• 1  Fatma Abdallah Al-Ouhîbî, L’Ombre. Ses mythes et ses portées épistémologiques et créatrices, Paris (...)
• 2  Max Milner, L’Envers du visible. Essai sur l’ombre, Paris, Seuil, 2005, p. 21.

2What’s more, “the theme of the shadow appears in the West as much as in the East, in the ancients as much as the moderns”1 and, as Max Milner specifies, “the relationship between the shadow cast by the human and a part of himself destined to follow it (once separate they merge in this way at the moment of death) is a theme which has constantly stimulated the imagination of the world’s people, between distant centuries and the most diverse civilizations.”2 When reflecting upon time, one must be able to speak of a universal and anachronistic theme.

• 3  Max Milner, L’Envers du visible. Essai sur l’ombre, Paris, Seuil, 2005, p. 23.

4Furthermore, and especially in religions which believe in life after death, many believe the shadow to be the part of every man and woman that survives them.3 At once ephemeral and in constant movement, shadows are also eternal and surviving.

• 4  Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, vol. XXXV, XLIII, edition John Bostock and Henry Thomas Rile (...)

6While artists rarely mention shadows, be it in the titles of their works or in the list of materials in the work’s description, the shadow has always been a part of the vocabulary of art. From the outset, it held a place of its own in art practice and theory. Indeed, according to the complier, Pliny the Elder, representation in the West may own its origins to the shadow. In volume 35of his Natural History devoted to the art of his era, he relates the myth of the birth of art. According to Pliny, Butades of Sicyon, the Corinthian potter, and his daughter number among the first portraitists. The young girl, “being deeply in love with a young man about to depart on a long journey, traced the profile of his face, as thrown upon the wall by the light of the lamp. Upon seeing this, her father filled in the outline, by compressing clay upon the surface, and so made a face in relief, which he then hardened by fire along with other articles of pottery.”4 From the very beginning, the image would thus involve rendering the absent and disappearing figure present, and the image’s creation thus finds itself most intimately linked to love and death, to this strange couple formed by Eros and Thanatos and to the two greatest mysteries of human history.

• 5  Aloïs Riegl, Le Culte moderne des monuments. Son essence et sa genèse, Paris, Seuil, [1984] 2013, (...)

9It is interesting to study the shadow and the ephemeral precisely in their relationship to the monument, from which they are in principle poles apart. Indeed, according its definition in the Petit Robert dictionary of French, the monument is “an architectural work, a sculpture, destined to keep alive the memory of someone or something,” for the long-term, eternally. As Aloïs Riegl points out, it refers to a work that is “built for the exact purpose of keeping an action or fate forever alive in the living memory and conscience of future generations.”5 Yet, as paradoxical as it may seem, as Robert Musil claims in his Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten [Posthumous Papers of a Living Author] published for the first time in 1935, “the monument is invisible.” The monument may be monumental and it may adorn the centers of the majority of our public squares, but we fail to see it; and its content, which is supposed to commemorate and serve to remind, is thus rendered invisible and inoperative.

• 6  Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Esthétique de l’éphémère, Paris, Galilée, 2003, p. 18.
• 7  Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, Les statues meurent aussi, France, 30 min, 1953.
• 8  Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, Les statues meurent aussi, France, 30 min, 1953.

10Is this the result of a world saturated with images, a world in which it has become difficult to see and most of all to observe images, to become aware of and understand them over time? Is it the outcome of a present “haunted by the empires of transience particular to mass culture”6 and the speed of fast food and instant messaging in our society that values productivity and efficiency at all costs, and in which we no longer take the time to stop and pause before a work? Indeed, statues also die, and as Alain Resnais and Chris Marker assert in their eponymous film, “(an object dies) when the gaze that once rested upon it fades to nothing.”7 Elsewhere, while denouncing colonialism and discussing African sculptures, they wanted to show how artworks are unquestionably denaturalized when they are decontextualized by institutions and subjected to a scientific gaze. They contend that, “At the very moment that African art is crowned as a great achievement, it becomes a dead language.”8 They continue: “Why does African art find itself in a museum of anthropology, the Musée de l’Homme, while Greek or Egyptian art finds itself in a museum of art, le Louvre?”The question demonstrates just how much the context of a work’s visibility influences its (non)-comprehension. So, how should a monument be conserved today? How can it be made visible and, above all, comprehensible? What can be done so that it doesn’t become a “dead language”? And, most importantly, how can one conserve the monument’s (transient) moment, so that it remains eternally and appropriately alive and visible?

• 9  Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythes et pensées chez les grecs. Études de psychologie historique, Paris, La (...)

14Furthermore, Jean-Pierre Vernant explains that with the colossus, “the Greeks were able to translate into a visible form certain otherworldly powers that reside in an invisible realm,”9 just as the artists mentioned here translate and perpetuate invisible phenomena in the visible realm, such as the ephemeral, emotions and memories. The colossus —which was erected to contain the soul, and thus the shadow, so that it would no longer haunt the world of the living— is closely connected with shadow monuments. Each oscillates invariably between eternal and ephemeral, between visible and invisible, between life and death, between the present and the past it reflects; these interdependencies conserve both the monuments and their memory, ad vitam aeternam.

• 10  Robert Musil, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, translated by Peter Wortsman, Hygiene, Eridano (...)

17This should be the role of the monuments dotted about our cities. Their presence in our daily environments should change us into actors,or at least into active viewers of our spaces and our histories. They should invite us to consider the work and its content. For, as Robert Musil noted in the text cited above, there appears to be a “contradict[ion] [...], monuments are so conspicuously inconspicuous. There is nothing in this world as invisible [...] there are those that embody the expression of a living thought or feeling: it is, however, the purpose of most ordinary monuments to first conjure up a remembrance, or to grab hold of our attention and give a pious bent to our feelings [...] and it is in this, their prime purpose, that monuments always fall short.”10

• 11  James Young, The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, New York, Prestel by Neues, p. 17 (...)

18And yet, as Franz Kafka wrote in a letter to Oskar Pollak from January 27th 1904, “we need books and monuments to stop the sea from freezing. In frozen memory, the past is nothing but the past. Even if monuments speak of the past, their inherent temporality should be the future.”11 But when a work has been set in stone, how can one avoid fixing its time as that of the event, rather than conserving its temperamental and ephemeral nature? How can the emotion of an ephemeral event be conserved once it has been made stable and eternal?

• 12  [Online] http://morfai.blogspot.fr/2008/09/seeder.html [accessed 7 June 2013]. (...)

19A monument in Kaunas (Lithuania) is transformed into an anecdotal but on the whole evocative piece that draws the viewer’s gaze thanks to the shadow cast by its sower of seed —the generic image of invisible public monuments sown throughout our cities— whose effect is heightened by a graffiti artist’s addition of stars upon the wall. This statue gained recognition through the internet12 under the title of “The Star Sower” or “The Seeder” (fig. 3), and thus revealed it bore a new meaning and poetic touch. Might it be that the shadow renders the monument visible?

• 13  Exhibition press release, “Le monument est invisible,” La Galerie, Noisy-le-Sec, 2012. Our transla (...)

21This is a certain kind of monument, an architectural and/or monumental sculptural work that is situated in public space. But “the monument desires above all to be the vehicle of a memory —personal or collective— its vessel, the vector of a message throughout time.”13 For, even if the monument is rendered visible (by the shadow), over time its message fades away. Fixed, it evokes a past, a history that has since passed. But what can be done to make history and memory remain visible? What must be done so that the monument is capable of giving rise to a meditation on the past, while at the same time producing contemporary modes of thought and a narrative for the future, in short, that it be a monument of the moment?

• 14  Pierre Nora, “Le Retour de l’événement”, in Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora(eds.), Faire de l’hist (...)
• 15  Raphaële Bertho, “Retour sur les lieux de l’événement : l’image ‘en creux’”, Images Re-vues, no. 5 (...)

22In Faire de l’histoire, t. 1: Nouveaux problèmes [Making History, New Problems], Pierre Nora insists on the fact that, “for an event to exist, it must be known,”14 but it must also be seen. The narrator of Alain Resnais’s film, Hiroshima mon amour… does not cease to repeat, “You saw nothing in Hiroshima.”But in the media saturated societies of today, the event takes shape in the image. And yet, if our world is saturated with perfectly visible images, they are not necessarily seen or noticed. It would appear therefore in disappearing the image appears, or else appears in its “imprint,” its inside out form, as a latent presence.15 Images and, in particular, monuments would need to acquire this formal necessity in order to reveal themselves in absence, imprinted, inside out.

• 16 For more information, cf. Jean-Christophe Bailly, L’Instant et son ombre, translated by Peter Worts (...)
• 17  Georges Didi-Huberman, Génie du non-lieu. Air, poussière, empreinte, hantise, Paris, Minuit, 2001, (...)
• 18  Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, scenario by Marguerite Duras, translated by Richard Seaver, Ne (...)

23The allusion to the film by Alain Resnais was not incidental. More monuments have been created for the Second World War than any other event. Furthermore, the link between Hiroshima and the shadow is of unsurpassed intensity. When the bomb exploded, at the very moment that the bodies of the habitants burned and perished, the heat was such that light printed the silhouettes of men, women and objects onto walls and floors, creating instant, lifesized, acheiropoietic images. These images have become, paradoxically, perennial traces of the event (fig. 5).16 As Georges Didi-Huberman notes in Génie du non-lieu [Genius of the Void], Hiroshima created the most literal transposition of our beliefs into image: “When a being passes away, it is said to become a shadow.”17 While bodies die, shadows survive. He reminds us of a passage from Hiroshima mon amour: “Like you, I too have tried with all my might not to forget. Like you I forgot [...] Like you I wanted to have an inconsolable memory, a memory of shadows and stone. [...] Like you, I forgot. Why deny the obvious necessity for memory?”18In the meeting of stone and shadow, and thus between the lasting and the transient, memory remains and feeling persists, inconsolable. It is hardly surprising therefore that artists use shadows to create monuments of the ephemeral, that is, monuments which allow one to read the ephemeral by evoking, implicitly, the past, all the while conducting it into the present, for tomorrow.

• 19  Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire. Note sur la photographie, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma/Gallimard/Se (...)

25Two experiments in New York ascertained the scale of the task and sought to pay homage by trying to distinguish themselves from the “voyeuristic” nature of press images. A diaphanous, immaterial monument was thus imagined, Tribute in Light (2004, fig. 6): invisible in daylight and ephemeral, two beams of light projected vertically into the sky make the towers appear —sporadically— and preserve the dual temporality and dialectic between what was (the “ça a été” dear to Barthes) and the here and now (“c’est là, ici et maintenant”).19 What is more, the site of the Twin Towers is now occupied by a subterranean monument (9/11 Memorial, fig. 7). No longer erected, the monument pierces, plunging us deep into the earth, into a black hole, provoking a sensation of vertigo.

• 20  Georges Didi-Huberman, Génie du non-lieu, Paris, Minuit, 2001, p. 105.

27In the works mentioned thus far, the shadows were fixed and set. The only way of making them disappear would be to switch off the light, to better switch it on [BB]. “For as long as we are alive,” writes Georges Didi-Huberman in Génie du non-lieu, “our shadows do not cease to shift about and, above all, vanish and disappear, we know not. Might our own disappearance give the shadow its permanence and compactness, its physical power to survive?”20 The shadow has, in effect, a power of survival, since it allows monuments to be not only visible but most of all, permanent, surviving throughout time. Fixed in this way, memory and the ephemeral are conserved without losing their power, without fading away. The shadow reveals and enlivens the monument, as well its moment, at every instant. Yet, while they magnify and revive the monument, shadow sculptures and monuments of the ephemeral seek also paradoxically, in some ways, to defy and perpetuate them.

• 21  Georges Didi-Huberman, Être crâne. Lieu, contact, pensée, sculpture, Paris, Minuit, 2000, p. 49. (...)

28The artist Giuseppe Penone would like “the ephemeral to become eternal”; his sculptures ceaselessly question the relationship to time. “How does sculpture sculpt time? How does it move with this time —in memory, in the present, protending towards the future?”21 These questions have been addressed in part by investigating the capacity of a monument to conserve the fragility of the ephemeral, which is understood as a past event that continues into the present and opens a future. What remains, therefore, is to reconsider the ephemeral as a reflection on life and being.

• 22  Hans Belting, Pour une anthropologie des images, Paris, Gallimard, 2004, p. 12.

29The ephemeral, the monument and the shadow together question implicitly the fragility of life, of the human, the passage of time and death. In his book entitled Pour une anthropologie des images [For an Anthropology of Images] Hans Belting asserts from the outset that “the experience of death has been one of the most powerful engines for the human production of images. The image presents itself thus as a response or a reaction to death [...]. Furthermore, our contemporary images are no different,”22 even if this relationship does not apply universally to all images. We earlier saw that in the myth of the origins of art, the portrait survived the lover who left for war. One of the aims of art is to perpetuate the ephemeral that is life, to fix that which ceases to exist and to make art outlast life so as to further a questioning into life.

• 23  Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Esthétique de l’éphémère, Paris, Galilée, 2003, p. 18.

30But how can a sculpture that is created at one moment be made to last? Certainly, its forms last, but what of their understanding? How can the ephemeral be sustained over the long-term? The role of art history is to perpetuate the life of art —as much through conservation as through discourse— and a good number of works endure, survive and transcend time. But what plastic, formal or other solutions do contemporary artists have to perpetuate the ephemeral? And this, in a society where, as Christine Buci-Glücksmann affirms, the ephemeral has become the new mode of time in the age of globalization, a real marker of society: “ephemeral families of shifting shapes and sizes, ephemeral work ever more ‘flexible’ and threatened, ephemeral lives and identities that lose their fixed bearings, everything leads to a kind of accelerated time that uproots old stabilities by denying the ephemeral’s limit point, death.”23 How not to deny death? How can one not express a desire for eternity and immortality through “fixed” forms, namely, eternal artworks? How can one give priority to reflections upon the fragility of life? And how can one make these reflections last through time?

• 24  Sigmund Freud, Essais de psychanalyse appliquée, Paris, Gallimard, 1933.

32Shadow sculptures are interesting in this respect because they are at the nexus of different art forms, namely photography and cinema, or popular arts, such as shadow theater. At once material and immaterial, fixed and mobile, ephemeral and eternal, artifices, illusions and realities, monuments and moving images, they defy traditional art categories to inquire more effectively into concepts like the ephemeral. Such is the work of the German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann, which shifts between monument and moving image, between permanence and impermanence. Since the beginning of his career, Feldmann has devoted attention to the everyday life, notably beginning with a practice of observing but most of all collecting objects and images, which he then reorganizes, purifying elements of their commercial intent, and giving them an esthetic, poetic and emotional charge. Shadow Play [Schattenspiel] (fig. 9) distinctly combines the mediums of photography, the black box, the magic lantern, shadow theater and sculpture to create a work that is at once fixed and mobile. Spot lights project shadows onto a wall that are cast from children’s toys set on revolving platters arranged upon a table. In this way the artist stirs up one of art’s essential themes, the relationship that one finds in Plato’s Republic between the object and its reproduction, between truth and illusion, for which Plato calls upon a similar formal apparatus, the cave. The movement of objects and their shadows creates a dance that is at once macabre and marvelous, provoking a sense of the uncanny.24

• 25  Georges Didi-Huberman, Être crâne. Lieu, contact, pensée, sculpture, Paris, Minuit, 2000, p. 52. (...)
• 26  Céline Aubertin, “Sculpter l’éphémère,” Figures de l’art, no. 12, 2006, p. 167-168.

33Hans-Peter Feldmann manages thus to plunge the viewer back into their childhood. “Matter is memory,”25 writes Georges Didi-Huberman in Être crâne, and the shadows even more than the toys themselves recall the moment when they spoke, were alive and accompanied us body and soul. Mixing mediums, forming a kind of moving monument to childhood, the artist gives an eternal quality to the work, all the while while keeping it alive, mobile and thus invariably effective. As Céline Aubertin states in an article entitled “Sculpter le temps” [Sculpting Time], to sculpt the passage of time is to capture an eternal fluidity, to be freed from all heaviness and to lose the source of one’s perspective,”26 which is what Hans-Peter Feldmann proposes.

• 27  Claudio Parmiggiani, Stella Sangue Spirito, Arles, Actes Sud, p. 19-21.

35“I like to watch a time that leaves its trace —I like the fact that with its wild imagination, time forms— and to work with all that spreads out, radiates, is intangible and allusive and which lasts the longest: shadow, ashes, dust,”27 thus Claudio Parmiggiani brings to light this fertile paradox between the intangible, the allusive, the immaterial and that which lasts the longest. For the artist the enduring thing, which is shadow, ashes and dust, underlines once more the duality inscribed into the very heart of that image-matter that is the shadow. In this in-between the work and the work’s memory remain intact, inconsolable.

• 28  Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Esthétique de l’éphémère, Paris, Galilée, 2003, p. 33.

36Shadow sculptures are fundamental in the relationship they maintain between the ephemeral and the monument, not only in what they say of that to which they refer —that is, a body, its apparent disappearance, memory, its permanence etc.— but also for their capacity to refresh, to give life, and at the same time to stabilize and perpetuate images, forms, ideas, such as the monument and the ephemeral. As such, monuments of the ephemeral, shadow sculptures, are works of both the momentary and the continuous. They express a fragility not unlike an interior, “baroque ephemeral,” that is following Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s typology, associated with melancholic and meditative vanities, still lifes, skulls and reflections.28 But they also approach an “exterior ephemeral,” that of nature, in which light and shadows reveal the time of cycles, flux and seasons. This is confirmed in Samuel Rousseau’s Sans titre (l’arbre et son ombre) [Untitled (The Tree and its Shadow)] (fig. 11), which projects in a loop the continuous cycle of a tree’s shadow changing with the seasons, a work which inquires into the fragility and the transience of life, in all its infiniteness. Certainly, life is ephemeral, but perhaps to better begin again... The shadow remains, but most of all, it conserves forms, speech and memory.