F A I
L U R
E
Documents of Contemporary Art
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Failure / edited by Lisa Le Feuvre MIT Press books may be purchased at special
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ISBN 978-0-262-51477-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street,
1. Failure (Psychology) in art. 2. Arts, Modern— Cambridge, MA 02142
20th century. 3. Arts, Modern—21st century.
I. Le Feuvre, Lisa.
NX650.F33F35 2010
709.04—dc22
2010006956
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Introduction//012
DISSATISFACTION AND REJECTION//022
IDEALISM AND DOUBT//066
ERROR AND INCOMPETENCE//114
EXPERIMENT AND PROGRESS//164
BiOGRAPHICAL NOTES//226
Bibliography//232
Index//235
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS//240
DISSATISFACTION AND REJECTION
Paul Barolsky The Fable of Failure in Modern Art,
1997//024
Dieter Roth Interview with Felicitas Thun, 1998//027
Abigail Solomon-Godeau The Rightness of Wrong,
1996//030
Sarah Thornton On John Baldessari, 2008//032
Stuart Morgan The Man Who Couldn’t Get Up:
Paul Thek, 1995//033
Ray Johnson On Another Throwaway Gesture
Performance (1979), 1984//038
Clive Gillman David Critchley: Pieces I Never Did
(1979), 2005//038
Marcus Verhagen There’s No Success Like Failure:
Martin Kippenberger, 2006//039
Merlin Carpenter I was an Assistant (to Kippenberger,
Büttner and Oehlen), 1990//043
Emma Dexter Authenticity and Failure: Luc Tuymans,
2004//047
Michael Wilson Just Pathetic, 2004//050
Mark Prince Feint Art: Martin Creed, Ceal Floyer,
Sergej Jensen, Michael Krebber, Paul Pfeiffer,
2003//052
Johanna Burton Rites of Silence: Wade Guyton,
2004//057
Daniel Birnbaum Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster:
De Novo, 2009//065
IDEALISM AND DOUBT
Paul Ricoeur Memory and Imagination, 2000//068
Søren Kierkegaard The Concept of Irony, 1841//072
Gilles Deleuze Bartleby, or The Formula, 1989//076
Giorgio Agamben Bartleby, or On Contingency,
1993//081
Paul Watzlawick On the Nonsense of Sense and
the Sense of Nonsense, 1995//084
Scott A. Sandage The Invention of Failure: Interview
with Sina Najafi and David Serlin, 2002//085
John Cage Anarchy, Poem I, 1988//089
Joseph Kosuth Exemplar: Felix Gonzalez-Torres,
1994//090
Renée Green Partially Buried. Version B: Reading
Script, 1999//094
Lotte Møller Failures: Annika Ström, 2008//102
Jennifer Higgie The Embarrassing Truth: Matthew
Brannon, 2008//103
International Necronautical Society Tate Declaration
on Inauthenticity, 2009//108
ERROR AND INCOMPETENCE
Joel Fisher Judgement and Purpose, 1987//116
Brian Dillon Eternal Return, 2003//122
Larry Bell Something caused one of the glass panels
to crack …, 1997//125
William Wegman Bad News, 1971//126
Chris Burden TV Hijack (1972), 1973//127
Chris Burden On Pearl Harbour (1971), 1990//128
Tacita Dean And He Fell into the Sea, 1996//129
Julian Schnabel Statement, 1978//131
Christy Lange Bound to Fail, 2005//131
Jörg Heiser All of a Sudden, 2008//137
Fischli & Weiss The Odd Couple: Interview with Jörg
Heiser, 2006//143
Fischli & Weiss How to Work Better, 1991//145
Richard Hylton The Moving World of Janette Paris,
2002//146
Heike Bollig and Barbara Buchmaier Holes in Our
Pants, 2007//151
Emma Cocker Over and Over, Again and Again,
2009//154
EXPERIMENT AND PROGRESS
Coosje van Bruggen Sounddance: Bruce Nauman,
1988//166
Yvonne Rainer Interview with Michaela Meise,
2008//169
Robert Smithson Conversation with Dennis Wheeler,
1969–70//171
Frances Stark For nobody knows himself, if he is only
himself and not also another one at the same time:
On Allen Ruppersberg, 2002//173
Karl Popper Unended Quest, 1974//177
Bazon Brock Cheerful and Heroic Failure, 2004//180
Jean-Yves Jouannais Prometheus’ Delay: Roman
Signer, 1995//182
Inés Katzenstein A Leap Backwards into the Future:
Paul Ramírez Jonas, 2004//184
Will Bradley The Village, 1997//190
Simon Patterson Manned Flight, 1999–//192
Harald Szeemann Failure as a Poetic Dimension,
2001//195
Russell Ferguson Politics of Rehearsal: Francis Alÿs,
2007//195
Hans-Joachim Müller Failure as a Form of Art,
2009//200
Edgar Schmitz Which Way to Heaven: Phil Collins,
2007//204
Lisa Lee Make Life Beautiful! The Diabolic in the Work
of Isa Genzken, 2007//209
Eduardo Abaroa, Sam Durant, Gabriela Jauregui,
Yoshua Okon, William Pope L. Thoughts on Failure,
Idealism and Art, 2008//215
Liam Gillick Transcript from Three Perspectives and
a Short Scenario, 2008//220
Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
1921//225
Lisa Le Feuvre
Introduction//Strive to Fail
Uncertainty and instability characterize these times. Nonetheless, success and
progress endure as a condition to strive for, even though there is little faith in
either. All individuals and societies know failure better than they might care to
admit – failed romance, failed careers, failed politics, failed humanity, failed
failures. Even if one sets out to fail, the possibility of success is never eradicated,
and failure once again is ushered in.
In the realm of art, though, failure has a different currency. Failure, by definition,
takes us beyond assumptions and what we think we know. Artists have long
turned their attention to the unrealizability of the quest for perfection, or the
open-endedness of experiment, using both dissatisfaction and error as means to
rethink how we understand our place in the world. The inevitable gap between
the intention and realization of an artwork makes failure impossible to avoid. This
very condition of art-making makes failure central to the complexities of artistic
practice and its resonance with the surrounding world. Through failure one has
the potential to stumble on the unexpected – a strategy also, of course, used to
different ends in the practice of scientists or business entrepreneurs. To strive to
fail is to go against the socially normalized drive towards ever increasing success.
In Samuel Beckett’s words: ‘To be an artist is to fail as no other dare fail.’1
This collection of writings investigates the ways that artists have used and
abused the idea of failure across a number of definitions and modes of address,
taking a journey through four imperatives: dissatisfaction and rejection; idealism
and doubt; error and incompetence; experiment and progress.
The first section, Dissatisfaction and Rejection, addresses claims on failure that
arise through discontentment with and refusal of the way things are, whether in
the artwork or the surrounding world. Failure is ever concerned with the artwork’s
place in the world and is tied to its twin, achievement – a relationship fed by
distinctions, fears and opportunities.2 The paradox of failure is that one cannot set
out to fail, because the evaluation process of success – as measured by failure –
becomes irrelevant. For Beckett, embracing failure offered the possibility of
refusing the primary drive of successful art in his time, expression – the concept
of which he viewed as a misconstruction at the core of our reception of art.
Although this book focuses on failure in recent art, it has been the source of a
productive and generative drive since at least the first stirrings of the modernist
era. The Parisian Salon des Refusés of 1863, for example, was an exhibition of
failures. At the time, the Salon was an ultimate site of artists’ validation; in 1863
12//INTRODUCTION
the Academicians rejected around 3,000 works that they felt challenged the
criteria and authority of the Academy of Fine Arts. The outcry at these exclusions,
which included works by Whistler and Manet, led to an alternative exhibition of
rejects alongside the official selection.3 Émile Zola included the event in his 1886
novel The Masterpiece, describing artists desperate to be removed from the
official selection to the Salon des Refusés, as the ‘failures’ were far more relevant
to their work than those approved by the academicians.4 For an artist to place a
work into the world is to lose control. What does refusal mean? Who are the
arbiters of taste? Failure here becomes a pivotal term, rejected by one group,
embraced by another.
When failure is released from being a judgemental term, and success deemed
overrated, the embrace of failure can become an act of bravery, of daring to go
beyond normal practices and enter a realm of not-knowing. In 1953 Robert
Rauschenberg proposed to Willem de Kooning his Erased de Kooning Drawing.
Confronted with the younger artist’s request de Kooning agreed, but he chose a
work he considered the most difficult to perform the act of erasure on. It took
around a month, and around fifteen different erasers, for the drawing to be pared
back to almost-white in a gesture of removal that broke with conventional art-
making. Dieter Roth’s experimental pushing of failure to its limits too enabled
him to view the work of preceding artists from a new perspective. In the late
1950s he began to take the view ‘that even Malevich’s black square resulted from
a feeling of failure. One always arrives at something one can no longer depict.’5
When the conventions of representation are no longer fit for purpose failure can
open new possibilities.
As the texts on works by artists such as David Critchley in the 1970s and
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster in the present make clear, one of the most crucial
areas where we can identify the endemic presence of failure in art-making
activity is in the gap between intention and realization.6 In the video work De
Novo (2009), Gonzalez-Foerster ruminates on the ways in which any possible
proposal, artistic or otherwise, is informed by the history and failures of all those
that might have gone before. She describes her past ideas as ‘black holes’ that
always seems unsatisfactory when realized. Critchley’s work Pieces I Never Did
likewise shows the artist talking to camera, where he describes eighteen
propositions for artworks, taking in performance, film, video, installation and
sculpture, each one never moving beyond notes in a sketchbook. Such is the
process of wrestling with ideas – self-censorship often defines a creative act as a
failure before it has been released into the unpredictable realm of the public.
In 2010 the artist Michael Landy filled the South London Gallery with a
dumpster-shaped vitrine measuring 600 cubic metres, forming out of
polycarbonate and steel a waste container for artworks. Anyone rightfully owning
Le Feuvre//Strive to Fail//13
a work of art could apply to use the disposal facility, with successful applicants
approved by Landy in a process that validated self-declared failures. On acceptance,
works were logged into an inventory, with provenance and details noted, and
then either immediately thrown in by their owners or carefully stored by white-
gloved art handlers to be disposed of later. Landy declared this sculpture a
'monument to creative failure'. In his autobiographical memoir Hand to Mouth: A
Chronicle of Early Failures (1997), the writer Paul Auster recalls one of the ruses he
devised to avoid deciding what to write: he dreamt up a literary prize for self-
nominated failures. He then reflects on the way this compulsion to sanctify failure
was an attempt to hide his own abject fear of what it might be.7 The judgement
involved in naming something a success or a failure is symptomatic of the time
and place, and contingent on the critical apparatus one uses to define it.8
To achieve resolution is to achieve a masterpiece - a work, in the classic
modernist formulation, where nothing can be improved, nothing added.9 Yet this
enterprise, in which the artist is creator of the ‘perfect’ artwork, is doomed to fail
from the start. Zola’s novel of 1886 followed from an earlier short story by Honoré
de Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece (1831), which narrates a failure of belief,
reputation and — that very crux of artistic practice — the failure of the artist’s
realization to meet an intention.10 Balzac describes an ageing painter working
tirelessly on a portrait of a past lover. The work is hidden from all until it will be
complete and perfect. Ever dissatisfied, the artist meticulously strives to make
his painting so realistic that it is indistinguishable from a living body. However,
when revealed, the pursuit of perfection has undone the representation, leaving
a ‘wall of paint’, with a single, perfect foot just visible amongst the mass of colour.
The master tries to justify the painting as an atmosphere rather than a depiction,
but ultimately, in this era of representational painting, he believes it to be a
failure, evidence of his lost mastery. Balzac’s account is of the gaps between
intention, expectation and realization.
John Baldessari advises his students: ‘Art comes out of failure. You have to try
things out. You can’t sit around, terrified of being incorrect, saying ‘I won’t do
anything until I do a masterpiece.'11 In Baldessari’s Wrong (1967) — a technically
‘wrong’ photographic composition, in which the artist stands in front of a palm
tree so it appears to sprout from his head — the aura of the compositionally ‘right’
image is disrupted so that – even though the new image perhaps replaces this
merely with an alternative aesthetic – with the break in representative
conventions, a pleasure in failure is introduced.12 Who has the right to claim the
wrongness of an image? What does it matter if a tree sprouts out of a head? This
is a turning away from the authority of what is deemed to be right. Assumptions
are where attention starts to waver: we can sometimes only become truly
attentive when something is indeed wrong.
14//INTRODUCTION
While speculative thought strives for ever-deepening levels of understanding
in the search for content, irony asks questions, not to receive an answer but to
draw out of content and form yet more questions. The philosopher Søren
Kierkegaard’s writings are suffused with paradox, choosing a series of endlessly
unfurling contradictions over definitive truth. The ironist deals with the how of
something being said rather than the what, paying a distanced attention to the
surface of statements so as to identify gaps in knowledge and productive
miscommunication. Where we embrace the irony of bad taste like the artist
Martin Kippenberger, deliberately turning away from technical skill, we distance
ourselves from the assumed natural order of things.
Kippenberger always seemed to push too hard or the wrong way, resulting in a
space of failure where he seemed more than happy to cast himself. His Metro-Net
project (1993–97), for example, set out to install a series of subway entrances
around the world that would lead to nowhere. The first was built on the Greek
island of Syros; another was designed as a mobile structure that was crushed on
the occasion of its exhibition at Metro Pictures in New York, simply so it could fit
through the door.13 As Ann Goldstein has written, Kippenberger ‘mastered the act
of failing not through his own incompetence, or even that of others, but through
a savvy and strategic application of the oppositional and incongruous.’14 Indeed,
in the face of failure, is there any point in striving for success, when there can be
an immersive warmth in being simply pathetic, in not trying. As Ralph Rugoff
claimed in his landmark group show ‘Just Pathetic’ (Los Angeles and New York,
1990), to turn away from ambition is a position: ‘To be pathetic I stop being a
loser, haplessly falling short of the idealized norm’, seeking no place in history,
turning instead to a desultory and indifferent claim on the present.15
The second section, Idealism and Doubt, considers how in the field of art these
polarities operate as productive engagements. If failure is endemic in the context
of creative acts, this opens the question not whether something is a failure, but
rather how that failure is harnessed. Indifference can offer a position of resistance
akin to the attitude of Herman Melville’s scribe in Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story
of Wall Street (1853), analysed in different ways by Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio
Agamben. Melville’s narrator, an elderly lawyer, describes his encounter with
Bartleby, a man who he chose to employ in his chambers on the basis of his
apparent constancy, which he believed would even out the inconsistencies of his
existing employees, one of whom was irascible in the morning, the other in the
afternoon, both moods adjusted by lunchtime drinking. However fast and
committed the scrivener is at his chores at the start of his employment, he very
quickly adopts a particular attitude of indifference, responding to questions and
requests with the simple phrase ‘I would prefer not to’, in an incessant passive
resistance to required and prescribed behaviours.
Le Feuvre//Strive to Fail//15
To take such a position is to be beyond redemption, to refuse either success of
failure, a position Lotte Møller discerns in the work of Annika Ström, and Jennifer
Higgie in the work of Matthew Brannon. As Leo Bersani and Ullyse Dutoit state
in Arts of Impoverishment, their study of Beckett, Mark Rothko and Alain Resnais:
‘Surely nothing can be more dangerous for an artist or for a critic than to be
obsessed with failure. “Dangerous” because the obsession we are speaking of is
not the coming anxiety about failing, but rather an anxiety about not failing.’16
Paradoxes are at the heart of all dealings with failure – it is a position to take, yet
one that cannot be striven for; it can be investigated, yet is too vague to be
defined. It is related but not analogous to error, doubt and irony.
Idealism, and its travelling companion doubt, is driven by a misplaced belief in
perfection – a concept setting an inaccurate route to what-might-have-been, to
the past, and even to perfection itself. Is there a method more pertinent than
perfection to the ways we understand our place in the world, and in which art
can complicate what we think we know? Think of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled
(Perfect Lovers) (1987–90), an identical pair of battery-operated wall clocks,
placed side by side, which inevitably will fail to keep the same time. The
‘perfection’ here lies in the failure of accuracy; anything else would be romantic
fiction. Like these out-of-sync clocks, human beings are all fallible; perhaps this
is most explicitly revealed to us in the ways that we understand the past through
memory and imagination. Here failure abounds. As Gonzalez-Torres demonstrated
in much of his work, photographic, or indexical, recollection will never be the
most truthful. In 1929 Walter Benjamin reflected on Marcel Proust’s unravelling
of perceptions through an engagement with the power of forgetting that is driven
by an endless methodological dissatisfaction: Proust’s typesetters record his
constant changing of texts, not to correct mistakes but rather to introduce
marginal notes, as if in a desperate attempt to remember everything.17 It is near
impossible to record every single thing and event in our lives – the task would be
as overwhelming as in Jorge Luis Borges' fable Funes the Memorious (1942).
The thinker Paul Ricoeur considered in detail the processes of memory and
recollection, noting that perfect memory, like Gonzalez-Torres’ Perfect Lovers, is
replete with both error and perfection. Ricoeur describes memory as always
being at the mercy of the powerful forces of distraction and influence from other
experiences held in the mind. ‘Pure’ memory is simply the act of recollection;
memory influenced by imagination is an engagement.18 This is demonstrated in
Renée Green’s return to the site of Robert Smithson’s work Partially Buried
Woodshed (1970): Green’s Partially Buried in Three Parts (1996–97) directly
addresses remembered and forgotten history. Her multipart installation
interweaves interviews with local residents, activists, her family members and
artists, about their imagined and actual memories of America in the 1970s. The
16//INTRODUCTION
charge in Green’s work is in the power of the failure to remember and in the
failure of the facts of events, specifically the anti-Vietnam protests at Kent State
University, to be written into history. As with Gonzalez-Foerster’s recollections,
the references build, to draw attention to the moments of forgetting and to the
ways in which recollection is a process clouded by mistake, misrepresentation,
failures of verisimilitude.
If perfection and idealism are satisfying, failure and doubt are engaging, driving
us into the unknown. When divorced from a defeatist, disappointed or
unsuccessful position, failure can be shifted away from being merely a category
of judgement. Section 3, Error and Incompetence, examines these two aspects of
failure as positions that can be taken up positively. Julian Schnabel, for example,
describes in this section his work as a ‘bouquet of mistakes’.19 Rather than
producing a space of mediocrity, failure becomes intrinsic to creating open
systems and raising searching questions: without the doubt that failure invites,
any situation becomes closed and in danger of becoming dogmatic. Art-making
can be characterized as an activity where doubt lies in wait at every turn and
where failing is not always unacceptable conduct. As the artists Fischli and Weiss
note of their video The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge, 1987), in which an
assembly of mundane everyday objects and pieces of garbage perform a hilarious
set of chain reactions: ‘For us, while we were making the piece, it was funnier
when it failed, when it didn’t work. When it worked, that was more about
satisfaction.’20 After all, if an artist were to make the perfect work there would be
no need to make another. Emma Cocker describes in her text ‘Over and Over.
Again and Again’ that to try again is to repeat, to enter into a series of rehearsals
with no end point, no conclusions.21 Beckett’s advice in Worstward Ho (1983) is
to keep on trying, even if the hope of success is dashed again and again by failure:
‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’22
These refusals to accept incompetence as an obstruction often employ
repetitive strategies, just in case a single error was an aberration. In the work of
artists such as Marcel Broodthaers, Bruce Nauman and Bas Jan Ader, Sisyphean
tasks are driven by a performed disbelief in error as a negative. In an art context
such repetition has the potential to pass through the threshold of tedium and
even slip into slapstick. To set out to succeed at failing, or to fail at failing, is to
step aside from the orthodox order. Slapstick, as described by Jörg Heiser in this
section, fills narrative with illogical possibilities that evoke embarrassment and
laughter.23 Embarrassment is a natural response to failure: you want to disappear
when it happens, when the world looks at you and judges you for your failing.
What though, if being embarrassed is not so bad after all? We all embarrass
ourselves frequently, yet it is fear of the judgement of our failures that endures.
Chris Burden’s practice acts out the simple question ‘what happens if you…?’,
Le Feuvre//Strive to Fail//17
making the risk of failure a space of opportunity as he pushes the limits of
possibilities and courts incompetence. Burden proposes questions that are
manifested through actions and events, interrogating structures of power and
assumptions, introducing doubt, and never fully eliminating the unknown. He
offers a series of impossible proposals that are then acted out: integral to each is
the possibility and frustration of failure. This can be seen most explicitly in When
Robots Rule: The Two Minute Airplane Factory that took the form of an assembly
line manufacturing model airplanes to be launched into the cavernous space of
Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries in 1999. Although on paper the machine was
capable of the task, in practice only a single plane made the flight, with visitors
instead confronted with technicians carrying out tests and adjustments.
Technology has no intuition, reflexivity or ability to know if something ‘looks
right’, yet the purpose of machines is to increase efficiency beyond the ability of
the human hand. At Tate the apparent failure made the work all the more
poignant; the inability of the machine to replicate human endeavour became a
poetic philosophy of failure. The once-success, though, raises the question ‘what
if it was tried again?’. With an adjustment could countless model airplanes be
manufactured in a day? He has observed that ‘some of my favourite sculptures
were the ones that were total disasters. You fantasize a way they are going to be,
you try to do everything in your power, and then they are total flops. It’s really
interesting to examine how you could be so wrong.’24
Failure, by definition, takes us beyond assumptions and what we think we
know and can be represented. Section 4, Experiment and Progress, examines
failure’s potential for experimentation beyond what is known, while questioning
the imperatives of progress. The act of testing takes on a different register when
considered as a process rather than a result-oriented search for progress. When
testing is an end in itself, non-completion, and therefore non-perfection, becomes
a valid option. There is a pleasure in testing through failure. The artist Roman
Signer, for example, courts failure just in case success unexpectedly turns up. If
not, though, it really doesn’t matter. His ‘accident sculptures’ ironically mimic
experiments and their documentation. Paul Ramírez-Jonas addresses the
hierarchies of failure through an exploration of the spaces between desire for
progress and actual experience.25 His video Ghost of Progress, 2002, is shot from a
camera mounted on his bicycle handlebars as he traverses an unnamed city in
the developing world. At the opposite end of the handlebars is a scale model of
Concorde – once a symbol of optimistic progress, now a failed experiment.
Utopian hopes and ultimate commercial realities embodied by Concorde are
juxtaposed against a background of survival street commerce, new and old cars,
public transport, noise, decaying historic and modern buildings, smog, dirt, and
people going about their daily lives.
18//INTRODUCTION
This speculative experimentation, or testing, is tied up with the modernist
project, where the idea of the inventor (be it the artist, scientist, philosopher or
explorer) is embedded in the desire for a progress-driven radical break in
understanding. When one’s expectations are dashed there can be an opportunity
for a new register of thinking. As Robert Smithson states in his conversation with
Dennis Wheeler (1969–70), by isolating the failures one can ‘investigate one’s
incapabilities as well as one’s capabilities’, opening up possibilities for questioning
how structures and limits shape the world.26
The philosopher of science Karl Popper popularized the process in logic known
as falsifiability: the probability that an assertion can be demonstrated as false by
an experiment or observation. For example ‘all people are immortal’ is an easily
falsifiable statement, demonstrated by the evidence of even one person having
died. For Popper, the essence of scientific experiment is the investigation of more
complex falsifiable propositions, or hypotheses. What characterizes creative
thinking within an experiment is the ability to ‘break through the limits of the
range’, that is to apply a critical mode of thinking rather than working with the
sets of assumptions at hand. In order to do so one must engage with failure and
embrace the unanticipated.27 In art, failure can also be a component of speculative
experiment, which arrives at something unrecognizable as art according to the
current criteria of knowledge or judgement.
In this uncertain and beguiling space, between the two subjective poles of
success and failure, where paradox rules, where transgressive activities can
refuse dogma and surety, it is here, surely, that failure can be celebrated. Such
facets of failure operate not only in the production but also equally in the
reception and distribution of artworks, inscribing certain practices into the
histories of art. As we know, these histories are constantly tested and challenged
and are themselves implicated in artists’ roles as active agents, seeking new
forms of rupture, new delineations of space within contemporary experience, in
order to place something at stake within the realm of art.28 The impossibility of
language, as explored in Liam Gillick and Will Bradley’s inclusions in this section,
forces a stretching of this structure of understanding beyond its limits, in order
to pull on thought rather than words: this opens moments of un-understanding
which in time can be elucidating. To paraphrase the section from Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that closes this collection: often it is worth
considering that the deepest failures are in fact not failures at all.
1 Samuel Beckett, from ‘Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit’, transition, no. 48 (1949); reprinted
in Samuel Beckett, Proust & Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1965)
119–26.
2 See Daniel A. Siedell, ‘Art and Failure’, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 40, no. 2 (Urbana-
Le Feuvre//Strive to Fail//19
Champaign: University of Illinois Press, Summer 2006) 105–17.
3 See Bruce Altshuler, ed., Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions that Made Art History. Volume 1: 1863–1959
(London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2009) 23–30.
4 Émile Zola, L’Oeuvre (Paris, 1886); trans. Ernest Vizetelly, His Masterpiece (New York: Macmillan,
1896); reissued as The Masterpiece (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008).
5 Dieter Roth, interview with Felicitas Thun (Basel, February 1998), in Dieter Roth: Gedrucktes
Gespresstes Gebundenes 1949–1979 (Cologne: Oktagon Verlag, 1998); reprinted in Flash Art
International (May–June 2004) 104–5.
6 See Clive Gillman’s text on David Critchley in this volume, xx; and Daniel Birnbaum’s text on
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, xx.
7 See Paul Auster, Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failures (London: Faber & Faber, 1997) 35–7.
8 See Tom Holert, ‘Surviving Surveillance? Failure as Technology’, Printed Project, no. 6 (Dublin,
2007).
9 See for example Russell Ferguson’s citation of Virginia Woolf and Michael Fried, in Francis Alÿs:
Politics of Rehearsal (Los Angeles: Armand Hammer Museum of Art/Göttingen: Steidl, 2007) 11.
10 Honoré de Balzac, Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu (Paris, 1831); trans. Richard Howard, The Unknown
Masterpiece (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001).
11 John Baldessari in Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World (New York: Norton, 2008) 52
12 See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘The Rightness of Wrong’, in John Baldessari: National City (San
Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art/New York: D.A.P., 1986) 33–5; reprinted in this volume,
xx.
13 See Marcus Verhagen, ‘Trash Talking’, Modern Painters (February 2006) 67–9; reprinted [retitled
by the author as 'There's No Success Like Failure': Martin Kippenberger] in this volume, xx.
14 Ann Goldstein, ‘The Problem Perspective’, in Ann Goldstein, ed., Martin Kippenberger: The Problem
Perspective (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008) 39–44.
15 Ralph Rugoff, from catalogue essay for ‘Just Pathetic’ (Los Angeles: Rosamund Felsen Gallery/
New York: American Fine Arts, 1990), cited in Michael Wilson, ‘Just Pathetic’, Artforum (October
2004).
16 Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993) 1–9.
17 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Image of Proust’ (1929), in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah
Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) 201–16.
18 See Paul Ricoeur, La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000); trans. Kathleen
Blamey and David Pellauer, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2004) 7–10.
19 Julian Schnabel, Statements (1978) in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (Berkley:
University of California Press, 1996) 266
20 Peter Fischli, David Weiss and Jörg Heiser, ‘The Odd Couple: An Interview with Peter Fischli and
David Weiss’, frieze, no. 102 (October 2006) 202–5.
21 See Emma Cocker’s essay in this volume, xx.
20//INTRODUCTION
22 Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (London: John Calder, 1984); see also Brian Dillon, ‘Eternal
Return’, frieze, no. 77 (September 2003) 76–7; reprinted in this volume, xx.
23 Jörg Heiser, ‘Pathos versus Ridiculousness: Art with Slapstick’, in All of a Sudden (New York and
Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2008).
24 Chris Burden, interview with Jon Bewley (1990), in Talking Art, ed. Adrian Searle (London:
Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1993) 26–7.
25 See Inés Katzenstein, ‘A Leap Backwards into the Future’, in Paul Ramírez Jonas (Birmingham:
Ikon Gallery, 2004) 108–12; reprinted in this volume, xx.
26 Robert Smithson, from ‘Interviews with Dennis Wheeler’ (1969–70), section II, in Robert Smithson:
The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1996) 208–9; reprinted in this volume, xx.
27 See Karl Popper, Endless Quest (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); and Bazon Brock,
‘Cheerful and Heroic Failure’, in Harald Szeemann, ed., The Beauty of Failure/The Failure of Beauty
(Barcelona: Fundació Joan Miró, 2004) 30–33.
28 See Joseph Kosuth, ‘Exemplar’, in Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary
Art, 1994) 51–9; reprinted in this volume, xx.
Le Feuvre//Strive to Fail//21
