Hermès

Project Hermès is a site-specific installation in a vacant house in La Jolla, California based on transcribed conversations between Eloisa Haudenschild in La Jolla and Mark Bradford in Los Angeles that took place from January to July 2013. From Haudenschild were stories of an eccentric, former neighbor who harbored deep antagonism and paranoia towards her and her family. From Bradford was the initial impulse to research domestic settings of homemade webcam pornography, later abstracted into a web of black lines that aggressively cut across the interior of the neighbor’s dilapidated house.

Hermès, Marcos Lopez, the messenger, traveled for six months between La Jolla and Los Angeles relaying Haudenschild’s stories of hostile encounters with her neighbor to Bradford. It was only through these stories, and a scale-model made by Hermès, that Bradford experienced the space during the first few months of the project.

Project Hermès opened on August 3, 2013 for only twenty-four hours. After which, both the house and installation were completely demolished.

The design component of this project was complicated by the fact that Mark Bradford could not see the space for several months or have a solid idea of his intervention at the onset. Also, the conversations with Eloisa were ongoing. Knowing this, I felt it was important to give Mark as much contextual information about the house as possible and so I measured the interior as plan and elevation and with the aid of photographs, subsequently translated these drawings into CAD files, SketchUp models and photo-realistic renderings. The timing was such that as these rendering were near completion, Mark came upon the idea of the 'web' which necessitated a physical model (1/2" = 1'-00") as a drawing surface for his process. The model remained in-progress right up to production, continuing to be translated into a digital drawing to be used later as an aid in the production of the final piece.

- Marcos Lopez (Hermès)

What struck me was the psychological strangeness that revolved around the neighbor’s home. I’m drawn to using the home as a construct for talking about psychological conditions and the idea of voyeurism. When Hermès describes the stories of the neighbor it is as if we are peeking into her life, going through her closets, looking through her windows - it has a voyeuristic feel to it…I did not have a physical relationship with the space (neighbor’s house) until I came here today for the first time…So I started to see this disconnect between public and private space. Then I thought I’ll do some research on this site called Cam4 and what was interesting about it were the people using their webcams in a public way, performing very private acts. I started to take pictures of their places without them in it. In order for this to happen there had to be some interaction, like asking them if they could move off camera so I could take a picture of just their living room. They would get freaked out but when they would move off camera you could see their space. And then I thought about the neighbor who had been carrying out these public and private, very strange, psychological acts for a really long time. I started thinking about her private space and about interruptions, almost like a weird fissure.  I thought I needed to do this hard-edged abstraction that cut through her private life - that interrupts it. So the line becomes a psychological and physical part of the space because I believe the neighbor was constantly being psychologically interrupted. Privately, she was one way and publicly, she was another way. Her mind was constantly interrupting itself in this weird kind of madness…so when I saw the line cutting across her refrigerator and lines cutting across her carpet, it felt like someone came into her private space…like a violation. When you see pictures of the line, it’s as if it cuts right across the glass. The line for me is the distortion or the fissure between her public and private lives - it’s like a crack. This woman was cracked…she was clearly two people.  Her narrative was cracked and it’s almost as if her narratives constantly interrupted themselves. So I wanted to do something with that interruption and thought about what you can do in a home to interrupt that narrative. I thought the most violent thing I could do is simply to interrupt that narrative by cutting through and straight across the house so it starts to fragment. I started making the line at one end of the house and I didn’t lift my hand up as I went through the model Marcos made. The line was aggressive and her house had secrets, so in some ways I wanted to expose the aggressiveness and violence of her life…her meanness. It feels mean cutting across her house with the line…it’s like slashes that are cutting across the interior.  When I saw pictures of the house it looked spooky to me. Even if I didn’t know the neighbor, I could tell I would feel uncomfortable inside the house…this is a real intense installation. I wouldn’t have thought to do a line but I kept thinking about the simplest, most minimal gesture I could make. I am a painter so I wanted to use that vocabulary…I could see how strong it could be.

- Mark Bradford

3.1.2013 conversation betweenEloisa and Hermès

The haudenschildGarage, La Jolla, CA

...we proposed that Mark respond however he decides, awesome that he already sent us those photos and that audio piece - his ideas resonated with me. the next time you (Marcos) go back to Mark with more information, he’ll decide how best to translate all this into something concrete. the timing couldn’t be better since the place will be demolished in august and we have the perfect amount of time to use that space, which is amazing. hopefully something will end up in the house… it could be part of the new construction or become part of the remains. i am going to show you the blueprints of the new construction in the neighbor’s lot, they are finished and we are presenting them to the city very soon. it would be great for you to see them. today we decided that you will start coming to visit the property every few weeks, but that could change - we’re flexible. we are thinking the project would happen over a few months and try to have it finished by August so that gives us six months. when it’s completed, this project will be presented at the garage…i spent many years depressed looking at the neighbor’s house…now she’s dead. the situation over there around the pool with barbed wire and giant water bottles along the top of the fence was strange, i have no idea why. the house has a negative vibe to it but it will be completely demolished soon. you can imagine how ready we are to move on. the perfect moment and place for our project. she always lived by herself, i never saw anybody come in or out of that place. twenty-six years of living next to each other and i never saw anybody except her in the house. i was the only person who ever spoke to her in my family. my first move after we bought her house was to plant those tall trees along the easement. i put those trees in so i wouldn’t have to look at her place anymore. in the front lawn over there was the tent where she would put her mom…and then, in some rooms, did you notice that some of them had their own locks? she also had - i think i told you - a motorhome, right? the motorhome was her method of punishing me for having people over. she would move her motorhome to block my driveway. if i behaved poorly and people came to the garage – they had to walk by her property - she would then position her motorhome to almost completely block my front gate. she would even stop people from coming in…anytime i would say anything to her about the poor state of her property, she would answer, “i was here before you - if you didn’t like it you shouldn’t have bought the place.” the motorhome was entirely covered in old sheets and that’s what people would see when they came over to my house…her motorhome had pieces of wood covering the tires and there were always these wires and connections coming out of it, like she was transferring power to it from the house - i don’t know what she was doing inside it. her life seemed sad to me but she was so mean that it was hard to find sympathy for her because she was so aggressive…i am just amazed at how Mark was able to understand her so quickly and place her with those people who break social codes, in fact there was no social code for her…she was one of the first doctors in la jolla and I think something of an icon to people. but the way we experienced her was completely different. i think she moved here in the ‘50s as this is a very old house, never painted or remodeled. i wouldn’t be surprised if she was one of the very first people who bought in this neighborhood…if my neighbor could see us now, she would be very unhappy that we bought her property, since she didn’t like me at all. one time she stopped me coming home and said, “too many people drive and walk by my house”…once she looked at me and said, “you’re looking forward to me dying, aren’t you?” she had those types of exchanges with me, she was that kind of woman. she had nothing to lose and it was very difficult to deal with her since no rules applied to her - including federal laws. i had to pick up my mail at the post office because she got upset with me and threw my mailbox in the trash…today, Marcos, you got the keys to the house for the first time. before that, we just talked about it and you saw it from the outside. i’m happy to hear Mark would like to come to the garage. this project is going to change you and i would like to be part of this process with you. i noticed that you like that room with the floral curtain that’s falling apart - i’m sure there are a lot of stories about that room and this house...Monica and I were looking in some rooms where the carpet is yellow but there are big spots of blue where furniture used to be...the house hasn’t been touched for years and years and years…did you notice how she cooked? she brought down these old electric burners from the wall, like a hot plate…she probably hardly ate, she was so small, maybe she didn’t even use the stove much. maybe she ate only a couple of apples or bananas...when the house is torn down, it will be like a cleansing to me…it’s a dark house with no power and that’s why it’s good coming here early. when you came in today, we ran out to say hello and followed you but you had already entered the house and the idea is that you must enter and stay in the house by yourself. sorry i didn’t welcome you. what’s important is to be open and stay in communication. i am very excited about everything...

2.16.2013 conversation with Mark and Hermès

The Bradford Studio, Los Angeles, CA

So right now because of the stories you’ve told me about the woman, the thing I was most drawn to was her psychological state…with the stories of her pruning at 3 am and the climbing of the trees and her kind of antagonistic relationship with her neighbors…these routines and patterns that she always was involved in. What struck me was the psychological strangeness that revolved around her home and I’m drawn to using the home as a construct for talking about psychological conditions and also the idea of voyeurism. I think in some way when you describe her stories to me we are peeking into her life, going through her closets, peeking through her windows - it has a voyeuristic feel to it and that’s also something that I am interested in. I am interested as well with this idea of the voyeur … in a lot of the things you described it felt like she was putting on a performance in some ways with these strange patterns. She really constructed a personality that she involved us with - I find that interesting, almost like an eccentric witch brewing these strange concoctions of her own. So I am sort of thinking about playing with materials. I don’t know how I ended up here (with the webcam images)…oh, I know how…a friend of mine sent me a random link “Oh hey Mark you should look at this” and I think it was a drunk tranny or something like that – “Tranny Drunk at Home.” But when I looked at the video of this tranny, she was in her house and she had a webcam and she was sort of drunk and looking at the camera and being as sexy as a tranny can be. It ain’t that pretty, you know, size 11 high heel shoes and football shoulders don’t look good in Prada. But then I became interested in her home and interested in the environment without her in it. So I went to the site and it’s a webcam site for voyeurs and exhibitionists and they share cameras. But the weirdest thing happened, I was looking at the site and it’s international – people from Turkey, Sweden, Los Angeles, Dubai, India - mainly these kinds of players and real amateurs are real people, not actors. They were always in their home; no one was in a nightclub. So you had these personal spaces, these sorts of intimate home environments where they were doing personal things on camera. Seemingly they were private but they were broadcasted very publicly and then I started to think about removing people from the frame. I watched a man take a shower - I suppose he felt that we wanted to see this 400 pound man take a shower and I could tell it was a European shower…the strangeness of the bathtub, it looked like a Jacuzzi or something. So what I began to do was to wait for everyone to exit the frame, exit stage left, and once they exited stage left then I would take a picture of this environment without the person in it…it was very strange, very psychological, very private, very public, very voyeuristic, very uncomfortable. I was also uncomfortable as I was listening to you telling me about this woman’s story, this kind of uncomfortableness looking into someone’s private world. And so with these webcam images, I thought I would get a photo album or something to display for family and friends to look through mainly on coffee tables with the images in it. And there were these empty spaces in the screenshots I took…they were so loaded and they just came to me waiting for the people to leave the frame and they would sort of “brb” - be right back. Then they would come back and begin this sort of relationship with the viewer. And it was very strange because some of the people I would watch were clearly doing sexual acts in the same kitchen that they would be in the morning making lunch for their husbands or for their boyfriends. Then I also started to think about facades, things on the outside are not always what they seemed to be on the inside. You showed me the pictures of the neighbor’s house, I was struck by how clean it was on the outside, how orderly it seemed to be…But all the stories you’re describing are of someone that is out of balance, someone who is not living by the sort of appropriate social codes, someone who’s breaking down all of the codes of appropriateness. And that is what I see in these images, I see the same kind of appropriateness when there is no one in the image and they become very inappropriate once the person is in frame because of the acts they are doing and so I am playing with those things right now as a starting point. This is just a starting point but I think it’s interesting.

3.9.2013 conversation with Mark and Hermès

The Bradford Studio, Los Angeles, CA

Well…so after what you’ve told me this week what I’ve noticed and thought about the most is that there are so many different psychological parts to this woman. My god, I mean where to begin…this is a 26 year old, very pointed relationship with well thought through attacks on a woman who was the opposite of her. I see she gravitated in a weird way to Eloisa because Eloisa is very maternal. She takes people in - people, they love Eloisa, her family loves Eloisa, her husband loves Eloisa, her community loves her. It’s beautiful. Everything you described about this woman is that she’s not a beautiful woman inside or out. She was not loved. She put her mother in a tent - that’s the opposite of love. The woman who brought you into this world is put in a tent. At the same time, Eloisa’s daughter Rita is having her wedding in the home she was born in and this woman next door puts her mother in a tent. I find that kind of interesting as a paradox. And Eloisa has the haudenschildGarage to bring people together. So in a way it’s interesting because Eloisa had a home but also had the Garage and in another way this woman had a home and had a mobile home. So again I see an interesting parallel between the two. I also see a lot of mirroring and how in a way this woman was attracted to her neighbor and to her family and to who Eloisa was. I can also see she was so bitter that she wanted to tear it down - I find that strange. And what I also find strange about what you were telling me is that the neighbor was so private and personal. You said that woman said to Eloisa, “you don’t like me, you should talk to the neighbors about me.” So that implies that she knew exactly how to manipulate other people. So I wondered what her neighbors thought? Maybe that Eloisa was making some of it up and I wonder what people thought of her medical practice? These attacks were something very particular to Eloisa’s family. I don’t know why I say Eloisa, it could have been the whole family. I have a feeling that it was more Eloisa. I think in some ways the woman saw a mirror image of what she could have been. Her house, full of loneliness and sorrow, every one of the pictures you showed me looked sorrowful and lonely. Eloisa’s house is just the opposite. So it’s almost like the light exists with the shadow, but the shadow has to come out of the shadow…but it can never come out of the shadow. I think the images of the Cam4 webcam, with this kind of voyeur and exhibitionism and the psychological and private, were a good starting point. But the more I was thinking…I guess stitching more things together, I always come back to the home. What I found interesting also is that until Eloisa bought the place she only had her thoughts of what went on inside this woman’s home and the woman, I suppose, never got the chance to see what went on in Eloisa’s. But the woman was left with her thoughts about Eloisa and her property and her house and what went on in that house all in her own fantasy, all in her twisted, twisted fantasy. It’s like a web in a weird way. You give a spider LSD and have it make a web. It’s like a fractured spider’s web. You know they used to give spiders LSD in ‘60s experiments and have them make these webs and the webs were always disjointed and fragmented…and sort of catching people inside of these webs psychologically, emotionally, not necessarily physically. This idea of the web - something like what a black widow spins - is what I am thinking of. So it’s all playing on what we talked about last week and how aggressive she was. She couldn’t be aggressive physically because she couldn’t get to her physically, but what she was very good at was interrupting Eloisa’s emotional space or Eloisa’s physical space with that damn motorhome. The unease that in any moment something outside of your control will influence your day to day life is a really, really hard thing. And I think that this woman keyed into that, I think she keyed into exactly how to interrupt Eloisa and her family life, she had to study them…

6.3.2013 conversation with Mark and Hermès

The Bradford Studio, Los Angeles, CA

How did I end up with the installation of the bold lines? The whole project has to do with psychological mapping and a fragmented reality. My understanding of the neighbor where the installation will be is that she had two realities - a public reality and a very private reality and the private reality was really fragmented. She had dualities, and building on the narrative of what I’ve learned, I decided to give the psychological fragmentation a 3D form, in other words, a large installation that had site, materiality and physicality. And since I am an abstract painter, I am also interested in social abstraction - an abstraction that is not the traditional abstraction that looks inward and ignores the outside of the studio, but an abstraction that looks out towards the environment and into the social body that we call the city or the society. And so I looked into this social abstraction, an abstraction that references the geo-abstraction of the 1970s…and earlier than that, Frank Stella. And so I looked at the idea of a line and historically what it meant and built on that. My design is one continuous line and one gesture - one brush stroke that continues all over the house. I wanted to make it feel domestic and also have a relationship with art history. I also wanted to feel like the domestic space was invaded and it was somehow fractured and uncomfortable. And so the marks are aggressive and demand your attention. It is more like a steamroller running through your home. And so it is this idea of fragmentation and abstraction and secrets in domestic spaces that break away the fabric of the house. Think about the yellow brick road for a second, this strange yellow path that led to Oz. I think of this dystopic yellow brick road on its way to very dark places in America, very dark places in our psyche…

6.12.2013 conversation with Mark, Eloisa and Hermès

The haudenschildGarage, La Jolla, CA

I did not have a physical relationship with the space (neighbor’s house) until I came here today for the first time…So I started to see this disconnect between public and private space. Then I thought I’ll do some research on this site called Cam4 and what was interesting about it were the people using their webcams in a public way, performing very private acts. I started to take pictures of their places without them in it. In order for this to happen there had to be some interaction, like asking them if they could move off camera so I could take a picture of just their living room. They would get freaked out but when they would move off camera you could see their space. And then I thought about the neighbor who had been carrying out these public and private, very strange, psychological acts for a really long time. I started thinking about her private space and about interruptions, almost like a weird fissure. I thought I needed to do this hard-edged abstraction that cut through her private life - that interrupts it. So the line becomes a psychological and physical part of the space because I believe the neighbor was constantly being psychologically interrupted. Privately, she was one way and publicly, she was another way. Her mind was constantly interrupting itself in this weird kind of madness…so when I saw the line cutting across her refrigerator and lines cutting across her carpet, it felt like someone came into her private space…like a violation. When you see pictures of the line, it’s as if it cuts right across the glass. The line for me is the distortion or the fissure between her public and private lives - it’s like a crack. This woman was cracked…she was clearly two people. Her narrative was cracked and it’s almost as if her narratives constantly interrupted themselves. So I wanted to do something with that interruption and thought about what you can do in a home to interrupt that narrative. I thought the most violent thing I could do is simply to interrupt that narrative by cutting through and straight across the house so it starts to fragment. I started making the line at one end of the house and I didn’t lift my hand up as I went through the model Marcos made. The line was aggressive and her house had secrets, so in some ways I wanted to expose the aggressiveness and violence of her life…her meanness. It feels mean cutting across her house with the line…it’s like slashes that are cutting across the interior. When I saw pictures of the house it looked spooky to me. Even if I didn’t know the neighbor, I could tell I would feel uncomfortable inside the house…this is a real intense installation. I wouldn’t have thought to do a line but I kept thinking about the simplest, most minimal gesture I could make. I am a painter so I wanted to use that vocabulary…I could see how strong it could be.

Jordan Crandall: On Hermès

A webcam image appears on the computer screen, a window into someone's private home. The home's occupant is in the midst of staging a performance, or going about some ordinary domestic task. The cam feed is accessible to anyone else who cares to watch, but often, not much is happening in this little theater of the everyday. The actor is frequently compelled off screen to attend to some household matter. In those moments, all you can see is the room.

Shadows flicker at the edge of the window, reminding you that this is a live feed, and offering tantalizing hints of some unexpected action about to unfold, some domestic drama about to ensue. You keep watching. Why? You may come to realize, in these expanses of stillness, that the mise en scène, not the actor, is the star of the show. The occupant has been upstaged by the house. The room, far from being still, is a teeming cosmos unto itself, rife with material, sensory, and psychological charge. By the time the occupant returns, you've already cast them in the role you want them to have. The role that the house itself seems to demand.

A person's dwelling space, rather than simply functioning as a container, is actually part of the person that resides there. Observing them through a limited interface, however, you can't tell much. All you have is an image. You may have bits of communicative or contextual data, but ultimately these obscure more than they reveal. The information unfolds only within the terms of what you are willing to allow -- the conditions of the interface you are using -- and often this is accommodated only to the extent that it addresses some deeper need. Who is this person?, you may wonder on the surface, but that is not really the question that you are asking, the question that keeps you watching.

Mark Bradford's research into the use of such domestic webcams, and the kinds of psychological strangeness that they arouse, were part of the informing backdrop for the Hermès project. The vicissitudes of peering and the vagaries of projection instituted by these intimate, remotely-present views, as they are conducted through circuits of interface, were conditions that were brought to play in the work. The views were oriented toward a particular duo of homes and the theater of conflict that ensued there. It was a drama that was action-packed at the level of script and character, but devoid of the primary actor beneath, focused as it was on an empty house whose occupant had exited the frame. It was a narrative that one could access, but through challenging representational conditions that rendered views, actors, and communications partial. These limitations, far from being ignored in the context of the project, were made explicit and generative in the work.

The central mediating function was provided not by an online interface but by a person: the messenger Hermès. He embodied the complexity of the interface in all its material, social, and linguistic resonance. His job was to carry messages from the project's commissioner, Eloisa Haudenschild in La Jolla, to Mark Bradford in Los Angeles, throughout the first half of 2013. These messages concerned the history of a reclusive homeowner who for many years inhabited a house next door to the Haudenschild residence. The woman was now dead and the property acquired by Haudenschild. Bradford's commission was to develop a temporary site-specific installation there. The installation was to open to the public for one day, August 3, 2013, after which time the house would be demolished.

The messages that Hermès carried from La Jolla to Los Angeles were communicated orally. They took the form of observations and anecdotes that together sketched the picture of a villainous woman who, for 26 years, harbored a deep antagonism towards the Haudenschild family. Her decaying home was an eyesore, her ramshackle yard composed of dirt, crabgrass, plastic jugs, peeling cement, and rusty barbed wire. She seemed to deploy its ugliness as a weapon, aware of the aesthetic dread that it incited. Though her house was spacious, she rarely allowed anyone inside; the occasional guest was installed outdoors in a tent. Her living patterns were irrational.  She seldom ventured out, yet would occasionally burst from the house in the middle of the night to engage in a round of feverish pruning, apparently unaware of the yard's barren state. She often glared menacingly at visitors to the Haudenschild estate; at times she would shout insults at them, or back her dilapidated motorhome down the driveway to block their paths. Unhinged, she once threw the Haudenschild's mailbox in the trash. One could well imagine her staying up at night devising ever new torments for her neighbor. Some of these occurrences might well be chalked up to the pitfalls of living next door to an eccentric person were it not for the constant psychological and aesthetic anguish that the wretched woman seemed to impose.

Once the woman was gone and the property acquired, the home's interior, newly accessible, was found to match the character traits that were expected. Reports were conveyed of vast expanses of stains on hideous, decades-old carpeting; frayed, falling curtains; dirt-caked tiles; strips of yellowed wallpaper peeling off walls; frightening cabinetry. As if rummaging through the contents of her mind, these were testaments to the woman's psychological condition -- evidence of a failed interiority that corresponded to the external view. A teeming cosmos unto itself, rife with material, sensory, and psychological charge, the house occupant's role has been cast, cast in the role one now envisions for them and succumbs to, the role that the house itself seems to demand or validate. Accessing the space through a limited interface, you have only the visual impressions conjured, the flickerings at the edge of the screen. You range through the domestic expanse, absorbing and activating the villainous woman-dwelling through the interface of the descriptive words. Who is this person?, you may wonder on the surface, but that is not really the question that you are asking, the question that keeps you listening.

Bradford parallels the uneasiness that he experienced in webcam viewing via the Internet with the unsettling nature of listening in on these private views via Hermès. A voyeuristic thrill of discovery, combined with the discomfort of eavesdropping in on something of a private nature, but that which is willingly offered up for access. There was no viewpoint onto the dilapidated home save for that which that had been channeled by Hermès, yet images formed in the mind. On the Web, Bradford took screenshots of domestic webcam scenes only when people were absent from the frame. Images formed, pictures were taken, but as Bradford remarks, their representational facades are illusive: inside and outside do not always correspond.

It is a matter of how the views are brought together, assembled in degrees of coherency and resonance, across the differences of interface, culture, environment, disposition, and memory, and the markers of adequacy or validation that they are subjected to. In the provisional configuring of the drama the actors can be kept in the frames or the stage resolved around them, and the necessary dramatic tension -- lost in those ordinary online theaters of the everyday -- thus provided. The actor can be called into the frame through the allure of the melodramatic, thereby transforming absence to presence, boredom to excitement, everyday monotony to exemplary narrative. Shadows at the screen's edge are centralized, tantalizing expectations made real. The primary actors might be cast as feuding neighbors across generational, cultural, or class lines in a luxurious California enclave. On one side an eccentric physician, one of the neighborhood's early residents -- perhaps from the 1950s, before property values escalated -- hostile to the wealthy arrivals who have colonized its rural tranquility. A recluse, irritated by the social vivacity of the neighbors; an ascetic riled by unnecessary ostentation. One the other side a prominent art collector and patron who often hosts events at her home, in which she has installed an exhibition space for art projects that she often sponsors, hostile to a neighbor who lacks cultural appreciation and aesthetic integrity. A convivial hostess, irritated by the antisocial mindset of the neighbor; a generous cosmopolite riled by unnecessary austerity.

However defined by character traits and genre, the outcome of the dramatic apparatus was clear. The denouement was quick, masterful, and bold. The villain had been defeated by way of a thick black line that ran continuously and confidently throughout the entirety of the dilapidated home. The mark served the functions of territorialization, interpretation, and eradication. It enacted an occupation, a viscerally felt imposition into a private domain that had now been claimed. It interpreted, so as to expose, the occupant's own internal violence -- aiming to evoke, through a hard-edged abstraction, the dead woman's projected psychic state, described as a condition of interruption: a mind fragmenting itself and thereby generating its own ensnaring web. And finally, it anticipated the demolition that was to come, as if offering a guideline for the home's destruction.

Who was that person?, you may wonder, but is that really the question that you are asking, the question that keeps you envisioning and reading? The complex of stories, observations, interfaces, affects, and materials that is operative here tells many things. The least of these identify the woman who dwelled in the center. Not much is happening in her little theater of the everyday. The occupant has been upstaged by the house, or merged into it, but in any case the ontological arena has been flattened, and identity is not the only attribute to seek. What emerges victorious in the leveling is not the image, however effectively it captures, but the intermediary:  the connective, translational, and relational conduits that are brilliantly embodied in the Hermès figure who is the artwork's real central actor. A new dwelling will emerge; actors, affects, and drawn lines will ascend and subsume, messengers will carry on.