Reflections on Not Vital's Self-Portrait as a Table (2025)

Not Vital: Self-portrait as a Table (2025) 

Marble 115 x 65 x 50 cm [1]

 

'The table as autonomous object is not merely the sum of its parts 

and the ear is not merely a passive cavity or vacuous opening ...' 

 

 

I. 

 

Sometimes, you go to a gallery for one artist and leave haunted by the work of another ...  

 

So it was I returned to Thaddaeus Ropac for the opening of a show by Liza Lou full of previously shared expectations [2] and, while her hyper-colourful fusion of glass beads and oil paint didn't disappoint, it was the concurrent exhibition by Swiss artist Not Vital [3] - bringing together a selection of sculptures with his latest series of painted self-portraits - that captured my curiosity. 

 

Specifically, it was his obsession with the human ear as a motif that I found intriguing ...    

 

 

II.

 

As the title of his exhibition indicates, Vital doesn't want people to merely look at his work, but listen also to what it is telling us about the art of representation and the "intersections between painting, sculpture and architecture" [4]. 

 

And in order to encourage us to attend with our ears rather than just view with our eyes, it's the former that feature prominently on several of his works; playfully protruding from canvases or, in the case of his Self-portrait as a Table (2025), adorning a polished marble surface.   

 

As a Deleuzian philosopher and forniphile who has an interest in the becoming-object of the human being, I naturally found this piece irresistible. 

 

It isn't just art as furniture (or vice versa), but a zone of indiscernibility; i.e., a space wherein boundaries dissolve, differences blur, and transformative connections proliferate. Just as the artist becomes table, the table starts to sprout ears and become a new type of listening device.  

 

 

III. 

 

The English physicist A. S. Eddington famously argued there were two types of table: the tangible everyday object that we eat our dinner off; and the scientific or quantum table that is understood conceptually in terms of fast-moving atoms and empty spaces [5].  

 

But Not Vital presents a third table; the table we discover in art and which excites the interest of object-oriented ontologists like Graham Harman; the table that is neither reduced downward to invisible particles, nor upward to a series of properties, effects, and functions [6]. 

This table we encounter in art lies somewhere between (and beyond) these two. Picasso envisioned it from multiple simultaneous perspectives [7] and Vital - amusingly - attaches ears to it. The key thing, however, is this: great artists aren't content to pull up a chair at just any old table; they want one that stands in the mytho-poetic fourth dimension (i.e., the realm of true relatedness between all things and into which every straight line curves) [8]. 

 

 

IV. 

 

Finally, I'd like to say something about the ears sticking out from the surface of Vital's marble table, forming "irrational, dreamlike anatomies" [9] and prompting us to wonder why it is that since a table already possesses legs, it shouldn't also one day grow lugs ...  

There's something rather touching about the thought of old-fashioned (analogue) objects evolving the Momo-like ability to listen with genuine, time-giving sympathy and not merely the artificial intelligence of Alexa.

 

We desperately need a new ethics of listening, so that we might learn once more to acknowledge (and liberate) the Other in their otherness. It's poignant to imagine that Vital's table doesn't only encourage us to attend to it, but is attentive to us and prepared to lend an ear.   

 

Although, having said that, there's always the danger that a table with ears open to every sound and sigh might eventually become monstrous ... 

Notes

 

[1] This work by Not Vital is included in the exhibition Listening + Looking (10 April - 23 May 2026), at Thaddaeus Ropac (London): click here for details. 

 

[2] See the post dated 19 March that I published in anticipation of Lou's FAQ exhibition which is also showing at Thaddaeus Ropac (London) from 10 April until 23 May 2026: click here.

 

[3] A comprehensive biography and CV for Not Vital is available on the Thaddaeus Ropac website: click here.  

      In brief, he was born in Switzerland in 1948, but has spent much of his adult life travelling and living in foreign countries including China, Brazil, and the USA and his work is inspired by his nomadic lifestyle. Vital studied visual arts in Paris from 1968–71 and then moved to New York in 1974, where he began his artistic career: 

      "Exploring the boundaries between abstract and figurative forms, his work is marked by a particularly intimate relationship with materials, including plaster, steel, marble, ceramic and organic matter. [...] The physicality of his approach, combined with an innate understanding of his chosen materials' essential properties, results in visually challenging works that are often destabilising in their striking scale and presence."

 

[4] This from p. 1 of the Thaddaeus Ropac press release for Listening + Looking - click here. One assumes it was written by Nina Sandhaus (Head of Press). 

[5] Eddington proposed his two table theory in his Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh in Jan-March 1927. These lectures formed the basis of his seminal text The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge University Press, 1929). See the Introduction, pp. xi-xix. 

      Readers who are interested, can find this work published online as a Project Gutenberg ebook (2013): click here.  

 

[6] See Graham Harman, The Third Table / Der Dritte Tisch, Number 085 in the dOCUMENTA (13) series '100 Notes - 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen - 100 Gedanken', (Hatje Cantz, 2012). See my synopsis and critique of Harman's essay published on Torpedo the Ark (10 Mar 2018): click here.  

[7] I'm referring here of course to Picasso's 1919 collage La table. Created in a Cubist manner, the work attempted to represent the object on a two-dimensional canvas from all sides at once, by breaking it down into geometric components: click here. 

 

[8] See D. H. Lawrence writing in 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 347-363. 

 

[9] Thaddaeus Ropac press release for Listening + Looking, p. 2.  

 

Turning a Beady Eye on the Work of Liza Lou

The artist Liza Lou 

Photo by Mick Haggerty 

ropac.net

 

'Somehow, I too must discover the smallest constituent element, the cell of my art, 

the tangible immaterial means of expressing everything ...' [1]

 

 

I. 

 

If asked, I could probably name at least three culturally significant events that happened in NYC in 1969: Woodstock; the Stonewall Riots; and the birth of American visual artist Liza Lou. I believe there was also a huge ticker-tape parade for the Apollo 11 astronauts, but, like Picasso, I'm indifferent (if not hostile) to moon landings [2]. 

 

Best known for the use of glass beads in her sculptures and paintings, Liza Lou has a new solo show opening next month at Thaddaeus Ropac here in London [3] and I'm very much looking forward to going along and learning more about her work. 

 

For anyone who can transform a domestic setting such as a kitchen or backyard into a magical space [4] deserves respect and I'm interested in how her practice is grounded in labour and community, emphasising the material many-handed process of production rather than simply the conceptual genius of the artist.

 

But I'm also interested in how her more recent work - born of the solitude of the Mojave desert in southern California, rather than a studio in South Africa employing a large highly-skilled team of Zulu bead workers - is rather more personal in its expression. 

 

Or, as it says in the press release for the forthcoming exhibition, how Lou has "rediscovered her own individual mark, along with a focus upon colour as both subject and object" [5]. 

 

But while the material focus of her practice "has expanded to incorporate drawing and painting", she has, I'm pleased to see, remained "committed to the bead as the generative cell of her art" [6]. Because just as you take away his soul when you remove the hunchback's hump [7], Lou would strip her own art of its essential element were she to abandon the beads; "her signature unit of art making for more than three decades" [8].

 

 

II.

 

Etymologically, the modern word bead derives from an Old English term (of Germanic origin) for prayer: gebed (meaning to ask or entreat) - and one wonders what it is Lou is asking of herself and of us as viewers [9] of her new works combining (presumably mass-produced) glass beads and oil paint on canvas.

 

I don't have an answer to this question, but I like to think that we are being invited as viewers not simply to take something away, but give something back; to enter into an exchange with the artist of some kind (beads are thought to be one of the earliest forms of trade between peoples and bead trading may even have helped shape the development of human language [10]). 

 

I also like to think that this exchange is symbolic in nature rather than commercial; i.e. a non-productive and reversible form of exchange based on gift-giving, ambivalence, and reciprocity rather than economic value; a ritualised interaction that strengthens social bonds and directly challenges the capitalist system of consumption and commodification.  

 

Art should never be a one-way thing or a finalised transaction; as much as a work should challenge us, we should challenge and interrogate it. Great art criticism is not a form of appreciation, but of defiance and of daring the artist to go further in a game not so much of truth and beauty, but of life and death.  

 

Perhaps that's why Lou says that every brushstroke requires full fetishistic seriousness and every mark made upon a canvas becomes a holy shit experience. I don't know if this requires one to be heroic, or just a little bit reckless and foolish. Maybe a combination of all these things - not that there's anything careless or crazy in the pictures: 

 

"Lou uses her chosen material to denaturalise the spontaneity of the brushstroke, juxtaposing each painted drip and spatter with a process that demands painstaking care and precision. By translating fluid pigment into cell-like particles of colour, she forges a new experience of painting grounded in what she describes as the push and pull between 'absolute control and total abandon'." [11] 

 

 

III. 

 

Unfortunately, we now come to the problematic aspect of Lou's FAQ exhibition: 

 

"'These works are about amplification, about making things more ideal [...] in this body of work I'm using my material as a way to make paint more paint than paint.'" [12]

 

What Lou describes as ideal amplification is exactly the process Baudrillard discusses in his concept of hyperreality; a process wherein something is engineered to be more X than X, so that the real object or event can eventually be replaced by its ideal. 

 

What on earth does Lou hope to achieve by making paint more paint than paint - unless it is to make it more colourful, more vibrant, more perfect than the messy, unpredictable, slow-drying original paint which is just particles of pigment suspended in linseed oil. Such hyperreal paint would be a kind of lifeless version of real paint; cleaner, safer, even if more saturated with colour and productive of hi-res images perfectly suited to their digital reproduction and transmission on screens.  

 

Surely that's not what Lou wants; to turn glass beads into pixels (or hyperreal Ben Day dots)? I'm going to be disappointed if it is, but I suppose I'll find out next month ...

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Rainer Maria Rilke, writing in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, 10 August 1903, in Letters on Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke, trans. Joel Agee (Northpoint Press, 2002); lines that Liza Lou likes to quote. 

  

[2] I'm quoting Picasso who, when asked by The New York Times to comment on the moon landing replied: "It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don't care." His remark was published on 21 July, 1969, the day after Neil Armstrong simultaneously took his one small step and one giant leap.

      Some readers might be shocked by his lack of interest in technological achievement - and some interpret it as a sign of weariness and old age (Picasso was 87 at the time) - but I think it's more an affirmation of his privileging art over and above science; his way of staying true to the earth and the body, rather than thrilling to the thought of outer space and rocket ships.    

 

[3] Liza Lou, FAQ (10 April - 23 May 2026), at Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House, 37 Dover Street, Mayfair, London, W1. Click here for details. This exhibition marks the artist's sixth solo show with the gallery.  

 

[4] Lou first came to the attention of the art world with the 168-square-foot installation entitled Kitchen (1991-1996); a to-scale and fully equipped replica of a kitchen covered in millions of beads. 

      Rightly or wrongly, it has been given a fixed feminist interpretation; Kitchen is a powerful statement on the often neglected value of women's labour ... etc. It is also said to challenge boundaries (and hierarchies) of what does and does not constitute serious art. The work now belongs in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC). 

      Kitchen was followed by Backyard (1996-1999), a 528-square-foot installation of a garden featuring 250,000 blades of grass, which, upon closer inspection, are revealed to be tiny wires strung with beads.  As the threading process would have taken Lou 40 years to complete singlehandedly, she chose to invite public volunteers to assist her. Backyard is in the permanent collection of the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain (Paris). 

 

[5] Press release by Nina Sandhaus (Head of Press at Thaddaeus Ropac, London), p. 4. The press release can be downloaded as a pdf by clicking here.  

 

[6] Ibid.

 

[7] See Nietzsche, 'On Redemption', Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 

 

[8] Nina Sandhaus, press release, as linked to above.  

 

[9] Nina Sandhaus addresses this question, telling us that FAQ proposes "a series of fundamental questions about the nature of art that Lou has returned to across decades: When is a painting not a painting? What constitutes a paint body? Can a brushstroke be more than a brushstroke - and colour more colour than colour?" Again, see her press release linked to above. 

[10] Interestingly, with reference to this last point, the works in FAQ are titled after figures of speech, thus highlighting, as Sandhaus says, "the analogy Lou draws between visual art and language". 

 

[11] Nina Sandhaus, press release. 

[12] Liza Lou, quoted in the press release for FAQ.

 

 

For a follow up post to this one, please click here.