Agnieszka Kurant crouches on the floor of her bedroom studio in New York, where she unfurls what looks, at a glance, like a run-of-the-mill world map. In place of the seven continents, however, it shows a collection of so-called “phantom territories”: nonexistent islands that appeared on various maps as late as the 1940s. Some were invented to score additional funding for colonial trips; others were cartographic homages to a family name or simply mirages spotted by travelers. “For this piece,” Kurant explains, “I work a lot with a crossover of alchemy and magic. I work, for example, with pigments that appear and disappear depending on the weather.” To speed up a process that would usually take several hours—heat from bodies in the gallery changing the temperature by a crucial few degrees—she runs a space heater over the surface of the work, the shift causing the territories to fade away, so that only their names remain.
Map of Phantom Islands is among the works the Polish conceptual artist will show in “Exformation,” her solo exhibition at SculptureCenter in New York. The vanishing map offers a neat introduction to the notion of phantom capital, an idea that drives much of her practice. Phantom capital, to Kurant, is “a certain redundant surplus, unused areas of matter—debts that can be capitalized on and very often are.” While the imagined borders of the phantom states dissolve, rendering them invisible, they remain significant in that they shape lived reality. “Even though none of them exists, some of these islands almost led to real wars, or at least to real political conflicts,” she says.
A centerpiece of “Exformation” is the newly commissioned film project Cutaways, which follows a similar logic of making tangible these invisible presences. In collaboration with Oscar-winning film editor Walter Murch (The Godfather: Part II, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient), Kurant researched characters who had been cut out of feature films altogether after footage was shot, for reasons varying from the aesthetic to the practical. She ultimately selected a character apiece from Stanley Kubrick’s The Conversation, Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point, and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, and, working with artist John Menick and writer Manuel Cirauqui, wrote a script positing an interaction among the three. The actors who originally played the cut roles—Charlotte Rampling, Abe Vigoda, and Dick Miller—agreed to reprise their characters, who will, appropriately, meet in a junkyard.
“On the one hand, it related to my interest in immaterial labor and how people are uncredited for things,” she says. “Complexity science talks about the phenomenon of the silent hero or silent evidence. It’s all of the people who are absolutely necessary—they need to exist in order for one person to get credit for something. And on the other hand, it’s about the notion of a new potentiality. What could have happened if some of these characters actually were in the film? They would probably change its perception and meaning.”
For Cutaways, pieces of dialogue written for each character and subsequently cut are culled from the original films’ scripts. Adds Kurant, “I’m really interested in this kind of hybrid situation of authorship, that these characters were invented by someone else—by different authors. And the dialogue lines are also written by someone else.” It’s a common theme in her practice: For Phantom Library, 2011, she enlisted graphic designers to create the spines for fictional books mentioned in novels; for the shortwave-radio piece 103.1 (title variable), she draws heavily from a Heinrich Böll story, using as well the assistance of a programmer and a team of sound editors. These credited collaborations further hybridize or even destabilize the status of authorship in her work.
The role of editing in Cutaways, in addition to that of authorship, further colors her examination of the function of phantom capital in the realm of cultural production. “I’m interested in editing as a political and intellectual tool, a very basic political tool that is available and that exists in everyone’s lives,” Kurant says. Editors, as she points out, are often themselves phantoms: “Quite frankly, I’m surprised that Hans Ulrich Obrist hasn’t interviewed Murch yet,” she says, “because he talks about editing almost like proto-curating. It’s about the political choices that you make, and about the rhythm and the music. It’s an invisible art.” Skilled editors, she notes, see characters who have been left out, “not visually but in terms of some kind of trace,” lending a magical layer to an otherwise pragmatic practice.
The process of illuminating the invisible generates what she describes as “an alternative economy, an anti-matter of an economy,” produced in tension with the history of conceptual art and capitalism. “I always found the legacy of conceptual art interesting, where actual dematerialization was just a promise that was never fulfilled,” Kurant explains. “Whereas in a way, late capitalism is realizing the dream of the dematerialization of an object. I feel that there are so many things in the contemporary economy and politics that are almost like readymade conceptual work, so I’m interested in excavating this and bringing it to the light.”
This article appears in the November 2013 issue of Modern Painters.
