takes place just before Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring? In appearing on stage, biting her nails, Floyer impersonates a nervous performer, although that doesn’t preclude the possibility of her actually being nervous. To approach such a question is dangerous. It is to ask what is the difference between art and non-art, and that is a question which has exercised a great many people over a great many years, and to no great effect. Let’s think about it by thinking around it.

In 1999 Floyer produced two photographic works, Half Empty and Half Full, works which are obviously related.13 In fact, they look identical, each showing what appears to be the same glass containing an amount of water which seems to occupy half its volume (obviously this is another of Floyer’s works where the form is suggested by the title, a picture made from words). As the works are not shown side by side it is impossible to compare their visual similarity, although we have been told that the prints have been made from two different negatives (and so are different in the strict sense which Leibniz might have insisted upon). Yet it would be impossible for us, the viewer in the gallery, to tell them apart, or rather, to say which was which, which was half full, and which was half empty. It depends on how you at it, is the response which the work seems to demand. What this work seems to suggest, therefore, is that two things which appear identical can have very different (in this case opposite) meanings.

We can find something similar in Jorge Luis Borges’ extraordinary story, ‘Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote’. A story which appears to be a work of literary criticism, ‘Pierre Menard…’ looks at a work by the eponymous author found amongst his papers after his death. 'This work, perhaps the most significant of our time, consists of the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of the first part of Don Quixote and a fragment of chapter twenty-two.’ This is not merely some modern updating, as Borges makes clear:

‘He did not want to compose another Quixote - which is easy - but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide - word for word and line for line - with those of Miguel de Cervantes. 14

It is only through immense hard work – ‘he multiplied draft upon draft, revised tenaciously and tore up thousands of manuscript pages’ - that Menard is able to make his slow progress. Yet despite the difficulties inherent on such a task.
‘Menards fragmentary Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes’. The latter, in a clumsy fashion, opposes to the fictions of chivalry the tawdry provincial reality of his country: Menard selects as his “reality” the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vega...
Cervantes’ text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say, but ambiguity is richness.)’ 15

Menard’s Quixote has no need of opposing the fictions of chivalry as Cervantes’ book had long since rendered them obsolete; similarly, Cervantes would not have considered his the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vega, as it was simply the age in which he lived, and it was certainly not the land of Carmen, a nineteenth-century literary creation. Although they share the same words, these identical texts perform very different tasks, respond to very different intentions. In exploring the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vega, Menard is also exploring the century of Cervantes, and of his Quixote. Reference to this earlier Quixote is part of what Menard’s work is about; logically, this cannot be the case for Cervantes’.

I think that we can consider Menard’s Quixote, then, of possessing a degree of self-consciousness which separates it from that which it impersonates, and I think that we can extend this notion to the works of Floyer which we have considered also. As we mentioned earlier, impersonation depends upon the awareness that impersonation is taking place (as opposed to illusionism or imitation, which depends upon it being hidden) and at the risk of anthropomorphising the artworks, there is an undoubted self-consciousness at work here. That Light is impersonating a standard lightbulb is part of the work, just as it is when Garbage Bag is impersonating a garbage bag, or Light Switch a light switch. This is something which a ‘real’ lightbulb, garbage bag or light switch - even within the same galleries - just couldn’t do.

This self-consciousness is equal to an awareness of their own materiality, the supposed transparency of mimetic representation made visible to itself and to us. Consider Light Bulb (Floor) (1996) for example, or Spot Light (Wall) (1998), which both consist of an ‘ordinary’ fitted and working lightbulb with a magnifying glass held just below it. The magnifying glass acts as a lens, projecting onto the floor, or wall, the manufacturer’s name and the bulb’s specification as it is printed on its surface, albeit reversed. ‘OSRAM’, we might then be able to work out, ‘60W’, or ‘PHILIPS’ or whatever. If we attempted to read the text upon the bulb itself, by looking directly at it, we would see nothing, or rather we would see too much, too much light. We would see the light, so to speak, and not the bulb. Through a simple action, Floyer allows us to see the transparency (and opacity) of the bulb itself, a seeming inversion. It is like the shift between transparency and opacity which occurs in Blind (1997) where, at first, we cannot see the (roller) blind against the window even though that is all there is to see, and only become aware of it when the faint outline of the window-frame appears behind as the material blows in the breeze. The classical ‘window onto the world’ which representation promised remains obscured; in becoming conscious of that which frames such a view, our ability to perceive is greatly improved. What we are looking at, to borrow a phrase from Arthur C Danto, is the ‘transfiguration of the commonplace’.16 It is art happening.

Ceal Floyer’s work looks simple; often it looks as if there is nothing to see (although as Duchamp pithily remarked, one can look at seeing). Yet, as we have seen, these works can lead us in important directions, allowing us to consider the nature of representation, or the difference between art and non-art. We can accept this challenge; or we can simply smile to ourselves, and appreciate their ‘rightness’ as artworks, however they happen.

Notes

1. Quoted in Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context ù Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p.51

2. A number of Duchamp’s puns are included in (eds.) Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973). Given that Floyer's ‘Nail Biting’ performance takes place just before Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, it is perhaps appropriate to include also the following, translated by Elmer Peterson:

Il faut dire:
La crasse du tympan, et non le Sacre du Printemps.

(One must say:
Grease of eardrum and not Rite of Spring.)

3 Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth ù The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. Charles Ruas, (London: Athlone Press, 1987), p.11

4 Dr. Pierre Janet, ‘The Psychological Characteristics of Ecstasy’ (1926), trans. John Harman, in (eds.) Alistair Brotchie et al, Atlas Anthology 4: Raymond Roussel ù Life, Death and Works (London: Atlas Press, 1987), p.39

5 Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘Énigmes et transparence chez Raymond Roussel’ (1963), trans. Barbara Wright as ‘Riddles and Transparencies in Raymond Roussel’, in ibid., p.104

6 Raymond Roussel, ‘Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres’ (c.1931), trans. Trevor Winkfield as ‘How I Wrote Certain of my Books’ in (ed. and trans). Trevor Winkfield, How I Wrote Certain of my Books (Boston: Exact Change, 1995), p.3

7 Quoted in Mark Ford, Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (London: Faber & Faber, 2000), p.96. The first major study of Roussel’s life and work in English, this book is recommended to anyone with an interest in Roussel or, indeed, the development of the avant-garde in the twentieth century.

8 How I Wrote Certain of my Books , p.28

9 Raymond Roussel, Impressions d’Afrique (1910) trans. Lindy Foord and Rayner Heppenstall as Impressions of Africa (London: John Calder, 1983), pp.32û3

10 ‘Riddles and Transparencies in Raymond Roussel’, p.101

11 Death and the Labyrinth - The World of Raymond Roussel, p.65

12 ‘Riddles and Transparencies in Raymond Roussel’, p.102

13 Of course, these works also have a relationship with a work by another artist, Michael Craig-Martin. In 1974, Craig-Martin exhibited An Oak Tree (1973) at the Rowan Gallery, London, a work which has become extremely important to British conceptualism, and around which one might usefully base a discussion of the imitation or impersonation of objects by other objects (although that is for some other time). To look at, the work consists of a glass shelf, supported high upon a wall by two chrome brackets, like an untouchable bathroom shelf. Upon the shelf sits a glass tumbler, which contains some water. A sheet of paper also within the gallery contains a ‘fake’ interrogation of the artist which goes some way to explaining the title of the work:

Q. To begin with could you describe this work?
A. Yes, of course. What I’ve done is change a glass of water into a full-grown oak tree without altering the accidents of the glass of water.
Q. The accidents?
A. Yes. The colour, feel, weight, size.
Q. Haven’t you simply called this glass of water an oak tree?
A. Absolutely not. It is not a glass of water anymore. I have changed its actual substance. It would no longer be accurate to call it a glass of water. One could call it anything one wished but that would not alter the fact that it is an oak tree…
Q. Do you consider that changing the glass of water into an oak tree constitutes an artwork?
A. Yes.

Quoted from Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 1998), p.248

14 Labyrinths (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), pp.65-6

15 Ibid., pp.68-9

16 Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). Danto’s book is a far more rigorous and intelligent exploration into the defining of ‘the work of art’ than I have been able to make in this essay (than I am able to make, period). Unsurprisingly, one of the many works which catches his attention is the fragmentary manuscript of M. Menard.