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OF VOIDS, WORDS AND THE PLACES OF ART |
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Jack Pierson is exhibiting at the CASM some of his posters, in which he composes words out of letters taken from other posters found on the street. The relation with language, its analysis and the word is a subject of reflection and interest in the work of more than a few artists — a reflection that draws on sources that range from Mallarmé to Foucault. Pep Agut has taken up this concern as one of the nodal points of his work, and it was a fundamental aspect of the piece he presented at the CASM in 2004. In the text we publish here he reflects on art and language..
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PEP AGUT
In Les Intellectuels en question, Maurice Blanchot commences his text by referring to the idea, endorsed by Hegel, that the Crusaders set out for the Holy Land in order to liberate the Christ of the Holy Sepulchre, even though they knew perfectly well —in accordance with their faith— that they would find the tomb empty and that even if they were victorious they could do no more than liberate the void itself.
It can be claimed, however, that those Christian armies, those hordes of illiterate, half-starved warriors, were fully aware of the socio-economic and political returns that their capacity to manage the ways their gesture was interpreted could bring them. Indeed, the setting in motion of an enterprise on such a scale, constituted on the condition of impossibility of its supposed objective, was only thinkable if those who were to take part in it were convinced that living and dying on the fringes of the story would confer on them the status of necessary extras in the great theatre of the world that had to circumscribe that fiction. It would be as if the core of a star were made to appear by cosmic imperative with the paradoxical function of concealing its own non-existence while at the same time being the only possible scenario capable of accommodating an objective reality it was inescapably bound to inhabit.
Whenever I think of this fascinating story I always get an image in my head of Box for Standing (1961) by the American artist Robert Morris, I suppose on account of the nature of the piece, at once totemic and foundational. And straight away, enchained as it is, I see that other image of the same piece, still in the studio, with the artist standing inside it, physically occupying it completely, having made it to fit his body. Installed in the exhibition space, this work constitutes a mechanism that can only wait there, in the hope of trapping us with its subtle strategy in the discovery of something very similar to what the Crusaders would have found out: although it is the void that configures the container, the container cannot include the void; it can only indicate it, because the container can include nothing more than its own form, nothing more than itself, because otherwise it would be condemned to disappear in its own insignificance, undermined by the irrelevance of plenitude. In order to say this ‘comme il faut’ let us borrow the words of the French writer and add that the Crusaders (like us) ‘would discover themselves to be irremissibly anchored in the commencement of their enterprise, faced with the evidence that the only possible vacation would consist in the infinite continuation of the occupations’.
The extension of experience in visuality —which gives us access to the world by way of the formal categorization of what we perceive— to that of textuality —which gives us access to the world by way of the discursive categorization of what we think and say— has configured the realm of debate from the beginnings of modernity to the present day. The construction of symbolic referents capable of being at once unattainable and unavoidable has been a constant over the course of history and at the same time a current strategy for the interweaving of cultural, social, political and economic dynamic, especially signified in the Modern Project and the utopias. It will be said, however, that words themselves have ended up becoming one of these totems, controlled as they are by powers for whom the manipulation of language is their principal instrument of alienation, and that the discourses we construct with them can be little more than products to be bought and sold. It seems, then, that the task of recovering words and language, perhaps even attempting in some way to recover the logos, to restore its capacity to expose the falsity of the big new stories —often visual, such as a Nike ad— that are imposed on us, presents itself as an urgent issue.
Meanwhile, far along the worst path, we have managed to reach the most pathetic, perverse and pea-brained point in the course of the society of the spectacle, this long epilogue to the Modern Project it has befallen us to live though following the resounding failure of the proletarian revolutions that were to have saved us. To give a clear, concise and chilling example: live broadcast on the mass communications media of the start of military aggression against a small country by major Western powers for the purpose of stealing its oil followed immediately by a football game in which several of the players make more money in one year than a European worker would in 500 or an African in 5,000 years — always supposing, in the case of the latter, that he or she had a job …
In this state of affairs, in order to put into circulation with some degree of honesty and rigour a number of debates on the paradigm that would stand at the head of our decadent civilizatory order involving image and word, experiential regimes of interactivity and relationality, or visuality and textuality, etc, etc, without allowing ourselves to indulge in the purest cynicism or sink into the most absolute immodesties, I think we should be asking ourselves if we ought not first to write that famous acronym L.H.O.O.Q. at the bottom of our ID or passport photos. The fact is that in our complacent well-being we often convert the most serious questions into something like the practice of cricket in 19th-century India, as we discovered in the course of the lamentable presentation that Mr Roger Buergel, Artistic Director of Documenta 12, recently offered us at a seminar in the MACBA. There, under the esoteric title ‘What is an Exhibition?’, he enlightened us to the fact that there is a wheel on the flag of that great Asian nation and, having administered the lesson and armed his lady wife (who was in the audience) with a microphone, treated us to an Anglo-Germanic version of the pop delights of our very own Pimpinela. Sad.
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Words themselves have ended up becoming one of these totems,
controlled as they are by powers whose principal instrument of
alienation is the manipulation of language, so that the discourses
we construct with them can be little more than products to be bought and sold.
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At the same time, however, we must try not to lose sight of the ground on which we construct the debate; in other words, the construction of the project (and the obvious fact that we need to start by laying the foundations somewhere). As I said
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| Exhibition by Jack Pierson at the CASM, 2006 |
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at the outset, from this we can derive social and economic benefits, and even some scraps of political power that our ability to manage the interpretations of our gesture, of our discourse —and thanks to the power of the communications media, in the age of the global circulation of information a discourse is often no more than a gesture— will share out in one way or another.
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We should ask ourselves if we ought not first to write that famous
acronym L.H.O.O.Q. at the bottom of our ID or passport photos.
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In conclusion, we might pass round the bonbons and make everything nice by taking refuge under the aegis of some important artwork, with a bit of rhetorical limbo dancing. We could, for instance, choose Bruce Nauman’s The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (1967), but with the bitter aftertaste of all we have been saying and the truly astonishing roster of artists that have —often from very fringe positions, or relegated at least to the margins of the official histories of all the different periods— overstepped the bounds of the realms assigned to them, I would prefer, as a kind of circumstantial sop to the evident impossibility of convoking them all here to show us the place of art, to turn instead to Poesure et Peintrie. D'un art, l'autre,the wonderful exhibition that Bernard Blistène put on in the Vieille Charité in Marseilles in 1993, and more recently to Art i utopia. L'acció restringida, which Manolo Borja and Jean-François Chevrier curated at the MACBA, expanding it to include film and video. And to keep on trusting —as I have held for too many years now— that the place of Art will continue to be the public space par excellence, over and above all epochal circumstance and the human condition. |
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