ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a transhistorical view of a poetics of humility, of the low, of detritus and of the ruin, chiefly associated with an ethical postwar writing and painting degree zero, and with the origins of arte povera. Extending the program for a putative “Lazarean art” of impoverishment and disorientation, originally formulated by Jean Cayrol in the context of the postwar intellectual debates around the representation of the experience of the camps (see Silverman & Pollock, Concentrationary Art, 2019), the chapter traces a lineage of literary and art works that stage a preoccupation with detritus, especially in the form of cultural, literary/pictorial quotations used as non-recuperable waste, riddled with holes—an art and literature that treats its own material as waste. The chapter argues that this art breaks with the valorizing of the fragment that amounts to a “consolation of good forms” (Lyotard) in modernism, and implicitly, to an aesthetic recuperation of disaster. Instead, this “Lazarean” art and literature adopts an aesthetic and ethical approach of “salvage” (cf. Bates, Beckett’s Art of Salvage); it displays stark gaps, ruined textual/pictorial surfaces, non-knowing; its materials are often discards and its figures assimilated to waste; it thematizes finitude, often deliberately exposing its own material surface to the ravages of time. In that sense, it can also be treated as a specific form of postmodernism—in the sense given by Lyotard—that refuses the sense of unity of form, however precarious and nostalgic, that is still preserved in “core” modernism.
The body of work considered includes Beckett’s essays and prose works from the 1940s and early 1950s, together with Imre Kertész’s drafts for Fatelessness, and the aborted project of the novel “I, the Executioner,” fragments of which would be incorporated into Fiasco. These works share a destabilization of authorship, of received forms, and a complementary treatment of their own material as discards. The chapter examines these texts in parallel with a poetics of impoverishment in the 1940s–1950s collages of Alberto Burri, in the installations of Mario Merz, as well as in the work of contemporary artists El Anatsui and William Kentridge (the frieze Trionfi e Lamenti, Rome, 2016).
