Cut

 

An aporia or borrowed incision into fabric begins to take shape or rather become an apparition. Cut or coupe as they say in France when the Directer decides they have seen enough. An establishing shot might travel in an open space, in memory of what was described by Gilles Deleuze in his reflections on Cinema, or an infinite zoom into a white sheet. Anyway enough….

 

Cut

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The open space is a crowded museum. We are looking for details to locate us.

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A fabrication of labels imagined for that audience of one required to bring the work to life; a clue read on a mobile device and played back as an audio supplement. A guest, customer or viewer of a type yet to be specified looks at something which is almost nothing. A whitish square of 1 inch diameter; a minimal relic.

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An item that needs some context to generate an attention dividend; an elementary kind of label or device for curatorial communication between the object and the subject. Sometimes there is little difference between a vitrine and a coffin.

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According to the head of the Schleswig-Holstein State Archives, Prof Dr Rainer Hering, "This glass plate containing the fabric remnants of the Bayeux Tapestry is Nazi-looted artefacts, which will of course be returned to the rightful owner. After numerous discussions and emails with German and French authorities, the way is now clear for its return to the Bayeux Museum.” ( The strange story of the Nazi obsession with this legendary artefact still isn't over. David Musgrove is content director of the HistoryExtra.com. Fragments introduced as if…or just like a footnote to the discussions via email and through other undisclosed channels through which; speech like this might occur.

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The question of restitution has begun or was started by others, previously to this archival discovery. We place this concept of restitution and the quandary of what might be restored within an opening prelude described as a suspended aporia. Who accepts such restitutions?

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Where is the fragment or looted culture going?

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What is achieved in that transport?

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We can start answering our rhetorical questions, returning to the artefacts of contemporary culture, invisible actors and past ministers screaming about losing their marbles etc. You know what I mean when I say the frame is taken for granted. We have heard already it is to be returned and displayed in Germany alongside an entire replication of the Bayeux Tapestry. The public will be invited to look at the simulation of the ancient embroidery; to reflect on the representation of history, warfare and those displaced into those infamous stitches.

 

There is a difference between the reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate and the presentation of the Bayeux Tapestry. Let's not delude ourselves when this fragment is retuned as almost certainly it will be; its return will be a gesture, it will not be repatriated across that border that currently divides the fragment from its origin. It will remain forever apart. But more of the processions and possessions of history will follow.

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Displayed in a vitrine or mounted like a negative of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Sqaure. An invitation ‘choreographed’ as they say of exhibition design; so the viewer can stare into a singularity. In the contemporary museum and gallery the subject is seldom present to that singularity but is instead distracted, cajoled to self archive a look or the act of looking and being seen and even contemplation.

 

Media supplements can be ingested sonically through an earpiece: playbacks like the guide that moves audiences around the Museum of Bayeux, employed to state in a low fi format, what the artist meant to achieve in that revolutionary painting.

 

The Tate perhaps the quintessential arbiter of an objective record declares; “In his 1927 book The Non-Objective World, the artist reflected: ‘In the year 1913, trying desperately to free art from the dead weight of the real world, I took refuge in the form of the square.’ We cannot stop there as more intriguing to us is that ludicrously; as if…. we had orchestrated or manipulated his notes; it was perhaps also merely a fragment as; “the square did first make an appearance in 1913, as the design for a stage curtain in the futurist opera Victory over the Sun.”

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No not that Sun, not the red top arbitrator of bigotry and abuse. If we had a curatorial choice —- free from concerns of our sponsors —- we might perversely choose to exhibit a painting that samples the mood of that work such as; Gillian Carnegie’s Black Square (2008) not the earlier Untitled (1998), the more popular paintings of her derrière.

 

We find it useful to remind ourselves and that audience of one, our corruptions of meaning and flesh are everywhere and decades old for example Marlene Dumas, The Artwork as Misunderstanding, 1991 despairs that; ‘There is a crisis with regard to Representation. They are looking for Meaning as if it was a thing. As if it was a girl, required to take her panties off as if she would want to do so, as soon as the true interpreter comes along. As if there was something to take off.’

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It is a paradox that Museums must pretend that objects are not all ghosts of this type of hermeneutics — an imprecise curated meaning or spectres glimpsed in the periphery of the apparent Zeitgeist. Any item dug up or pulled out of the archive such as; a piece of linen to be specific [cut] from a larger almost complete fragment: although then again, what is it to be fully attached or detached from the whole?

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How should we consider a stitched up scene, a framing or the forensics and aesthetics of a crime typical of wartime, that suspension of all ethical loops or threads of conscience into a savage and enduring thirst for annihilation? A savagery encoded in the thanatotic acceleration of intelligent targeting and the neutralisations of the competition; an arrow glanced straight on or a phallus penetrating an eye?

 

Are these violences petty crime or white collar misdemeanours, different entirely from the rape and cutting off of clothes,, the blood rituals of the battlefield, is there a scale or moral code to determine how to pass judgement on a bureaucracy of micro incisions, the technical extraction of a part in order to control the whole of history for at least a thousand years?

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The movement of the relic is critical; it stayed hidden in Bayeux Cathedral's Treasury during the 100 Years' War, and despite Caen falling to the English it remained untouched. It remained in Normandy until Napoleon demanded it travel to Paris as a propaganda tool to support his intended invasion of Britain. The Column of the Grande Armée or Colonne Napoléone has not moved from Normandy and stands 53 metres high. Approached from a grande avenue visitors are invited to climb inside the Corinthian triumphal spiral. This erection near, Boulongne-sur-Mer France is modelled on Trajan's Column. The invasion never happened, and after being displayed in 1804, the Tapestry was returned to Bayeux, where it stayed until the Second World War.

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It is possible that Field Marshall Rommel or Hitler climbed those warn steps and looked out over the channel. It is certain that those shock troops of historical detour and propaganda; the Nazis began to take an interest in all modes of occult power. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, was particularly fascinated by the 11th-century embroidery. In the films of Leni Riefenstahl we can see the obsession with the parade and the movement towards cinematic documents of mythology. The Tapestry is a prototype document that dictates or reveals a dynastic transfer of power. A mythical talisman even. It is too fragile now to go on tour or at least the larger part. That is the conclusion of forensic conservationists. The small archival fragment can of course go anywhere.

 

Even to England.

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If there are traces of blood they are not visible to the eye. This repurposed sheet of menstrual recordings apparently washed; a cleaning and cleansing remembered now as the haul or heist, a geist/spirit/mind/ghost all readings and possibilities spinning on that machine created to scramble the meaning of the coded fragment. Those female labourers at Bletchley Park working alongside Alan Turing, the persecuted operative subjected to chemical recoding in order to avoid prison.

 

Experimented on like those still surviving or dead in an occupied territory. A place between exodus and destruction, buried in the rubble, bodies beaten or smashed into fragments, in a history seen tomorrow in the palm of our hands, almost powerless readers look into the narcissistic mirror media to find answers to the recording and re-coding of times like these.

 

As an alternative to prison, Turing chose to undergo chemical castration, a form of hormone treatment designed to suppress libido. This treatment, which involved estrogen injections, resulted in side effects like gynecomastia (enlargement of the breasts) and other physical and emotional consequences which must be considered in the margin alongside patriotism and state sanctioned torture.

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Before the Second World War, Himmler had co-founded Das Ahnenerbe, the Society for the Study of Ancestral Heritage, the aim of which was to promote archaeological investigation of sites associated with early Germanic settlement. As Professor Shirley Ann Brown notes on the subject, “In July 1939, a memo written by Franz Altheim, professor of classical philology at Frankfurt University, arrived on the desk of Wolfram Sievers, Ahnenerbe’s general manager. It proposed that a detailed examination of the Bayeux Tapestry would prove that the Normans who conquered England were, in reality, Vikings – and, by extension, Germanic.”

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It is impossible to say precisely how their investigation might determine such 'facts’ —although nobody is or has opposed the archives that attest to; Rollo also known with his epithet, Rollo "the Walker", the Viking who, was given Normandy as a Duchy in exchange for protection against other Norse raiders. The Count of Rouen died in 930 but his descendants were indeed back on the road for the invasion of England in 1066. So it was a curious mission that sent Dr Herbert Jankuhn, professor of Viking archaeology at Rostock University, to Bayeux with a team of experts to carry out a detailed study. But maybe this incredulity is because we have watched all the seasons of Vikings and know the backstory so well. Perhaps at that time he believed that closer inspection of the ships and period detail would confirm the Viking origins of the Normans?

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This expert was in charge of theoretical readings whilst a Dr Karl Schlabow, a textile conservator and head of the Germanic Costume Museum in Neumünster, was responsible for fabric analysis and taking careful measurements. No doubt in accounting for the nine remaining panels and their extreme length he decided; perhaps alone late one evening, to cut out a small section of the backing fabric. It has the suggestion of a fetish.

 

Perhaps it was a romantic gift for Herbert Jeschke, an artist from Berlin – and the only member of the research team who wasn’t a paid-up member of the Nazi party or SS – but commissioned to create full-size drawings and watercolours of the Tapestry. In 2019 Jeschke’s archive was gifted to the city of Bayeux and was found to contain smaller fragments and threads.

 

The State Archives received Schlabow’s estate in 2022. Archives are always slowly ingested into an institution. An institution has a kind of built in resistance to the work of fostering or hosting additions to its collections. Only later do they become protective and possessive. It was a year later, while indexing his documents, experts found a glass plate with a fragment of linen fabric measuring about an inch. Based on other archival materials and the inscription on the plate “Bayeux Ground: I Chain, II Weft,” they were able to infer the fabric’s origin.

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During the occupation the French obstructed the Nazi investigations, but eventually the Tapestry was moved to a monastery outside Bayeux, unrolled and photographed. The images becoming part of chronological sequence that when overlaid with previous photography in 1872 by Joseph Cundall for example and the more recent 2017 hi definition scans of the fabric, 2.6 billion pixels, could be read simultaneously as evidence of the deterioration of the fabric and obsolescence of the analogue photographic image.

 

Zooming out from the threads to figures in a landscape with few features, zooming in like a recognisance flight over Caen before the booming and naval bombardment of the D day landings. The parallel stories of risk and conservation being aligned with fate as after non-stop work through the summer of 1941, the Tapestry was moved to the Château de Sourches, some 100 miles south of Bayeux, where it joined treasures from the Louvre.

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The State Archives director Rainer Hering said he considered the fabric remnant to be Nazi loot that, “will of course be returned to the rightful owner.” He added: “For me, the return of objects unlawfully placed in archives, libraries or museums is a piece of historical justice.”

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Before the fall of Paris we read through the excellent wiki entry: Cryptanalysis of the Enigma (The article details the historic evolution of code breaking strategies and tools developed to crack the dispatches make by Nazis on their Enigma machines which were portable devices for encrypted messaging.) in remembrance of that lucky break when the orders of the SS to take the fabric to Germany were intercepted.

 

A discontinuity of facts and the speculations on some German words, like: Fotze, Schwachkopf, Wichser, Spermaeimer or other expletives and common phrases used to open and close communications might short circuit the Enigma Machines. Bletchley Park would later term these lists of slack discipline, ‘cribs.’

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A cast of phrases in which violence is always ironic, typical of casual genocide and clearing a geography of subjects. In a chronomorphia of delays and relays we read the casting of new types of political machines against which we have no resistance. Positions paused between resistance and restitution; a falling apart of the histories of the text and image or was it Image, Music, Text? This vertiginous forgetting of the real and its feeling, the impression of Jean Genet’s Funeral Rites, fantasies about the bodies of Nazis and bodies of Communists; the totalitarian body even as a synergy and circle; rapacious appetites to unbind the materiality of flesh from pretension to thoughts. That single sheet. Off White as Virgil Abloh called his label which continues the brand in his absence, an aporia brand, the ghostly afterimage of, ‘free thinking’, ‘suspended disbelief', ‘touch of hand', ‘its real’ etc. It is expensive this legacy industry. The heritage culture of the human and perhaps obsolete. They have abandoned reading to the machine.

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/Cut a digital sampling; sonic, visual, textual and soon olfactory and sensational.

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An erotic wound or a teasing of the body. A mourning and bit of old cloth. Bit: Mourning Remains in Derrida and Cixous One has perhaps to let oneself be taken in a little longer by the words, the morsels of words or dead bits in decomposition that let the writing go a bit more unbridled.—Jacques Derrida, “Ja or the Faux-Bond”

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No cut or drop it already./

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No you don’t want to read or hear any of these letters breaking apart fragments of a restitution which has begun but not too quickly. The ancient origins of civilisation are at stake; those archeologists of the Aryan were also looking at the Parthenon Frieze and antiques to add and to the reconstructed Ishtar Gate and Processional Way built at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin from materials smuggled out of Iraq by Robert Koldewey.

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Restitution, reconstruction, or even Res(is)tance of Remains. Ari Tanhuanpää, PhD, Senior Conservator, Finnish National Gallery is invited into our scenic hallucination of processions and interpretations. And Bowie or Hannah Höch take turns to make popular the theme of our text and the remains?

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In fact an embroidery now deposited in at least two museums where it was thought only months previously that all the remains were kept together, only the large fragment was lost. That piece which may or may not have presented the coronation of William the Conquer and bastard. These illegitimate rags like the Dead Sea Scrolls just waiting for a revelation of the ‘Truth’ or historic fact. In Viking tradition which persisted in the Norman culture, illegitimate offspring can inherit privileges and titles, The remains on linen after a deflowering and dissemination. Arlette became the “frilla” of Robert; a legitimate wife according to the old Norman traditions, but a concubine according to Christian traditions. Their union produced a son, William, the future conqueror and King of England.

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A Military Intelligence officer wrote: “The work of plundering is carried out by a special battalion of the SS. Their task was to rob churches, museums and picture galleries and bring their booty to Germany.” They were perpetrators of a tradition that has existed since the beginning of modern archeology. Initially, the Allies built up a file on Nazi looting for propaganda purposes to discredit Hitler.

 

Not that this was the only manipulation of the Nazi Psychology, a letter sent from Alastair Crowley to Ian Fleming including the suggestion; “If it is true that Herr Hess is much influenced by astrology and magick, my services might be of use to the department in the case he should not be willing to do what you wish.” his note makes it clear that mysticism and mind control were weaponised on all sides.

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But on August 18, 1944, Himmler sent Carl Oberg, head of the SS in France, a radio message decrypted by Bletchley. The order read: “Do not forget to bring the Bayeux Tapestry to a place of safety.” It was no doubt that even before the war, 1066 was one of the numbers recited and learnt in English schools and some smart students would have read about the tapestry. It is in artefacts we encounter the decoding of education and the movement of documents.

 

This morsel preserved like a pile of shoes or abandoned spectacles, teeth… inexplicable, corrupted, pathetic, disgusting, human remains disappeared but present. Letting the ghosts inhabit that small remainder that has survived inane and inanimate in that German archive for more than 80 years in solitude.

 

Ari suggests,“Generally, le reste has been translated into English as ‘remains’, ‘remainder’, ‘remnant’, or ‘residue’, sometimes also as ‘rest’. Restance, in turn, has been translated as ‘remainder’, ‘remaindering’, or ‘remaining’. Derrida once said that he ‘cannot say whether or not remainder, by itself, adequately translates restance, but it matters little since no single word, out of context, can by itself ever translate another word perfectly’.

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It is not explained what language was used to communicate to the resistance but it is known the roles poetry and music played in preparing for important announcements, coded morsels dropped into the airwaves; parts which were connected to codes; a tapestry leading to key events such as the dropping of gliders and parachutes behind the Atlantic defences so that the allies could advance on Caen. When you think you are alone with an idea or an empty frame —- you are most deluded and I am delighted to invite Ari back onto the stage to discuss with us the dancing of the remains and the question of resolution, restitution and conservation of fragments/remnants/remainders etc…

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In a moment in which the radio announces that Pope Francis has died we quote at length from Ari; “The reste gathers together specific states of mind, such as melancholy and (impossible) mourning, triggered by the experience of standing before the imminent loss – standing before the reste – as well as specific bodily states inherent in the reste. The reste has also its distinct temporality, linked to the modality of imminence, to the rest(e) of time, delay or suspension (retard; moratorium) and abidance (demeurance/demourance), as well as its ‘other’ materiality to which we may refer using the substantive without substance that is la cendre (which Derrida favoured as a substitute for the trace): a materiality irreducible to extensity and physical tangibility.

 

Finally, I pose the question, can the reste be seen as the epitome of our essential and existential fragility, a finitude which we share with Being, as well as beings? Because, even if the reste is not, it is something we share and create between ourselves: the rest(e) to come. Cinders or smoke will rise above the Vatican.

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Between the scratch and the cut.

 

There is a discipline and disciples following certain styles of mixing. Beat matching, harmonic mixing, the breakdown, the Eq mix, the power cut, the spinback, fading, looping, bass swap transition, rewinds and the dead cut

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Derrida has another quasi-transcendental concept that comes very close to le trace and the reste, which is la cendre, ‘cinder’ or ‘ash’.18 For him, ash was the ‘figure of annihilation without remainder, without memory, or without a readable or decipherable archive’.19 (Jacques Derrida. ‘Poetics and Politics of Witnessing’. Trans. Thomas Dutoit & Philippe Romanski, in Thomas Dutoit & Outi Pasanen (eds.). Sovereignties in Question. The Poetics of Paul Celan. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005, (65–96), 68.)

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Cut and let's move on to the next scene.

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Lights camera action close up on Ari; “Here we come to the ethical question of how to preserve that which is absolutely and infinitely exterior to ourselves. In art museums, one comes across another double bind concerning the question of whether we should preserve artworks or exhibit them – but on the other hand, artworks can be saved as artworks only by exposing them, every now and then. Eventually, the mourning – perhaps even preservation – is going to fail and turn out to be impossible.”

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Montage of found footage. Various black and white images mostly of men in uniforms and boxes being moved in and out of vehicles. Historians of the internal tensions amongst the Nazis have identified that in the spring of 1944, during massive Allied bombing raids over northern France, Himmler decided it was time to seize the Tapestry in a secret operation called ‘Sonderauftrag Bretagne’ (Special Project Brittany): the Tapestry had a codename, ‘Matilda’.

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We read again from a plundered article. The Ahnenerbe worked out a plan to move the Tapestry to Germany. They had figured that this procedure should be in two stages. A risk mitigation strategy as they say these days.

The first stage would be to take it to move the Tapestry from Le Man to Paris and exhibit it. Once it was in Paris and in SS hands, it would be easy to spirit the Tapestry out of the country altogether. Make it a ghost object, hidden from scrutiny and protection.

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The scheme might have worked but the timing was wrong. On 6 June, the Allies landed on the Normandy beaches and Bayeux was liberated, on 8 June. Instead on 27 June, at about five in the afternoon a group of Gestapo, carrying sub-machine guns, burst into the Chateau de Sourche and took the Tapestry to Paris in a period of unimaginable danger for anyone or anything on the move.

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It reached Paris safely and was escorted to the Louvre, devoid of contents except for a very few items of sculpture and carved stone that were simply too large to be moved. There is no mention of a condition report at that time. So how far these moments, sequences, or scenes might have disrupted the fabric is unknown. Suitably packed unless hit by enemy fire it is hard to imagine the vibrations of the journey would be of significant concern. Artworks had indeed been moved in more precarious states. There was of course no insurance either for the priceless piece.

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Hitler and the Reich machine were caught off guard by the speed of the Allied advance. On 3 August a new man is in charge of Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz. His orders from Hitler were, in the last resort, to raze the city to the ground rather than leave anything standing in which the Allies could celebrate its recapture. The fragments or the entire edifice of the historical city, ordered destroyed. Himmler unlike Hitler could not give the Tapestry up. On 18 August, he sent a radio message to the head of the Gestapo and the SS in France commanding him, as part of the evacuation arrangements, to ‘bring the Tapestry to a place of safety’.

As you will recall from the pages of Jean Genet resistance fighters and Parisians had openly risen against the German occupying forces. Reading another reader, marginal notes on the void left by the death a lover you have to laugh at ”A redundant warning: if you're easily offended by explicit sex and deviant eroticism, don't ever read this book.

 

There's a lot of sex here, mostly homosexual, mostly violent, seldom tender and often dirty. These pages are soaked in lust, both physical and mental; lust as life asserting itself in the middle of horror, after the very last hope has been silenced by bullets or grief.” The anonymous author says what they like —- there is no other contract to restrict them. In a period of time threaded through the head of that fiction on Tuesday 22 August, officers from a e Panzer division arrived to remove the Tapestry. They were unable or reluctant to complete their orders. In the hail of small arms fire and the emergence of fear the Louvre was impossible to reach. In memory of those frail bodies and the soft fabric we might say like our conservator friend: “Our finitude and existential fragility should not be seen only in negative terms. I would like to think that in our fragile restance our relation to death is somewhat similar to the relation of artefacts to their destruction.”

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Three days later, on 25 August, the Allies liberated Paris.

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Let us go back to basics. History is not decided or a monument to be erected but not deconstructed or cut down to size. History is a suave type of fiction that alludes to methodologies and deep research but it is also a rather a faulty message passing between epochs and perspectives, between your ears and asking you to believe in what your eyes tell you. I will start speaking for a multiplicity, parts and particles of a discourse of fragments. particularities and sounds barely heard or decaying recordings in obsolete formats and still passed off as beginning or origin story.

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Cut.

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Day 4 Take two.

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Already it is impossible to meander we are rushing ahead of ourselves and beyond the incision, the wound and opening in the linen, the canvas, the foundation or support as you might imagine I want to call it: in homage or remembrance of supplements previously declared before the scaffolds on which a text might be built in order to stage a series of decapitations and uncertainties. A chair for example might be a scaffold on which women are paraded stripped and shaven. Humiliation and degradation, the human exiled even temporally from their culture. Saxons and Normans, Germans and French, copulations and conjugations of betrayal, lines defining these torn allegiances, between bondage and slavery, desire and powerlessness.

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Jump cut and we are lying in bed.

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Lovers of a certain type of discourse which through folds and asymmetries of tone pushes to the limit the fabric of our material; of our presence in the restitution of a historical regime which fell in 1945. The fabric around our bodies that may have become a seed bed impregnated not only with DNA evidence but histories of coded dispatches intercepted by cryptologists and relayed to resistance fighters in Paris. In War and Cinema Paul Virillio spliced together frames of the machinery of cinema and the battlefield, blurring distinction between vision and target, territory and representation. In the general movement of the twentieth century towards a mysticism and the cults of leaders’ of fascism and communism: we remind ourselves of observations on the cult of the image in warfare:

 

“War is a symptom of delirium operating in the half-light of trance, drugs, blood and unison….its psychotropic origins in sympathetic magic, to the riveting spectacle of immolation and death agony, the world of ancient religions and tribal gatherings.” Paul Virillio War and Cinema."

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Whilst the war was heading towards the final over exposure of the atomic bomb Virillio reminds us Goebbels with support from Hitler continued to pour resources into colour films, optical diversions of epic German military campaigns, signifying another endgame of the Reich that will not transpire. The force of arms is not brute strength but spiritual force. Himmler in a similar delirium of logistics and speculative callousness had imagined an epic reign of conquest. We follow Virilio and open our eyes to deployments of resource in occult and obscure theories, we do this to counter the terror of delusional rhetorics of White Supremacy. Cuts to cultural spending across the USA which fall back into that monstrous abyss of the Nazi regime. We have to ridicule the inept occult studies of those minor historians and archaeologists of fabric. Fragments cut to make peepholes for the KKK.

 

History just when you thought it was settled it has risen from the dead.

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The order of the SS was to prepare the Tapestry for relocation. The science and philosophy rooted in the ideology. This plan was not completed and died. The legacy remains in the archives. A scalpel blade or a pair of scissors?

 

What makes the cut?

 

A furtive incision or a scientific extraction, a fetish prepared or a mission aborted. The mysterious theft or preparation; hidden but waiting to be discovered later for a process of analysis; forcing a metaphor or morsel to give up its recipe and origin, the fate of the particle and the particular the same as the larger work? Go on, you were reading aloud on the question of the fragment and restitution.

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Cut silently, dropped like an e in a novel before us, cut between the press of history and fiction; although now moving in a coupe as they say. Taking a structural cue from an obscure essay by Jean Genet bearing the incomparably Genetian title "What remained of a Rembrandt torn into small, very regular squares and rammed down the shithole," Derrida arranges his book into two parallel columns of text, the left column on each page a (more or less) sustained commentary on Hegelian philosophy and the right column a more fragmented, stream of consciousness, impressionistic consideration of the works of Genet.

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Coupe

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