Index (A Review)

accident: and indexes, 2 (see also index)
art: as index, 3 (see also index); and luxury, 1
artist: at the turn of the century, 3
Artpace, 3
avant-garde: bourgeois concept of heroic male in, 5
Barthes, Roland, 4
bathrooms: and gender policing 2; in the tomboy film, 2
Baudrillard, Jean: between bathrooms and Bederman, 2
Bederman, Gail, 2
book: non-fiction, 3; as ocean, 1; unwritten, 3
Byatt, A.S.: on indexes and pleasure, 1
Cesarco, Alejandro, 3 – 6
crisis: in economy of cultural capital, 4
critic: and desire as metonymy, 4; as detective, 4
death: of the author, 3; of the reader, 3
discourse, 5; of absence, 5; and affective rhythm, 5; and indecision, 5; as initiator of practice, 5; master, 5; that says itself, 5; unspoken parts of, 5
displacements, 5
dissemination, 5
distance: between reader and text, 5; and place of enunciation (historicity), 5
exclusion, 7
Female Masculinities: index of, 2
How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read, 4
index: as art, 3 (see also art); as ordered, 1; poetics of, 3; practicality of, 1 – 2; as random, 1 – 2; as self portrait, 6; as sign, 6
Index, 3, 5
Index (A Novel), 3
Index (A Reading), 3 – 6
indexer, 3
library, 1
Manliness and Civilization, 2
narrative: construction of, 3, 6
pleasure: of sorting and ordering, 1
Sortes Virgilianae, 1
truism: when flipped on head, 3

(1)

A.S. Byatt once described indexes as "a kind of Sortes Virgilianae, a place where the pleasure of sorting and ordering meets the opposite pleasure of the random, the inconsequential and the chancy."

Indexes, those long, alphabetized lists at the back of books, are merely a practicality in many reader's lives. An index provides the reader with an orderly way to find out what's important in a book. It is also a mechanism through which a reader may retrieve a single droplet of information from within the ocean of ideas contained between the covers of a book. At the library, a scholar browses indexes to determine each volume's relevance to her project. Later on, after reading a book in full, she returns to the index to retrieve a reference about art and luxury in colonial America. Systematic and tidy, an index provides readers with access points to a text.

(2)

Indexes may be practical, but they are also studies in accident. Browse an index and the strangest and most serendipitous visual juxtapositions appear:

bathrooms: and gender policing, 20 – 29; in the tomboy film, 192
Baudrillard, Jean, 167
Bederman, Gail, 49 – 50. 271 – 72

These three consecutive entries from the index of Judith Halberstam's Female Masculinities offer practical information about what's important in the book. With a glance at the page numbers accorded each topic, the reader may infer which topics receive the most attention: (1) bathrooms, (2) Gail Bederman, (3) Jean Baudrillard.  For this reader, the entries also perform an inside joke. What better place to squish Baudrillard than between bathrooms and the author of Manliness and Civilization?

(3)

As any indexer will tell you, indexing is an art. For his current exhibition at Artpace, Alejandro Cesarco has flipped this truism on its head: his art is indexing. The show consists of three indexes to three books he has not written, at least not in the sense of putting narrative to a page with words strung together as sentences. Still, the viewer may construct a narrative out of Cesarco's indexes, and in that sense, these books are readable.

Cesarco's indexes look much like the pages found at the back of most non-fiction books. Entries are organized alphabetically and appear in a two- or three-column layout on each page. Pages are numbered consecutively (254, 255, 256...), and at Artpace, these pages are framed individually and hung together sequentially. The earliest work, Index (2000), reads like a list of the concepts, texts, histories and people you would expect a young artist to have been thinking about at the turn of the century. In comparison to two later works, this index is rather dry. Index (A Novel) (2003) hinges on the romance novel, and Index (A Reading) (2008) swirls around the concepts of the reader, the writer, memory and loss. This most recent work reads most evocatively; here, both Cesarco's subject and his increasing facility with indexes (the poetics of cross-referencing, subordination, contiguity and ellipsis) heighten the affective quality of the work.

(4)

In the popular and irreverent How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read, Pierre Bayard takes Roland Barthes' "death of the author" to an extreme: the death of the reader. For Bayard, the reader, like the author, is vanishing into the distance. "Readers" are constructed through texts, while texts are constructed through the reading of them. Bayard concludes that we haven't actually read the books we claim to have read, and therefore we possess no authority over these texts. This lack of authority incites crisis—namely, a crisis in the economy of cultural capital, which rests on, among other traits, our literacy.

Cesarco's indexes get at this crisis succinctly. An index allows the artist to write a book without writing it, and the viewer to read the book without reading it. In fact, with Cesarco's indexes, the viewer writes the book as she reads.

Take page 19 of the text to which Index (A Reading) refers, for example. The index tells us that his page discusses, among other topics, the critic as detective, desire as metonymy and Auguste Dupin. Viewers may construct all sorts of narratives from this constellation of terms. For this viewer, the terms coalesced around a discussion of the critic as both a logical, calculating detective à la Edgar Allen Poe's Auguste Dupin and a link in a chain of deferred desire for meaning within art. As a critic, I take this as a warning not to logic through the narratives behind Cesarco's indexes too obsessively.

(5)

Cesarco knows how to make an indexical joke, too:

discourse, 50; of absence, 11, 30-32; and affective rhythm, 15, 22; and indecision, 79, 123; as initiator of practice, 77; master, 64; that says itself, 2, 32; unspoken parts of, 199
displacements, 4
dissemination, 38-39
distance: between reader and text, 4; and place of enunciation (historicity), 65

These are four consecutive entries of Index (A Reading). It feels almost sinful to flesh them out. Their affective rhythms, unspoken parts and displacements put the distance between reader and text so crisply and seductively.

My favorite joke in Cesarco's indexes is much simpler. On the first page of Index appears the one-liner:

avant-garde, 78,84; bourgeois concept of heroic male in, 62

(6)

If these indexes do not index written texts, what do they index? In one sense, they bypass the text and index the author, Cesarco himself. In this way, the indexes may be understood as self-portraits.

In another sense, when read by a viewer in the gallery, these indexes become completely unmoored from both Cesarco and his unwritten text.  Instead, the indexes come to refer to texts the viewer constructs in relation to them. (For instance, Cesarco's Index (A Reading) indexes the story I told earlier about the critic on page 19.)

In a third sense, Cesarco's indexes point through his unwritten texts to the objects, people and ideas to which his texts would have pointed: the endless deferral of signs. Literally, these indexes index nothing that is.

(7)

Finally, there is what is left out of indexes. Indexes work by exclusion. An index that included every word in a text would be useless. Cesarco's indexes point to these gaps. All that has not been included haunts all that is.

Claire Ruud is Associate Director of Fluent~Collaborative.