In The Aesthetics of Disappearance, theorist Paul Virilio states that advanced culture is characterized by a degree and prevalence of speed—he refers to the velocity of projected imagery (cinema), of transmitted information (digital communication) and of ever more accelerated travel itself—that has progressively eroded perceptual stability; Virilio argues, in fact, that contemporary culture not only allows for, but is ultimately defined by this new order of visibility. ‘Speed treats vision like its basic element’, Virilio writes. Salcedo, too, is deeply and increasingly interested in the 'aesthetics of disappearance', in threshold conditions of perceptibility. And the violence that is implicit in Virilio's discussion of speed (elsewhere, he makes it explicit) strengthens the connection between his consideration of the urge towards invisibility and hers. But in her recent untitled furniture it is a kind of absolute zero of movement, an impossibly frozen moment of unending impact expressed as immutable stasis—an immobility to which the stiffened shirts, blocked doors, and embalmed shoes of her earlier work had pointed — that makes things tend to disappear into a state of altogether paradoxical dreaminess. Here a relevant body of public work can be found, perhaps in Felix Gonzalez-Torres' untitled stacks of offset prints, offered to exhibition visitors at no charge. Images, often, of emptiness—blue skies, unbroken expanses of sand—they run eternity and mortality together, with ephemera given away freely, forever. The generosity of this work, as much as its transcendent serenity in the face of unending loss, seems close in spirit to that of Salcedo's sculptures which transform the most obdurate of materials into visions as blank and yielding as clear sky.
N. Princenthal, Doris Salcedo, London, 2000, p. 81