“Then There Was War:” John Hejduk’s The Silent Witnesses as Nuclear Criticism

Abstract

Drawing on the reflections contained in Roland Barthes’ lectures on the “Neutral,” this article reconsiders John Hejduk’s The Silent Witnesses installation (1976), often thought a peripheral work despite the architect’s assertion that it is his most important statement. While discussions of silence normally presume the presence of a listener, I argue that this work concerns that which – if we can still describe it as silence – endures beyond any possibility of audition. This is the condition emblematized by the final blank gray volume of Hejduk’s installation, whose radical erasure of all traces gestures toward the absolute archival destruction – characterized by Jacques Derrida as an “apocalypse without revelation” – presaged by the nuclear age.

Keywords:

• architectural theory
• Jacques Derrida
• John Hejduk
• nuclear criticism
• Roland Barthes
• silence
• The Silent Witnesses

Notes

Notes

1 Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977–78) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 10.

2 Ibid., 12.

3 Ibid., 22.

4 Ibid., 24, 26.

5 John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works 1947–1983 (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 5.

6 Ibid., 125.

7 Ibid., 58.

8 Ibid., 129.

9 John Hejduk, “Silent Witnesses,” Perspecta 19 (1982): 70–80.

10 Daniel Libeskind, “Introduction” [1978], in Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 21–22.

11 Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 81.

12 Ibid., 91.

13 Ibid., 83.

14 For photographs of the installation, see Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 333, 337; and the website of The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago. Available online: http://www.renaissancesociety.org/exhibitions/308/john-hejduk-masques/ (accessed April 25, 2018).

15 Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 81.

16 On the American Museum of Natural History dioramas, see Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936,” in Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London: Verso, 1992), 26–59.

17 Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 96.

18 Ibid., 23, 81.

19 Ibid., 61.

20 Ibid., 26.

21 Ibid., 81.

22 Hejduk designates the period 1878–1908 “pastoral time” and 1908–38 “mechanical time”; ibid.

23 Susan Stewart, “Annal and Existence: On Kawara’s Date Inscriptions,” in On Kawara – Silence, ed. Jeffrey Weiss, with Anne Wheeler (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2015), 171.

24 Roberta Smith, “On Kawara, Artist Who Found Elegance in Every Day, Dies at 81,” The New York Times, July 15, 2014. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/16/arts/design/on-kawara-conceptual-artist-who-found-elegance-in-every-day-dies-at-81.html?_r=0 (accessed June 20, 2016).

25 Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 81.

26 Sigmund Freud, “The Theme of the Three Caskets” [1913], in Art and Literature: The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 14 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 238–239.

27 Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 81.

28 Ibid., 53.

29 Ibid., 76.

30 Ibid., 62.

31 Ibid., 62–63.

32 Ibid., 81.

33 Ibid., 124.

34 Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” Diacritics 14, no. 2 (1984): 23.

35 Barthes, The Neutral, 51.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark Dorrian

Mark Dorrian holds the Forbes Chair in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh and is Co-Director of Metis, an atelier for art, architecture and urbanism. His books include Writing on the Image: Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation (2015) and (co-edited with Frédéric Pousin) Seeing From Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture (2014). A version of this article will appear in Mark Dorrian and Christos Kakalis, eds., The Place of Silence: Architecture, Media, Philosophy (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2019).