What Is Left After the Essence Has Departed

An Essay of Images and Words About Remnants, Remains, Debris

In The Lonely City. Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, British author Olivia Laing writes about Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules: “What were the Capsules, really? Trash cans, coffins, vitrines, safes; ways of keeping the loved together, ways of never having to admit to loss or feel the pain of loneliness. [...] they have something of the feeling of an ontological investigation. What is left after the essence has departed?”. Beginning in 1974, Warhol sealed over 600 cardboard boxes, each one preserving a stage of his life – in other words, all the superfluous papers, letters, sketches, publications, photos, vinyl records, and clothes that had accumulated. Trash, this distinctly sapiens achievement, was archived and turned into a work of art.

Alvydas Lukys photographs “what remains.” Not just withered roses, dried-up fruit, ruins, or animal carcasses, but also food waste and disposable packaging – these all become remnants in his images. They belong to the same category as indelible traces, fossils, relics – all that is forever left in place or moved to special repositories. Watching a cardboard box decay near his home for two years, Lukys photographed its stages of erosion and metamorphosis. Sometimes the box looks like a body wrapped in rags, or what is left of it. Optically, it recalls the entire tradition of twentieth-century street photography of sleeping homeless people, slaughterhouse debris, and discarded materials that seem as if corpses are hidden inside.

As the French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman writes in The Modern Nymph: Essay on the Fallen Drapery (2002), examining Eugène Atget, Germaine Krull, Alain Fleischer, Denise Colomb, and Steve McQueen’s strategies of the informe and the uncanny, death lies in every fold of fabric thrown onto the pavement – yet there is also some sort of organic vitality present. In Mindaugas Lukošaitis’ 2022 drawings, lifeless bodies resemble piles of discarded rags. Here, the sense of life within the folds comes more from the dance of lines.

Illustration: Alvydas Lukys, Cardboard Box. Experiment with Disposable Packaging 3, 2025 (digital photograph)

Erika Grigoravičienė is an art historian with a PhD, critic, exhibition curator, and author of monographs including Pictorial Turn (2011), How to Look it, or the (Un)freedom of a Picture (2017), Biodiversity and Hybrid Expression in Contemporary Art (2024), as well as numerous scholarly articles and publications in the cultural press.