by Michael Sheehan
“It was like / a new knowledge of reality.”
– Wallace Stevens
A few ago I found myself more or less by accident sitting in the cinema-dark of the Byzantine Fresco Chapel of the Menil Collection looking at or meditating on the wall of repeated amateur portraits that is Francis Alys’ Fabiola Project, a massive wall of hundreds of amateur replicas of the same absent original, Jean Jacques Henner’s lost 1885 portrait of Saint Fabiola.
After the Art 