The connecting thread between the paintings and sculptures by Ghada Amer presented at her third exhibition in Korea is neither conceptual nor thematic, but rather the pondered result of a section in time, that of the period 2011-2013, that clearly defines the creative moment at which the artist now stands. As well as revealing her mature pictorial style, the selection shows how she has opened up to a new and intense line of sculptural experimentation and how her dialogue and long-standing collaboration with Iranian artist Reza Farkhondeh have become consolidated.

Ghada Amer has always defined herself as a representational artist, and through her works she has approached themes such as desire, love, sex, the power of language, gender differences and ideological authority. The sense of exclusion she experienced during her studies in Fine Art in Nice aroused her awareness of inequality. Over the course of two decades she has worked with images of women carrying out domestic tasks, iconic stereotypes out of fashion reviews and fairy stories, and erotic scenes from soft-core porn magazines for men. Such existential and political content has been shaped by a visual language in which embroidery as a minor art form, but also as a mode of feminine writing, challenged masculine control of pictorial tradition despite being nourished by it.

Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza declared that “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.” And Ghada Amer has persevered in her intuition and search, arriving at the fullness of a personal style that has unfolded in painting and sculpture, but also in graphic works, installations and garden design. The artist considers all these supports and disciplines a way of working in the expanded field of painting. As the design of garden beds, for instance, turns into a canvas, the plants and their flowers become strokes of colour. In 1997 she designed her first garden in Crestet, France, going on to create others such as Women’s Qualities (2000) at Busan Museum of Art, Korea. Before making the latter, she asked the museum staff to describe the qualities they valued in a woman, and ‘wrote’ in Korean characters on the eight flower beds in the museum those most repeated by the people she interrogated (submissive, chaste, fair skin, etc.). When the plants bloomed, the words turned deep red.

The paintings in this exhibition revisit the classical supports of canvas and stretcher, while thread is the specific linguistic element in their vocabulary. The artist’s skilful use of this material recently led her to declare with satisfaction, “I feel I have finally learned to paint with thread.” Unlike the dripping technique, in which paint was flung directly from the bucket by Abstract Expressionists (an act that has been interpreted as a metaphor of male ejaculation), or the use of the paintbrush (as a projection of the phallus), Ghada Amer’s embroidery weaves a plot in which spontaneity and control come together to create serialised shapes, rhythms and cadences. Her compositions are abstract in appearance and yet representational in content, and their pictorial space may relate to musical pieces or translate the sensual rhythms of matter. The thread motifs create patches of colour and outline faces, while the abstract grounds and floral arrangements reassert her preference for serialised compositional patterns. In terms of rhetoric, games of repetition, concealment and contrast play an important role, for they define visual impressions and articulate the conceptual interpretation of the art work.

“I learned painting through art history and the tradition of painting is part of my language. What I am adding to the History of Painting is the question of the place of women, the question of the craft versus Painting and above all the use of a feminine medium (sewing) that allows you to paint alongside with the traditional male medium (painting with brushes).”

Amer constructs a criticism of prevailing masculine tradition and insists on establishing a dialogue with the history of painting. As many other female artists like Louise Bourgeois or Kimsooja have been doing since the mid-seventies, she champions the female contribution to aesthetic discourse. Exploring her links with the modernism of painters such as Matisse, Léger and Rothko, and revisiting artists such as Velázquez, Goya and Giotto, she declares herself particularly close to the dramatic quality of some of their paintings: “There is a certain retained drama that I like in the Spanish old masters … and I think there is something similar in my work. In fact, all my work is almost about a specific emotion that I have, either about the world, a person, a friend, a lover, or politics, etc. It is very important to transmit that emotion to the viewer in a way that he/she can feel it because she/he can relate to the same experience. This in a way becomes «beauty». This is for me when a work is successful … The emotion has to be retained, otherwise it becomes too expressionist and we get more drama than beauty.”

The paintings in this show examine the topography of Amer’s women in ecstasy, of her pictorial referents and of the threads that fall on the canvas. Save for one, all the titles are followed by four letters, RFGA, the initials of the names Reza Farkhondeh and Ghada Amer. The acronym points to the ‘unofficial’ collaboration between the two artists, and acknowledges the contributions made by Farkhondeh to the creative process. As a result of their long-standing friendship and spontaneous dialogues, the pictorial space becomes an exercise in hospitality, a shared territory, a game of reciprocity and mutual enrichment that Amer has always striven to make explicit: “My long term collaboration with Reza is first of all a shared aesthetic intelligence. We both come from a similar background, Muslim raised, transported to the West, loving art against our family, a very acute awareness that we do not really fit into the Western History of Art and certainly not in the Eastern ones … All of this has developed into a friendship and into an existential experience: we cannot make art without the eye of one another and this has led to physically collaborate. We do not have conversations with each other, we have a visual language that we communicate with, it is very strange … Reza simulates my creativity and challenges me. And I think I do the same for him …”

The collaboration exists at two different levels: in the acronym that has featured in the paintings since 2001, and in the individual and joint signatures that since 2005 have appeared in the graphic work, a medium in which authorship is shared. In both cases, the limits of the ego, of complementarity and of the elective affinities that allow two separate entities to converge in one and the same body of work are issues that remain open. Amer and Farkhondeh thus participate in a sustainable economy in the realm of emotions and of knowledge, occupying a new relational paradigm. When French philosopher Gilles Deleuze defined the term ‘Fidelity’ in his Abecedary (a series of interviews broadcast on French television in 1996, the year after his death), he spoke of two potentialities that joined forces and thus be transformed through a secret connection.

The titles of the paintings are often jointly decided and stem from the impression or feeling that the final composition awakens in both artists. Here Comes the Sun – RFGA, for instance, is associated with the energy of dawn; the yellow patches of colour and wavy lines of Fin d’Été – RFGA allude to our memories of summer. Sindy – RFGAis named after one of Amer’s new assistants, in a practice that recognises and remembers the hard work they do : “I always title (after asking their permission) with their first name the first piece they embroider.”

Among all these recent paintings there is one, entitled Beneath the Blue Sky – RFGA,that is especially meaningful because it hints at a new development in the artist’s trajectory. Painted in deep blue, it evokes the darkness of night and is related to the idea of cosmic emptiness. At first glance it appears to be an abstract monochromatic work, but a closer look reveals sequences of embroidered motifs that remind us of traces of injuries, scars. Wounds are associated with cuts that tear the skin, gestures that pierce surfaces and encounter different tissues. Moreover, in connection with her recent sculptures, Amer updates the idea of spatial discoveries, travelling beyond the pictorial surface and thus identifying with the visionary oeuvre of Italo-Argentinian artist Lucio Fontana. When Fontana pierced a hole in a canvas or tore its surface with a stiletto or a knife, his intention was to reach the darkest depths of space, concerned as he was with the dichotomy between surface and depth, beginning and end, empty and full.

As Fontana had previously done, Amer resorts to oval shapes and models the void. The five sculptures presented in this show were made by cire perdue, either cast in bronze coated in gold or with a black patina coating, or cast in stainless steel that was polished or painted. Following the assembly of the various parts of each work, they were polished to attain a reflective shine.

The artist herself has declared that when she began the process of creating her new sculptures, her purpose was to explore the void: “My main thoughts here were rather formal. I wanted to make an empty sculpture and I wanted this sculpture to have an important shadow that would be added on or be part of the sculpture itself … I also wanted to make sculptures with lines … something like writing in space.” This process of research led her to create egg-shaped sculptures in which the flowing movement of criss-crossing wavy lines creates a dynamics of concealment and transparency that allows us at once to trace the metal lines and penetrate the space with our gaze.

The oval is a primeval shape, welcoming and maternal, that has been used by numerous artists, from Fontana to Constantin Brancusi or Henry Moore. In Amer’s sculptures it defines the place in which the figures are set and helps viewers recognise their actions. The works can be read in three-dimensional terms, or else they can be seen as flat pictorial planes because there is a perspective where spectators can suddenly discover and fix the image of figures or read some words. These sculptures may play with the mimesis established by the kiss or by the shape of a heart, yet they may also evoke a mystical dance or even relate to political events.

“The Blue Bra Girls, for instance, refers to the incident that took place during an uprising in Egypt in which a female protestor wearing a veil was beaten by the police and had her clothes torn. A photograph taken of her revealed she was wearing a blue bra, and so she was called ‘the blue bra girl’. I had an idea for a sculpture in which women would look defiantly at the public. I thought it was important that they should all have their eyes open and be looking at the viewer. I also wanted the women standing, instead of lying down. Then the ‘blue bra girl’ incident took place and so I called the piece after that, as a homage to all those women who stand up for themselves and fight,” says the artist. In the spherical sculpture entitled The Words I Love the Most, Amer takes a series of words like desire, depression, passion, crazy, anxious, all of which are written in Arabic and are related to love. The spelling of these words forms the lines of the rounded sculpture that has a slight inclination, like the Earth’s axis or the bodies of dervishes performing spiritual/mystical dances. The words actually create a sort of writing in reverse, for they can only be read on the inside by looking through the outer surface of the sphere, in which they appear inverted. To quote the artist herself, “We do not understand love, so we only see the right side when we are far away.”

By means of a linguistic logic that makes it self-supporting, Amer’s oeuvre pursues a beauty that combines form and the informal, drama and meaning, the beautiful and the political. Her works have an organic consistency that produces visual pleasure, carrying messages that relate to our ways of being in the world.

By enjoying the pleasure and the drama of her own thoughts and emotions, and by translating them into her artistic practice, the artist extends the limits of a tradition that will embrace women as creative subjects in their full right. The desire of discovering new territories for painting and larger spaces for aesthetic experience as well as for the ethics of generosity and hospitality might be one of the reasons why she and Farkhondeh have chosen Référence à Elle as the title for this show.

La entrada Ghada Amer, Kukje Gallery, Seúl, Corea, 2013 (Inglés) se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

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 (inglés) se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

«En el no pensar es bella la vida.»1 Sófocles, Ayax

«Aquel que comprende tiene alas.»2 Pañacavimca Brahmana, iv, i, 13

Según la física cuántica, la observación y el pensamiento crean la realidad, el universo existe cuando es percibido. Clarificar nuestras ideas sobre nosotros mismos y sobre el mundo es imprescindible para crear una vida más bella y más justa, si eso es lo que concebimos como deseable.

En la base del pensamiento están la conciencia del tiempo y de la muerte. El ser que entierra a sus muertos y elabora signos, mensajes, gestos o rituales sobre ese dolor ejerce una función simbólica, es decir, piensa.

Y quizá espera otra vida en el más allá, quizá cree en la transmigración de las almas, o actúa convencido de que solo somos la materia del cuerpo que habitamos y desaparecemos con él.

Pensar no es una actividad desinteresada y libre ni una función exclusiva de los filósofos. El pensamiento siempre está vinculado a las condiciones económicas y políticas del momento, y al entorno social en el que la persona ha nacido. La ciencia entiende el pensamiento como resultado de la acelerada interconexión neuronal cuyos flujos son impulsados por las circunstancias a las que el sujeto intenta enfrentarse o adaptarse.

Pensar históricamente significa datar, analizar causas, comparar, tener conciencia del tiempo y dar sentido a los acontecimientos que se desarrollan en él. Presente y pasado no son antinomias. La historia es un instrumento para interpretar el presente.

Pensar artísticamente supone construir artefactos y estrategias mediante los cuales la historia y la existencia puedan ser intuidas, comprendidas e incluso inventadas. Crear es una forma de trascender la muerte. Según el historiador Mircea Eliade, la auténtica hermenéutica creadora, como el descubrimiento científico o técnico, desvela significados que habían pasado inadvertidos o incomprendidos, o los señala con tanta intensidad que, una vez asumidos, el hombre ya no puede volver a pensar como antes.3

«Lo preocupante de nuestro tiempo –un tiempo que da qué pensar– se muestra en que todavía no pensamos», decía el filósofo alemán Martin Heidegger.4 Es decir, que no hemos aprendido a pensar. El miedo a la muerte y a la pobreza es utilizado por los poderes establecidos –sean las élites religiosas o las oligarquías financieras que dominan el mundo–, para debilitar el desarrollo del pensamiento crítico. Vivimos bajo los dictados de la economía del miedo, para la cual la guerra como tortura de masas, el saqueo sistemático, la «reconstrucción» después de la devastación o la organización de la «seguridad» se han convertido en florecientes industrias. Dice la periodista y escritora canadiense Naomi Klein que, en la época del «capitalismo del desastre», la desorientación que producen los shocks reduce la capacidad de resistencia, y que el mejor modo de permanecer orientados es estar informados, saber lo que nos está pasando y por qué.5 Pensar requiere, por tanto, una información plural y comprometida, que es precisamente lo que intenta evitar el discurso hegemónico de los medios de comunicación de masas.

Hay saberes que se transmiten a través de la información y del discurso. Hay otros que se sustentan en el mito y el símbolo. En ambos casos, el peligro radica en el orgullo de creer que tratamos con verdades absolutas, cuando nuestra evolución depende de ir asumiendo y superando las verdades relativas que están a nuestro alcance. Hoy somos conscientes de que la razón universalista ha sido utilizada etnocéntricamente, por y para el sujeto occidental. El cuestionamiento y la deconstrucción del uso instrumental de esa razón son necesarios para que sean factibles los ideales de libertad, igualdad y solidaridad que deben inspirar la vida a escala planetaria. El pensamiento vertical debe encontrar formas de entendimiento horizontal. La ética del respeto y del cuidado debe prevalecer ante los riesgos ecológicos y las amenazas morales que acechan la vida en la tierra.

A partir de estas reflexiones, la exposición Qué pensar gira alrededor de tres cuestiones fundamentales: la hybris contemporánea, la «desdicha» de la historia, y el consuelo y la conciencia que el arte puede aportar.

Por un lado, reconocemos la soberbia, la voluntad de poder y el orgullo desmesurados en personas, empresas, naciones e imperios. Por el otro, rememorando enfrentamientos individuales y guerras o masacres colectivas, nos planteamos qué tipo de pensamiento justifica la opresión, en nombre de qué verdad, de qué pulsiones y de qué intereses se han cometido y se cometen las vejaciones y crueldades de que está plagada la historia universal.

Del budismo al marxismo, existen múltiples teorías para explicar el sentido de la vida, justificar la inevitabilidad del sufrimiento humano o rebelarse contra él, pero ¿son las calamidades un «castigo de Dios», como dice el catolicismo?, ¿son las tragedias sociales una «necesidad histórica», como decía Hegel? Preguntarse si los desastres tienen un significado moral o son solo fruto de la arbitrariedad del destino y de la codicia es relevante cuando revisitamos la historia y vemos cómo los crímenes, las deportaciones, los atentados o las injusticias, cometidos a 13 veces en nombre del «progreso», se siguen produciendo sin que el ser humano parezca haber aprendido del pasado.

Vivimos momentos de convulsión, de necesidad de nuevas hermenéuticas que nos ayuden a comprender el sentido de nuestro estar en el mundo. Ahora es más urgente que nunca el análisis sobre cómo se construye el conocimiento como instrumento de dominio y como medio de emancipación, sobre cómo se articula la economía psíquica y política que sustenta el poder, y sobre las instituciones y los medios que controlan el saber.

El arte, que es representación, es un ejercicio de saber y de poder. Las obras exponen el mundo, lo analizan, lo revelan. Y la exposición que temporalmente las conjunta es un lugar privilegiado para el intercambio simbólico entre la obra y el espectador, un espacio para que, además del disfrute estético, se produzcan discursos críticos y nuevos diálogos políticos.

La modernidad luchó por la autonomía de la obra y cayó en un absolutismo hermético. Al mismo tiempo, el deseo de borrar las fronteras que separaban el arte de la vida dio lugar a otras formas de acción en las que la obra era concebida como medio, como puente, como texto que solo adquiría sentido al ser interpretado por el espectador. En esa conexión intertextual radica la posibilidad de una creatividad compartida como medio para entender y transformar el mundo en que vivimos. Y, como decía el poeta francés Antonin Artaud cuando comparaba el teatro con la peste, si las fuerzas que las obras liberan son negras no es culpa del teatro sino de la vida. Carl Gustav Jung señalaba en Psicología y Alquimia (1944) que solo integrando el Mal, aceptándolo y haciéndolo consciente era posible sanar al individuo y al mundo. El pesimismo de la inteligencia sabe que a través del pensamiento crítico, del optimismo de la voluntad, del arte verdadero, de la humildad y la compasión, la curación y la emancipación son posibles.

1 Citado en F. Jarauta, Cuadernos 9. Pensar – Componer / Construir – Habitar, Arteleku, Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa, Donostia, 1994. 2 Citado en M. Eliade, El vuelo mágico, Siruela, Madrid, 2005. Rosa Martínez Qué pensar. 3 Ibíd. 4 M. Heidegger, Conferencias y artículos, Ediciones del Serbal, Barcelona, 1994. 5 N. Klein, La doctrina del shock: el auge del capitalismo del desastre, Ediciones Paidós Ibérica, Barcelona, 2007. 12

La entrada Qué Pensar, Caixaforum Barcelona, 2012 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

«Solo la imagen representada mantiene vivo el deseo. […] No hay deseo íntegro sin representación figurativa exacta.»1 Walter Benjamin

«El deseo o “sed de vivir”, acompañado de todas sus pasiones y apegos, es el origen del sufrimiento.» Segunda de las cuatro Nobles Verdades del budismo.

En su película The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (La guía cinematográfica del perverso, 2006), el filósofo esloveno Slavoj Žižek dice que, al enfrentarnos al deseo, el problema no es determinar si el nuestro es satisfecho o no; el problema es saber qué deseamos. Según Žižek no hay nada espontáneo, nada natural en los deseos humanos; nuestros deseos son artificiales, nos han enseñado a desear. En contra de lo que habitualmente creemos, el deseo no es un instinto ni una pulsión subjetiva, sino un aprendizaje cultural, una construcción social que se regula a través de instituciones como la familia, la escuela, el Estado y los medios de comunicación.

Las estructuras básicas de la subjetividad dependen en gran medida del medio social en el que el individuo nace y se educa, de los códigos que hereda y que ha de desbrozar para dar forma a los afectos que le pueden hacer feliz. Y si bien, como decía Spinoza, el natural deseo de cada ser es ser, existir y perseverar en su ser, las estructuras de la división sexual en las sociedades androcéntricas, que delimitan la distribución del poder y del saber, canalizan la organización del deseo y marcan las pautas sobre cómo ser –cómo ser hombre, cómo ser mujer– y sobre qué desear.

Al pensar que la división entre los sexos es algo natural, que está tanto en el principio de realidad como en el de representación, quedamos subyugados por lo que Virginia Woolf denominaba «el poder hipnótico de la dominación». 2 Tener una habitación propia, tener derecho al voto, construir discursos propios y vivir como sujetos deseantes, y no como objetos del deseo de otro, suponía un reto necesario para desterritorializar la distribución histórica del poder y equilibrarla cuantitativa y cualitativamente. En los años 1960 y 1970, el feminismo, como filosofía política que persigue la igualdad entre mujeres y hombres, contribuyó a que las mujeres pudieran pensar su deseo, articularlo verbal, artística y políticamente. A pesar de sus conquistas, y de los intentos utópicos de la contracultura o de mayo del 68 por abrir nuevas vías en el orden existente, los paradigmas cognitivos a través de los cuales pensamos, hablamos y actuamos siguen marcados por la sexualidad masculina y por el legado patriarcal, que conciben el deseo como una carencia y como una fuerza que ha de ser reprimida. En 1972 Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari cuestionaron esa concepción tradicional en su obra El anti-Edipo. Capitalismo y esquizofrenia, en la que hablaban del inconsciente como una máquina deseante, como una fábrica, y del deseo como una producción cuyas imágenes son el resultado de la negociación entre la acción individual y la influencia de lo colectivo

En nuestra época, quien realmente regula la economía del goce es el capitalismo global. El mercado genera y vende deseo, induce la sed de cosas nuevas, promete goces ignorados y supuestamente infinitos. La manipulación comercial de lo instintivo, además de crear necesidades y deseos falsos, no conduce a la liberación sino que incrementa la represión y la sujeción al orden existente, porque sitúa al individuo en una línea de dependencia y de insatisfacción permanente.

¿Y cuál es el poder del individuo para enfrentarse a esa maquinaria? ¿Existe alguna posibilidad de soberanía individual? ¿Hay alguna verdad en el deseo personal? Cada sujeto es un cruce en el que conviven órganos, conciencia e ideología. En ese campo de batalla late el motor del deseo, y la causa que lo despierta puede ser burda o sutil, pero es siempre física y genera una corriente energética que hace vibrar la materia que nos compone. Así, la intensidad de una mirada puede activar un juego de interacciones, y la pertinencia de una palabra es capaz de vehicular el deseo inconsciente y dar forma al deseo consciente. Las imágenes relevantes condensan el deseo en iconos y representaciones a las que recurrimos para ver reflejada, excitada o calmada nuestra ansiedad. Para que el deseo nazca, hace falta un acontecimiento, un desnivel, una diferencia de potencial que ponga las energías en movimiento y se cree entonces una nueva realidad, ya sea «un relámpago o un riachuelo», como dice Deleuze en su Abecedario póstumo cuando habla de la D de Deseo.

El deseo es siempre contextual y relacional, no autónomo. Marcel Proust decía que cuando se desea a una mujer, se desea también el paisaje que la envuelve, la atmósfera que respira, las situaciones que la rodean. Se moviliza entonces el cuerpo hacia el placer, no solo sexual, sino el provocado por percibir, por existir. El deseo, como el pensamiento, tiene poder para generar su objeto, es una fuerza productora de realidad. «Lo que pienso se convierte en real porque está ocupando mi mente, como si fuera real», dice el budismo. Y la fuerza del deseo inconsciente es tal que incluso Oscar Wilde recomendaba prudencia cuando escribía «Ten cuidado con lo que deseas porque puedes conseguirlo».

Lo relevante es analizar las relaciones del deseo con la realidad y con la «máquina capitalista», evaluar el potencial desestabilizador del deseo para construir nuevas maneras de pensar, nuevas maneras de sentir.

Michel Foucault afirmaba que «el vínculo del deseo con la realidad –y no su retirada en las formas de representación– posee una fuerza revolucionaria». 3 Y, aunque ese desplazamiento del deseo hacia su conversión en obra de arte disminuya su potencial revolucionario, la representación sigue siendo útil para satisfacer una serie de necesidades psicológicas que alivian, en parte, el malestar del proceso civilizatorio.

En los apuntes previos a la realización de su película El cielo sobre Berlín (1987) y bajo el epígrafe Primera descripción de un film perfectamente indescriptible, Wim Wenders explicita cómo el arte nace del deseo cuando dice que, al comienzo de la creación de una película, «no se puede describir casi nada, sino: un deseo, o deseos. Desde aquí se comienza cuando se quiere hacer un film, escribir un libro, pintar un cuadro. Se tiene un deseo, se desea que algo exista y se trabaja hasta que ese algo exista. Se desea añadir algo al mundo, algo más bello, más verdadero, más exacto, más útil, o simplemente algo diferente de lo que ya existe»

La conexión entre el arte que nace del deseo y la mirada masculina es analizada por Laura Mulvey en su ensayo Placer visual y cine narrativo (1975, traducido al castellano en 1994), para constatar cómo el privilegio de esa mirada activa ha sido prerrogativa del hombre tanto en la producción como en el disfrute, y no solo en el campo del cine sino en el de la producción artística en general. La construcción histórica e ideológica de la mirada tiene un tremendo referente en la frase de Lacan «la mirada es la erección del ojo». La creación de «espacios» como el Gabinete Secreto del Museo Arqueológico de Nápoles ejemplifica también claramente cómo el poder concibe y regula el acceso a las representaciones. Cuando, entre 1755 y 1857, se excavaron las ruinas de Pompeya, la aparición de un conjunto de frescos, mosaicos y esculturas que representan desnudos y prácticas sexuales suscitó el debate sobre qué podía ser mostrado al público y qué debía permanecer oculto, bajo la custodia del Gobierno. Según el decreto real de Carlos iii de Borbón, de quien dependían en ese momento los territorios de Pompeya y Herculano, las mujeres, los niños y las clases populares tenían prohibido el acceso a esas piezas, que acabarían reunidas en el Gabinete Secreto, que quedaba reservado en exclusiva a los miembros masculinos de la aristocracia. Como constata Beatriz Preciado,4 ese museo secreto establecía una jerarquía y una segregación política de la mirada en términos de género, de clase y de edad, y definía así una estrategia de vigilancia del cuerpo excitado o excitable.

Las formas de regular lo visible o lo invisible, de reservarse el placer de la mirada, tuvieron otro ejemplo flagrante en el propio Lacan, que compró en 1955 El origen del mundo, pintado en 1866 por Gustave Courbet, considerada como una de las obras más obscenas de la historia del arte. Lacan mantuvo el cuadro en su casa de campo, oculto tras otro realizado por André Masson, a instancias de su propia mujer, Sylvia Bataille, quien le dijo que «los vecinos y la mujer de la limpieza no comprenderían», es decir, que el orden de la obscenidad, de lo que debe quedar fuera de escena, debía ser preservado. Cuando Lacan murió en 1991, el cuadro pasó a manos del Estado francés en concepto de derechos sucesorios, y desde 1995 se exhibe en el Museo de Orsay, junto a otras obras de Courbet. Al ser legitimado por el Estado, el cuadro perdió el aura de obscenidad que lo rodeaba y hoy se contempla como un ejercicio más del realismo de su autor.

Las obras presentadas en la exposición Qué desear son condensadoras de sentido y referentes iconológicos de un momento histórico en el que el cuestionamiento del poder fálico, las reflexiones sobre las identidades y el género, la fenomenología y la lógica de la sensación o las poéticas surgidas de una escritura compartida proponen nuevas formas de acceder al deseo. Estas obras, creadas en los últimos treinta años, tienen un referente histórico de primera magnitud en La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (La novia desnudada por sus solteros, incluso), de Duchamp, reproducida a escala real en la antesala del espacio expositivo. En La novia… se estructuró una de las más complejas cartografías ideográficas sobre el funcionamiento del deseo.

El establecimiento de puentes entre pasado y presente, y entre experiencia física de las obras e interpretación muestra cómo se construye la conciencia contemporánea del deseo como «afecto activo», pues las obras actúan como objetos deseantes e interpelan al espectador, lo convierten en agente no solo de su sentido, sino de su configuración. Se convierten así en motores de transferencia que salvan los espacios que nos separan y permiten crear nuevos territorios de juego en los que dar forma a las fantasías y elaborar las retóricas del éxtasis. A través de la escritura relacional y de la mirada compartida, se conforman percepciones, conceptos y afectos que abren nuevas puertas al deseo.

1 Walter Benjamin, Dirección única, Alfaguara, Madrid, 1987. 2 Citado en Pierre Bourdieu, La dominación masculina, Anagrama, Barcelona, 2000. 3 Michel Foucault, «El Antiedipo: una introducción a la vida no fascista», Archipiélago. Cuadernos críticos de la cultura, 17, Editorial Archipiélago, Barcelona, 1994. 4 Beatriz Preciado, «Museo, basura urbana y pornografía», Zehar, 64, ArtelekuDiputación Foral de Guipuzcoa, San Sebastián, 2009.

La entrada Qué Desear, CaixaForum, Barcelona, 2013 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

«Hoy es siempre todavía.»1 Antonio Machado, Nuevas canciones (1917-1930)

«Siéntate, siéntate, siéntate. Siempre se abre un camino.» Akira Kurosawa, Ikiru (Vivir, 1952)

¿Por dónde empezar? y ¿qué hacer? son las contundentes preguntas que dieron título a un artículo y a un tratado político escritos por Lenin en 1901 y 1902, respectivamente, en el contexto de inquietud social que desembocaría en la Revolución rusa, en octubre de 1917. ¿Qué hacer? es una obra programática, una guía de acción que señala la importante función de los intelectuales como autores de teorías y propuestas organizativas que, frente a la dispersión y la vacilación, hagan efectivas las acciones revolucionarias en los procesos de transformación de las estructuras sociales.

Lenin, que concibió estos escritos durante el destierro en Siberia al que fue condenado de 1897 a 1900 por sus actividades contra el régimen zarista, había tomado el título ¿Qué hacer? de una novela escrita en 1862, desde la cárcel, por el escritor, filósofo y revolucionario ruso Nikolái Chernishevski. León Tolstói también escribió en 1868 ¿Qué debemos hacer?, una obra que parafraseaba el título de la de Chernishevski, y en la que exponía su desacuerdo con la propiedad privada, a la que consideraba el origen de las desigualdades. Tolstói, que se nutría tanto del socialismo científico de Proudhon como de la pobreza predicada en el evangelio cristiano, no apoyaba la violencia como método y confiaba en una revolución pacifista.

La frase tiene, de hecho, resonancias bíblicas, pues la recoge originariamente el Evangelio de san Lucas (3:10-14), donde se relata que mientras Juan el Bautista predicaba anunciando la llegada del Mesías e instaba a la «conversión» de las personas que le escuchaban, estas le preguntaban: «¿Qué debemos hacer?». El discurso del Bautista se dirigía a tres grupos: los pobres, los recaudadores de impuestos y los miembros del ejército, y proponía acciones específicas a cada uno de ellos. A los pobres, les invitaba a compartir las necesidades básicas de alimento y vestimenta en un ejercicio de «solidaridad horizontal», a la que habría que sumarle la «solidaridad vertical» proveniente de los ricos. A los cobradores de impuestos, conocidos por sus abusos y su corrupción, les reclamaba honestidad y que no exigieran más tributo del establecido. Y a los soldados, les pedía que no usaran su poder y su fuerza para obtener información, y que tampoco persiguieran ganancias extras.

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.

En el terreno del arte, son significativas las estadísticas elaboradas por las Guerrilla Girls, el grupo de activistas creado en Nueva York en 1985. Su intervención en la Bienal de Venecia de 2005 alertaba sobre el hecho de que en el año de la fundación de este certamen internacional, 1895, la participación femenina fue del 2 %, y un siglo más tarde, en 1995, solo había alcanzado el 8 %. La Bienal de Venecia sirve también como ejemplo de la desigual distribución de la riqueza a escala global, tal como señalaba el artista Santiago Sierra en su proyecto Altavoces / Loudspeakers (2005): aquel año los países que gozaban de un pabellón nacional propio en el privilegiado espacio de los Giardini representaban el 24 % de la población mundial y producían el 83 % del producto mundial bruto –la suma de los productos interiores brutos de todas las naciones del mundo–, mientras que los países cuya representación nacional se encontraba fuera de los Giardini suponían el 34 % de la población mundial y producían tan solo el 9% de ese producto mundial bruto. En cuanto a los países que no participaron en la Bienal de Venecia, tenían el 42 % de la población mundial y producían el 8 % del producto mundial bruto.

Con la caída del muro de Berlín en 1989 murió también, simbólicamente, la tradición de las grandes utopías revolucionarias, y la década de 1990 supuso el triunfo del capitalismo global, que no ha hecho sino incrementar las diferencias entre una oligarquía cada vez más poderosa y una masa trabajadora cada vez más empobrecida y esclavizada. El mito de que un día las clases oprimidas se rebelarán no se corresponde con las nuevas y sofisticadas formas de control y de explotación, y la pregunta relevante es cómo se canalizarán los sentimientos colectivos de indignación para combatir unos mecanismos de represión y una retórica mediática cada vez más ajenos a los intereses de la mayoría. Hoy los conceptos de revolución y de verdad son, como dice el filósofo esloveno Slavoj Žižek, conceptos «zombi», muertos vivientes. Para hacer frente al relativismo y a la confusión imperantes, la educación y la información crítica son imprescindibles; solo a través de ellas podremos definir las líneas de acción que orienten nuestro comportamiento tanto individual como colectivo. Quizá por eso, la privatización de la educación se sigue utilizando como elemento de segregación que mantiene a los individuos ligados a la clase social en la que han nacido.

Para cada persona, el horizonte es siempre su propio horizonte, es decir, la línea que establece su visión de la realidad a partir de la ubicación –física, geopolítica, cultural– de su propio cuerpo. En ese territorio individual se articulan las energías conscientes e inconscientes, los órdenes de lo público y las aspiraciones privadas. Lo personal es profundamente político, y la idea de revolución empieza en uno mismo. Los cambios en la conciencia subjetiva tienen poder transformador y pueden estar determinados por la formación de la conciencia crítica, por una epifanía existencial o por la vivencia de una situación extrema, como narra el director de cine japonés Akira Kurosawa en su película Ikiru (Vivir, 1952), o como testimonian personas que, como el diplomático y escritor francés Stéphane Hessel, han sobrevivido a las guerras o al holocausto.

Situada durante la época de tutela de Estados Unidos sobre Japón, tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial, la película de Kurosawa explica la historia de un funcionario de una burocrática y corrompida administración municipal, que mantiene rutinariamente la mecánica de la que forma parte. Cuando descubre que está enfermo de cáncer, inicia una revolución personal que le lleva a tener experiencias que nunca antes habría soñado. De la mano de un poeta alcohólico y mefistofélico, vive la noche y sus placeres, se enamora de una mujer mucho más joven que él y, sobre todo, se enfrenta a la mafia local para ayudar a un grupo de mujeres amenazadas por la especulación inmobiliaria, que les iba a a arrebatar la única plaza donde podían jugar con sus hijos. Cuando uno de los mafiosos le pregunta si no les tiene miedo, su respuesta es el silencio, pero en su mirada se hace evidente la transformación interior que le ha hecho encontrar una nueva fuerza para resistir.

Por su parte, Stéphane Hessel, miembro del equipo que en 1948 redactó la Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos, explicaba que, después de sobrevivir a los campos de concentración nazis, sintió que «la vida restituida tenía que comprometerse». Desde su libro ¡Indignaos! Un alegato contra la indiferencia y a favor de la insurrección pacífica (2011), apela a la creación como resistencia y a la resistencia como creación.

En este sentido, el arte, como forma de conocimiento, como vía de interpretación analítica y poética de la realidad, puede ser una forma de resistencia contra el pensamiento uniformador, estereotipado y fetichista. Es cierto que las creaciones artísticas son mercancías y tienen valor de cambio, pero es cierto también que, si se prioriza su valor de uso, pueden propiciar experiencias cognitivas y afectivas transformadoras. Este ha sido uno de los objetivos fundamentales de las exposiciones Qué pensar y Qué desear, y es el leitmotiv de la exposición Qué hacer, que cierra el ciclo.

Sabemos que una exposición es una construcción simbólica en un espacio determinado, un paisaje temporal en el que la asociación formal y conceptual de obras diversas, enlazadas mediante una sintaxis reveladora, propone un discurso que articula la percepción sensorial, el pensamiento y las emociones. En Qué hacer no se formulan consignas directas ni consejos para la acción. Se muestran ejercicios plásticos y exploraciones ideológicas que pueden alentar nuestra transformación individual y social. Los «artefactos» que los artistas construyen, ya sean vídeos, esculturas, instalaciones, pinturas, fotografías o acciones efímeras, resuenan con mayor o menor intensidad dependiendo de los objetivos vitales y políticos de cada interlocutor.

Las propuestas seleccionadas aquí muestran cómo algunos artistas usan su cuerpo para resituarlo en relación a los parámetros, a las formas y a las estructuras –físicas y sociales, visibles e invisibles– que conforman nuestro entorno. Nos ofrecen instrumentos para orientarnos en el caos de las tormentas. Pueden ayudarnos a observar las genealogías familiares que nos protegen y sofocan a la vez. Cuestionan qué es salud mental y qué es locura, quién define estas categorías y cómo se establecen las instituciones que las administran. Señalan cómo se organiza la represión, la censura y la privación de libertad de aquellos que cuestionan el orden dominante, o indican cómo gestionar la reconstrucción y la reconciliación para aliviar el dolor. Porque la justicia requiere una reinterpretación crítica, una actualización de los pensamientos, de las emociones y de los valores que nos ayuden a reformular las preguntas ¿por dónde empezar? y ¿qué hacer? Como dijo Beckett, debemos empezar por el principio una y otra vez: «Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better» («Lo has intentado. Has fracasado. No importa. Inténtalo de nuevo. Fracasa otra vez. Fracasa mejor»).2

Reuniendo temporalmente estas obras alrededor de una idea y conectándolas mediante similitudes y oposiciones, la exposición se convierte en un campo magnético que, a través de sus diferentes zonas de intensidad, nos ofrece un lugar en el que proyectar nuestras inquietudes y despertar nuestra conciencia. Al lanzar mensajes contundentes, propone itinerarios y perspectivas significativas para la mirada y para la inteligencia; nos muestra que respiramos una atmósfera común y vuelve a insistir en que no estamos solos, ni para pensar, ni para desear, ni para hacer.

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 Qué Hacer, 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.

Centro di gravità permanente (A permanent centre of gravity) is the title of an Italian song composed in the eighties by Franco Battiato, which alludes to the need for assurances, for ways of escaping from the confusion and uncertainty that surround us. As well as surfacing in pop music, conflicts and a desire to attain balance are present in many other areas of the contemporary production of meaning. Psychoanalysis refers to a subject split between the conscious, the unconscious and the subconscious, at variance with instinctive drives and the cultural order. Mass sociology defines the class struggle; economics refers to the necessary inequalities in the production of capital and to the free market’s hypothetical capacity for self-regulation; biology analyses the evolution of species as a stark competition for survival. We are indeed aware that there is no balance in the economics of passion, no justice in the distribution of wealth and that art is not the realm of purity that modernism had dreamt of, and yet man is still seeking models of order and meaning to help him understand and act upon the world in which he lives.

The disenchantment caused by the decline of utopias and the increase in ecological disasters and wars leads us to believe that we live in a catastrophic world. The French philosopher Paul Virilio mentions “the progress of disaster” as a characteristic feature of our day and age, and states that the anthropological “horizon of expectation” is increasingly limited by the possibility of total annihilation. In his opinion, ‘progress’ has ended up being a significant movement towards extremism, as proven by Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Chernobyl or terrorism. The world resembles a schizophrenic magazine, the pages of which alternate between cheerful advertisements and terrible images of catastrophes, regularly presented in the form of spectacle by the mass media.
The proliferation of images numbs our sensitivity and proves the truth of the assertion made by Paul Valéry in the thirties: “The sensitivity of the moderns is in the process of wasting, since they need more intense excitement, a greater expenditure of energy, to feel anything at all”. The avant-garde trends of the early twentieth century entailed an intensive and competitive exercise in the renewal of styles, each ‘ism’ struggling to move beyond its predecessor, but today the power of symbolic destruction exerted by visual creation loses strength against the impact that real destruction has through the media. This explains why Baudrillard can declare that representation is no longer necessary; that a generalised aesthetic presence is well established in society, and that all that awaits us is numbness and total indifference.

In this context of the questioning of art’s traditional functions—serving as a mirror of reality, inventing imaginary worlds—I should like to draw attention to one in particular, that of art as a form of healing, a balm for social tensions and a critical device that facilitates micro-transformations of awareness in search of meaning and peace. In his treatise On Airs, Waters and Places, Hippocrates proposes a sort of human ecology and speaks of homeostasis, of the necessary balance between ‘humours’ and ‘passions’, between hormones and emotions. Today, the medicine of energy is the science of flows, rhythms and resonances according to which the world is a holistic entity, a series of interconnected and interdependent systems.
However, in the artistic realm it is historically obvious that neither the utopias of order and the system of Modernism (represented, for instance, in the work of Mondrian) nor the inflexible hygienic principles of totalitarian regimes (that hid disease and considered modern art a degenerate art) managed to conceal the shadows and the malaise of culture, that continue to reflect an unbalanced and sick world. This is why art cannot be satisfied with exposing the malaise or its symptoms, but must instead put forth new areas of analysis and act as a focal point of ideological and sensorial transformation.

Disease demands that organisms change their rhythm in order to recover lost balance (health), and has been the reason why many have chosen to devote their lives to art. Matisse began to paint during a long period of convalescence, and throughout his life would lend his pictures to sick friends, so that their compositional hedonism could relieve their anguish. Visual energies can lead viewers towards pleasure and positive thinking. Yet images can also produce rejection and violence when they express things that are emotionally or ideologically intolerable. The ‘madman’ who tries to slash the Mona Lisa and the political censorship that restricts freedom of expression are the most obvious examples of this.

Art, as a system for the production of meaning, incorporates symbolic questionings and linguistic strategies in order to configure the aesthetic accounts of a given period. From the harmony pursued by the Greeks to the tense abstract paintings by Rothko, the game of opposites characterising Western metaphysics has opposed reason, as a synonym for order, to madness; it has confronted theocratic and hierarchical systems to the anarchic and horizontal power of the masses; and it has separated science as a system of structured thought from art as a possibility of opening up poetic worlds. A scientist said recently that what distinguished him from a poet was that the latter could freely proclaim that “the sky is green”, or “the earth is as blue as an orange” (Eluard), but there are times when scientific formulations resemble poetry and moments when science appears as a poetic fantasy.

Today the theory of systems reveals the close connections between different fields of knowledge, and relativity and the principle of uncertainty undermine Newtonian certainties about the world. In 1665 Newton visualised the universe as a perfect machine supported by the law of gravity, according to which for every force working in one direction there is another one as large working in the opposite direction. The centre of gravity would be the invisible point where an object mass is concentrated and where equilibrium is obtained.

The world as a machine has been the dominant metaphor of the modern age in spheres ranging from science and sexuality to military strategy. In his book On War, Clausewitz explains how centres of gravity are defined as the enemy’s critically vulnerable points. Unlike machines, the performance of living organisms is never absolute but open, and depends on the environment to continue its progress. While classical vision concentrated on linear and consecutive processes, system thinking focuses on transactional processes, those involving interaction between various elements. Ilya Prigogine, for instance, speaks of dissipating structures that preserve their configuration by decomposing others and that through their metabolism create entropy that is dissipated in the form of degraded residues. Like dissipating structures, the process of cultural diversity also suggests that growth is the result of an ‘anthropophagous’ process, as defined by the Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade in 1928, a process in which the knowledge of colonisers is metabolised by the colonized so as to produce new meanings.

The notion of centre of gravity applied to the world of art refers to the continuous play between equilibrium and uncertainty to create new and meaningful conceptual and aesthetic worlds. The multiplicity of trends in contemporary art and the emergence of new geographical centres of cultural significance have introduced relevant transformations in pictorial and sculptural languages and have also facilitated the balance between centre and periphery, creating new centres of gravity outside the classical hegemonic ones.

Interrelating many levels of meaning and multiple aesthetic perspectives, the exhibition entitled Centre of Gravity marks certain significant moments in the aesthetic production of the past few decades, presenting artists of international renown. The exhibition is held coinciding with the celebration of the 9th International Biennial of Istanbul and other cultural events that complement one another, turning the city into a genuine international centre of gravity. While the Biennial diligently pursues its consolidation as a reference for new artistic developments, Istanbul Modern, which opened on 11 December 2004, is taking its first steps with the aim of institutionalising the memory of modern art produced in Turkey and of bringing to Istanbul outstanding works by established artists who have revealed some of the aesthetical, social and political concerns of our convulsed world. The title of this first international exhibition also plays with the idea of Istanbul Modern as a new gravitational centre in relation to its geopolitical area and to the global context of new international museums. The artists are presenting works subtly united by an invisible common thread: that of reflection on equilibrium, either in the physical, the psychological, the cultural or the political sphere.

In the mid-eighties, the paradigmatic sculpture Three Balls Total Equilibrium Tank by Jeff Koons entailed a surprising artistic challenge. Koons, who takes no direct part in the manufacture of his works, presented three static basketball balls in a transparent container, thereby transforming the vulgarity of commercial mass-culture objects into something sublime, hyper-real, promotional and spectacular, emphasising the fetishism of merchandise, the wonder of the banal. In her fascinating performance La cabra (The Goat), Pilar Albarracín dances with a wineskin to the rhythm of the music that is played by gypsies in street shows in which a goat is a key feature. The artist’s visceral implication in this orgiastic and chaotic dance forms a sharp contrast with Koon’s cool detachment and reveals how popular art can be the repository of an ancestral wisdom that connects us to the fundamental sources of life. The wine that is spilt on the dancer’s dress alludes to blood, to the most primitive instincts and to liberation from the dominant order symbolised by lost verticality.

Two works by Monica Bonvicini are featured in the show, the video Hammering Out and the sculpture Stairway to Hell first produced for the 8th Istanbul Biennial at Entrepot n. 4 and recovered as a landmark for Istanbul Modern when the building was renovated to house the museum. Both works refer to the need to deconstruct dominant systems and are examples of the artist’s sarcastic analyses of architecture conceived as an exercise of power, a sexual metaphor or a repetitive and ultimately melancholy process. Hyperbuilding, by Rem Koolhaas, is the inflatable model of the massive though unrealised project for a compact city of 120,000 inhabitants. In this pyramidal complex measuring a thousand metres in height, interconnected skyscrapers will attain their composite stability “through an orchestration of mutual dependence” in which “each component is conceived as essential, and any element can de rebuilt independently”, to quote Koolhaas. The attempt to combine simplicity and visionary ambition turns the complex into a giant sculpture, in which the masses of interior darkness lead viewers to envisage paranoid prefigurations of the future. The changing virtual constructions by Haluk Akakçe, on the contrary, invite beholders to sail through placid spaces and evocative atmospheres, and embody the idea of constant fluctuations as the basis of a possible order. Viewers experience a strange uncertainty that does not, however, culminate in distress despite there being no linear narrative marking a beginning and an end, and even though it is not clear whether the constant transformations of the visual compositions are fortuitous or whether they follow a secret logic.

Over the past few years Kemal Önsoy has produced a large corpus of pictorial compositions that clearly reveal his awareness of permanent instability. This continual obsession is wonderfully conveyed and broadened in the helicoid styrofoam sculpture that condenses numerous references to the ephemeral and unsteady nature of the construction of such worlds, alongside the need for support that all systems have. In Anish Kapoor’s work, the quest for poetic beauty, the analysis of the void as a space full of content and the invitation to travel through the depths of light and darkness become existential metaphors. The works When I Am Pregnant (a pregnant wall), its reverse, Untitled, and Red Mirror are fascinating exercises that broaden our phenomenological perception and knowledge of the real. Santiago Sierra’s work is completely different in scope, for it focuses on the analysis of social inequalities. Sierra organises critical performances with hired workers who often represent themselves. His oeuvre reveals how the disease of contemporary man stems from the alienation that makes him a mere productive force for capital, condemning him to carry out monotonous repetitive jobs for a negligible wage. In 111 Constructions with 10 Modules and 10 Workers the artist’s instructions give rise to a choreography in which the connections between Minimalism and capital are thrown into relief. The lack of communication in love relationships, the submission of women to the tyranny of domestic life and the celebration of sexual desire and female pleasure constitute the territory that forms the background against which Ghada Amer re-appropriates the tradition of Abstract Expressionist painting. Ghada Amer uses embroidery to mark with pornographic figures the surface of the canvas. She reflects on power and submission to the dominant linguistic and ideological strategies while she consciously creates beautiful and decorative compositions.

Richard Wentworth, one of the most significant figures in British sculpture of the eighties, has created a site-specific installation hanging hundreds of books from the ceiling in the hall of the Istanbul Modern, while others cover part of the museum library. In sculptural terms, this false ceiling subverts traditional notions of stability and grants new meaning to the idea of the ready-made. The association and rearrangement of books from Eastern and Western traditions disclose the connections and the distances between cultures and convert the museum space into an area of aesthetic and conceptual debate. Maaria Wirkkala also uses books in her work Found a Mental Connection II, albeit only two—a copy of the Koran and a copy of the Bible—that have been left open at the two ends of a floating iron bridge. In her sculpture, different groups of animals walk from each end of the bridge, crossing over without really meeting. This work, inspired by the artist’s desire to symbolically link the two banks of the Bosphorus, appears as a metaphor for exodus and passage, although the allegorical reference to an encounter is left disturbingly in suspension.
The use of the ready-made as a formal and conceptual strategy did not discourage other artists from working with sculpted figures in the mid-eighties. Muñoz created fascinating and terrifying set designs, generating narratives and psychological spaces endowed with a strange underlying violence. Muñoz clarified the difference between a statue and a figurative sculpture marking the artistic autonomy of the latter and its ability to freeze and dislocate time. His work Broken Noses Carrying A Bottle furthers the legacy of Goya and shows the violence on which our world stands. The rich tradition of performance art has been updated by artists like Janine Antoni, renowned for her reinterpretation and transformation into sculpture of daily physical rituals such as sleeping, washing, chewing, etc. In Touch, Antoni keeps her balance as she walks a tightrope that is aligned with the horizon of the sea. This work is about effort, ambition and control; physical and psychological balance, taking risks, the possibility of failure and the eventuality of falling; above all, it is about the power of our will to make our dreams come true and the possibility of keeping our balance in uncertain circumstances.

Memory is a fundamental centre of gravity in the work of Louise Bourgeois, Gülsün Karamustafa and Christian Boltanski. Two aluminium bodies and two series of drawings by Louise Bourgeois, all of them made in 2004, present the artist’s vitality and talent for continuing to translate emotional tensions, relations of identification and dependence and the energy of the unconscious in a constant search for sublimation. The similarities and differences between the two gleaming organic masses allude to the distance and the proximity that unite two bodies (mother and daughter perhaps) in a dialogue that is tense and silent, magnetic and inescapable, for each constitutes for the other a centre they are bound to flee from and return to.

Memory of a Square (Perceived from An Interior) made in 2005 is the most recent work by Gülsün Karamustafa, presented here for the first time. Using two projection screens the artist offsets public and private memories. Taking Taksim Square as the symbolic heart of Istanbul, Gülsün Karamustafa confronts memories of a public space with intimate situations in the domestic sphere. Reality and fiction, documentary footage and staged representation are used to update echoes of the past. Her film is not only a tribute to a square in Istanbul but to well known squares in cities all over the world, squares with their own historical and political backgrounds.

Christian Boltanski’s entire oeuvre is deeply linked to memory. He uses personal and cultural recollections in relation to history to create sculptures and installations in which light and darkness coexist. His proposal for Centre of Gravity is an interactive exercise that turns the museum into a place that welcomes the memory of its visitors. The artist requires the complicity of viewers, who are invited to bring photos from their family album to the museum, where they will be photocopied before shaping a huge collective mural. The resulting collage is a form of shared dramatisation in which the fragile quality of the photocopies alludes to the volatile and ephemeral nature of memory.

All the works displayed are propounded as centres for condensing meaning in order to transform the exhibition into a place for symbolic exchange between artists and the community. Helping to form critical and sensitive citizens and to promote new aesthetic and political dialogues are undoubtedly fundamental tasks for museums. Aesthetic experience implies a breach in the automatic reading of signs, for it reflects and subverts representational space proposing new gazes, new reflections. Paul Valéry wrote that poetic creation is the creation of expectation, and political hope for social change can also be included in this will. Today, it is necessary to encourage new relations based on desire, to establish transferences with people, objects or symbolic systems to favour the creation of that ‘transferential plasticity’ that will help us recover and heal the world in which we live. Expectation, pleasure and reflection are what we hope this exhibition, within its bounds, will help to generate.

Rosa Martínez
Chief Curator, Istanbul Modern

La entrada Centre Of Gravity, Istanbul Modern, Turkey (2005-2006) (Inglés) se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

Una mujer yace sobre un charco de sangre en una calle de Sevilla. Otra aparece camuflada entre diversos maniquíes en el escaparate de unos grandes almacenes de la misma ciudad. Sobre un coche de emigrantes marroquíes hay una muchacha, en traje tradicional, sujeta con cuerdas al resto de bultos de la baca. Vestida de faralaes, una esplendorosa mujer está amordazada y atada a una silla bajo la impresionante presencia de una cabeza de toro. Todas ellas han sido objeto de uso o abuso por parte de un sistema que las considera propiedades móviles, bienes de consumo. Todas ellas son Pilar Albarracín.

Gracias a sus escenificaciones y performances, Pilar Albarracín desvela el drama de las estructuras de dominación y pone en evidencia la violencia ejercida sobre las mujeres. Pero no lo hace desde un dogmatismo moralista, sino desde la ironía o el sarcasmo de visiones surreales y apropiaciones jocosas. Siendo una sola, personifica a muchas otras: la gitana, la campesina, el ama de casa, la prostituta, la folklórica, la emigrante, la niña herida… Al representar las subordinaciones al género, a la clase social y a la identidad nacional o étnica, se sitúa en una línea de análisis de las construcciones simbólicas que ha marcado los discursos más relevantes de las ultimas décadas.

Levy Strauss decía que la identidad podía ser un juego de «significantes flotantes», pero que es sobre todo un conjunto de representaciones que nos sujetan a la tradición y al statu quo. El retorno a las especificidades identitarias se produjo en el Romanticismo como reacción a la internacionalización de la Revolución Industrial y se reproduce ahora en una época en la que la globalización disuelve las diferencias locales o las reduce a clichés étnicos fácilmente consumibles. Por eso han proliferado los artistas que ahondan en las raíces antropológicas de sus culturas, y especialmente las mujeres que, como Shirin Neshat o la propia Pilar Albarracín, se cuestionan el papel que se les ha asignado en ese juego.

Albarracín toma los aspectos mas tópicos de lo «andaluz», que el franquismo vampirizó como metonimia de lo «español», y se sumerge lúdica y críticamente en ellos. La comida, el folklore, la religión o la economía rural son temas fundamentales en sus obras. En la performance Tortilla a la española (1999) va recortando pedazos de su vestido para «cocinarse» en una ceremonia de autoinmolación metafórica, mientras que la escultura Lujo Ibérico (2001) está formada por unas hermosas ristras de chorizos y morcillas en seda y terciopelo negro y rojo, colgadas del techo mediante ganchos de matanza. Los Relicarios (1993) se venden como amuletos contemporáneos. Contienen una fotografía de la artista y un trocito de la camiseta que utiliza para pintar, y en ellos ironiza sobre la función protectora, mística y casi sagrada del artista. Las series Ora et labora (2001) presentan a una oronda campesina realizando sus labores en un contexto idílico. Transmiten la ficción de felicidad que proporciona el trabajo cuando uno acepta su lugar en la escala social.

Apoyándose en una posmodernidad que facilita el tránsito por las disciplinas, y consciente del poder de las nuevas tecnologías, Pilar Albarracín usa el vídeo, la escultura, la fotografía, la instalación, el dibujo o la costura con ductilidad. Sin embargo, las performances son su apuesta más radical y conforman un territorio en el que ha proyectado su rebeldía de una forma directa y primaria. Su arte es metáfora de la insumisión y sus intervenciones en el espacio público juegan con el factor sorpresa y actúan como terapia social de choque. S/T (sangre en la calle) (1992) fueron 7 acciones realizadas en otros tantos puntos de Sevilla en las que diferentes tipos de mujer habían sufrido algún tipo de incidente. En Escaparates (1993-95) también interactuaba en el contexto urbano, esta vez suplantando a las maniquíes de varias tiendas. Las referencias a la belleza como prisión aparecen en La noche 1002 (2001) donde, evidenciando lo que Virginia Woolf denominaba el «poder hipnótico de la dominación», un fascinante fundido visual convierte el erotismo tintineante de la danza del vientre en el soniquete de cadenas de opresión.

El mundo de Pilar Albarracín está lleno de parodias y tragicomedias que rozan el paroxismo catártico. Hay flamencas con los lunares de su vestido hechos de sangre (Dots, 2001); hay un baile salvaje en el que su pareja es un odre de vino que se derrama sobre ella en cada movimiento (La cabra, 2001); hay una sesión de cante jondo donde grita sus lamentos in crescendo para acabar rasgándose el vestido, arrancándose el corazón y arrojándolo literalmente al suelo entre jadeos orgásmicos (Prohibido el cante, 2000). Todas estas obras son escenas bufas de las danzas que entrelazan el erotismo y la muerte, y ejemplos extraordinarios del desbordamiento que lleva a la liberación. Actualizan la idea del «cuerpo patético», un cuerpo que sufre todo tipo de heridas y de tensiones, y conectan con el teatro de lo grotesco y con los rituales de la crueldad. A diferencia de las ceremonias religiosas que persiguen la perpetuación de los sistemas de creencias, la performance contemporánea tiene un potencial crítico que pretende deconstruir esos rituales para alcanzar una catarsis regeneradora. El shock, las lágrimas o la risa son medios válidos para ello. El arte es entonces una terapia: permite la inmersión en los demonios personales, pero desde la conciencia de que éstos son producto de la ideología y de las estructuras sociales.

La construcción de objetos dinámicos que provocan situaciones y requieren la participación activa del público ha ocupado un lugar destacado en la trayectoria de Pilar Albarracín. Duchamp decía que es el espectador quien, mediante su interpretación, crea la obra. Pilar va más allá, pues considera que el análisis intelectual no es suficiente, y busca la interacción convulsa con el espectador que debe, literalmente, sufrir (o disfrutar) la obra, tanto física como emocionalmente. Lo consigue con piezas como El viaje (2002), un coche de emigrantes atestado de bultos en el que los espectadores, entre inevitables risas, experimentan las sensaciones (olores, baches, etc.) del tránsito de miles de norteafricanos por las carreteras españolas. Si no lo veo no lo creo (2002) eran unos visores panorámicos que creó para su intervención en la cala San Vicente de Pollença. Escenas de otras aguas (pateras, piratas, matanzas de atunes) confluían virtualmente en el mar turístico de Mallorca. Los delitos ecológicos, las situaciones de explotación o las fantasías de libertad chocaban con un contexto hedonista y de descanso. En Diván (2002) el espectador es invitado a tumbarse en una replica del diván de Freud como si fuese a iniciar una terapia y, al hacerlo, le invade el peso de todas sus desgracias. El choque emocional vuelve a producirse en Espejito (2001), un hilarante espejo que rememora el de Blancanieves pero en el que cada paseante que se mira, sea hombre o mujer, es insultado con la palabra «¡Fea!».

La urgencia por comunicar y el desafío a los lenguajes establecidos hacían que en los primeros trabajos de Pilar Albarracín se advirtiera un gusto rebelde por la tosquedad del lenguaje. En su producción reciente se observa una mayor sobriedad estilística, pero la intensidad comunicativa no disminuye. Las fotografías que escenifican mitos cristianos -como la expulsión del paraíso o la conversión de María Magdalena- aluden a las transformaciones asociadas a situaciones de castigo o de perdón. La tradición judeocristiana ha dado forma a esta perversión específica que conecta la culpa con la desobediencia a la Ley del Padre. Pilar Albarracín busca una salida de esa dialéctica, una curación que calme la tensión constante entre esos dos polos. Y lo consigue primordialmente a través de la risa heterodoxa, aunque es también capaz de transmitir la repugnancia más devastadora en obras como La pasión según se mire (2001) o La piedad (2001), que aluden a la violación. De este modo, sus visiones conectan con una tradición de crítica hispánica que tendría sus referentes en el esperpento de Valle Inclán o en las posiciones ilustradas de un Goya que hubiera asistido complaciente a la liberación de la mujer. Su gusto por el exceso y los contrastes enlaza con el Barroco, y su pasión por lo kitsch conecta con el Pop. Se sitúa así en una línea creativa que cuestiona el puritanismo del mainstream anglosajón y apuesta por la validación de las poéticas del derroche, del erótico «salir de sí» que glosara Bataille.

Analizando las imágenes construidas en el arte o en la cultura popular, disuelve el designio patriarcal que encierra a las mujeres en unos tópicos castrantes. Su arte es por ello testimonio pleno de que «la mujer» existe como sujeto de enunciación (aunque le pese a Lacan). Pero lo que hace de Pilar Albarracín un fenómeno (por no decir un milagro) es su exceso de generosidad y su coraje, así como un tesón y una autoexigencia sin concesiones. Además de la valentía para echarse al ruedo y coger el toro por los cuernos, o por el rabo, según convenga.

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 (Inglés) se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

Decía Oscar Wilde que nunca se debe dar consejos y menos si son buenos. Y sin embargo, aquí estoy, intentando explicar cuales son las sendas ideales por las que debe transitar un organizador de exposiciones. En mi caso, ser curadora no ha sido el fruto de una vocación prematura, ha sido un devenir que he construido paso a paso, una especie de destino que he ido descubriendo lentamente, guiada a veces por la necesidad y a veces por el azar. Hoy, hacer exposiciones es una forma privilegiada de crear nuevos territorios políticos y estéticos. No hay mapas seguros ni recetas salvadoras para hacer una buena exposición, pero son fundamentales la flexibilidad para adaptarse a los terrenos más accidentados, la defensa implacable de las convicciones interiores y la pasión por descubrir nuevas rutas.
Desde mi perspectiva, el curador debe ser :

• un ser psicológicamente polimorfo sin ser perverso,
• un explorador arriesgado dotado de radar para captar señales casi imperceptibles
• un diplomático con altas dotes para la negociación
• un guerrillero que promueve las transformaciones sociales
• un economista capaz de conseguir la mejor opción en los intercambios
• un editor que establece la mejor sintaxis entre las obras
• un terapeuta que ayuda a modificar la percepción de los problemas
• un creador de propuestas que despierta la conciencia crítica
• una persona capaz de compartir los problemas y los éxitos
• una caña de bambú, a la vez fuerte y flexible para sentir las corrientes sin sucumbir a ellas.

Esto es algo que yo he sentido y pretendido mientras organizaba exposiciones tan complicadas y maravillosas como la 5a. Bienal Internacional de Estambul (1997) «On Life, Beauty, Translations and Other Difficulties»; la 3a. Bienal Internacional SITE Santa Fe (1999), «Looking for a Place» o la Bienal EVA 2000 en Limerick (Irlanda) titulada «Friends and Neighbours».
En síntesis, y para dar consejos a la vez ambiguos y precisos, desde la apertura que da la incertidumbre, desde la prudencia que da la edad y desde la seguridad que insufla el Nuevo Feminismo, me atrevería a proponer algunas citas. Lean, por favor, y vean si les convencen:

· Elige un modelo elevado, mas para superarlo que para imitarlo (Baltasar Gracián)
· Be careful with what you wish, you might get it (Oscar Wilde)
· A veces una mujer tiene que hacer lo que un hombre ha de pensar dos veces (Anónimo)

© Rosa Martínez, 2001.

La entrada «Think it Over» Traducción del texto publicado en Words of Wisdom: A Curator’s Vade Mecum on Contemporary Art, New York, 2001. se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.