ATC - Kaja Silverman: The Twilight of Posterity

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In the summer of 2003, the Louvre mounted a large exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings, drawings and manuscripts. Within this exhibition there were several curious objects: four pairs of video editing monitors and a large-screen projection of digital images of The Last Supper. These objects constituted an "intervention" by Irish artist James Coleman. The video monitors displayed drawings from Leonardo’s notebooks, which return us to a moment prior to the division of art from science, technology, education, warfare, or even life itself. The projection figured Leonardo’s famous, and famously deteriorating, fresco through a constantly shifting series of slow pans across its sumptuous surface, detailed close-ups, and images of the full painting as it resides in the refectory of a Milanese monastery. Software randomly decided what images to show, and how to show them. Coleman's "intervention" ceased to exist the day the exhibition closed. While the Louvre may have expected Coleman to create a work of art that could be added to the museum collection to be preserved for posterity, Coleman, instead, created an "ephemeral memorial" for da Vinci.

In "The Twilight of Posterity," Kaja Silverman argues that Coleman’s intervention "transmits" da Vinci’s work through a radical reconfiguration of artistic posterity: Coleman ceded pride of place to the images he chose, and his agency to the numerical projection and video monitors; he refused to step into the position of author or symbolic "father;" he built decay and expiration into the work of art even during the tenure of its existence, and protected his images from posthumous entification by making the human psyche the only possible agency of their memorialization. Drawing upon the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the writings ofLeonardo da Vinci, Silverman stages her own intervention into our commonly held notions of artistic legacy, authorship, and immortality, to reimagine the artist…