Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.

The artistic project conceived by Nikos Navridis for Eleusis has undergone several phases before crystallising in a unique and significant intervention. As in an alchemical process, combustion, purification and sublimation have led Navridis to summarise his reflections in a forceful proposal, both as regards the specific site in which it is presented and as regards the present context of spiritual, social and economic crisis.

In the former oil factory that the municipality of Eleusis has been offering as a space for artists since 2004, the traces of the past converse enter into dialogue with awareness of the present, and the vestiges of history coexist with the new social uses of the place. While most of the artists invited on previous occasions displayed their works in the huge interior spaces of the factory, Nikos Navridis has preferred to accommodate them in exterior spaces, thus expanding the architectural and symbolic boundaries of both factory and city. Using the entire courtyard of the factory, he has transformed the dryness of the cement into an undulating field of wheat, and taken the long wall beside the front entrance and the former circular tank to install sentences by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. His choices regarding space, material, language and metaphor have enabled him to combine his own aesthetic, existential and political cosmography with the symbolism and dense history of Eleusis. This intellectual and emotional exercise comprises the certainty that art can and must shake our consciences and delight our senses in a critical way.

Since classical antiquity the name Eleusis has been bound to the mystical cults of Demeter, Persephone and Hecate, a triad of goddesses that symbolises fertility of woman and earth. As well as awakening a host of powerful legendary resonances, in Western culture Eleusis has remained associated with the awareness of the civilising process, the cyclic rebirth of agricultural crops and of human life itself. The ritual visit to her shrine was made each September and for over two thousand years offered a unique transition to those who were initiated in her mysteries, which revealed the secrets of metaphysical gnosis and celebrated the pacifying certainty that death did not exist, the vision that existence continued in new reincarnations.

The echoes of this path of wisdom and transformation coexist in Eleusis with the story of multiple cases of destruction. In spite of having been devastated in successive wars such as those waged by the Persians in the fifth century BC, the city and the temple were continuously being reborn out of their ashes. Their complete destruction was eventually brought about by Christianity towards the fourth century AD. As a rival religion, Christianity imposed its ‘truths’ on the mystery cults that had survived and even flourished during the Roman Empire, destroying the material and spiritual economy that sustained them. Following strict orders by Theodosius the Great, the sanctuary was closed and the practice ceased to be observed, receiving its final blow in 395 AD when the barbaric hordes led by Alaricus destroyed the shrine, killing the last hierophant.1

Other constructions and destructions have followed, the most significant of which are those associated with industrialisation and the tertiary or service sector in the twentieth century (a petrol refinery, the actual oil and soap factory, tourism, cultural consumption, etc.) and their consequent stages of development, decline and losses, often related to the flagrant unemployment rate in the region.
Bearing this background in mind, Nikos Navridis has chosen to work with two basic materials that enable him to reinterpret the myth and think about the present. The first is the legendary Eulesian cereal, wheat, and the second is a sentence by Irish writer Samuel Beckett that is also, to a certain extent, legendary.

In the large courtyard at the back of the factory Navridis has created a field of wheat on the cement ground. By preserving the roots of the spikes and replanting them, one by one, on a mantle of earth covering the merciless aridity of the cement, he gives form to the hope for a new rebirth. By looking back at the ancestral art of agriculture he reasserts the need for a new agreement with the forces of the underworld, that are no longer those of the infernal gods of classical mythology but the relentless darkness of the ideology of progress. What in the story of Demeter and Persephone was ‘the pact with the metaphysical sources of life’ 2 in the sombre reign of death, now becomes an exercise in faith and infinite patience over which hangs the threat of failure but also the hope of a necessary spiritual and material revolution. From our will to face up to failure and our confidence in our own dreams we obtain the strength to continue to try to construct reality and provide it with meaning: ‘I think that the tiring and excessive labour that is invested to the “planted cement” and the inherent vanity that characterizes this decision, carries something like a punishment and purification, and is filled with breaths and sounds as the wheat field moves,” says the artist.3

Navridis has succeeded in transforming the factory into a magical place through the wheat field, especially in the afternoon when everything turns to gold. And when the wind moves the spikes, the subtle undulation becomes a living painting that softly translates the beauty, the strength and the wisdom of cultivated nature. To install a wheat field in a deserted factory is an arduous exercise in transferring the past to the present, a powerful contrast between the almost artisan care of farm crops and models of industrial production. This intervention highlights the material conditions of existence and reveals the dehumanisation of the production and consumption of goods, but it also points out the potential of art in the symbolic reconstruction of the world. Marx and Engels wrote that the production of ideas and the production of consciousness were originally interwoven in material activity and the material intercourses of men, the language of real life.4

For Navridis, ‘the literal, physical transportation of the field on the cement is a powerful conceptual metaphor of the meaning of human labor and it directly connects with Beckett’s sentence “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” that suggests all the efforts and the mistakes we made in the past and are still making in order to achieve what we believe is better.’5 Beckett’s statement appeared in his second last novel, Worstward Ho, published in 1983. The ideas of failure, perseverance and repetition are summed up here with a touch of hope.

Navridis has split the sentence in two, installing the first part on a long wall by the entrance and the second part atop the circular building of the old oil factory. He has used letters measuring 95 cm in height, cut out of a metal surface and without any background. Each letter is red, in reference to a sense of urgency, and is outlined with a series of small red Led lights that reflect its shine on the wheat field.

Before deciding to present the project Try again. Fail again. Fail Better as a synthesis of his process of reflection, Navridis worked on other series of experimental pieces that helped him to shape the final installation and that certainly bear the seeds of future projects. He positioned a group of performers bearing white boards in the empty space of the factory courtyard as an allusion to the need for silence, to the urgency of the blank page, to the desire of starting afresh unburdened by tragic memories, and like in a Zen meditation ceremony he even stood close to the concrete wall of the circular tank, giving his back to the rest of the world and looking inwards, at his own void, at his own wall, at the possibility of his own failure. Reality, however, did not allow him to fail. By chance, if chance exists, some of the workers who replanted the wheat forgot to cut off the water supply and a surprising miracle took place in Eleusis: new spikes sprouted in the bleak and harsh context of the ‘cement field’, and their green stalks formed a sharp contrast with the colour of the ripe wheat.

In the intervention Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better, where dialectics is at once a connection and a separation between nature and language, Navridis continues to develop his artistic career, following a path that echoes the renewal of aesthetic languages and reveals his aspiration to conceive existential spaces as spiritual and political regions. Navridis’s oeuvre links the humanist tradition of Western culture to Zen intuitions of emptiness and postmodern theories of synchronicity. It shows how one of the main missions of contemporary artists is to combine different materials and influences to create works which temporarily articulate meanings that broaden our vision and awareness. This explains why Navridis is able to transform empty industrial spaces into symbolic sets in which Beckett’s words, acting as a contemporary oracle, coexist with the absurd yet vital exercise of replanting the wheat as a symbol of the need to be responsible for our material and spiritual nourishment.

For over more than two decades Navridis has been creating a corpus of work characterised by a huge poetic potential through which he often reflects on the binary nature of existence and on the continuous ignition and extinction of the world, to quote Heraclitus.6 Navridis has presented respiration as a primeval breeze, a subtle, abstract material needed in order to initiate his movement towards others. His work has been defined as ‘sculpture of breath’ for it shapes spaces, captures existential tensions and makes visible the invisible through respiration. In the works conceived for Eleusis it is the wheat that breathes, while spectators hold their breath as they read and reflect on Beckett’s words.

The updating of ethical truths through the language of art and the wisdom contained in myths reveals the need to seek new forms of thinking and acting that will help reshape the meaning of life and of the world. To quote Ernst Cassirer, the results of aesthetic fantasy are truly spiritual actions.7 There probably are other paths, but for the artist who articulates his works conscientiously and for the citizen who receives the wisdom they contain, all that can be done is to work hard and patiently to restore health and life to a universe dominated by slavery, helplessness, sickness and death. Healing, understood as a return to refounded civilisation, like a renewed faith in cyclic rebirth, is an unavoidable task, one that is certainly possible and is occasionally miraculous.

Rosa Martínez

NOTES
1 http://www.cyceon.gr/en/museum/content/105
2 R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Carl A. P. Ruck et al., The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, Chapter VI, Documentation (C. A. P. R.), p. 113, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California, 2008.
3 Nikos Navridis in an e-mail conversation with Rosa Martínez, August 2013.
4 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, 1845. First published in 1932. Accessible at http://www.marxists.org/archive/1845/german-ideology
5 Nikos Navridis in an e-mail conversation with Rosa Martínez, August 2013.
6 ‘This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made. But it always was, is, and will be: an ever-living Fire, with measures of its kindling, and measures going out.’ Heraclitus, Fragment No. DK30, The Fragments of Heraclitus. Accessible at http://www.heraclitusfragments.com/files/e.html
7 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. II, Mythical Thought. Translated into English by Ralph Manheim, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 1955.

La entrada Nikos Navridis, Eleusis, Greece, 2013 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

‘The sweetest life comes when one senses nothing.” Sophocles, Ajax

“He who understands has wings.”2 Pancanvimsha Brahmana (XIV, I, 13)

According to quantum physics, observation and thought create reality; the universe exists when it is perceived. If we are to create a more beautiful and fairer life, if that is what we imagine to be desirable, we must first clarifY our ideas about ourselves and about the world.

The awareness of time and of death lies at the base of thought. He who buries his dead and surrounds his pain with signs, messages, gestures or rituals exerts a symbolic function, i.e., he thinks. Perhaps he expects another life in the hereafter; perhaps he believes in the transmigration of the souls, or is convinced that we are only the matter of the body we inhabit and that we disappear along with it.

Thinking isn’t a free, disinterested activity or a function exclusive to philosophers. Thought is always linked to the economic and political conditions of each moment, and to the social environment in which one is born. Science regard~ thought as the result of an accelerated neuronal interconnection, the flows of which are driven by the circumstances the subject strives to confront or adjust to. To think historically means to date, to analyse causes, to compare, to be aware of time and to grant meaning to the events that unfold in time. Past and present are not antinomies. History is an instrument with which to interpret the present.

To think artistically implies to build artefacts and strategies by means of which history and existence can be sensed, understood and even invented. To create is a way of transcending death. According to historian Mircea Eliade, true creative hermeneutics, like scientific or technical findings, reveals meanings that had gone unnoticed or had been misunderstood, or else denotes them so intensely that once they have been assumed man can no longer go back to thinking as he did before. 3

‘That we still do not think is the most thoughtprovoking in our thought-provoking world,’ said German philosopher Martin Heidegger. 4 In othe words, we haven’t learnt to think. The fear of death and of poverty is used by established powers-be they the religiOUS elites or the financial oligarchies that dominate the world-is used to weaken the development of critical thought. We live under the dictates of the economy of fear, for which war as a torture of the masses, systematic plundering, ‘reconstruction’ after devastation and the organisation of ‘security’ have become flourishing industrie~ Canadian journalist and writer Naomi Klein says that in the age of’disaster capitalism’, the confusion produced by shocks reduces our capacity of resistance and that the best way of remaining centred is to be informed, to be aware of what is happening to us and why.5 To think, therefore, requires plural and engaged information, which is precisely what attempts to avoid the hegemonic discourse of the mass media.

Some forms of knowledge are conveyed through information and discourse. Others are supported by myths and symbols. In both cases the danger lies in the pride of thinking we are dealing with absolute truths when our evolution depends on our assuming and overcoming the relative truths that are within our reach. Today we are aware of the fact that universalist reason has been used ethnocentrically, for and by Western subjects. The questioning and deconstruction of the instrumental use of that reason are needed to make the ideals of freedom, equality and solidarity that must inspire life on a planetary scale feasible. Vertical thought must meet forms of horizontal understanding. The ethics of care and respect must prevail before the ecological risks and the moral perils that threaten life on Earth.

Starting from these reflections, the exhibition entitled What To Think revolves around three basic issues: contemporary hubris, the ‘misfortune’ of history and the consolation and consciousness that art can provide.

On the one hand, we recognise excessive arrogance, will to power and pride in people, companies, nations and empires. On the other hand, as We recall individual confrontations and collective massacres and wars, we wonder what kind of thinking justifies oppression, in the name of what truth, wha drives and what interests have the humiliations and cruelties of universal history been committed.

From Buddhism to Marxism, numerous theories have tried to explain the meaning of life, to justify the inevitability of human suffering or to rebel against it. Could calamities be a form of ‘ divine punishment’, as we learn from Catholicism? Are social tragedies a ‘historical necessity’, as Hegel tells us? To wonder whether disasters have moral meaning or are simply the result of the arbitrariness of fate and greed is relevant when we revisit history and see how crimes, deportations, terrorist attacks and acts of injustice often committed in the name of ‘progress’ still take place, without man seeming to have learnt from the past.

We are living in times of unrest and need new hermeneutics to help us understand the meaning of our being in the world. Now more than ever before we need to analyse how knowledge is built into an instrument of control and into a means of emancipation, how the psychic and political economy that supports power is formulated and how the institutions and means that control knowledge operate.

Art, that is representation, is an exercise in knowledge and power. Art works display, analyse and reveal the world, and the temporary exhibitions that assemble them are privileged spaces for symbolic exchanges between works and viewers, spaces that generate critical discourse and new political dialogue as well as aesthetic enjoyment.

Modernism fought for the autonomy of the art work and fell into a hermetic form of absolutism. At the same time, the desire to blur the frontiers that separated art from life gave rise to other forms of action in which the work of art was conceived as a means, a bridge, a text that only took on meaning when interpreted by the viewer. In this intertextual connection lies the possibility of shared creativity as a way of understanding and transforming the world in which we live. As French poet Antonin Artaud declared likening the theatre to the plague, if the powers liberated by plays are black it is not the theatre but life that is to blame. In Psychology and Alchemy (I944), Carl Justav Jung suggested that only by integrating Evil, by accepting it and bringing it to consciousness would it be possible to heal individuals and the world. The pessimism of intelligence knows that through critical thought, the optimism of will, true art, humility and compassion are healing and emancipation possible.

1 Sophocles, Ajax. Translated into English by Ian Johnston, e-text, line 660, Malaspina University College,2 Nanaimo, British Columbia. The Spanish excerpt quoted in Francisco Jarauta, Cuadernos 9. Pensar – Componer / Construir – Habitar, Arteleku, Diputaci6n Fotal de Gipuzkoa, San Sebastian, f994. Pancanvimsha Brahmana (XIV, T, 13). Qyotec by Mircea Eliade in Yoga, Bolingen Foundation Incorporated New York, I958, p. 329- 3 Ibid. 4 Martin Heidegger, ‘Was heisst-Denken’. Translated from the German as ‘What Is Called Thinking,’ Harper & Row, New York, 1968, and subsequently as ‘What Calls for Thinking?,’ in D. Krell (Ed.), Martin Heidegger. Basic Writings, Harper & Row, London and New York, 1977, pp. 341-386. 5 Naomi Klein, tbe Shock Doctrine: tbe Rise of Disaster Capita/ism, Penguin Press, London, 2008.

La entrada What to Think, Caixaforum Barcelona, 2012 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

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La entrada What to Desire, CaixaForum, Barcelona, 2013 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

‘Today is always still.’ 1 Antonio Machado, Nuevas canciones (I9I7-I930)

‘Sit down, sit down, sit down. A path will always open up for you.’ Akira Kurosawa, To Live, 19 52

Where to start? And what to do? are the forceful questions that Lenin used as a title for an article and a political treatise he wrote in 1901 and 1902 respectively, in the context of social unrest that would lead to the Russian Revolution of October 1917- What Is To Be Done? is a programmatic work, a guide to action that signals the important role played by intellectuals as authors of theories and organisational proposals that, in the face of dispersal and hesitation, will put revolutionary actions into effect in the transformation of social structures.

Lenin, who conceived these essays during the years 1897 to 1900 when he was banished to Siberia for his activities against the tsarist regime, took the title What To Do? from a novel written in 1862 in prison by the Russian author, philosopher and revolutionary Nikolay Chernyshevsky. In 1868 Leon Tolstoy wrote What Should We Do?, a work that paraphrased the title of Cheryshevsky’s piece where he revealed his disagreement with the concept of private property, which he considered the source of inequalities. Tolstoy, who was inspired by the scientific socialism ofProudhon as much as by the poverty preached by the gospel, didn’t support violence as a method and dreamt of a pacifist revolution.

The phrase has in fact biblical echoes for it first appeared in the Gospel of Saint Luke (po-r4), where we learn that while John the Baptist announced the arrival of the Messiah and urged those listening him to ‘convert’, they replied ‘What should we do?’John’s discourse was addressed to three groups the poor, tax collectors and soldiers, and suggested specific actions be performed by each. The poor were invited to share their basic needs of food and clothing and practice ‘horizontal solidarity’, which would be complemented by the ‘vertical solidarity’ provided by the rich. Tax collectors, renown for their injustices and corruption, were exhorted to be honest and not demand higher taxes than those established. In their turn, soldiers were asked not to use their power and strength to obtain information and to make sure they didn’t seek extra benefits.

A pesar de pregonar la justicia social, tanto las religiones como las doctrinas de salvación posponen habitualmente el juicio para después de la muerte, mientras que las teorías y los movimientos de acción política priorizan la acción transformadora del presente. Sin embargo, los ideales –como la libertad, la igualdad y la fraternidad de la Revolución francesa (1789)– y los valores –como los recogidos en la Declaración de los Derechos Humanos (1948)– se siguen ignorando hoy en un contexto en el que los intereses económicos se imponen a cualquier otra consideración.

In spite of proclaiming social justice, religions and doctrines of salvation usually postpone judgement until after death, whereas political theories and movements prioritise actions that transform the present. Nevertheless, ideals (such as those of liberty, equality and fraternity declared by the French Revolution in 1879) and values (such as those announced in the Universal Declarationof Human Rights in 1948) continue to be ignored today in a context in which financial interests prevail over any other consideration. In the realm of art, the statistics drawn up by the Guerrilla Girls activist group founded in New York in 1985 are quite revealing. Their intervention at the 2005 edition of the Venice Biennale warned of the fact that the year the international art event was founded, r895, female participation was only 2% and a hundred years later, in 1995, it had only crept up to 8%. The Venice Biennale also exemplifies the unequal distribution of wealth on a global scale, as pointed out by artist Santiago Sierra in his project entitled Altavoces / Loudspeakers (2005): that year the countries that enjoyed a national pavilion of their own in the privileged space of the Giardini corresponded to 24% of the world’s population and produced 83% of the gross world product (the sum of the gross national product of all countries in the world), whereas those countries represented outside of the Giardini area corresponded to 34% of the world’s population and produced a mere 9% of the gross world product. As regards those countries not represented at the Biennial, they corresponded to 42% of the world’s population and produced 8% of the gross world product.

The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 entailed, in symbolic terms, the death of the tradition of revolutionary utopias, and the decade of the nineties witnessed the triumph of global capitalism that has merely resulted in growing differences between an increasingly powerful oligarchy and a working population progressively impoverished and enslaved. The myth that one day the oppressed classes will rise up and rebel doesn’t tally with the new and sophisticated forms of control and explOitation, and the relevant question is how will the collective indignation be channelled in order to combat mechanisms of repression and rhetoric that are to an increasing extent foreign to the interests of the majority. Today, as stated by Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek, the concepts of revolution and truth are ‘zombies’-living dead. Education and critical information are key elements when it comes to confronting the reigning relativism and confusiononly through them may we be able to define the lines of action that will guide our individual and collective behaviour. This could perhaps explain why the privatisation of education is still used as a form of segregation that keeps individuals tied to the social class into which they were born.

Each individual has his or her own horizon -the line that establishes their vision of reality starting from the physical, geopolitical and cultural position of their own body. This is the personal territory in which conscious and unconscious energies, public orders and private aspirations are articulated. The personal is profoundly political, and the idea of revolution begins in oneself. Changes in subjective consciousness have a transformative power and can be determined by the awakening of critical awareness, by an existential epiphany or by the experience of an extreme situation, as narrated by Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa in his film To Live, of I952, or as proven by people who have survived wars or the Holocaust, like French diplomat and writer Stephane Hessel.

Set at the time of American military custody of Japan after World War Two, Kurosawa’s film tells the story of a civil servant working at a corrupt local administration office performing the same bureaucratic tasks day in, day out. When he finds out he has cancer he undergoes a personal transformation that leads him to experiences he would not otherwise have dreamt of. A drunken Mephistophelian poet guides him as he explores the night and its pleasures, he falls in love with a woman much younger than he is, and in order to help a group of women threatened by property speculation he challenges the local mafia, that were about to take over the only square in which they could play with their children. Asked by one of the mobsters whether he is afraid of them he remains silent, although his gaze betrays the inner transformation that has led him to find new strength to resist.

Stephane Hessel, a member of the group of men who in I948 drew up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, revealed how after having survived confinement in Nazi concentration camps he believed in the importance ofleading committed lives. In his book Time for Outrage (20n) he appealed to the idea ‘to create is to resist, to resist is to create.’

In this sense, art as a form of knowledge, as a channel of analytic and poetic interpretation of reality can be a form of resistance against uniform, stereotyped and fetishistic thinking. While it is true that artistic creations are goods and have an exchange value, it is also true that if their use value is prioritised they can bring about transformative cognitive and emotional experiences. This has been one of the chief objectives of the series entitled What To Ihink and What To Desire, and is the leitmotif of What To Do, the show that brings the series to a close.

We know that an exhibition is a symbolic construction in a specific space, a temporal landscape in which formal and conceptual associations between different works, bound together by a revelatory syntax, suggests a discourse that articulates our sensory perception, thoughts and emotions. What To Do doesn’t formulate direct slogans or advice for action, but displays plastiC exercises and ideological explorations capable of encouraging individual and social transformation. The ‘artefacts’ made by artists -be they videos, sculptures, installations, paintings, photographs or ephemeral actions-resonate more or less, according to the vital and political objectives of each interlocutor.

The proposals in this selection reveal how certain artists reposition their body in accordance with the parameters, the forms, and the structures (physical, social, visible and invisible) that shape our environment. They offer us devices that guide us through the chaos of storms. They help us trace the family genealogies that are at once protective and stifling. They challenge the notions of mental health and madness, ask themselves where such categories come from and how the institutions that regulate them are set up. They signal how repression, censorship and the loss ofliberty of those who question prevailing order are organised, and point out how reconstruction and reconciliation should be managed so as to alleviate pain. For justice requires a critical reinterpretation, an updating of the thoughts, emotions and values that help us reformulate the questions ‘Where do we start?’ and ‘What do we do?’ As Beckett asserted, we must start at the beginning over and over: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

By assembling these works temporarily around an idea and connecting them through likenesses and contrasts, the exhibition becomes a magnetic field with zones of varying intensity that offers us a plac( in which to project our concerns and awaken our conscience. By launching convincing messages, it suggests meaningful itineraries and perspectives for the gaze and for the intellect, revealing that we all breathe a common atmosphere and stressing the fact that when we think, desire or do, we are not alone.

1 Antonio Machado, Nuevas canciones; De un cancionero apócrifo; Poemas de la guerra, Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 2006.. 2 Samuel Beckett, Beckett short no. 4 – Wortsward Ho, John Calder, 1983.

La entrada What to Do, CaixaForum, Barcelona, 2013 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

The River of Endless Love 1

Rosa Martínez

“My art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.” Ana Mendieta, 1983 “A Selection of Statements and Notes”, Sulfur, vol. 22, 1988, 70.

“The mind of the great sage of India is intimately transmitted from west to east. While human faculties are sharp or dull, the Way has no northern or southern ancestors.” Sekito Kisen (700-790) Sandokai (Harmony of Difference and Sameness)

The Search for Vision Some works of art caress our senses with the lightness of a feather. Others pierce our heart like a sword. Some are curative, for their wisdom and beauty act as a balm for our sorrows. A few arouse our critical intelligence and make us aware of evil and injustice. The subtle irony of others makes us smile. Some even o∏er us a refreshing silence, a pause in the maelstrom, a space for meditation. Others act as energy condensers, like batteries charged with meaning. But they all need a viewer in order to exist. They all expect that interpretative, plastic transfer that shapes our sensations, awareness and affections. They all wish to convey their vision, be it purely aesthetic, playful, ideological or deeply sacramental.

Quantum physics has taught us that the existence and identity of things is based on transformation and not on an immutable essence, and that the interpretation of the observer modifies the observed. Insofar as it gives the viewer the role of creator, quantum physics coincides with the theory of language, which believes that the reader is also an author. Subjectivity and objectivity, phenomenology and perception are interwoven.

However, as Rilke said, the world into which we are born is a world that has already been interpreted, and our growth process fluctuates between the need to learn its codes and our yearning to be free of the clichés in which meanings are entrenched. We are body and language; we continue to need instruments of vision and methods of thought that will help us navigate through life and implement the ability to transform ourselves. To quote Miyazawa Kenji,2 perhaps everything is no more than a landscape of our soul and perhaps to shape that landscape is the great Work we are called on to perform.

Literature and film have offered us paradigmatic creations on the physical and symbolic paths a human being will journey through to discover himself or to explore the multiple dimensions of existence. From Ulysses’ travels to Dante’s Divine Comedy, from Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad to Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, there is nothing for us but to persevere in order to navigate the earthly or infernal world in which we live. The 1989 film, Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Le≥ for the East? by South Korean director Yong-Kyung Bae, is a profound reflection on morality in the search for enlightenment and on the awareness of death as experienced by a Zen master, his disciple and a young apprentice. The master advances several koans that have to be solved and states, “When you dig up the moon in your inmost mind to light up the sky and the earth, its light will chase away all the shadows of the universe.”

To Read the World Again

At the onset of the twenty-first century, the concept of the work of art is not only based on the material nature of its support, nor is it identified with the idea of object. Painting and sculpture have broadened their traditional formats. Film, drama, performance art, happenings, photography and all forms of relational art have opened new doors to the ontology of what is considered art. Classical borders have become porous, disciplines are interconnected and artistic activity has spread to new physical, conceptual, social and geopolitical territories.

Today, science, art and philosophy move towards a vision of humanity and the cosmos that is unitary, not divided. When Beuys said that “Every man is an artist” and that the transformation of thought through words is in itself a sculptural act, he was not far from the Buddhist idea that every one of us is a potentially enlightened being, a Buddha, a god. To curate an exhibition is to propose a subtle yet determined combination of works, to articulate a reinterpretation of the world, one that is partial and fragmentary, but as true as possible. Curators are mediators, interpreters, catalysts and channels for the experiences of others that become their own.

In the realm of art shows, diachronic interpretations assess the evolution of forms, while thematic proposals explore specific aspects of cultural production more deeply. Totalising visions give way to other developments, other forms of interpretation. In this opening up of new spaces, synchronic interpretations and the transversal interconnection of works from different cultures and ages have appeared in curatorial practice as propitiatory exercises. This prospective gaze prefigures a near future in which differences will cease to mean hierarchy, separation and exclusion, and will prioritise instead the values of co-existence, sympathy and interconnection.

This task requires si≥ing through the mad circulation of messages, shedding new light on what is already known and, in the best of cases, tracing an unexpected flash of awareness and thereby triggering an uncommon joy. Conceiving images as ‘operational symptoms’, revealing their elective aΩnities, expanding the reverberations of meaning that throb within them. To study their symbolic migrations and global legibility is the task. However, it is not only an intellectual task, but an exercise that needs a heart.

The Exhibition as a Journey

Unforeseen associations of objects and images pointing to something that has not yet been visualised and revealing the ‘magnetic anomalies’ that exist between works leads to the discovery of new sculptural and poetic qualities of the real, as Harald Szeemann declared and practiced. By uniting visible things to the invisible space that surrounds them, we create the continuity of the world. And that continuity can be transformative because it invites us to overturn previous preconceptions and invent new territories of meaning.

Visiting an exhibition is a phenomenological experience and, in the best of cases, it can be a rite of passage, an emotional and spiritual transfiguration. The exhibition is a proposal, a guiding tool to enable us to see through the eyes of the spirit. Its effect can be even greater if the power of love inspires the choice of works and the rhythms between them, if the spatial sequences, the volumes and voids, lights and shadows are carefully planned.

The fact that the Palazzo Fortuny should be the architectural and symbolic setting in which our curatorial exercise suggests new possibilities for vision is particularly relevant. Fortuny combined fashion, painting, philosophy, trade, set design, lighting and photography with a huge passion for Eastern wisdom. His palazzo embraced a certain way of life and was a laboratory where the arts could be interconnected.

TRA: Edge of Becoming hopes to share and broaden the radiance of this legacy, to establish the flows of beauty, love and awareness that transcend it, to grant access to some celestial spheres without excluding the vision of the door to hell. Today, this is a source of pleasure and growth that can be obtained through various types of ecstasy, the fortuitous and incomplete relations of which can be traced through the echoes of some of the works in the exhibition:

• Consider the thought of a Zen monk who, over 1200 years ago, decided to abandon his monastery in order to escape from the inflexibility of a rule that was too strict and castrated genuine spiritual search.
• Observe the inside of a ritual African mask, whose strange eyes and fading smile tell us of the other side, the other world. –
• Imagine the cosmic weight of ultramarine blue.
• Understand the suffering of a woman crossing through darkness under a stone before surfacing once again to the light, purified and redeemed, as a healing ritual and a promise.
• Enter and exit through fictitious migratory doors that make us ‘Oriental’ or ‘Occidental’.
• Discover in the wabi labyrinth space, a work consisting of two strokes on the upper and lower parts of the canvas: the demarcation of the void, above and below the horizon.
• Share the beauty of dialogue with the dead and the generosity of singing softly to corpses.
• Stroll through a forest of voodoo dolls made out of industrial waste.
• Admire a woman who keeps her balance on the horizon of the sea.
• Imagine that we are walking up a liquid ladder made of transparent glass that doesn’t break.
• Lift up our arm in a dark room to gain access to a beam of light. To become light.
• Observe a blackbird that comes up to eat seeds in the courtyard of the palace.
• See a rainbow appear on a skirting board, at floor level.

Within the multifaceted tour of the Palazzo Fortuny we come across the artist’s studio, a hidden matrix, a secret chamber with a plain sink for washing the paintbrushes. The marks le≥ by the brushes on the plaster of the wall are traces of waste, involuntary non-artistic signs of the existence of the tools Fortuny used to shape one of the multiple possibilities of seeing and being. These marks provide an indication and a hope for all those who still want to make the effort to see and to be. If it is true that we all eventually find the necessary echoes for our paths, then we shall probably leave the exhibition having navigated a river of endless love and wisdom, a river with secret bends and turbulence that will continue to flow towards new hopes and becomings.

1. The title of this essay is taken from the 1988 song, River of Endless Love by The Moody Blues. Opposite Page: Descartes, René (1596–1650), Traité de l’Homme. Published 1677 by T. Girard in Paris. 2. Miyazawa Kenji, Spring and Ashura (1924). Translated into English by Ruriko Suzuki, An Asura in Spring, Shohakusha, 1999. “These poems would make man, the Milky Way / the Hecatomb and the sea urchin / think of the cool Theory of Essence / as they feed on the dust of the universe / or breathe the air of salt water. / But all is reduced to a landscape of our soul.

La entrada TRA. Edge of Becoming, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, Italy, 2011 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

A woman lies in a pool of blood in a street in Seville. Another appears camouflaged among some dummies in the window of a big department store in the same city. On top of a car belonging to some Moroccan immigrants there is a girl in traditional dress, roped to the rest of the bundles on the luggage rack. Dressed in traditional Andalusian costume and in the commanding presence of a bull’s head, a magnificent woman is gagged and tied to a chair. They have all been used or abused by a system that considers them chattels, consumer goods. They are all Pilar Albarracín.

Through her mises-en scène and performances, Pilar Albarracín reveals the drama of the structures used for domination and shows us the violence to which women are subjected. However, she does not do it through moralizing dogmatism, but with the irony and sarcasm of surreal visions and in her own jocular style. Although only one, she personifies many: the gypsy, the peasant, the housewife, the prostitute, the folclórica (popular singer), the immigrant, and the injured girl. In representing subordination to gender, social class and national or ethnic identity, she shows that her analysis of symbolic structures is consistent with what has been said in the most influential pronouncements of recent decades.

Levy Strauss said that identity could be a game of “floating signifiers”, but that it is above all a set of representations that tie us to tradition and the status quo. In the Romantic period, a return to specific identity came about as a reaction to the internationalization of the Industrial Revolution, the same thing is occurring again at a time when globalization dissolves local differences or reduces them to easy-to-digest ethnic clichés. Hence the proliferation of artists who dig down to the anthropological roots of their culture, especially the women who, like Shirin Neshat or Pilar Albarracín herself, question the role they have been given in this game.

Albarracín takes the most stereotypical aspects of “Andalusian-ness”, which the Franco régime turned into a cliché of “Spanishness”, and dives playfully and critically into them. Food, folklore, religion and the rural economy are fundamental themes in her work. In her performance Spanish Omelette (Tortilla a la española), 1999, she cuts away pieces of her dress to “cook herself” in a metaphoric ceremony of self-immolation, while the sculpture Iberian Luxury (Lujo ibérico) 2001, is made up of a beautiful string of chorizos and black puddings in silk, and black and red velvet, hanging from the ceiling on giant meat hooks. The Reliquaries (Relicarios), 1993, are sold as modern day lucky charms. They contain a photograph of the artist and a piece of the shirt she wears to paint in; in them she ridicules the protective, mystic and almost sacred role of the artist. The series Ora et labora, 2001, presents a self-satisfied peasant going about her tasks in an idyllic context. They convey the fictional nature of the happiness brought by work when one accepts one’s place on the social scale.

Basing herself on a post-modernism which facilitates transition from discipline to discipline, and aware of the power of new technologies, Pilar Albarracín uses video, sculpture, photography, installations, painting or fashion design with ductility. However, performances are her most radical statement and they mark out a territory on which she has projected her rebelliousness in a direct, primary way. Her art is a metaphor for insubordination and her appearances in public spaces make use of the surprise factor and act as social shock therapy. Untiteled. Blood in the Street (S/T. Sangre en the calle), 1992, were seven events played out in seven locations in Seville in which different types of women had experienced some type of incident. In Shop Windows (Escaparates), 1993-95, she also interacted in an urban context, this time taking the place of the dummies in shop windows. References to beauty as a prison appear in Night 1002 (La noche 1002), 2001, where she demonstrates what Virginia Woolf called the “hypnotic power of domination”: a fascinating visual fusion converts the tinkling eroticism of a belly dance into the jangling sounds of the chains of oppression.

Pilar Albarracín’s world is full of parodies and tragi-comedies that verge on cathartic paroxysm. There are flamenco dancers with spots on their dresses that are bloodstains: Dots, 2001. There is a savage dance where her partner is a wineskin which spills liquid on her with each movement: The Goat (La cabra), 2001. There is a session of cante jondo (flamenco singing) where she shouts out her laments in crescendo and ends tearing off her dress, clawing out her heart and throwing it literally on the floor amidst orgasmic groans: No Singing (Prohibido el cante), 2000. All of these are farcical scenes of dances where eroticism and death are intertwined, and are extraordinary examples of the outbursting that leads to release. They express in contemporary terms the idea of a “pathetic body”, a body that suffers all types of wounds and tensions, and connect with the theatre of the grotesque and rituals of cruelty. In contrast with religious ceremonies which seek to perpetuate systems of belief, contemporary performance has a critical potential that aims to destroy those rituals to achieve a regenerative catharsis. Shock, tears or laughter are all valid ways of doing this. Art is therefore a therapy: it allows one to become immersed in one’s own devils, but with the awareness that these are the product of ideology and social structures.

The construction of dynamic situation-provoking objects which require active audience participation has played an important part in Pilar Albarracín’s development. Duchamp said that it was the spectator who, through their interpretation, create the play. Pilar goes even further as she believes that intellectual analysis is not enough, and looks for convulsive interaction with the spectator who must, literally, suffer (or enjoy) the play, both physically and emotionally. She achieves this with pieces such as The Trip (El viaje), 2002: a car full of immigrants which is crammed with packages in which the spectators, between unavoidable bursts of laughter, experiment the sensations (the smells, the jolts, and so on) of the journeys of thousands of North Africans on Spanish roads. Seeing is Believing (Si no lo veo no lo creo), 2002, consisted of panoramic viewers which she created in the cove of San Vicente in Pollença. Scenes from other waters (boats full of illegal immigrants, pirates, the slaughter of tuna) came together virtually in the tourist-thronged sea of Mallorca. Eco-crimes, people being exploited or fantasies about freedom clash with a relaxing hedonistic context. In Divan, 2002 the spectator is invited to lie down on a replica of Freud’s couch as if he were about to begin therapy, and as he does so the weight of all his misfortunes invades him. This emotional clash is again produced in Mirror, Mirror (Espejito), 2001, a hilarious mirror that reminds us of Snow White, but in which every passer-by who looks at him or herself is insulted with “You’re ugly!”

In the urgent need to communicate and the challenge to established modes of expression present in Pilar Albarracín’s early work, we could sense a rebellious taste for the coarseness of language. In her latest production we observe a greater sobriety of style, but the communicative intensity is not diminished. The photographs that portray Christian myths, such as the expulsion from paradise or the conversion of Mary Magdalene, allude to the transformations associated with punishment or forgiveness. Judaeo-Christian tradition has given form to this specific perversion that connects blame with the disobedience of the laws of the Father. Pilar Albarracín looks for a way out of this dialectic, a cure that will ease the constant tension between these two poles. She achieves it primarily through heterodox laughter, though she is also capable of transmitting the most devastating repugnance in works like Passion Depending on How you Look at it (La pasión según se mire), 2001, or Pity (La piedad), 2001, which deal with rape. In this way, her visions connect with a tradition of Spanish criticism and its echos of Valle Inclán’s esperpento (theatre of the grotesque or macabre) or in the positions illustrated by a Goya who would have looked favourably on women’s liberation. Her taste for excesses and contrasts borders on the baroque, and her passion for what is kitsch connects with Pop. She is thus part of a creative movement that questions the puritanism of the Anglo-Saxon mainstream and is in favour of the validation of the extravagant poets, of erotic “coming out” as Bataille once said.

Analysing the images created in art or popular culture dissolves the patriarchal design that imprisons women in castrating moulds. Her art is a full testimony that women
exist as subjects of enunciation (whether Lacan likes it or not). However, what makes Pilar Albarracín a phenomenon (not to say a miracle) is her excess of generosity and courage, as well as her tenacity and the fact that she is extremely demanding with herself. That and her courage to go out and grab the bull by the horns, or the tail, as the situation requires.

Rosa Martínez

La entrada Pilar Albarracín, Altadís. París, 2003 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

Between Seduction and Terror

Even if the universe were to annihilate mankind, Pascal tells us, man would still be much greater than that which kills him, since he knows he is to die. The universe knows nothing, says Pascal; our dignity lies in our thought. Despite this tragic awareness of death, the myth of man as the centre of all things has fostered Western philosophies and driven the Wests scientific explorations, artistic revolutions and colonial conquests. Underlying these we always find the will to dominate and a desperate craving to go beyond the known. Technological development has played an essential part in this ambitious, relentless drive, fuelled by a blindly optimistic faith in boundless progress. Yet nowadays that infallibility is being questioned. Technology poisons and destroys in the name of development, and makes man an ever more artificial, dependent being.

Today, theories of chaos, the decline of the notion of the future and the new currents in postcolonial thought are questioning the moral, aesthetic and ideological supremacy that the West has held for centuries, and querying the conviction that its achievements are absolute and positive. Yet even so, the orthodoxy of thought associated with the globalisation of the media and the inordinate voracity of transnational capitalism are forming a tenebrous shadow play and continuing to extend their ferocious tentacles to exploit the resources of the planet. Awareness of this continuing devastation has led to weariness, nihilism and despair, though it is also heightening the need to defend sustainable growth and to reconsider, from a new ethical standpoint, the meaning and function of science, art and thought as privileged forms of becoming acquainted with, celebrating or transforming the world.

Cai Guo Qiang has reflected deeply on the complexities of the contemporary scene, travelling the worlds pathways in many directions geographically, aesthetically, conceptually and he has, through his art, established countless bridges linking different realities. His creations have brought the East and the West closer together, as well as the human and the divine, the industrial and the spiritual, the terrestrial and the cosmic. His work has also sought to soothe the pain and heal the wounds of the body viewed as a house, and of the house and the city in relation to the forces of the earth, through the teachings of ancestral Chinese medicine and the theories of feng shui. Armed with a clear awareness of his own times, Cai Guo Qiang has analysed the twentieth century by evaluating the ambivalent power of atomic energy, which has liberated the productive forces of matter but which has also yielded formidable destructive power, and drawn a new planetary landscape that has depicted the earth as a mushroom field, in the words of the artist.

The critical irony in the titles of some of his projects clearly points to his concerns and to the need to find a balance between realities whose meaning is unbalanced. Bringing to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot (Venice, 1995) is doubtless one of his most captivating projects, since Cai Guo Qiang himself inverted in time and space the journey of the mythical Venetian and brought to Venice medicinal herbs and other remedies not present in the riches that Marco Polo gathered in China. Among his numerous Projects for Extraterrestrials, two are particularly significant: No. 7: Rebuilding the Berlin Wall (Berlin, 1991), in which he serves a reminder that even if there are no physical walls, other frontiers still exist; and No. 16: The Earth Has Its Black Hole Too (Hiroshima, 1994), recalling the dropping of the atom bomb in the Second World War. Other projects, such as Calling (Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1999), allude to the need to connect the human and the divine, even if making the connection involves, among other possibilities, using old telephone directories for New Mexico.

The generic title of his exhibition in the Vienna Kunsthalle, Im the Y2K Bug, personifies and refers to the millennium bug, that invisible enemy that will affect domestic computers and, more dramatically, the computers that control armament and communications systems all over the planet. Cai Guo Qiang explores this collective hysteria and highlights ambiguous feelings of fear and fascination at the potential breakdown of the normal functioning of society. In his installation of that name, Cai Guo Qiang has created an artificial lawn hiding a complex network of land mines, all connected up to and controlled by a computer. There are over 200 switches in total, which trigger when the viewers walk over the lawn and randomly spark off small explosions in the form of atomic clouds. The who, the when and the where of the explosions cannot be worked out exactly from relations of probability. The ideas of danger, uncertainty and the imminence of accident define this artificial field as a metaphor for our world, which has become a mine-field that might blow up at any time.

In many of his works, the presence and active intervention of the viewers is essential for the formal completion of the work and for giving it meaning. Spring Breeze is an environment in which the breeze is produced by fans installed in the middle of the room. This false spring breeze allows the visitors to fly little kites and to experience the illusion of a bright day out in the country. Memories of childhood, the fantasy of idealised nature and the pleasures of play are rediscovered in a highly technological context in which the lightness of the kites contrasts with the noise of the fans. The desires, hands and actions of the viewers are necessary elements in giving life to this project. Individual bodies and movements become sculptural materials. The laughter, improvisations and uncertainties of the people trace rhythms in this imaginary space that Cai uses to fuel a relational aesthetic in which the important thing is not so much the objects themselves but rather the interrelationships that are created.

Big Bang, Small Bang brings together video images of war, fireworks, natural explosions and projects arranged by Cai using gun powder, with major differences and worrying similarities between them all. In Change of Seasons, the viewers can consult documents on his previous projects while drinking tea. In all, this exhibition displays a wide range of his work, and a chance to become acquainted with his obsessions and his enormous creative versatility. Nowadays we are not living at a time of high structural stylistic energy; labels classifying artistic phenomena come and go rapidly without ever gelling into clearly differentiated formalisations. Nowadays there is no one single direction or a main narrative, and so Cai Guo Qiangs polymorphic capacity to combine materials and concepts and to interpret the different places in which he works is a paradigm of the new situation being experienced by contemporary art and thought. Today the artist, like the curator, is bound up in the arduous task of uncovering and giving form to certain relations that affect the body of society, and to that end his spirit must be volatile and incisive, constant as the movements of the sea and yet unpredictable and intense like a meteorite. That is why Cai, when referring to his creative methodology, asserts that the material means he uses are unimportant, and the style is unimportant, and even the concept. The fundamental thing is to get to the heart of a situation. Replacing preconceived ideas and changing styles or materials are all perhaps necessary means for making no change at all, for trying to say the same thing, for seeking that unifying force that integrates art with the universe, Yin and Yang, and the artistic traditions of the East and the West.

In his reflections on cultural-exchange phenomena, Cai Guo Qiang contrasts the meaning that similar signs have in different contexts, wishing to bring them closer together and endow them with new meanings. The dragon, for example, which is an image of power and prosperity in the East, is seen in the West as a threat, as a destructive monster. In the fascinating Dragon Sight Sees Vienna project arranged on the evening of 6 November 1999, the dragon became a blazing metaphor representing the crowds of tourists who will visit the new Museum Quarter, an area in which the artistic energies and the historical memory of various institutions are concentrated. The dragon shone fleetingly in the Viennese night and marked out its fiery outline, resting on the metal skeletons of cranes. The fascination it exerted seduced and terrified thousands of spectators.

Cai Guo Qiang has worked over most of the world, and as a member of the diaspora of Chinese artists settling in the United States he has had direct experience of how the ideas of globalisation, the centre and the periphery are forged in ideological terms. In the new post-colonial order, the others are generally expected to speak of their otherness, their exoticism. Thus many Chinese artists have taken up prominent places in the western market at a time when the West needed to cure itself of the overweening power of its own logos and renew itself with the aid of other energies. For these artists, the challenge today is to go beyond the dual aesthetic of the mirror, and beyond the dialectic that forces them to focus on their ancestral culture as a harmless way of being exotic. Today the risk lies in analysing problems that are common to the new global society from a many-sided aesthetic of prisms through which various visions may be integrated. In this context, Cai occupies a privileged position as one who brings perspectives together and who links up traditions and identities.

When reflecting on the idea of artificial intelligence and how new technologies too can get ill and even create art, Cai Guo Qiang is forging a powerful metaphor on the society of our time. Earthquakes and other natural disasters have sometimes been taken as complaints from a humanised earth protesting at the damage inflicted on it by man. Devoured by his own hubris, man is creating artificial surroundings, transgenic foodstuffs, clones, robots and other forms of artificial life from which he has nonetheless been unable to eradicate the notion of death or the feeling of dread at the prospect of an accident. Accidents have spread from the everyday domestic sphere to means of transport, industrial production and computer control systems. Yet in addition to individual or collective accidents, the spectre of a total accident hovers over us: an uncontrolled chain-reaction explosion in nuclear arsenals, leading to the definitive extinction of the planet. We now live under this constant threat. Accidents no longer have a moral significance, though to placate our anxiety we turn to the old idea of punishment for the arrogance and titanic aspirations of man, or else we resign ourselves to the idea that they are the price of progress.

Art, as a way of creating images from our desires and fears, reflects the pain and perplexity felt today at this general lack of meaning, and it seeks momentary consolation in irony. As Octavio Paz said, the future had been reigning in the West since the eighteenth century, but today that idea of time is coming to an end. We are now experiencing the decadence of the future, and as Cai Guo Qiang shows us, we are inhabiting a random world in which seduction and terror, chaos and marvels all live together. In this world, chance and necessity engage in a dialogue seeking to guess who is the greater, who the more fearsome: man, capable of consciously destroying, or the universe, creating and destroying without knowledge, as Pascal said.

Rosa Martínez
Barcelona, November 1999

La entrada Cai Guo-Qiang, Kunsthalle Wien, Austria, 2002 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

Oscar Wilde said one should never give advice, especially good advice. And yet, here I am, attempting to indicate the best roads for an exhibition organiser to take. In my case, being a curator was not the result of an early vocation but a process of becoming, which I’ve had to build up step by step; a kind of destination I’ve had to discover slowly, guided at times by necessity and at others by chance. Today, setting up exhibitions is a privileged way of creating new political and aesthetic territories. There are no reliable maps nor fail-safe recipes for producing a good exhibition, but flexibility is vital for adapting to the most rugged terrain, as is a staunch defense of one’s inner convictions and a passion for discovering new routes.

In my view, a curator should be:

• a polymorphous being, but not a perverse one
• an intrepid explorer with a radar capable of picking up almost imperceptible signals
• a diplomat with honed negotiation skills
• a guerrilla intent on promoting social change
• an economist capable of clinching the best deal in an exchange
• a therapist who can help change someone’s perception of problems
• a ‘proposer’ able to stimulate critical awareness
• a person willing to share both problems and success
• a bamboo rod, both strong and flexible, sensitive to currents without being swept away by them.

These were my feelings and my goals when I organised exhibitions as the Fifth International Istanbul Biennial, On Life, Beauty, Translations and Other Difficulties (1997); Looking for a Place, the third Biennial at SITE Santa Fe (1999), and the EVA 2000 Biennial in Limerick (Ireland) entitled Friends and Neighbours.

In short, to give advice both ambiguous and precise -with the
openmindedness born of uncertainty, with the cautiousness of experience, and with the confidence inspired by New Feminism- I take the liberty of offering you these quotations. Read them and see if you are persuaded:

. “Choose a lofty role model; not to imitate but to surpass.”

-Baltasar Gracian
. “Be careful with what you wish, you might get it.”
-Oscar Wilde

. “Sometimes a woman has to do what a man has to think over.”
-Anonymous.

© 2001 Rosa Martínez and International Independent Curators International (ICI), New York.

La entrada “Think It Over” From Words of Wisdom. A Curator’s Vade Mecum on Contemporary Art. New York, 2001 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

Buscando Otros Lugares.

2000 © Rosa Martínez. Artículo publicado en la revista ARCHIPIÉLAGO, número 41 “De la muerte del arte y otras artes”. Madrid, 2000

La entrada El Arte como Asistencia Social, Archipiélago, Madrid, 2000 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

In 1994 Janine Antoni created a photographic tryptich entitled Mom and Dad while between 1996 and 1999 she completed and, a sculpture made by grinding two enormous limestone boulders against one another. Despite vast differences between the materials, media and processes used what both works share is the use of two bodies (her mother’s and father’s in the first piece, and the two stone blocks in the second) which, in one way or another, are closely interrelated and strangely interchangeable. In both instances, the artist -who has so often resorted to her own body and her everyday activities in making her sculptures- was not present at the final exhibition of the work, despite her intense physical and emotional involvement in the creation of her works.

Mom and Dad is a triptych in which the artist’s mother and father are shown in the classic poses of portrait photography, smiling and looking obligingly at the camera. But what jars us is that their facial features and clothes have been switched, as have their roles. Using prosthetic make up, wigs and her parent’s clothes, Antoni created a caricature whose reversals are unsettling for the viewer as s/he flits from one photo to another trying to ascertain the real identity of each figure. But, Antoni states, “What became fascinating during the process was the resistance or the impossibility of turning my parents into each other. What I was arriving at was half-mom, half-dad creature, but to create this composite I had to reverse our roles in the sense that my parents made me, and now I was remaking them.” This leads to a second reversal: the power of biological reproduction and generation, originally invested in her parents, has been exchanged for the artist’s creative power. The symbolic complexity of this action invokes multidirectional vertigo. While arousing misgivings about the true sexual identity of her parents, it also alludes to secret exchangeability between them and highlights the masquerade lurking behind established social stereotypes. It also shows that identities are not fixed, solid or stable; instead, they fluctuate somewhat perversely between terms that pit nature against culture.

In Mom and Dad, Antoni also demonstrates that, like gentle but
unrelenting rainfall, family life generates profound transferences that
erode and alter the initial set of conditions: “Although physically my parents may embody certain stereotypes in terms of their sexual identity, their personalities were much more complex. What seemed most striking to me was that after forty years they had become a kind of unit, sometimes in spite of these gender roles”. In this work, the unit includes the artist herself, although she does not figure in the images: “I decided this must be another self-portrait, because that is what I am, a biological composite of the two.” This feeling of connection blots out, albeit momentarily, any differentiation from (and between) the original unit, but right away it also points to the inevitable individuation that is linked to an awareness of death. That is why the elliptical portrait also exudes the vertigo of an absent presence.

Something ultimately related to one’s physicality enables one to momentarily re-create that lost unit. The phenomenon in question goes beyond the Romantic, pantheistic identification with nature and accompanies the fleeting dissolution of the ego that is triggered by sexual encounter. This idea struck me like a bolt of lightning when I first saw and, a formidable sculpture which also contains other images relating to love, tenacity, routine and time. The sculpture consists of two 600-pound limestone blocks that are placed on top of one another with a steel pole acting as a central axle. A second pole was then inserted into the top rock, parallel to the ground; similar to a mill, Antoni pushed the pole in a circle for five hours a day, over a six-week period. With great effort, she worked to achieve a relationship where the two forms resisted and gave into one another at an equal rate. She stopped grinding when the two rocks were interconnected. The hardness of the stone, synonymous with resistance and difficulty, alludes to willpower and time as elements that give shape to forms. The choice of a conjunction for the title of the work refers to copulative connection. The artist’s ulterior motive was to show how two bodies sculpt each other.

The starting point of and was a visit Antoni made to the sanctuary in Delphi, Greece, in 1996. She was fascinated by the perfect juncture of the stones used in building the walls. When she asked how this had been achieved, she was informed that only continual rubbing of two surfaces against each other is capable of producing such a perfect fit. She assumed that she herself would be able to get the same flat connection that she had seen in Delphi but, to her surprise, her experiment produced a much more complex union, one that departed from the perfect straight lines of the sanctuary but which bore witness to the malleability of two bodies mutually transformed by continual contact.

Antoni began work on the sculpture during a one-month stay in 1996 in the only active Shaker community in the world at Sabbath Day Lake, Maine. In 1998, after a two-year interlude, she had the sculpture transported to the Skowhegan School of Art, also in Maine, where she was giving summer classes. She worked on the sculpture five hours a day and had to overcome some severe setbacks because the system she had devised for grinding the two rocks kept breaking down. Hers was truly the dedication of an ascetic, a labor of repetition and persistence which proved to her that sacrifice and resilience are closely linked and that transcending this dialectic brings enormous satisfaction.

Through her work, Janine Antoni explores the conjunctions and disjunctions that sculpt bodies and identities and, by positioning herself in their interstices, she questions conventions and gives new forms to friction and conflict. By playing with interpretations of herself, she defines her own identity as both person and artist and turns her obsessions, desires and intuitions into fascinating images which attest to the power of art as a technology of self-knowledge and self-creation. Yet her works transcend the personal sphere, leaping into the collective and becoming intense metaphors of the human condition. As Octavio Paz says, the artist “crystallizes visions and transfigures his grief,” thanks to the sublimation involved in symbolic representation. But this sublimation would be insufficient if it were merely a way of transcending pain. Janine Antoni shows us how the act of sublimation and the labor-intensive processes associated with disclosing and sculpting one’s visions can reveal unknown territories of meaning and give one immense pleasure.

Rosa Martínez

Published in Janine Antoni, Ink Tree Edition, Küsnacht (Switzerland), 2000.

©2000 Rosa Martínez and Tree Editions

Edited by Cristina Bechtler/INK TREE Edition, texts by Dan Cameron, Amy Cappellazzo, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Rosa Martinez, Nancy Spector, Marina Warner

La entrada Janine Antoni, Conjunctions and Disjunctions. Küsnacht, Switzerland, 2000, se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.