Vide de corps - tombeau vide. The Power of Absence: A Cenotaph for Max Dvořak and the Visual Dialects of Georges Didi-Huberman the Visual Dialects of Georges Didi-Huberman
Abstract
In 1921 Adolf Loos created a model for a mausoleum for Max Dvořák, which was conceived as a cenotaph approximately six metres in height and was to be located in the Zentralfriedhof (central cemetery) in Vienna. The project never came about, however, and only the model for it exists.
In his book Ce que nous voyons,ce qui nous regarde (1992), Didi-Huberman wrote about the objects of American minimalists, noting that minimalist cubes and other strictly geometric objects made out of modern materials are evocative of Egyptian sacred structures and are where the modern and the archaic come together, and Loos's cenotaph evoked this too. According to Didi-Huberman, these elementary geometric objects have anthropomorphic, human features, and for that reason we find them disturbing to look at; they possess a kind of 'humanity' but in 'a state of absence'.
Viewed from this perspective, the model cenotaph for Max Dvořák represents an archi-tectonic and auratic figure or, more accurately, the embodiment of loss and the absence of the other.