ABSTRACT

One of the most arresting works in Max Ernst’s oeuvre is a photomontage of late 1920 titled Die chinesische Nachtigall (The Chinese Nightingale) [Fig. 8.1]. A composite figure with a massive, conical head, a fanlike headdress, a single wide-open eye, raised arms, and the elegantly tapered lower anatomy of a bird lies supine, viewed from above in a grassy field, her bare, distinctly female arms flailing in a helpless and desperate gesture as though protecting herself from imminent threat from above. Ernst, then living in Cologne, sent the original photomontage of this motif to Tristan Tzara in Paris for reproduction in his imminent publication Dadaglobe, accompanied by a full caption that provided the title and identified the work, erroneously, as a “sculpture.”1 The caption provided detailed information about the “sculpture’s” alleged medium:

8 different types of plumage along with 2 sectional views, one white one colored 3 speckled robes made out of amazon skin tunic from the finest litmus paper

Its mode of display:

a on a pedestal b in a jumping glass cage, slightly more expensive

And its dimensions:

Height: 3.10 meters; width 2.25 meters

The caption is misleading from beginning to end. It refuses to supplement the image with facts about the class and physical attributes of the object represented. A traditional caption would bridge the epistemological divide between the

physical object-in-the-world and its miniaturized, two-dimensional, black-andwhite reproduction on the printed page. It would provide clarification and elucidation, “a surfeit of written information” in Rosalind Krauss’s words, deemed necessary to supplement the “depleted power” of the visual sign.2 Ernst’s legend, by contrast, probes this divide between the photographic signifier and what is signified, presenting the fiction of a monumental, three-dimensional sculpture that never, in fact, existed as such in the world. His text constitutes instead a deliberate act of trickery and deceit, of subterfuge within an established system of signification. Modeled and three-dimensional, the object pictured resembles a sculpture, but at the same moment that this description begins to take hold, it dislodges. There is a headdress but no “plumage”; there are “robes,” but they are not speckled. As a convincing falsehood, Ernst’s system is porous, far from airtight. Whether the flaw is in the caption or in the image is unclear. But what is evident is that there is a gap, a chasm, between the two. The relationship between image and caption has been pried open, rendered unreliable. Deception, for Ernst, was not an end in itself but a means towards a state of semiological instability and epistemological uncertainty. For a brief but crucial moment, Ernst, first and foremost a painter, focused his critical powers on the referential authority of photography.