Notes on Objects

# Harm van den Dorpel's Paper Cut Sculptures and the Ghost in the Machine

## I. A Receipt for Nothing

In IOU (Narrative Projects, London, 2015), Harm van den Dorpel worked with thermosensitive paper — the same thin, heat-reactive strips issued as receipts by cashiers and ATMs — mounting large sheets onto canvas, burning traces into their surfaces with hot air rather than ink. The resulting works resembled paintings but refused to behave as such: their provenance was embedded not in the art market's traditional ledger of provenance but in the blockchain, what van den Dorpel called, with the precise ambivalence of a programmer who has read too much history, "our only hope." The receipt, that most disposable and transient of capitalist documents, was consecrated as art object. The ghostly transaction — IOU: I owe you — was timestamped into a supposedly perpetual distributed ledger, as if permanence could be conjured from pure abstraction.
It is out of this conceptual constellation that the paper bag sculptures emerged.

## II. Notes on Objects (London, 2019)

Shown at the same venue four years later, the works Bag and Another Bag — presented in the group exhibition Notes on Objects, curated by Daria Kirsanova alongside Teresa Braula Reis, Braco Dimitrijevic, Marte Eknæs, Carlos Noronha Feio, and Anton Ginzburg — appear at first glance to be acts of tender absurdity. Van den Dorpel had cut shopping bags, those ubiquitous and disposable vessels of consumer exchange, into sculptural forms referencing the Dadaist paper collages of Hans Arp. Yet read against the IOU exhibition and its blockchain preoccupations, the bags reveal themselves as condensed theoretical objects: sites where the history of avant-garde rupture, the logic of financial abstraction, and the material residue of late capitalism collapse into one another.

The shopping bag is the receipt's sibling — both are paper, both are instruments of transaction, both are designed to be discarded. In van den Dorpel's hands, both become monuments to the ghost of value.

## III. Arp's Collages and the First Catastrophe

Hans Arp began making his torn and cut paper collages — Papiers déchirés, Reliefs, Configurations — in Zurich beginning around 1916, during the First World War. Working by the "law of chance," Arp dropped torn paper onto surfaces and accepted what fell, refusing the sovereign gesture of compositional control. This was not mere aesthetic experiment. It was a principled response to catastrophe: to a civilization that had administered its own mass slaughter through the same bureaucratic rationality it applied to industrial production. The collages were antimachines made from the scraps of a machine culture. Their forms — ovoid, biomorphic, suggestive of cells or clouds or dropped handkerchiefs — refuse the hard geometry of utility. They are figures of life made from the waste of a death culture.

Van den Dorpel's cut bags invoke this genealogy explicitly, but transpose its historical conditions onto our own. The global landscape of 2019 — and still more so today — is no less apocalyptic for being slower, more distributed, more mediated. Climate catastrophe, platform monopolism, the financialization of every human relation, the algorithmic acceleration of precarity: these are the thermosensitive paper of our moment, records that wash out unless handled with extraordinary care. The bag, cut into Arp-like form, stages the same gesture Arp made in Zurich: take the refuse of the transaction economy and make of it something that refuses transaction.

## IV. The Spectre in the Bag

Among Arp's most celebrated works is his 1915 collage Ghost (Gespenst) — an amorphous white form hovering against a dark ground, suggestive of both a figure and its own dissolution. The ghost does not haunt by presence but by trace, by the persistence of a shape that should not be there.

The opening line of The Communist Manifesto, published by Marx and Engels in 1848, reads: "A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism." The specter, for Marx, is not the thing itself but its anticipatory pressure — the form that a possibility takes before it is realized or defeated. It is legible only to those the ruling order has trained to see it everywhere and fear it; it is invisible to those who might welcome it. The ghost and the commodity are structurally related: both are things that appear to have a life independent of the material conditions that produced them. Marx called this the fetish character of the commodity — the way in which social relations between people appear as relations between things.

Van den Dorpel's paper bags inhabit exactly this haunted space. The shopping bag is the commodity's skin — it carries the object of desire from the site of exchange to the private interior, then is discarded. It is pure instrumentality, pure transparency: it should not be looked at, only through. To cut it into Arp's ghost-form is to make the bag's own spectral condition visible. The thing that was meant to disappear — the wrapper, the receipt, the transaction — is made to stand up, to take shape, to haunt.
And the blockchain, invoked in IOU as "our only hope," is itself a spectre in this sense: an immaterial ledger that claims to guarantee the reality of transactions in the absence of any trusted human institution. It is the communist manifesto's ghost inverted — not the spectre of collective liberation, but the spectre of pure exchange, haunting a world that has lost faith in everything except the incorruptibility of the ledger. Van den Dorpel holds both spectres in tension, without resolving them. He does not celebrate the blockchain; he timestamps into it. He does not mourn the bag; he cuts it into art.

## V. The CNC Cut Bags, Japan 2026

The new works presented in van den Dorpel's 2026 solo exhibition in Japan extend the series through a further formal displacement. Where the earlier bags bore the evidence of the artist's hand — the trace of the cut, the slight imprecision of scissors or blade — the CNC-milled versions introduce numerical control into the Dadaist gesture of chance. The machine now makes the cut that Arp made by dropping, that van den Dorpel made by cutting: the law of chance has been encoded, parameterized, run as script.

This is not a betrayal of the Arp reference but its logical intensification. Arp's surrender to chance was a refusal of bourgeois authorship; van den Dorpel's delegation to the CNC router extends that refusal into the domain of software, where authorship dissolves not into randomness but into code. The forms that emerge carry the same biomorphic ambiguity as their predecessors — organic, hovering between figure and abstraction — but their precision is the precision of the algorithm. They are ghosts with coordinates.

Shown in Japan, the bags acquire an additional geographic resonance. Japan's paper culture — washi, origami, the aesthetic of ma and the carefully folded wrapping — meets the Western history of Dada collage and blockchain provenance in a site where the disposable and the ceremonial have always been held in closer proximity than in Europe or America. The shopping bag in Japan is frequently a small object of considered design; its cutting and elevation to sculpture is less violent, more elegiac. The spectre here takes a different form — less haunting, perhaps, than hovering: the ghost of global capital as it appears from the edges of its own geography.

## VI. What the Bag Owes

IOU — the title of the 2015 exhibition — means I owe you. The debt is never specified. It is a promissory note without terms. In van den Dorpel's expanded practice, the bag sculptures are the physical form of this note: the remnant of a transaction whose content has already been consumed, shaped into the form of a ghost that Arp drew in Zurich while Europe destroyed itself, stamped with the blockchain's date and time, offered to the gallery as an object of contemplation.

What does the bag owe? The same thing the receipt owes, the same thing the commodity owes, the same thing the spectre owes: an account of the conditions that produced it, which it carries silently within its form, and which it will never, by itself, speak aloud.