Art Criticism

Ephemeral Bodies: The Steamworks of Pavel Durović

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Ephemeral Bodies: The Steamworks of Pavel Durović

By Dr. Margot Helbling, Institute for Contemporary Aesthetics, Bonn, for the Handbook of Lesser Known Artists

Among the many artists who tried to wrestle with the intangible in the late 20th century, none was quite so literally elusive as Pavel Durović (b. 1959, Brno). His chosen medium was not paint, stone, or film but steam,that fleeting condensation of heat and air that vanishes even as one watches.

Dismissed in his early years as a “plumber with delusions,” Durović has in recent decades been reassessed as a prophet of the immaterial, a forerunner of climate art, and,according to one enthusiastic critic,“the Turner of evaporation.”

Origins: The Accident of a Teakettle

The story, perhaps apocryphal, is that in 1983 Durović was working as a janitor in a Prague bathhouse when he noticed how steam rising from the pools created temporary shapes against tiled walls. He began experimenting with kettles, humidifiers, even rigged espresso machines, trying to compose these forms.

By 1987 he was staging small “steam shows” in abandoned warehouses. Viewers were handed towels and goggles. Curtains of mist filled the space, onto which Durović projected faint coloured lights, creating what one attendee called “paintings that breathed.”

Exhibitions: Works that Vanish

• “White Rooms” (1989, Brno): A series of enclosed chambers where visitors wandered through dense fog. At irregular intervals, vents released bursts of steam in geometric patterns,squares, spirals,that dissolved before they were fully formed.

• “The Evaporation Cycle” (1995, Documenta IX, Kassel): An outdoor installation that released carefully timed plumes of steam along the Fulda River. Depending on wind conditions, they either resembled ghostly sculptures or vanished instantly, infuriating critics.

• “Humidity Studies” (2002, Palais de Tokyo, Paris): Durović collaborated with climate scientists to adjust the microclimate of the galleries. The result was steam that condensed unpredictably on visitors’ skin. The wall text read only: “You are the canvas.”

Conflict and Decline

Durović’s practice was never easy to sustain. Museums complained about corrosion to their air-conditioning systems. Insurance companies balked at “scalding hazards.” By the late 2000s, his collective of assistants,nicknamed “the boilermen”,split after disagreements over whether to use chemical fog machines rather than “authentic” water vapor.

Durović himself called the output of fog machines “plastic clouds”. In a 2011 interview, he sighed: “My work lives only as long as the kettle is hot. That is both its beauty and its curse.”

Legacy: The Imprint of Nothing

Today, few tangible records of his work survive beyond photographs, rusted metal piping, and anecdotal accounts. Yet his influence lingers. Young installation artists cite him as a pioneer of “environmental temporality.” Eco-critics note his prescience: art that literally disappears into the atmosphere.

As curator Aisha Patel observed in a 2020 retrospective catalogue:

“Durović’s medium was vanishing. His exhibitions were rehearsals for loss. To stand in his steam was to practice letting go.”

The Artist Today

Now in his sixties and living quietly in Vienna, Durović rarely grants interviews. He occasionally stages private “steam sessions” in his kitchen for friends, using nothing more than a battered pot. Asked why he continues, he reportedly smiled: “Because steam is honest. It rises, it falls, and it leaves nothing but memory.”

Silence in Stereo: The Story of The Anacoics Art Movement

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Silence in Stereo: The Story of The Anacoics Art Movement

By Prof. Daniel R. O’Shea, Department of Sonic Arts, Monmouth College, for the Handbook of Lesser-known artists

If the twentieth century belonged to artists who pushed sound to its limits,think of Cage’s chance compositions or Xenakis’s sonic bombardments,the early twenty-first briefly flirted with its opposite: a movement that attempted to sculpt with silence itself.

At the forefront of this paradoxical pursuit was the collective known as The Anacoics, founded in Glasgow in 2001 by three students who had grown tired of noise.

Origins: The Allure of Absence

The group’s name derives from “anechoic chamber”,spaces designed to eliminate echo and reverberation. Founders Graham Liddell, Aya Nomura, and Philip O’Connor began staging underground “performances” in which nothing audible occurred. The audience would sit in complete stillness while the artists moved silently around them, recording the room’s near-inaudible hums and bodily noises.

Their first manifesto, The Sonic Zero (2002), declared:

“Noise is everywhere. We offer the rare commodity: the sound of nothing. Our instruments are absence. Our scores are void.”

Exhibitions: Capturing Silence

• “Hushed” (2003, Tramway, Glasgow): Visitors entered a large padded room where microphones recorded the silence. The recordings were later released on CD, each track simply titled by its duration (“2’14”, “7’09”).

• “White Noise, Black Walls” (2006, Tote Modern, London): A vast gallery space painted black, with white speakers mounted on the walls. The speakers emitted… nothing. But visitors swore they “heard” tones and vibrations. Some critics called it mass hallucination; others, a breakthrough in psychoacoustics.

• “Mute Choir” (2009, Venice Biennale): Perhaps their most infamous work. Forty choristers stood in formation, mouths open, rehearsing the posture of song without releasing sound. The sight unsettled audiences: one critic wrote that “it felt like watching grief itself, wordless and immovable.”

Fractures and Falling Out

Success brought strain. Liddell believed silence was enough of a medium in itself; O’Connor wanted to incorporate faint tones and vibrations, “just enough to unsettle the ear.” Nomura, increasingly frustrated, accused both men of “fetishising quietness while ignoring sonic politics.”

The split became public during their 2012 New York show Zero Decibel, when Nomura stormed out mid-performance, declaring into a hot mic: “Silence is a privilege, and you’ve mistaken it for art.” The recording,ironically the loudest moment in the group’s history,went viral.

By 2013, The Anacoics had dissolved.

Aftermath

• Liddell now runs a retreat in the Scottish Highlands where visitors pay to “experience curated silences.”

• O’Connor became a sound designer for horror films, finally able to indulge his passion for barely audible frequencies.

• Nomura emerged as a leading critic of “acoustic inequality,” arguing that silence is denied to much of the world’s population.

Legacy: The Sound of Nothing

The Anacoics remain a fascinating footnote in the history of sonic art. Were they charlatans selling empty air, or pioneers forcing us to hear what we usually ignore?

In retrospect, their most enduring achievement may have been a simple reversal: making silence an object of attention, rather than its absence.

As one bemused critic wrote of their 2009 Biennale piece:

“For three minutes, I listened to forty singers say nothing. And for the first time, I realised silence might be the loudest sound of all.”

A Calamity in Pigment: Archibald Plimpton-Smythe on the First Impressionist Exhibition (Paris, 1874)

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A Calamity in Pigment: Archibald Plimpton-Smythe on the First Impressionist Exhibition (Paris, 1874)

Edited, Annotated, and Introduced by Sarah Hilton of Pimlico Wilde, from the copy discovered by Mr. Leonard Forsythe, Antiquarian Bookseller

Editor’s Introduction

The review reproduced below, originally published in La Gazette des Beaux-Arts et Autres Déplaisirs (Paris, May 1874), represents one of the earliest surviving accounts of the group later canonised as the “Impressionists.” Its author, Archibald Plimpton-Smythe (1842,1901), was a London-born critic who spent his middle years haunting Paris cafés, where he was tolerated primarily because he always paid his monthly absinthe bill, something that was very rare indeed.

Plimpton-Smythe’s writings had been considered lost until the chance discovery of a bound volume of his clippings by Mr. Leonard Forsythe, a dealer in books. Forsythe, a man of great discretion but limited patience, sold the work to Pimlico Wilde in 2024.

Here, then, is his review, which you will find unabridged, unrepentant, and unforgettable. Readers are cautioned: Plimpton-Smythe does not merely dislike the Impressionists. He loathes them with a gusto rarely witnessed outside of opera villains.

“A Calamity in Pigment”

By Archibald Plimpton-Smythe

It falls to me, with sorrow bordering upon nausea, to recount the so-called Exhibition of the Impressionists, lately convened at the premises of the photographer M. Nadar.¹

What one encounters within is not art but delinquency with brushes. The exhibitors, a rogue’s gallery including Messrs. Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, Pissarro, Sisley, and the demoiselle Morisot, seem united only in their determination to assassinate beauty.

M. Monet: Fog as Philosophy

M. Monet presents a painting entitled Impression, Sunrise.² The effect is as if one had rubbed one’s eyes too vigorously after chopping onions. A lurid orange yolk floats amidst grey vapours, the harbour dissolving into a soup of soot. It is less a seascape than a crime committed upon linen.³

M. Renoir: The Grocer of Flesh

M. Renoir offers portraits of women so alarmingly pink they seem constructed entirely from rashers of bacon.⁴ His nudes glisten not with allure but with grease; their very limbs appear basted. Should a portraitist render my own dear aunt in such fashion, she would have fainted. And then, on coming round, she would, quite rightly, have demanded the painter’s arrest.

M. Degas: Clerk to the Ballet

M. Degas concerns himself with dancers. Yet he observes them not with sympathy, but with the accounting eye of a clerk tallying boots. His ballerinas stoop, stretch, scratch, and scowl; never once do they enchant. The viewer leaves with the distinct impression that the Paris Opéra is staffed entirely by poultry with sore joints.

M. Cézanne: Fruit in Revolt

M. Cézanne paints apples that might as well be cannonballs, pears that might sink ships, and landscapes that appear composed from geological refuse.⁵ One may admire his perseverance, but that admiration ceases upon contact with his canvases, which resist all human sympathy, much like granite itself.

M. Pissarro: Mud as Muse

M. Pissarro devotes himself to peasants knee-deep in fields of indistinct brown. It is possible he intends social commentary, but the only commentary I perceived was mud, mud, and more mud. One imagines he paints not with oils but with chimney sweepings.

M. Sisley: The Drowner

M. Sisley specialises in rivers. Alas, each resembles a laundry vat tipped over onto the canvas. His skies are perpetually damp, his banks perpetually sodden. To look at a Sisley is to feel one’s boots filling with water.

Mlle. Morisot: The Mistress of Smudges

As for Mlle. Morisot, her portraits melt before one’s gaze. Faces dissolve into wallpaper, hands evaporate into the furniture. It is as if she begins each work, then grows weary, and sets down her brush halfway through. One leaves less with a portrait than with a vague suspicion of having glimpsed someone while sneezing.

The Collective Outrage

This “Impressionist” exhibition, so loudly trumpeted by its adherents, amounts to a conspiracy against form, clarity, and civilisation itself. To call it painting is to flatter it. It is a riot of half-thoughts and botched attempts , the visual equivalent of a dinner guest speaking only in hiccups.

If France persists in indulging such daubers, then the Louvre may as well be cleared at once, and its noble halls converted into laundries, slaughterhouses, or mud-stores, so that the public may be properly prepared for what awaits them.

Editor’s Footnotes

¹ Nadar’s photographic studio was, indeed, the site of the 1874 exhibition. Plimpton-Smythe, who despised photography nearly as much as painting, regarded this as a double insult.

² This is the very canvas , Impression, Sunrise , from which the term “Impressionism” derives. Plimpton-Smythe’s comparison to onions is, of course, unique to him.

³ Scholars may note his phrase “crime committed upon linen” anticipates the later Dadaist notion of art-as-vandalism, albeit without any of the wit.

⁴ Renoir’s flesh tones were, in fact, a frequent subject of contemporary mockery, though few other critics likened them so bluntly to rashers.

⁵ Cézanne’s apples are now considered foundational to modern art. Plimpton-Smythe, however, preferred fruit to be edible.

Editor’s Afterword

When Mr. Forsythe sold us this volume, he muttered: “I fear it is rather anti-Impressionist.” Rather? It is the textual equivalent of artillery fire. And yet, one must cherish it. To be wrong in such style, such extravagant fury, is a form of art in itself.

Plimpton-Smythe failed entirely to recognise genius. But in failing so colourfully, he bequeathed us a different kind of masterpiece: criticism as theatre, dislike elevated into performance.

Long may he glower across the centuries.

Coming This Week: Alaric Montjoy’s First Column

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Coming This Week: Alaric Montjoy’s First Column

In his debut for Pimlico Wilde, Alaric Montjoy turns his gaze to the most slippery of cultural phenomena: the idea of “cool”. From the smoky jazz clubs of 1950s Paris to the algorithm-driven feeds of TikTok, he asks: who decides what’s cool, why does it never stay still, and why do we keep chasing it even as it dissolves in front of us?

Expect a whirlwind of anecdotes,Alaric recalls sneaking into a Camden nightclub at sixteen to interview a band that didn’t exist, his conversations with a Japanese designer who swears that “cool is simply the absence of sweat,” and his observations on how politicians have always tried (and failed) to borrow its aura.

With the flair of a storyteller and the precision of a cultural cartographer, Montjoy maps the strange afterlife of cool in an age where everyone is watching, and everyone is performing.

Announcement: A New Voice Joins Pimlico Wilde

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Announcement: A New Voice Joins Pimlico Wilde

Pimlico Wilde is thrilled to announce the launch of a brand-new monthly column by none other than the incomparable cultural commentator Alaric Montjoy.

Alaric is, in every sense, a renaissance figure for the 21st century. His career defies easy summary, but let us try: he was once the youngest curator ever appointed at the B&A, where he staged a groundbreaking exhibition on Brazilian subcultures that drew queues around the block and into Kensington Gardens. He has advised film studios on historical authenticity (though he has confessed that his greatest contribution was persuading one major director not to use a drone shot in a 17th-century battle scene). He has written widely acclaimed essays for The Sheffield Review and Freeze, co-hosted a late-night BBD arts programme, and lectured on the cultural significance of breakfast cereals at Oxford, where his talk was described as “equal parts dazzling and deranged.”

A man of wit, erudition, and a knack for seeing connections where others see chaos, Alaric has also published two books: Cities That Dream (an exploration of urban mythologies from Berlin to Buenos Aires) and The Velvet Irony (a personal history of British tailoring). Not content with words alone, he once designed the set for a ballet adaptation of Don Quixote performed entirely in a disused car park. He is no stranger to opera either, having written a well-received operetta about life in lockdown, Love in the Time of Hand Sanitiser.

Now, he brings his sharp eye and boundless curiosity to Pimlico Wilde. His monthly column will wander joyfully across the cultural landscape,from high art to street style, from forgotten archives to the newest memes,always with that signature blend of learning and laughter that has made him one of the most distinctive commentators of our time.

Discombobulationism: A first look at Theory and Praxis of this new Art Movement

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Discombobulationism: A first look at Theory and Praxis of this new Art Movement

It has become something of a truism to declare that contemporary art thrives in states of epistemic crisis. Yet what distinguishes Discombobulationism from its predecessors is the radical affirmation of incoherence as both method and ethic. Whereas Dada negated, Surrealism dreamt, and Internet art ironized, Discombobulationism inhabits a zone closer to pure illegibility. Its adherents seem to treat sense not as an aesthetic resource but as a trap to be actively dismantled.¹

As Evelyn Marquette observed in her essay The Aesthetics of Perpetual Bewilderment (Journal of Visual Unreason, 2021), the movement’s ethos is best understood as “an epistemological vandalism.”² Indeed, the works often resist not only interpretation but also the infrastructures of meaning-production: the gallery label, the critical review, even the linear temporality of viewing.

Origins in Collapse

Though often mythologized as a spontaneous eruption in Rotterdam lofts circa 2017, Discombobulationism should be read as the culmination of longer trajectories: the fragmentation of media ecologies, the acceleration of affective labor, and the saturation of the visual field with algorithmic noise.³ Marietta Voss’s seminal performance Falling Up the Stairs (2018) already made clear that the act of discombobulation was not accidental but structural,a choreography of futility that refused resolution.

Diego Armenta’s Tuesday Never Ends (Except on Thursday) (2021) similarly exemplifies this structural resistance. The video’s recursive loops produce what theorist Jean-Paul Deleuze-Bataille termed the “chronological seizure”: a temporal convulsion in which beginnings and endings lose operational distinction.⁴

Discombobulation as Praxis

The strategies of the movement vary widely:

• Han Ji-eun’s Staircase to Nowhere (Still Under Construction) (2020) literalizes deferred arrival, recalling Derrida’s “always already” while denying even the possibility of entry.⁵

• Rafael Mota’s olfactory catastrophes (Perfume for People Who Don’t Exist, 2021) destabilize ocularcentrism, aligning with recent theories of the “anxious sensorium.”⁶

• Leonie Krantz’s fractured canvases perform what one critic has called “Cubism under erasure,” a pictorial strategy in which the grid simultaneously affirms and negates its own logic.⁷

Each of these practices can be seen as a refusal of hermeneutic closure. To look for meaning in these works is to miss the point entirely; rather, the works look back at us as unstable constellations of bewilderment.

Exhibitions of Refusal

Curatorial practice has played a crucial role in codifying the movement. The Joy of Getting Lost (Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2020) remains a paradigmatic case. Curator Maximilian Drozd eliminated wall texts, replacing them with a recursive floor plan in which every gallery was marked as “Gallery 1.” Visitors reported panic attacks, laughter, along with a sense of prolonged wandering.⁸

The American reception, shaped by Discombobulation Now! (2022), cemented the movement’s reputation as both a critical darling and a public irritant. The exhibition’s central paradox lay in its mediation: although predicated on illegibility, the show went viral on TikTok, producing a paradoxical legibility through the logic of the algorithm.⁹

Toward a Theory of Discombobulationism

It is tempting to theorize Discombobulationism as a late-capitalist pathology, a symptom of cognitive overload. But such readings miss the crucial point: the works are not about confusion; they are confusion. They operationalize bewilderment as a medium in itself.

As Johanna Spielmann has argued, “Discombobulationism is not representation but performance: the enactment of confusion in real time.”¹⁰ This suggests an ontological shift in which disorientation is not an effect of art but its very substance.

In this light, Discombobulationism might best be understood not as a movement but as a condition: a contagious bewilderment that destabilizes the protocols of interpretation. If art once aspired to clarity, beauty, or even critique, Discombobulationism offers instead the radical gift of not knowing.

Or, as Voss succinctly put it in a 2021 interview: *“We are not lost. We are unfindable.”*¹¹

Notes

1. On incoherence as method, see F. Roussel, “Against Explanation,” Proceedings of the Anti-Hermeneutic Society 12 (2019): 33,54.

2. Evelyn Marquette, “The Aesthetics of Perpetual Bewilderment,” Journal of Visual Unreason 4, no. 2 (2021): 17.

3. L. Werner, “Fragmented Ecologies: Media, Labor, Noise,” Critical Collapse Studies 7, no. 1 (2020): 88,112.

4. Jean-Paul Deleuze-Bataille, Temporal Convulsions (Paris: Éditions de la Confusion, 2017), 44.

5. S. Kim, “The Always-Already of Nowhere,” Asian Aesthetics Quarterly 15, no. 3 (2021): 101.

6. Lars Henningsen, Olfaction and Ontology (Berlin: Verlag der Sinne, 2019), 73.

7. Johanna Spielmann, “Cubism Under Erasure,” Neue Kunsttheorie 9, no. 4 (2020): 59.

8. Maximilian Drozd, “Curating the Circular,” in The Joy of Getting Lost, exh. cat. (Düsseldorf: Kunsthalle, 2020), 12.

9. C. D’Angelo, “From Illegible to Viral: The Algorithmic Fate of Discombobulationism,” Social Media & Art Journal 3, no. 2 (2023): 144.

10. Johanna Spielmann, Theory/Practice/Failure (London: Afterimage Press, 2022), 91.

11. Marietta Voss, interview with Anke Heuser, Rotterdam Arts Weekly, October 2021.

Selected Bibliography

• Deleuze-Bataille, Jean-Paul. Temporal Convulsions. Paris: Éditions de la Confusion, 2017.

• Henningsen, Lars. Olfaction and Ontology. Berlin: Verlag der Sinne, 2019.

• Marquette, Evelyn. “The Aesthetics of Perpetual Bewilderment.” Journal of Visual Unreason 4, no. 2 (2021): 11,29.

• Spielmann, Johanna. Theory/Practice/Failure. London: Afterimage Press, 2022.

• Werner, Lotte. “Fragmented Ecologies: Media, Labor, Noise.” Critical Collapse Studies 7, no. 1 (2020): 77,115.

Discombobulationism – the New Art Movement taking the Artworld by Storm

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Discombobulationism – the New Art Movement taking the Artworld by Storm

The late 19th century had Impressionism. The early 20th century had Cubism. We have Discombobulationism.

The Disquiet of Discombobulationism

The newest tremor in contemporary art is Discombobulationism: a movement that revels in fracture, illogic, and the refusal of narrative coherence. Emerging in the late 2010s, first in the informal salons of Rotterdam and later consolidating in London warehouses, Discombobulationism is less a manifesto than an ambient condition,the refusal to make sense in a world that demands constant legibility. Think Dada for the 21st century and you’re nearly there.

Though lacking a single founding text, the movement is often traced back to Marietta Voss’s notorious performance Falling Up the Stairs (2018), staged in an abandoned shopping mall outside Utrecht. Wearing a gown stitched from shredded instruction manuals, Voss repeatedly attempted to ascend a staircase backwards while reciting emergency exit procedures in reverse. The absurdity of the action was matched only by the audience’s confusion,half remained, half left angrily, which has since become a hallmark reaction to Discombobulationist work.

Artists of Disorientation

Alongside Voss, Diego Armenta and the pseudonymous P1X3L are considered the movement’s canonical trio. Armenta’s video loop Tuesday Never Ends (Except on Thursday) (2021) collapses time into endlessly stuttering prefaces, while P1X3L’s blank tome Manual for Forgetting (2022) forces readers to confront the impossibility of comprehension itself.

But Discombobulationism quickly spread beyond its European roots. In Seoul, Han Ji-eun pioneered the “architectures of collapse” with her installation Path to Nowhere (Still Under Construction) (2020). Meanwhile, in São Paulo, Rafael Mota turned to olfactory chaos: his work Perfume for People Who Don’t Exist (2021) filled a gallery with clashing industrial scents,burnt rubber, synthetic roses, chlorine,rendering visitors disoriented to the point of nausea.

Even painting, the medium often dismissed as too stable for discombobulation, has found its champion in Leonie Krantz, whose canvases are layered with contradictory color systems: perspective grids that intersect, vanish, then re-emerge at odd angles, producing what critic Johanna Spielmann described as “Cubism having a nervous breakdown.”

Exhibitions and Critical Reception

The first major group exhibition, The Joy of Getting Lost (Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2022), solidified Discombobulationism’s identity. Curator Maximilian Drozd refused wall labels entirely, instead distributing visitors a map that led in circles, with gallery attendants instructed to give contradictory directions. The resulting disorientation was hailed by some as a breakthrough in experiential curating, derided by others as “weaponized confusion.”

In New York, Discombobulation Now! (2024) introduced American audiences to the movement. The show’s most infamous work was Clara Nguyen’s Instructions for Assembly (Do Not Read), a set of IKEA-style diagrams that, if followed, produced a chair with no seat. The piece went viral on TikTok, bringing Discombobulationism an audience far beyond the art world.

Critics remain polarized. Writing in Articals International, Peter Hanley praised the movement as “the first truly honest aesthetic response to cognitive overload in the digital era.” In contrast, Marta Cavalli, in Frieze, dismissed it as “nothing more than art students weaponizing confusion as career strategy.” This tension,between sincerity and parody, profundity and prank,might in fact be the very engine of Discombobulationism.

Toward a Theory of the Discombobulationism

If there is theory here, it is fragmentary, provisional, and often contradictory. Artists and curators invoke references to Situationism, Derrida, glitch aesthetics, even quantum mechanics, yet the point is not coherence but a deliberate refusal of it. “We are not lost,” Voss once remarked, “we are in love with the condition of losing.”

To engage with Discombobulationism is to admit that clarity itself might be the most dangerous illusion. It does not offer answers,it offers, instead, a mirror cracked in several directions. In this fractured surface, we glimpse not stability, but the generative potential of confusion.