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INTENSIVE CURES |
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Lluís Bisbe, who exhibited at the CASM a few months ago, reflects on certain aspects of the work that Ceal Floyer is currently presenting at the centre, raising questions about repetition, the meticulous observation of reality and the minimal intervention of the artist that also figure among the interests of his own work. Here at the Butlletí,
then, we engage once again in an exercise of an artist looking
at another artist's works, as we have done on other occasions.
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LLUIS BISBE
Ceal Floyer has put stickers with the phrase “Mind the step” on every step of the stairs in the CASM, reminding us at every step, as we ascend, that we need to tread carefully. Like an over-protective refrain it accompanies us from the bottom step to the top of the staircase that connects the three floors and up to the highest level to which visitors have access. Paradoxically, this minimal intervention has a large-scale dimension, because the great stone staircase becomes part of the artist's intervention. The supremely simple gestures takes the spectator into the realm of do-it-yourself. By utilizing something that was already in the exhibition space it reveals a conception of art that places a special emphasis on the ideas that spring from an attentive look at what there is around us. The concrete experience of doing a project for a specific place, that art is something that goes on all around us and that the function of the artist is to perceive it and help us recognize it.
Repeating a phrase over and over is an ancient and effective pedagogical tool or trick that serves to fix its content in the conscious mind and at times manages to infiltrate it into the subconscious and allow us to liberate, protect or absent ourselves for a time from our consciousness. It is used insistently for this purpose in religious practice (mantras, rosaries, Sufi chants.), in certain punishments that aim to subdue the will (brainwashing, classroom punishments.), and also in political and advertising slogans (“España va bien” - Spain is doing well), in the choruses of popular songs and to reinforce the identity of a group or as a self-help exercise. It is almost as if repeating a phrase enough times opened an invisible back door into a part of our brain where that phrase was tattooed with indelible ink.
No one is free from the endless siege of repetition.
Where this mechanism is best and most often manifested
is in what is usually called “actuality”,
which is configured by the news carried by the different
media. The news is listened to, watched and read over
many breakfasts; it is listened to or read again on many
commuter journeys; it is reread during the coffee break;
it's on in the background in many homes and in many restaurants
at lunchtime; it may be read again after lunch, and is
watched and listened to at night. But it doesn't end
there, because the very internal structure in which the
informative actuality is presented is repetitive: first the headlines, then the development and then the summary. This
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interest in repeating "what is happening in the world" is
an interest in drawing it, in profiling it; in other words,
in constructing a vision of it in some part of our soft
and tender absorbent encephalic mass. This image of the
world that is created under the influence of the news is
fairly hostile and is mostly full of misfortunes and dangers
from which we are advised to protect ourselves or be protected
from: mind the drugs, mind the diseases, mind the wrinkles,
mind the sun, mind the virus, mind the revolts, mind the
salt and the sugar, mind the fats, mind the step.
The first time I went to London what most caught my attention was that, on the Underground, every time the doors opened you heard the same voice repeating "Mind the gap" (between the train and the platform). We have become accustomed to talking machines; when I choose lead-free petrol, a recorded voice reaffirms me in my act by telling me "you have chosen lead-free petr"; as the doors of the lift in the metro station close, another voice tells me they're closing, and as they open, that they're opening; when the metro enters the station, a bright spark says "entering the station". This act of enunciation of that which already is, reaffirming it and confirming it, is in itself a tautological redundancy that, depending on how it is used or understood, can be regarded as a stylistic figure or a coarse defect. But, fortunately, we are not totally vulnerable to the charms of repetition; in fact, it makes us wary: when a friend tells us several times that he no longer thinks about his ex-girlfriend we immediately suspect that he is trying to convince himself or convince us of something that isn't true. Similarly, Ceal Floyer's warnings lead us not to over-protection against the possible accident, but to suspicion and the irony with which we can counter the siege of the apparently obvious.
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“Not many people come out of an exhibition genuinely disturbed, and very few people get hurt in an amusement park, because the risk is only the appearance of risk, and even that is controlled.”
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The obsession with security is a phenomenon that is coming to characterize this start of the century and it seems that this is just the beginning of an ascending spiral. Museums and, by extension, exhibition galleries are highly protected spaces: temperature, humidity, UV radiation, surveillance cameras of vigilance and private security guards. One of the aims of security or safety is to avoid pain - to avoid falling on the stairs- but the avoidance of pain is a very different thing from pleasure. Pleasure and pain are two extremes -that sometimes touch- and the suspension of pain is an intermediate grey area where nothing much really happens.
There are two safe spaces that have in common the production of a certain pleasure in the experiencing of apparently risky sensations without suffering any real danger: exhibition galleries and amusement parks. Not many people come out of an exhibition genuinely disturbed, and very few people get hurt in an amusement park, because the risk is only the appearance of risk, and even that is controlled. At Disneyland California there is an attraction that creates the illusion of changing size. Like Alice, who got smaller when she drank from the bottle that had "drink me" on the label. In "A Bug's Life", as the attraction is called, we are made to feel tiny by the trick of making small things gigantic. There is a whole mean imaginary of what is beautiful and small, which stems, I suppose, from the need to simplify, reduce and compress what is complex: in France, the beautiful and the small can be confused with one another; in Spain, there is the conceptist maxim that "the beautiful when brief is twice as good"; in the English-speaking countries "less is more", and in Japan…
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Ceal Floyer has photographed a bonsai from below and projected a slide expanding the image to the size of a large tree, as if to place the spectator beneath it or the bonsai on top, or both at once. Making a bonsai much bigger would amount to undoing the act of perverse cruelty involved in mistreating a small sapling so that it stays small and giving it back the size it would have attained if it had not been mutilated. An unhealthy love takes the form of over-protection; in order to keep on protecting their babies, mothers often come to wish "if only they could always stay this small", that most loving and terrible of phrases. To conserve is an attack on life. An excess of protection is a perverse aberration. It’s easy enough to imagine that those who claim to protect us secretly wish us harm in order that they can put into practice all that they know; paradoxically, a Classical Greek conception of beauty holds that whatever is fitted to its function is beautiful. There is a symbiosis between the accident and the people that come to our aid, because in order perform the function for which they have been trained, they need others to come to harm. I have always been wary of those lifeguards that, in their tedious inactivity, must be hoping that we will drown so they can save us. |
In all probability like the other stairways on which the artist may repeat the operation.
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Actuality is more formative than informative, as Agustín Sánchez Ferlosio reminds us.
Disabilities apart, there is something unpleasant about hearing them speak Catalan, because otherwise they would use the intermittent beep made by heavy machinery, a sound that is universal and serves not only to warn Catalan blind people. But this helps us know where we are.
Far more apparent in the English-speaking world.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
In Catalonia people say "the good jam is in the small pot". It seems to me that 'the beautiful when brief is twice as good' reflects a fantasy of effective art that can say a lot with very little.
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