The Art of Vanishing

Following is an extract of my 2010 essay The Art of Vanishing. The essay used Point Omega the just published novella of Don Delillo, Sous le Sable, a feature film of Francois Ozon and a then current exhibition of Bill Henson photographs at Roslyn Oxley Gallery to explore how we approach and understand ideas of evanishment through contemporary cultural objects. 

photo: André Kertesz

‘He wanted pure mystery. Maybe it was easier for him,

something beyond the damp reach of human motive.

Mystery had its truth, all the deeper for being shapeless.’

1

When Don DeLillo set out to write his fifteenth novel, he had an art installation in mind: Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, a video of the Hitchcock classic slowed down to play at 2 frames per second over 24 hours. He had seen it three times, and become curious about what we miss seeing, when we only look at things in conventional ways. When he went to write about it, he put a man in a gallery and described him watching the work. Two other men came in. It became clear that they were the central characters of the book. They became Richard Elster, a 73 year old retired academic and ‘war intellectual’ and Jim Finley, a slightly sycophantic documentary filmmaker wanting to make a movie about Elster and his time in the war rooms of the Pentagon. Elster and Finley spun off into their own location, a space where time was completely different to the focussed time of the gallery. DeLillo dropped them into the Anza Borrego desert, to a shack where they (and he) could talk. And on he went, paragraph after paragraph, following the mysterious crumbs he was dropping in front of himself, until he arrived at Point Omega. ‘A novel develops its own structure and I feel myself just following along.’

The creation of any artwork is a mysterious and uncertain process. Where ideas come from, how they gather other fragments and become something bigger, who the characters are, where they terminate, all of it is an act of making something from nothing, risking a way into the void to see what can be brought forth. Some artists follow the path of uncertainty behind the scenes, in order to deliver something coherent and sure. DeLillo works to translate the uncertainty to the page for his reader to trip up on and fall into.

            Reading Point Omega feels like following a band of escape artists, one, the anonymous movie viewer, who would dissolve into the frame by frame perfection of a mesmerically slow film, the other, Elster, who would expand into the immensity of the physical world around him as a way of releasing himself from the claustrophobia of thought and ticking time. The third, Finley, tags along for the ride, belatedly fleeing a failed marriage and an equally unpromising film career in New York City. For a book that is very much about the urban, western world of the current moment, it is surprising that none of the action of the book actually takes place in the world to which it refers. No-one stays. The city, New York, outside the doors of the Museum of Modern Art, is ‘life beyond, the world beyond’ as if it were already gone, rendered so unreal to be unliveable.

When something disappears, it is replaced by absence. And in that absence we see and seek the thing more clearly, aware of it all the more for being unable to see it. Absence has an intangible surface which cannot be interacted with, just a void without a barrier, into which we could be drawn. DeLillo understands something about absence. Point Omega is a slim, pared book of stymied narrative drive, sketchy figures and elusive and contradictory states of mind. DeLillo knows we will go hunting for action, character and a point, that we will pursue convention. He will trap us with the sharpest observations, depositing maxims into the mouths of his characters and leaving us with the echo of their silences.

Creativity, understanding, basic living involve an interplay between presence and absence: what is given and what is suggested, what is read and what is perceived, what is living and what is not. Human kind is the species which lives constantly aware of its own death. Point Omega draws a vision of the world that we have created as a distraction against our lurking sense that life will one day come to nothing. It is a world of noise to cover the silence, clocks to mark out time, ‘folk tales’ to predict the shape the end might take and strategies against all of it: ‘priorities, statistics, evaluations, rationalizations’. Richard Elster claims that, with his work, he wanted to get real, make ‘a haiku war … a set of ideas linked to transient things. See what’s there and then be prepared to watch it disappear.’