Located at 80 Washington Square East, a street-level, three-panel-long window gallery displays the face of Simone Weil, a French Resistance philosopher and activist during World War II. The exhibition displays photographic and archival material of Weil’s work. The space is small and ultimately limits the indigo colored photographs and text’s ability to communicate Weil’s groundbreaking political philosophy on the party system.
A mercurial and controversial thinker, Weil’s philosophy earned her the paradoxical description of “an activist, a pacifist, a militant, a mystic and an exile.” She lived from 1909 to 1943 and completed the essay highlighted in this exhibition, “On the Abolition of All Political Parties,” the year of her death. Albert Camus, a French philosopher and supporter of Weil’s work, later helped publish the essay posthumously.
In this essay, Weil asserts the ineffectiveness of political parties, arguing that their existence does not justify their preservation. Though political parties have some benefits, Weil cautioned against political parties’ tendency to produce “collective passion.” This can cause individuals to subscribe to the identity of a party rather than the pursuit of truth and justice.
However, limited to only three artworks that are not accompanied by descriptions, the exhibition’s scant information fails to contextualize the main arguments of Weil’s philosophy. A more descriptive history of Weil’s life, a brief overview of the artist’s works or a statement from the exhibition’s curators would have offered a clearer glimpse into the curatorial intention behind the display.
Instead, the exhibition contains only a large-scale portrait of Weil, the scanned first page of Weil’s essay in French and a few disconcerting color inversions of conference posters from 1999. To gain insight into the exhibition’s significance, the viewer must be overly compelled by the three nebulous pieces to search for context individually, outside of the exhibition.
The first window displays a close-up photograph portrait in layered indigo and white, with Weil’s face occupying the entire panel. She has a neutral expression, with her eyes closed and her short dark hair kept neatly out of her face. The high-contrast coloring clearly shows the highlights of her forehead, nose and chin, emphasizing the shadows from her glasses and gaunt cheekbones. There is no description next to the image nor any information about the photograph’s context. The lack of information and Weil’s expressionless face create a sense of mystery around the image and its curatorial purpose. The vacant ambiguity of the portrait prevents the viewer from understanding Weil’s beliefs.
Another panel contains “Archive poster designs” from the 1999 “Simone Weil: The Madness for Truth” conference. On the glass window, 16 silhouettes of Weil are arranged in a four-by-four array. The first 15 images are almost identical versions of the original conference poster from 1999, with the figure of Weil standing at the center of the composition. The words “Simone Weil: The Madness for Truth,” “November 12th-14th” and “Columbia University” are written in bold serif type, along with more information about the event. These 15 panels are numbered and take up the majority of the window panel. Most strikingly, they are edited to invert the colors. Weil’s face and skin are deep indigo against her white hair, coat and outlined features — creating a haunting effect. Only the final poster, unnumbered, is set in its original coloring, with Weil in a dark coat. The text with details about the conference is absent — the only words are Weil’s name on the left side in a thin, serif typeface.
The posters’ high contrast, repetition and discoloration are attention-demanding. However, there is no additional information provided about the poster or its designer in its advertising. The inverted colors make the entire composition resemble an array of perplexing identical film negatives. The final poster stands out starkly from the sea of indigo preceding it, yet viewers’ curiosity about the poster’s significance is left unsatisfied.
Weil was described as “a philosopher of margins and paradoxes” whose “thought defies categorization, the ways in which her ideas are taken up often say as much about her commentator as they do about her.” This description provides some justification for the exhibition’s restraint regarding contextualization, allowing observers to make their own characterization of Weil, yet even discovering these past descriptions of Weil requires additional research.
The absent contextual information feels especially callous considering that the majority of Weil’s work was published posthumously, leaving her unable to decide how her writing would be presented. Moreover, the public nature of the exhibition being located in a high-traffic area begs for more comprehensive explanations of her work — it is unlikely that many passersby would stop to look up Weil’s name. In her time, Weil’s politics and activism were unapologetically controversial, and, in obscuring her philosophy through vague and unsettling imagery, this exhibition only does a disservice to her life’s work.
Contact Sydney Chan at [email protected].