Ed Krčma: 'Wols, Smallness and Creaturely Life'
The first post-war exhibition of German-born artist Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) consisted entirely of drawings. These tiny raw worlds, set down ‘on little scraps of paper,’ were compared by Jean-Paul Sartre to ‘pullulating viruses under a microscope.’ Rather than developing the kind of poetics of angst in relation to which Wols’ work has often been discussed, this paper offers a phenomenological reading of his drawings, taking their remarkable smallness as a starting point. Smallness in Wols is immersive and vertiginous, lending the drawings a magnitude in the imagination, as these teeming worlds are brought up arrestingly close. In thinking about the stakes of such a project for making art in a devastated post-war France, I will also briefly explore the usefulness of Eric Santner’s concept of ‘creaturely life’. For Santner, this term refers to the realm of compulsions and excitations, where the animal and human are brought into a peculiar proximity by the latter’s exposure to the exertions of sovereign power and uncanny desire.
