Simon Starling at Galleria Franco Noero, Torino.

March 2 — June 12, 2021

The gaze carries weight, quite literally, we might add in this case. And the pun would be intended. I am at Franco Noero’s gallery in Torino. It is raining lightly outside. I am standing in front of an installation by Simon Starling dated 2005, After Christopher Williams/After Jean-Luc Godard.

The installation sprawls across two walls and is made of 21 heavily framed photographs. In some of these photographs we see other photographs. Looking more carefully, we notice that they are all rephotographs, taken from the same set of photographs.

The original set, Starling rephotographed for a solo show at the Kunstmuseum in Basel, was made by Christopher Williams. It shows a dam in Switzerland, the Grand Dixence, that was the set of an early short film by Jean-Luc Godard, Operation Beton.

A rephotograph is a photograph of a photograph. It is a poor way of reproducing photographs. There is always some degeneration from print to print. But rephotography is also a full blown genre in the contemporary arts. It gained some traction in the 1980s with appropriationism. One thinks of Sherry Levine reproducing Walker Evans’s prints.

Your eyes goes from one photograph of a dam to the other and the other and the other until you have scanned across two big walls several times over. You then need to stop, because, as I said, the gaze carries weight, and once you are done scanning the walls, you have carried enormous quantities of water. Why all the work, you ask?

In physics, Work is what a mass of water does when it falls from a higher to a lower plane. Dams capture the energy spent in the fall using turbines to transform the falling water into electricity. What attracted Starling’s attention to this particular dam was the odd fact that during the day it sold the electricity it produced at a higher price than the one it paid to the neighboring countries to pump water into its basin at night.

The whole body of work is a sustained meditation on the irony of this situation, beginning from the fact that Starling was bringing back to Switzerland the images Williams made there, to be sold at a markup once there again.

Starling is fascinated by cycles. On the one level this cycle is the very emblem of the modern, capitalist notion of labor. On the other, they are a meditation on the nature of art as a special type of human activity. Connecting the two levels the three laws of thermodynamics.

On the economic level, capitalism is an attempt to defeat entropy. In the markup in price the markdown of energy is hidden until the gain is spent, requiring the cycle to start over.

At the symbolic level, art is a way of marking up the value of everything it touches. The ancients knew that everything humans make is art, but in our age what is touched by the artist’s hand acquires value as Art.

The two levels are connected through the inexorable logic of thermodynamics. Everything inevitably leads to the expending of energy and the gaining of entropy.

Starling underscores the markup in price of the photographs he rephotographed by printing his rephotographs on platinum paper, a photographic process that is much more costly than ordinary printing.

The markup is illusory, however. The more energy you spend crossing the piezometric divide, the more entropy your gaze acquires. Carrying to and fro all the weight in water of the installation your eyes will tire—there is no punctum to be gained—and rest on the floor before realizing, through some additional blind cogitation, how it all hangs together.

It has stopped raining. It will take me some more ‘gray matter’ (Duchamp) to realize, later, that for a brief while the contemporary equivalent of the Sistine Chapel was in a former industrial workshop on the outskirts of Torino. How else to describe this work if not so?

Art and capitalism are twins in ambition. They are the two strategies our species has set forward to buy us time before the oblivion. But time is running out, entropy is winning, the end can only be deferred.

To defer the apocalypse was once the office of political theology. Today the accumulation of capital and the production of art have picked up its burden to carry forth. One may wonder if the current art market has a soul. It certainly has a spirit, if only a tragic one.