Triad 3 of 32 · 2026-09-26 · Difficulty 3 · Same subject, Shared figure or motif, Conflict
The thread
What is left when the apparatus that certifies a work and the work it certifies come apart. Zweig’s blind collector points ‘to the millimetre’ to the collectors’ stamps (Nagler, Remy, Esdaile) on the back of a blank sheet: provenance without the object. Perec’s forger has certificates for everything (‘They had them’) but cannot make ‘an authentic masterwork of the past’: the object without its provenance, and the one mark he cannot copy is Antonello’s ‘me pinxit’. Krauss names the machinery (‘to find the mark, the warrant, the certification of the original’) and argues the original was always propped on the copy (Rodin casts, the vintage print, the grid; ‘spontaneity was the most fakable of signifieds’). Conflict: Krauss dissolves the original; the councillor and Winckler each stake a life on it, and in both fictions the belief produces something real. Zweig’s portfolios are prints, already multiples: the medium in which Krauss, quoting Benjamin, says asking for the authentic print ‘makes no sense’.
The three books
- The Invisible Collection, Stefan Zweig, Anthea Bell (translator); 1925 (Die unsichtbare Sammlung); Pushkin Press ed.. Anchor: certification without an object. A blind collector shows blank sheets and points to collectors’ stamps on their empty versos.
- Portrait of a Man, Georges Perec, David Bellos (translator); written 1957–60; French publ. 2012 (Le Condottière); Eng. 2014. The object without its provenance: a forger with certificates for everything who cannot make an authentic Antonello, and finds his own face instead.
- The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Rosalind E. Krauss; 1985 (title essay October 18, 1981). The theory both fictions test: the discourse of originality rests on a repressed discourse of the copy.
Notebook
- Write the verso: using Zweig’s ‘invisible collectors’ stamps’ and Krauss’s ‘the mark, the warrant, the certification of the original’ (p. 162), describe a work solely through its versos (stamps, labels, accession numbers, condition notes). At what line does a reader believe in the recto?
- A recipe for your spontaneity: Winckler fails at ‘that celebrated tautness in the jaw’ and gets ‘my own face’; Krauss: ‘spontaneity was the most fakable of signifieds’ (p. 167). Write one of your unforgeable gestures as instructions for a forger, then what the instructions leave out.
- The catalogue as tombstone: ‘Just promise me to draw up a handsome catalogue: it will be my tombstone’. Draft five entries of the councillor’s catalogue raisonné for sheets that no longer exist; set one beside Borges’s list of Pierre Menard’s visible works.
Rabbit holes
Links as checked on the day of the reading.
- Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (Marxists Internet Archive) https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
- Krauss, ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition’, October 18 (1981), Monoskop PDF https://monoskop.org/images/3/32/Krauss_Rosalind_1981_The_Originality_of_the_Avant-Garde.pdf
- Lugt, Les marques de collections de dessins & d’estampes (1921), Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/lesmarquesdecoll00lugt
- Louvre, Antonello da Messina, Portrait d’homme dit Le Condottiere https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010065016
- Varga & Guignon, ‘Authenticity’, SEP https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authenticity/
- Mandiberg, AfterWalkerEvans.com https://www.afterwalkerevans.com/
To carry
“spontaneity was the most fakable of signifieds” — Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde’, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, p. 167
Themes
aura · authenticity · Benjamin · catalogue · certification · collectors’ marks · copy · forgery · originality · prints and multiples · provenance · spontaneity
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