“... chaosmos ... unitary and yet untotalized, a chiasmic concept of the world as a field of mutual and simultaneous interference and convergence.” — Philip Kuberski, Chaosmos: Literature, Science, and Theory
An escalator rises from the composition's threshold, its steps narrowing gradually as they climb toward a destination that has disappeared. Enlarged far beyond the scale of the printed page from which it originated, the black-and-white scanned image occupies most of the pictorial surface. Its curved sides swell outward, bodily in association, as the mechanical regularity of the steps establishes a recession into space. Above it, other objects hover without an obvious shared logic. A bare foot on the upper right; an orb crowned by a cross hangs at the left; at the center, a dense cluster of mechanical parts has been compressed into something resembling a tangled machine, a heart, or a planet. Each retains the impersonal grain of reproduction, yet each has been severed from the explanatory text that in the original context made it legible. Many of the scanned images in The Structure of Chaos originate in Reginald Bragonier Jr. and David Fisher's 1981 What's What: A Visual Glossary of the Physical World, a reference book organized around the promise that the material world can be made intelligible through images, names, and classification. Its illustrations isolate “things” so that they can be identified, fixing each object within a stable relation between image and word. Libeskind reverses that process of naming. Unbound from their captions, the objects hover between recognition and indeterminacy: the eye knows that it is looking at a foot, a machine, an escalator, while contour, texture, grain, and scale simultaneously press themselves forward as autonomous pictorial entities. Libeskind's act of unnaming operates another kind of intelligibility, one dependent on association and intuitive looking.
The work's painted surface intensifies instability. Fields of red, blue, and yellow engulf the scanned objects and divide the composition into territories, crossed by seams, black passages, and fine lines that run between the reproduced forms. Once used by the glossary to connect labels to what they named, these lines are reproduced after the words have vanished. Printed image, painted color, drawn mark, and physical join retain their individuality as they share a surface. Chaos describes a mode of organization in which coherence arises through adjacency, rhythm, interruption, and association. The question posed by the show is therefore a formalist one: what kind of order can emerge among fragments that retain their difference?
Displacement offers one way to describe the process through which that order takes shape. Libeskind subjects images drawn from What's What to a sequence of material and optical transformations: scanning, enlargement, cutting, joining, printing, painting, and airbrushing. Each manipulation loosens the image from the system of identification to which it belonged. Meaning migrates from naming and classification toward scale, proximity, rhythm, resemblance, and association.
Displacement operates across several registers in these works. It is first material. An image leaves its original context, in this case a codex (as in many other works by the artist), passes through the scanner, changes scale, and is relocated onto another surface. This movement belongs to a broader tendency in Libeskind's practice, which repeatedly draws images out of archives, printed matter, and other visual systems and places them into new configurations. Displacement functions in this sense as both a method and a condition of her image-making: things circulate, change contexts, and acquire new relations along the way. In The Structure of Chaos, that movement is especially concentrated. At the level of perception, emphasis is displaced again. Attention moves from identification toward associative uncertainty. Displacement, at its most basic level, therefore names the physical movement of images, the redistribution of meaning within them, and the associative movement of the viewer's attention.
The term displacement of course carries a psychoanalytic history. In Freud's account of the dream-work, Verschiebung describes a transfer of psychic intensity from one representation to another, so seemingly peripheral elements acquire unexpected force through association. Libeskind's works stage a comparable movement at the level of the image. Once the glossary's hierarchy of naming and identification has been loosened, visual emphasis migrates. Anton Ehrenzweig's account of “unconscious scanning” offers a related model for how such a field is perceived. For Ehrenzweig, diffuse attention registers dispersed and seemingly incompatible elements as part of a larger structure before their relations have been consciously resolved. The term carries an almost literal resonance in Libeskind's practice: scanning is both the mechanical procedure through which these images are extracted and enlarged, and a way of describing the associative attention their new configurations solicit.
Libeskind's practice has often been framed through the history of collage and its modernist legacies. A broader genealogy comes into view when image assemblage, (unconscious) scanning, displacement, and recombination are treated as recurring operations within a longer history of making images mobile and generating new relations between them. The movement of images from one system of relations into another also has a long material history. Early modern albums are objects of displacement. Drawings, paintings, calligraphies, prints, and other fragments were collected, cut out of originals, remounted, bordered, and brought into new proximity on the page. Across early modern Eurasia, from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, albums were important sites for collecting and encountering images and texts. Distinct traditions developed across Europe, the Ottoman world, Safavid Iran, and Mughal South Asia, yet many shared an investment in bringing heterogeneous materials into the intimate proximity of the codex. Album compilers assembled drawings, paintings, calligraphies, prints, inscriptions, and fragments produced at different moments, in different styles, and often within different cultural contexts. Persian and Mughal albums would place Persian painting beside European prints, Chinese and Indian drawings, calligraphy, and imported visual motifs, while European albums similarly accumulated images, texts, emblems, signatures, and materials gathered through travel and exchange. The album page offers a structure in which the chaos of cultural, material, and stylistic differences function as a principle of organization.
The Persian album, muraqqaʿ, literally “patched together,” makes this logic of displacement explicit. Albums were often constructed from materials that had already circulated independently before being gathered into a new codex. In a 1544–45 preface to a Safavid album, the painter and historian Muhammad Dust describes the process as bringing the “scattered folios of past and present masters” from “the region of dispersal into the realm of collectedness.” The statement captures both the material condition of the album and its aesthetic ambition. Selection and arrangement transformed dispersal into relation. Album composition relied on connoisseurial judgments that were often formal and associative, allowing formalist correspondences to organize materials that shared no original context. Order arose through the placement of fragments whose heterogeneity was emphasized.
European album culture developed through a range of related forms. To name a few types, friendship albums accumulated inscriptions and images through travel and encounter, encyclopedic and natural-historical collections gathered visual knowledge, and print albums, often known in German as Klebebände (or a sticky book), in which prints and drawings were pasted, cut, regrouped, and reordered within a codex. The latter offers the closest material parallel to the Persian album. Images produced independently were removed from earlier contexts and assembled onto new pages according to subject and visual correspondence, or simply by the preferences of the assembler. Cutting and mounting made the image mobile, while placement generated relations that, again, had not existed before. Across these album traditions, assemblage functions as a means of giving structure to displacement. Their purposes varied, from connoisseurship and classification to memory and visual knowledge, yet each relied on the capacity of an image to leave one context and enter another. Libeskind activates this same condition of mobility while shifting it into the technological and spatial terms of the present. The printed fragment passes through the scanner, changes scale, crosses from book to wall, and enters a pictorial field whose order is generated through association.
The logic of the album also extends into Libeskind's earlier engagement with Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas. Her project The Secret Life of Photographs pays homage to Warburg's unfinished atlas, which arranged hundreds of photographic reproductions across large panels in shifting constellations. As in the formats discussed above, images acquired significance through their placement alongside one another, while the arrangement was provisional and open to revision. Libeskind's Archive Fever, developed from this project in 2021, similarly gathered images from print and digital ephemera into a nonlinear mural that viewers entered from multiple points. In these works, the logic of the album expands beyond the codex. Displaced images occupy the wall, and adjacency is environmental and bodily.
The movement from page to wall changes the kind of attention these images demand. Ehrenzweig's “unconscious scanning” returns here as a model for perceiving structures whose relations emerge across dispersed elements rather than through a single sequence. In Libeskind's work, the removal of names and the redistribution of images loosen the classificatory hierarchy inherited from What's What. Chaos, in this sense, names an associative order: a structure whose coherence is sensed across relations that are mobile, contingent, and only partially available to conscious explanation. Scale gives this associative field a different bodily register. The album gathers heterogeneous images within the intimate dimensions of the codex, held in hands, turned page by page, and examined at close range. Libeskind takes images formed at the scale of the codex and magnifies them beyond the dimensions of the viewer. The page enters the architecture of walls, altering the bodily relation between image and spectator. Libeskind's works might in this sense be understood as colossal miniatures, carrying the visual memory of the printed page into a scale that surrounds the body.
Seen within this longer history, modernist collage appears as one episode in a much more varied history of image assemblage. The significance of that history lies in the different ambitions attached to similar acts of choosing, cutting, gathering, and juxtaposition. Across the album traditions discussed here, these operations served connoisseurship, memory, classification, comparison, and the organization of visual knowledge. Libeskind inherits the operations while redirecting their terms through the scanner, the printed sheet, and the architectural scale of the wall. The Structure of Chaos begins with a book that aspired to make the physical world knowable by fastening a thing, an image, to a name. Libeskind uses the recognizable objects, but recognition ceases to exhaust what the image can do. Intuition has its own claims on attention. The surviving leader lines offer a particularly vivid residue of this shift: vectors of explanation whose words have disappeared, still pointing with precision after their referents have been stripped from text. Album culture provides an older vocabulary for this condition, in which displacement acts generatively and fragments gathered from elsewhere acquire relation while preserving their difference. In Libeskind's work, displacement also carries its psychoanalytic charge. Image, meaning, and attention all move from their assigned positions, producing an order that is felt before it is fully explained. The taxonomy of What's What lingers across the surface as another structure forms around it. This is the structure of chaos, perhaps what Deleuze and Guattari, following James Joyce, call a chaosmos, an order composed from heterogeneity that preserves the instability of its parts.
— Gilad BenDavid