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Contretemps 3, July 2002

Michael Goddard
Hypothesis of the Stolen Aesthetics
You can say The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting is a detective film because of
its riddle. As a rule, in a detective film, as in any gothic systemlike Marxism or
psychoanalysisat any rate, in a system where there is a faade and inside a riddle,
you enjoy finding the explanation. In a more baroque system, as in the system of
Hypothesis, you dont enjoy finding the enigma, but rather go from one level of
interpretation to another. Its like the horizon: once you reach the horizon, theres
still (another) horizon.
1

Ruizs Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978) is an intriguing exploration of the
relations between art and life, and between both pictorial and cinematic images and
thought. The film was originally planned as a collaborative documentary on Pierre
Klossowskis ideas and aesthetic practices, that would take place in Ruizs words in a
situation that was befitting to him,
2
through the cinematic creation of tableau vivants.
These tableau vivants, a practice which pervades Klossowskis theoretical and fictional
work were, in the film, attributed to the fictitious 19
th
century painter Tonnerre, whose
paintings are obsessively collected by Octave, the central, clearly autobiographical
character from Klossowskis novel, The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
3
A tableau
vivant is the reconstitution of a famous painting using human bodies with the maximum
of attention paid to recreating the detail of the original in order to duplicate or intensify
its effects. This activity of the 19
th
century salon can be understood as a highly perverse
reproductive technique that instead of making an original more exchangeable through
the multiplication of copies,
4
would render it absolutely singular through its corporeal
actualization in living material. Given Klossowskis obsessive interests in art,
perversion and mysticism, it is not hard to understand the occult aura that such a
practice would exercise on his imagination.
So the original idea, which would have required Klossowski to play both himself
and his fictional character in order to narrate a series of recreated fictitious paintings
attributed to a non-existent painter, and in fact based on obsessive themes from his own
work, already had a dizzying blend of truth and fiction, documentation and simulation.
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Contretemps 3, July 2002
Things were, however, complicated by the fact that Klossowski left suddenly for Italy,
leaving Ruiz with a collection of false paintings, some extras and no script. He was left
with no option but to improvise a fiction, in which his special kind of Spanish suitable
for translation into French
5
became a parody of Klossowskis own archaic, bourgeois
style, a free translation of his aesthetic theories into the idiom of the art film, in every
possible sense of the expression.
Perhaps provoked by Klossowskis disappearance, Ruiz organised the film around a
constitutive absence, namely the idea of the stolen painting. The novelistic paintings
attributed to the fictional painter Tonnerre from Klossowskis novel would be examined
as a series whose true significance could only be grasped in the relations between
them rather than in the thematics of the individual paintings. This turned the project
into a strange kind of detective film about art, featuring a single protagonist, the
collector as the investigator, and a series of paintings re-constituted as tableau
vivants as the suspects.
However, just as the collector warns the narrator and the audience about the
numerous traps set by the paintings, it would be a mistake to think that this was a film
solely, or even primarily about art. Instead, it should be understood as an examination
of the creation of theories and theoretical systems that artistic and other phenomena can
provoke, about the theoretical monomania that Klossowski is such an exemplary case
of. The conceit of the stolen painting hypothesis, that is the use of an absent part of
a system to account for that systems anomalies, is also highly resonant with Deleuzes
concept of the series. This particular use of Deleuzes concept of the series, as well as
Klossowskis theorization of the suspended gestures of the tableau vivant, is suggestive
of a Neo-Baroque or occult dimension to modern aesthetic theory and practice. The
elaboration of this stolen aesthetics exemplified by the work of Deleuze, Klossowski
and Ruiz will be the aim of the rest of this essay.
Pierre Klossowski, the Demonic Theory of Art and the Tableau Vivant
Here, in the case of Tonnerre, I am referring to the fascination exerted upon him
by this in itself false genre (of the tableau vivant), very much in fashion during the
period. The game consisted in rendering as faithfully as possible the gestures, the
poses, the lighting, the effect one supposed produced by the masterpiece of such
and such a painter. But this was not simply art imitating lifeit was a pretext. The
emotion sought after in this make-believe was that life giving itself as a spectacle to
life; of life hanging in suspense
6
For Klossowski, the work of art is not an autonomous entity but the site of a demonic
complicity that begins with the artist and his particular obsession or phantasm, and is
then (potentially) repeated in the experience of the viewer. It is demonic, because for
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Klossowski the unconscious psychic phantasms that psychoanalysis asserts are imaginary,
are both exterior to the subject and completely real.
7
A demon thus conceived is a virtual
entity, a kind of intermediary between the human and the inaccessible divine, but it
requires an image or simulacrum in order to be actualized. This conception of art led
Klossowski to an idiosyncratic understanding of arts supposed mimetic relationship to
the real. For Klossowski it was an error of realism to believe that the mimetic function
of art should lie in a reproduction of the real world, an error that is only compounded
by the rejection of mimesis in contemporary abstract art in favour of broken objects,
[and] images gone to pieces.
8
The idea that technical practices such as photography
have freed painting from the need to represent the real world is for Klossowski a
complete misunderstanding of the mimetic function of art that also underestimates the
mimetic power of photography and cinema. Instead, mimesis should be understood as
the reproduction of a phantasm, or the tracing of a demonic encounter that actualizes
and makes communicable an otherwise virtual, but perfectly real force. Figurative, or
as Deleuze says figural art,
9
considered as a block of sensation or a phantasm caught in
an image, in other words as a simulacrum, can only reproduce the demonic strategy,
10

by producing the same condition in the viewer as originally experienced by the artist in
submitting to the phantasm. For Klossowski this demonic complicity, as opposed to
the subjectivity of the artist, explains the haunting power of works of art: What then
sustains the action of a finished picture, if not the coming and going of this demonic
presence, between the artist and his simulacrum, the simulacrum and its viewer.
11
The same conception of simulacra is equally present in the novels of Klossowski that
were the basis of Ruizs film.
In The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, there is an alternation between two
journals, one kept by the perverse Octave, described by his wife Roberte as an old
man, spry despite his years, [] this relic in whom there survives the bourgeois caprices
of a bygone period which the disorder of our own has restored to fashion,
12
and
one kept by Roberte, who, along with Octaves unexhibitable collection of paintings
by the fictional 19th century academic painter, Tonnerre, form the twin obsessions
of his existence. In the book, these obsessions are presented as being entirely
inter-related:
Just what does contemplating such painted scenes satisfy in me? It can be put
in words of one syllable: these paintings, in the guise of art, realize that which I
am practically incapable of doing in life, with Roberte, although I dont shrink
from practicing the thing without at all realizing it.
13
The thing in question, is awakening the emotion aroused by a certain feminine
physiognomy, which is the particular phantasm captured by the simulacral paintings
of Tonnerre, whatever their ostensive theme.
14
The disturbing fact that the simulacrum
of Roberte is a product of Klossowskis own obsession with the physiognomy of his
wife, Denise Morin-Sinclair, is perhaps what lead Ruiz to leave this simulacrum aside
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Contretemps 3, July 2002
with the exception of its appearance in the mythological form of Diana the huntress, in
favour of that of the Baphomet, the demonic, metamorphic figure par excellence that
was the subject of Klossowskis final and most enigmatic novel.
The novel The Baphomet,
15
which is set primarily in the atemporal, metaphysical
world of pure spirits, concerns a ritual supposedly practiced by the Templars, based
on the sacrifice of a perfect youth. In the prologue to the novel, the young Ogier is
smuggled into the Templar order by his Aunt who has adjoining lands, in order to tempt
the monk-soldiers and thereby cause the ruination of the order and the dispossession
of their land. When this treachery is discovered, rather than simply punish Ogier, they
decide to use him in a ritual to summon the Baphomet through a ceremony in which
he is both priest and sacrifice. The enigmatic result of this ritual is that the youths
uncorrupted body resplendent with beauty, hands bound behind his back, hanging
from a rope around its neck,
16
remains perpetually suspended, despite the destruction
of the order and the death of all its members. In a sense the Baphomet is an allegory for
the same timeless suspension of a phantasm that the work of art enacts, the capturing of
a phantasm in an image that long outlives its original creator.
It is this simulacrum of The Baphomet that Ruiz employed to cinematically translate
Klossowskis ideas in Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting. By cinematically constructing
a series of fictitious paintings as tableaux vivants, whose inter-relationships are
based around the ritual of the Baphomet, Ruiz was not so much making a film about
Klossowskis theories as directly enacting them. Certainly a cinematic tableau vivant
does not produce an identical effect as a live one, but in its ambiguous intermediate
status between a pictorial and a cinematic image, as an image that is in apparent stasis,
and yet breathes and pulsates, it enacts a similar type of suspension of life as the
practice of tableau vivants itself. In addition to this, in its ability to provoke theoretical
activity through being part of a series, the use of tableau vivants in Hypothesis is clearly
allegorical of the power of both pictorial and cinematic images to provoke thought, to
generate complex levels of interpretation. Furthermore, in its aporetic structure it is
an attempt to examine the void at the centre of all systems whether philosophical or
aesthetic, the point at which they open out onto an unspecifiable, chaotic outside. This
is in accordance with Ruizs own approach to cinema, which is to view films not as
self-enclosed entities but as open systems that constantly evoke other films and images
to infinity.
17
In this sense cinematic images can function in a similar manner to tableau
vivants: rather than the unambiguous representation of a particular time and place, they
are potentially nothing more than suspended poses and scenes opening out onto infinite
relations with other images. In the original practice of tableau vivants a suspension
of time was enacted through the relationship set up between the original models who
posed for the artist and the re-constitution of the same poses in the present. The cinema,
like the practice of tableau vivants, is an art of demonic repetition, of simulation, but
it extends the powers of repetition from a simple doubling into a wild proliferation
of images. It is this cinematic power of simulacral repetition, and the sense that
what is repeated is other to what the images appear to represent, that is developed in
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Contretemps 3, July 2002
Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting through the cinematic exploration of its precursor,
the tableau vivant.
However, there is one further crucial element to this film that has been implicit
throughout this paper, namely the aesthetic theories of Gilles Deleuze. While Ruizs
occasional mentions of Deleuze seem disproportionate to the affinities between his
cinematic practice and Deleuzes ideas especially in the latters work on cinema,
Deleuzes complete avoidance of Ruiz in his Cinema books seems even more surprising.
In the case of Hypothesis, it is not Deleuzes cinematic theories but his concept of the
series that becomes an organizational principle used in order to translate Klossowskis
theories into cinematic terms. Therefore it is worth examining this concept in more
detail, in order to understand both how it functions in the film, and the relationship it
generates between the aesthetics of Ruiz, Deleuze and Klossowski.
From the Stolen Painting to the Stolen Aesthetics: The Series in Deleuze and
Ruiz
A book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective
novel, in part a kind of science fiction. By detective novel we mean that
concepts, with their zones of presence, should intervene to resolve local
situations. They themselves change along with the problems. They have spheres
of influence where they operate in relation to dramas and by means of
a certain cruelty.
18

In The Logic of Sense,
19
which is itself a serial work composed of overlapping
series rather than chapters, Deleuze defines the series as always heterogenous: every
unique series, whose homogenous terms are distinguished only according to type or
degree, necessarily subsumes under it two heterogenous series. These two homogenous
series are composed of terms of the same type but that differ in nature from the terms
of the other series and it is in the interference between these two series that the passage
enacted by the complex series is constituted: the series is always multi-serial. A series
might be constructed, for example, between a series of events and the states of affairs in
which these events might or might not be realized. The strictest examples of series can
be found in mathematics, but they also occur in literature and processes of signification.
The relation between the signifier and signified as posited by Saussure should, according
to Deleuze, be understood as this mutual interference between simultaneous series. In
fact, he redefines the terms signifier and signified as the construction of a heterogeneous
series through inter-relation between an event-series and a series corresponding to
states of affairs.
20
In some ways this is similar to Derridas concept of diffrance or
Lacans account of the sliding of the chains of signifieds under their signifiers, although
it is considerably more abstract. What is interesting about Deleuzes formulation is
its applicability to works of art, in that it can form a model for the multiple relations
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Contretemps 3, July 2002
between two series of terms, which constitute a novel, for example, without reducing
these relations to a fixed meaning. For example, in Edgar Allan Poes The Purloined
Letter,
21
there are two interfering series involving a compromising letter that is
successfully hidden by being left out in the open, and that is then discovered by a third
character, which suggests an endless repetitive circulation. This example was of course
used by Lacan, and must also be seen as a direct precursor to Ruizs film in which the
stolen letter is refigured as a stolen painting. Deleuze points out several more complex
examples of this serial technique, for example in James Joyces Ulysses,
22
between the
signifying series Bloom and the signified series Ulysses, in Klossowskis novels,
in the double sign designated by the name Roberte and in Gombrowicz between a
series of hanged animals and feminine mouths in Cosmos.
23
From these literary series,
Deleuze derives three crucial components of the serial method:
1. The terms of one series displace those of the other, hence the minister who appears
in different positions in the two series in Poes story: in other words there is an essential
variation or lack of correspondence between the two series.
2. One of the series, the signifying series is in excess over the other series.
3. Finally and most importantly there is a paradoxical case that ensures this relationship
between the two series and is not reducible to either series.
This last requirement, which is fulfilled for example in Lacans reading of the Poe
story by the circulating letter, is clearly evident in Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, as
the missing painting that interrupts the series of paintings. For Deleuze, this paradoxical
entity is present in both series and ensures their circulation and communication
precisely through maintaining their divergence. In the last part of this paper I would
like to examine the operation of the stolen painting in Hypothesis as just such a
paradoxical entity and show how it ensures the circulation of the two heterogenous
series that the film constructs.
The apparent simplicity of the collection of Tonnerres paintings is a deceptive one,
which is problematised from the outset by the conjecture of the stolen painting. As each
painting is reconstructed as a tableau vivant, linked by some seemingly insignificant
detail of lighting or gesture to the next in the series, various complications arise: are
these relations that the collector indicates not purely arbitrary, when all kinds of other
relations between the paintings seem to exist? Does each successive painting not seem
to repeat, or even to contain within it elements of the previous ones? Passing over the
substantial problems involved with the hypothesis of the missing fourth painting, which
would have been the central one in the series, when we come to the fifth painting things
become considerably more complicated. We are told that this painting entitled The
Scandal composed of nine miniature melodramatic scenes from family life arranged to
be read like the face of a clock, also has its basis in an actual scandal featuring the
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Contretemps 3, July 2002
very models from a respected family who posed for the painting. We also learn that
the events and rumours surrounding this scandal were re-iterated in a roman--clef
that appears to incorporate all the narratives suggested by all the paintings up until this
point, even, surprisingly, including the first one of the mythological scene of Diana and
Acteon. Furthermore, as the collector recites the incredibly perverse and complicated
plot of the novel, it becomes clear that the series of paintings are all interwoven with
a different series corresponding to what the collector has already referred to as the
ceremony. This ceremonial series is what the collector was referring to when he stated
at the beginning of the film that the paintings do not show but rather make allusion;
namely, that instead of a simple series of paintings there are the two series of the
paintings reconstructed as tableaus vivants, or the signifying series and the series of
gestures that make up the ceremony itself, which is increasingly revealed to be the Rite
of the Baphomet, as the signified series. Some indication of how the communication
between the two series operates is given by the seemingly chaotic nature of the sixth
painting, in which figures from all the other paintings, and some figures we havent seen
before (whose presence is explained through the hypothesis of the stolen painting), are
arranged in groups of three. This chaotic assemblage is explicated as being the tracing of
gestures from the previous painting, all of which form circular curves.
24

The apparent resolution of the enigma in terms of the re-enactment of the ceremony
of the Baphomet, however, remains highly problematic, not least because of the
paradoxical role of the missing painting. As just the type of paradoxical element, or
empty square that Deleuze referred to as the key to the functioning of complex series,
the stolen painting is the absent center, the mysterious point that belongs to both series
and yet is given in neither. What the film demonstrates is that this empty space, rather
than being a lack, is precisely what generates the endless theoretical speculation about
the paintings, the ceremony and their inter-relationship that the paintings provoke.
Considering that its connection to the preceding painting was a mask, and what follows
it is the representation of a scandal involving the ceremony, it is implied that the missing
painting is the key to the ceremony itself. It is precisely what Deleuze refers to as an
empty place, characterized by both lack and excess at the same time: in one casean
extremely mobile empty place in another case an occupant without a place.
25

There is the empty place between the two adjacent paintings, which can never be
specified, and the mask, itself an allegory of the irreducible gap between the two
series of appearance and the real, or signifiers and signifieds, which is an occupant
without a place.
Nevertheless, in a sense the repetition of this paradoxical missing element is the
ceremony, in that it makes the series of tableau vivants and the series of ceremonial
gestures communicate by endlessly diverging, and thus generates an experience of the
ceremony in the viewer, however incohate and incomplete this experience might be. In
witnessing the very suspended gestures of the tableau vivants, which are the simulation
of a ceremony that exceeds rational explanation, the potential of works of art to suspend
spatio-temporal relations is directly performed through cinematic means: what the film
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demonstrates, above all, is the power of the cinema to hold life in suspension, to offer
life as a spectacle to itself in a demonic doubling of the affective power of the tableau
vivant. As such the film is both an enactment of Deleuzes concept of the series and
Klossowskis theories of the demonic complicity involved in works of art, offering
to the viewer a simulacrum in which the singular phantasm that was the object of
the ceremony of the Baphomet, or at the very least a heretical neo-baroque tendency
in contemporary aesthetics, is actualized once again. Along these lines, perhaps the
simulacrum of Klossowski and his aesthetic theories that the film enacts could be a
similarly paradoxical element, the empty square, absent yet excessive, linking the two
heterogenous series of Deleuzes philosophy and Ruizs film-making in a divergent
yet productive occult communication, that is itself a missing or stolen element from
most accounts of contemporary aesthetic practice and theory. One might then want
to bring in other simulacral series, such as those constructed by Witold Gombrowicz
in his novels Cosmos and Pornografia, which Deleuze refers to in conjunction with
Klossowski, and whose affinity to Klossowskis aesthetics could be attributed to
their shared Polish background. And then there is the even stronger affinity between
Ruizs aesthetics and those of Gombrowicz, who like Ruiz constructed radically
deterritorialised, neo-baroque works that function as thought-provoking infernal
machines. All of the above could then be seen as the multiple components of a minor
modernist series-assemblage, a neo-baroque aesthetics of sobriety, operating at a
considerable distance from modernist aesthetics as it is conventionally understood.
Michael Goddard
University of Sydney
Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Australian Society for Continental Philosophy,
November 22-24, 2000, at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
Notes
1. Raul Ruiz, Two Comments on Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, Raul Ruiz Dossier
(Sydney: AFTRS) 2.
2. Ruiz, Two Comments on Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting 2.
3. In Pierre Klossowski, Roberte Ce Soir and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, trans.
Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1969).
4. As analysed in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,
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Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) 217-252.
5. Raul Ruiz, and Ian Christie, Problems of Time, Space and Perception: Ian Christie Interviews
Raul Ruiz, Raul Ruiz Dossier (Sydney: AFTRS) 2.
6. Klossowski, The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes 100.
7. The demon or phantasm is an external force, actualized in the relation between the artist and
the painting and then again in its reception. See Pierre Klossowski, On the Collaboration of
Demons in Works of Art, Art and Text 18 (1985): 9-10.
8. Klossowski, The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes 143.
9. See Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, unpublished translation by
Daniel Smith.
10. Klossowski, On the Collaboration of Demons in Works of Art 10.
11. Klossowski, On the Collaboration of Demons in Works of Art 10. For a detailed analysis
of Klossowkis conception of the simulacrum see Scott Durham, Phantom Communities: The
Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998) 76-114.
12. Klossowski, The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes 114.
13. Klossowski, The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes 115.
14. The way the narrator practices this in everyday life is via what he calls the laws of
hospitality, by means of which he offers his wife to any-one who visits his home, thereby
multiplying both her identity and his own. Through practising this rite, which is based on the
detailed examination, interpretation and intensification of the ambivalent corporeal gestures of his
wife, Octave sees himself, like an artist, as engaged in the creation of simulacra: Such making
common property of a cherished living person, is not without analogy to the hallowed gaze of an
artist (Klossowski, The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes 123).
15. Pierre Klossowski, The Baphomet, trans. Sophie Hawkes and Stephen Sarterelli (New
York: Marsilio Publishers, 1998).
16. Juan Garcia Ponce, Introduction, The Baphomet xvii.
17. See Raul Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema, trans. Brian Holmes (Paris: ditions Dis Voir), in which
Ruiz adopts Walter Benjamins idea of the optical unconscious as the basis for a wide range
of speculations on the nature of primarily cinematic images. Benjamins idea that there is an
unconscious of images, that is a paradoxical corpus of signs capable of conspiring against
visual conventions (32), is used by Ruiz in order to affirm a heretical, simulacral approach to
cinematic images in both practice and theory. The cinema, for Ruiz, in its overproduction of
signs always overflows whatever normative intentions might be imposed on it in the interests of
standardization: the various theses on the cinema as a hegemonic culture industry only deal
with the conscious intentions of mainstream cinema, rather than the unconcscious and accidental
effects that this cinema continually produces.
18. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia
UP, 1994) xx.
19. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York:
Columbia UP, 1990).
20. We call the signifier any sign which presents in itself an aspect of sense, we call the
signified, on the contrary, that which serves as the correlative to this aspect of sense the
signifier is primarily the event as the ideal logical attribute of a state of affairs, and the signified
is the state of affairs together with its qualities and real relations (37). In addition to the fact
that Deleuze dispenses with the necessity of language in order to describe the signifier/signified
relation, he also shifts it away from referential meaning towards the mutual interference of two
series defined independently of their contents/terms.
21. Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter, Selected Tales, ed. David Van Leer (Oxford,
New York: Oxford UP, 1998) 249-265.
22. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993).
23. In Witold Gombrowicz, Cosmos and Pornographia, trans. Eric Mosbacher and Alastair
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Hamilton (New York: Grove Press, 1978) and Deleuze, The Logic of Sense 39.
24. The placement of characters in groups of three indicates the combination of these gestures in
three dimensions into spheres, which sets up a relation to the luminous sphere in the final picture,
which is a symbolic portrayal of the ritual of the Baphomet itself.
25. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense 41.
Copyright2002 Michael Goddard, Contretemps. All rights reserved.