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Sometimes You Lose,
Sometimes You Just Don't Win |
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Magalí Arriola (art critic and curator based in Los Angeles) gave a lecture last November in the context of La Rereguarda [The Rearguard]. Staged in the CASM’s Consulta space, La Rereguarda was a bid by Eduardo Pérez Soler, the curator of the project, to document the critical voices that have been speaking out against contemporary art from a number of sectors.
Magalí Arriola’s lecture was part of a series, together with Jordi Ibáñez and Félix de Azua, in which her role was that of a ‘defender’ of, or at least, some one involved in, contemporary art. The text that follows is a résumé of that lecture, which in fact goes beyond a mere defence to raise questions such as the responsibility of writing about art and, by extension, of criticism. This is an issue that, in view of its importance and critical state, we will continue to engage with.
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MAGALÍ ARRIOLA
Given the multiplication of the artistic proposals that inundate the schools, the institutions and the market, the conditions of production and reception of a work make it more and more difficult for both the producer and the receiver to localize the margin of manoeuvre that enables a piece to transcend the perimeter that delimits the system in which it is installed. The chances of coming up with an initiative as radical as those posited in their day by the avant-gardes that operated from marginal positions, against the currents of official culture, seems increasingly remote. And the idea that these initiatives, for their part, might generate a cohesive identity that would affect a mass public generated by a mediatic culture is surely close to impossible. But does this really have to be the motor force that drives the production of art? Before we get too dreamily nostalgic about the combative vehemence of the arts —a vehemence that led, paradoxically, to the fetishization and veneration of their historical moment— perhaps we ought to ask ourselves if, given the situation today, art still needs to be concerned with having an immediate impact on a potential audience in order to assume the star role in its own transcendence.
Rather than impose on myself the titanic task of defending the systematic appropriation of art by its diverse spaces and instances of legitimation, addressing those points that criticize the so-called detractors of contemporary art, I shall take it as read that in general terms, we certainly found ourselves |
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| Gianni Motti. Nada por la fuerza, todo con la mente, 1997 |
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fighting a lost battle, in the full knowledge, what is more, that history is rarely written by the vanquished. Let’s put ourselves for a moment in the fatalistic position of the loser, and accept that this is a battle that no longer needs to be fought; that perhaps it is no longer necessary to struggle against the complexity of the system, but to function alongside it instead, as Walter Benjamin wrote, ‘brush(ing) history against the grain’, so as to open ourselves up to the possibility of detecting those spaces bordering or parallel to the system from which we can perceive artistic production. Engaging in a constant resituating of the parameters on which the critical possibilities of a work are based serves to shift our attention away from the protagonistic presence of the work toward the intrinsic premises that inform it and act as a catalyst of new considerations.
In his book The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau establishes a clear distinction between the concepts of tactics and strategy. ‘I call a strategy,’ he writes, ‘the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will ... an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an environment. (…) Political, economic and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategic model. I call a tactic, on the other hand, a calculus which cannot count on a proper (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality.’ We know, of course, that art, if it is to be recognized as such, has to have a specific localization within its own ecosystem. But it is more important to highlight precisely the difference that Certeau draws between the notions of time and space. ‘The proper is a victory of space over time. A tactic, on the other hand, since it has no place, depends on time: it is always looking for opportunities that must be seized “on the wing”. Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into “opportunities”.’
Gianni Motti
When the Swiss artist Gianni Motti was invited to Colombia in 1997 by Maria Inés Rodríguez to present his psychoanalyst’s office, his intervention resulted in the piece entitled Nada por la fuerza, todo con la mente (Nothing by force, all with the mind). In the course off the consultations that the artist carried out in the Espacio Vacío, in Bogotà, he noted that most of the people who turned up at his office to tell him their everyday troubles and preoccupations were complaining about what the then president, Ernesto Samper, was doing. Motti decided to write to the president proposing a session of analysis, and his letter was published by the opposition newspaper El Espectador, which took up the case and decided to support the cause. When he received no reply from Samper, Motti decided —with the backing of hundreds of artists and citizens— to destabilize the president’s position by means of a telepathic action in front of his residence, attempting to communicate the word Renúncia — resignation. Although the immediate outcome of the piece was not Samper’s resignation but Motti leaving the country, the action was inscribed in the minds not only of the people who took part in it, but also of those who read the story several days running on the front pages of the local papers. Before we ask ourselves whether Samper saw the newspapers that week or if, on the contrary, he received the telepathic message, perhaps it is more important to think about how a gesture such as this can persist in the collective memory as an initiative motivated by the popular will and desire.
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When we refer to certain procedures by means of which a work can serve to root people’s belief in the possibility of change, works and interventions like this one open up the possibility that improbable murmurs, unproductive gestures and transitory actions can effectively undermine the foundational structures that articulate not only the perception of an artistic phenomenon but also of the possible consequences that this can have in our everyday lives. It would seem, then, that the repercussion of
the pieces and of certain artistic practices currently depends more on the survival of the stories, myths and legends that accompany their conception and realization than on any immediate contact we may have with them. Far from seeking to fetishize the word of the artist, my aim here is to question, as certain artists have done, the messianic and prophetic character that is frequently attributed to the message of art in order to explore precisely the capacity of the premises implicit in a work to propagate themselves beyond that system and make an impact on the collective imaginary. Quite clearly, the potential of the artistic gesture as social allegory leads us not so much toward some kind of spiritual redemption as toward a fluctuating but
concise combination of freedom and determination that enables them to find a point of anchorage in the cultural memory. The fact that certain artists have set out to detect those hollows and cavities that still offer some degree of mobility in the realm of politics, economics and society, allows us to think that there are still spaces of possibility in which we can affirm our faith in artistic production.
Francis Alÿs
Francis Alÿs’s contribution to the Emergency Biennale organized by Jota Castro and Evelyne Jouanno to restore Chechnya’s cultural heritage consisted in sending an embroidery by Alighiero Boetti that he had obtained from a collector in exchange for one of his own drawings. ‘I thought that Boetti would have liked to see a work of his return to the land |
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| Carta de Francis Alÿs, Bienal de Emergencia 2005 |
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for which one of his
ancestors had fought,’ Alÿs wrote in the letter that accompanied the piece and its certificate of authenticity. This
ancestor was Giovanni Battista Boetti, who led the Chechen resistance against Catherine the Great of Russia in the 18th century. Over and aboveevoking the generosity that characterized Boetti as an artist, Alÿs’s gesture also leads us to reflect on what it is that causes a work to find an opportune or appropriate place of residence once it has left the artist’s hands, and at what point it can be said that the work has safely reached its destination.
Of course, there is nothing to guarantee that the work by Boetti will remain where it is forever, in a country devastated by civil war, and become part of the cultural heritage. And perhaps we also need to ask ourselves if art, in whatever format, should aspire to a permanent residence. When it prompts us to consider the dislocations and relocalizations of a work, the particular format of the Biennial points toward the circulation of the cultural goods and values and, above all, toward the way in which the context in which a work is presented can affect its signification. From this perspective, Alÿs’s contribution also functions as a circumstantial but non-defining gesture which suggests that the flows of information and the conditions of its movements are perhaps more important than the actual works they contain.
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Domingo Malagón Alea
In conclusion, I would like to end with a belated tribute to Domingo Malagón Alea, artist and forger of identity documents under the Franco regime. The bronze plaque that accompanies a piece Mario García Torres is inscribed with the following quotation from Malagón himself:
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Look how things have turned out for me, when after getting out of more than a few difficulties I might have come to be a successful artist, if by successful we mean the recognition and general applause of the public. In the end, I don't know if I have managed to be an artist, but I do know, of course, that the success of my activity was due, quite apart from the various technical considerations, to achieving the greatest possible discretion.
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| Brodat d’Alighiero Boetti |
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| Perhaps we can identify with the humble cause of an artist such as Malagón, and concur with him in thinking that generating new figures and faces for that which already exists, or for that which has ceased to exist, constitutes a hope, the circumspections and the reservations of which can resituate us, albeit without the notoriety that results from the ferocious protagonism of the age of the spectacle. The fact that sometimes you lose and sometimes you just don’t win doesn’t always mean that we have to end up defeated. |
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