In Mark Tansey’s Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight, Alain Robbe-Grillet, French writer and filmmaker, is scrubbing stones in the desert. As the viewer looks closer they realize the stones that Alain Robbe-Grillet is scrubbing are the Sphinx and Stonehenge.

Judi Freedman comments in “Metaphor and Inquiry in Mark Tansey’s Chain of Solutions,” that “Through his determined scrubbing, Robbe-Grillet attempts to strip these stones of their content, no doubt a reference to his wish to remove hidden meaning from every object.”