PLINTH
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
– T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922
_________
A 19th-century guillotine stands alone, reaching just over 2.5 metres beneath the gallery ceiling. No room sheet. No intro text. No explanatory gestures. The gallery is devoid of context or clues. And yet, here it is. This beautiful instrument of death, painstakingly reconstructed from original schematics.
So, what does it represent now?
Obviously (perhaps begrudgingly) it’s been stripped of its function. It’s not here to execute, but to pose. Aestheticised. A spectacle. Repositioned as an object for contemplation rather than consequence. Given the hollow theatre of much of today’s art industry – its curatorial puns, obsession for spectacle aesthetics, and appropriated ideologies – maybe that’s exactly the point: all postmodern irony and inside jokes.
And yet. Looking at it now, it still feels a bit too meme-like for its own good. Too stiff. Too staged. Not nearly as immediate – or as entertaining – as the drone footage of Ukrainian operators turning Russian soldiers into bloodied pulp. Remember the ISIS video of the man burned alive in a cage? Or the Mexican cartels casually killing the foot soldiers of their rivals? What about the shocker that emerged last week, showing emergency crews in Gaza executed and buried by the IDF – another war crime awaiting a PR makeover and the exhausting accusations of antisemitism that accompany any attempt to challenge it.
Ideologies aside, we’ve learned to watch death from a distance. Edited. Exported. Optimised for shareability. Along the way, we’ve somehow managed not to feel it.
I’ve titled this show, PLINTH. A holding space reserved for ‘cultural significance’, a designated site for something to be taken seriously. A platform for contemplation. But what does it really mean to place a guillotine in a small gallery down a cobbled lane in Edinburgh? Is it a memorial? A prop? A symbol? A threat? A joke?
Any provocation dies the moment it enters the gallery. What’s left is a monument to resignation. A sculptural shrug. A reminder that while our outrage is infinite, our actions are not. We live in an age where decorum takes precedence over protest – which even then feels more like theatre than threat. Resistance, if it appears at all, tends to be absorbed, documented, hash tagged, then algorithmically mashed into content.
It’s not that we don’t see death anymore. It’s that we’ve learned to see it without being changed by it. We’ve substituted proximity for presence as we continually witness life through glass screens while losing our capacity to be diminished by loss. As Baudrillard reminds us, “The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced.”1 Death is no longer something we especially fear; we can simply scroll past.
Perhaps PLINTH could be read as a warning. But here, I’m inclined to think it’s better understood as an elegy.
So why bring such a symbol here – to a white-walled space of civility, soft lighting, and quiet contemplation?
Because I need you as the witness. A living reminder that real power doesn’t need permission. Your opinion is irrelevant. Your grief, useless. Your prayers, easy fictions.
The guillotine is not a symbol of justice, but of inevitability. An allegory of the deadly weight of state apparatus, against which you do not stand a chance.
§
Talking about power is a bit like trying to convince people that capitalism has a viable alternative isn’t it? It’s difficult to grasp because it doesn’t behave like the things we can see, touch, or name. It lives in the permissions it gives itself, often far outside our realms of experience.
You can buy a kitchen knife from Tesco if you fancy a bit of a stabbing spree, but getting your hands on a Tactical Ballistic Missile? It’s a bit more of a mission. Yet death is said to be the great equaliser, the one true equality. Sadly, even death has been monetised, categorised, given preferential treatment, and more recently embedded into algorithms. There’s even a celebratory tone if you kill ‘the bad guys’ in the War on Terror (surely one of the greatest examples of intentional language framing?) where a semantic cloak wraps each act; who would oppose such a righteous crusade other than a traitor?
Achille Mbembe gives us language for this. In Necropolitics, he argues that modern power no longer governs by shaping life, but by deciding who gets to die. Sovereignty isn’t in policy – it’s in the kill decision. His claim that “death has become infrastructural”2 is both damning and precise. Death today is not a spectacle, but a process. It is scheduled, data-driven, buried under layers of authorisation.
The logic is familiar. As of 2022-23 Global military spending surpassed $2.2 trillion USD3. Of course this is capitalism. Did you think it was ideology alone? Clean kills aren't free, no matter the cost of human lives. And what exactly is a clean kill if collateral damage of innocents is a permissible part of the show?
Actually, wait – we do have a missile for that!
The R9X Hellfire missile is a firm favourite of mine. Not because it explodes, quite the opposite. It doesn’t. Designed to reduce collateral damage (which is very thoughtful), it operates by precision: a 45kg deadweight laser-guided directly onto a target. At the last millisecond, six long blades, each around a metre long, deploy from the body, shredding the individual into pulp. It’s a scalpel with the velocity of a meteorite. The spectacle is the surprise. Good luck getting that into a white cube anytime soon.4
It’s beautiful, too, streamlined, modern, almost banal in its elegance. Like most contemporary art, its horror is in its restraint. It offers up a curious overlap: tools of execution are already artworks. Museums across the world display swords, clubs, and instruments of war with the reverence of cultural artefacts. Māori taiaha, Japanese katana, Scottish claymores – all held behind glass in display cases, dripping in libidinal fantasy. Colonial collectors fetishised these objects not for their function, but for their form.
Ian Hamilton Finlay – one of the most under appreciated artists of the last century – understood this better than most. His concrete poems and stone-carved aphorisms are quiet studies in the way language and violence riff poetically, free from any kind of pathos.
And yet, we do not afford the same reverence to newer weapons. We don’t display missiles the way we display old spears. Why? Because the modern kill is not romantic – it’s bureaucratic. It is delivered by drone, coded by software, authorised by text message. Machine learning now interfaces with covert engineering. Algorithms sort the deserving from the disposable.
These scripts, approved by governments, coded by defence contractors, provisioned by household names such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Palantir – deliver the decision, but never the drama. And somewhere, on a monitor, in a room full of coffee cups and snack wrappers, someone clicks “confirm."
The sacred, as Bataille reminds us, is not the religious. It is the unassimilable, that which we cannot reduce to function or profit. In The Accursed Share, he sees violent death as one of the last true expressions of sovereignty – the moment when order collapses and chaos is ritualised. Public executions, he says, were grotesque spectacles through which the state reminded you of its ultimate authority. ‘Sovereignty is nothing,’ he wrote, ‘if it is not the refusal to accept limits.’5
The guillotine was once this kind of theatre.
Now it stands again, in a gallery, somewhat awkwardly. Its refusal to act – this decision not to drop the blade – might be the most terrifying aspect of all. It exposes the gap between our ability to kill and our willingness to admit it.
Luigi Mangione knew this. In 2024, he allegedly shot the CEO of a health insurance company in a New York street. But this time it wasn’t just an act of violence, it was a narrative rupture. For a moment, it wasn’t a drone, or a process. It was a person. And that’s precisely why it felt closer to myth than to politics.
§
So let’s not pretend.
You’re not here to mourn. You’re not here to intervene. You’re here because there’s nothing left to do in art except look. Have you seen the new Kiefer show? Did you manage to catch the Olafur Eliasson installation in the foyer? And how good was the R9X when it sliced that terrorist cunt into pieces? What finesse. What precision. Do they ever come up at auction?
The gallery is not neutral. Nor is it sacred. It is a vessel for containment. It permits difficult objects and subject matter so long as they’re no longer dangerous. The guillotine is here precisely because it is not currently killing anyone. It has been rendered safe. Framed. Lit tastefully. Sometimes art even throws in a bit of learning, so it’s not all bad.
But yes, like all art, this is an artefact. The difference is a matter of time and context – two things the gallery distorts expertly. The state removes the head. The gallery polishes the blade and places the rope carefully for dramatic effect.
In the end, the guillotine becomes palatable. Which is to say: aesthetic.
There is no protest here. No outrage. No identity politics. Just a platform. A plinth. So if you’re not going to stop the systems that kill, you may as well admire them. If we can’t abolish them, what else can we do?
Still, there’s a kind of metaphysical dignity in all of this. Gods of metal and algorithm – precise, genderless, wholly indifferent, omnipotent. Bringers of light and salvation, messengers of ideological liberation, blessed with hypersonic grace and algorithmic judgement. Oh, you bright and risen angels!
What kind of culture would exhibit an instrument of death, strip it of its function, and call it art?
The better question might be:
What kind of culture needs to?
§
FURTHER READING:
BATAILLE, George, The Accursed Share, Vol. 3: Sovereignty, Zone Books, 1993
BAUDRILLARD, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation, Semiotext(e), 1981
MBEMBE, Achille. Necropolitics, Duke University Press, 2019
NOTES:
BAUDRILLARD, Simulacra and Simulation, Semiotext(e), 1981, p146.
MBEMBE, Necropolitics, p.92. The actual source text is, “Contemporary forms of subjugation are less about disciplining bodies than about controlling populations through the logistics of death.”
In 2022-23 Global military spending surpassed $2.2 trillion USD. While real-time 2024 data varies, 2024 arms exports are generally estimated to sit at around 100-120 billion USD. See Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), for specific annual arms transfers www.sipri.org
Watch this space - August 2025!
BATAILLE, The Accursed Share, p.199
ABOUT THE GUILLOTINE:
The guillotine was designed and fabricated to original 19thC plans by Oliver Cain, from Oliver Cain Studios. (www.olivercain.com) It’s been hand made from structural wood (pine), bolts, jute rope, stainless steel blade and fixings, and paint. It is built slightly smaller than true scale to accomodate height. It is also lethal.
All images are copyright of the artist/lenders. This essay forms a part of my gallery practice research. As such the views of the gallery practice are my own, not those of the artists I work with. Sign up to the mailing list on the website: scottlawrie.com