A straight line is not always the shortest distance -or the safest one- between two points. At least not in space voyages, love affairs or art exhibitions.

A spaceship has to follow mathematically curved paths to reach its point of destination and, if an aeroplane were to rise or follow a perfectly straight flight path, it would disintegrate in the upper layers of the atmosphere.

Seduction requires sinuous, intermittent strategies, plays on irony, assertive approaches, territorial marks and even the occasional heart-shaped line drawing.

Exhibitions tend to leak along the vertex lines suposed to frame them; they refuse to fit the plan drawn up for them and their contents slip out through tangential spaces that reveal panoramas which may astound or disappoint, depending on the viewer that sees them.

What journeys, love stories and exhibitions have in common is that they are inclined to become the stuff of a fable. They have a beginning -sometimes imaginary- then unfold -sometimes abruptly- and come to an end, at times a happy one. They likewise share the fact that they are part of existential transits which hardly ever occur in a pure form but tend to merge and even become confused, so that an exhibition might turn into a tale of love or a voyage become an aesthetic experience.

Of all such phenomena, experiences associated with journeys afford the broadest metaphorical transpositions. What air traveller has not, on some occasion, shuddered when reading the airport sign “Passangers in transit”, associating it with the fleeting nature of human existence? And who could have failed to notice how we arrive at and depart from places called “terminals”?

When talking of journeys we may, of course, mean utilitarian, geographical travel, but we may also be referring to the transit between reason and madness, or consciousness moving across realms of knowledge, or the intense venture into desire. There are real journeys and imaginary ones. There are chemical journeys and virtual ones. There are journeys of war and of love.

From carefully planning routes, or the decision to shake off chance encounters, to confrontation with the disturbing forces of unexpected turbulence or the exciting satisfaction of discovering new territories an ethics or aesthetics of journeying can be discerned -just as powerful allegories of iniatation, exploration or the return to one’s beginnings are readily applicable to the symbolic field of experience.

Curators are likewise indefatigable travellers who must do the rounds of studios, visit galleries and move around cities. Their mission is that of an explorer who must not only describe the landscapes he or she has seen but, through the exhibition medium, sketch out the subtle lines that bear witness to the fleeting depictions of new terrain, for their purpose is not merely to shed light on what others produce but create it themselves, to break it into the multiple facets that enable it to be temporarily coded and thereafter to migrate towards further truths, towards other readings and other landscapes.

While the curator scans and charts creative routes of artists, the artist epitomises the archetypal traveller who traverses the tracts of that “theology of the unthinkable” which Julia Kristeva aludes to as being the unavoidable road to engendering new ways of seeing reality.

The artist always attempts to discover new places where reality has not wholly been determined and there is thus room for creating new configurations and scenting atoms of possibility and freedom.

Creation involves a journey into dark depths from which one sometimes emerges with eyes bloodshot from the impact of what one has seen.

In the field of love, the journey takes place between people who momentarily desire to become mutually habitable. To love is to emerge from oneself and to move towards the other, and such a journey, while entailing trespassing on the other’s space, affords the only chance of forfeiting one’s identity to generate a common space, the only way to indulge in passion, pleasure and the disillusion that leads us to want to “live in another body” and pursue what are but other phantasm that will enable us to formulate discourses and the experiences of transformation and redefinition of our own identity.

The ardent, irrational nature of desire and the drive for instant gratification must be reconciled with a willingness to accept what is possible and to understand that certain means and areas of transition are required to attain it.

Here, the figure of the pilot is relevant, as it conjoins the method required to master technique with spontaneity and the capacity to react to the unforeseen, because a pilot knows that each day he must confront death and that a momentary decision will pose a conclusive challenge to fate and lead life to take a new turn.

Divers, too, may become involved in a descent to unfathomable depths, in a journey that entails returning with the renewed stregth of one who has survived a terrifying vision, an unbearable experience tantamount to “life embracing what threatens it” (Deleuze-Guattaril).

The inexorable end of the journey, of love and exhibition is melancholy. Melancholy, because something was … and is no longer. Melancholy for what might have been but never was, and melancholy because the loss was inevitable, for the phantasm we had been dreaming about for so long finally dwelt in a body different from the one we had constructed in our imagination.

And yet, with Schelling one must renew one’s optimistic reading of nature’s inexhaustible capacity for renewal and the human capacity for creation. One must be aware that love is ever germinating in the depths of deception, tedium and ennui.

One must trust that other journeys and other exhibitions shall similarly turn into stories of love in which we shall continue to thrash about between the hallucinatory satisfaction of desire and the constructions of reality.

© Rosa Martínez

La entrada Stories of Love. Traducción del texto publicado en el catálogo de MANIFESTA 1. Rotterdam, 1996 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

Curators: Rosa Martínez, Viktor Misiano, Katalin Neray, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Andrew Renton.
ROTTERDAM, the Netherlands, 9 June – 19 August. 1996.

Venues: Rotterdam, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Witte de With, center for contemporary art, Chabot Museum, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.

Selected Artists:

AMSTERDAM: Liza May Post, Renée Kool. ATHENS: Jenny Marketou. (New York), Lydia Venieri. BARCELONA: Eulalia Valldosera. BEAUNE: Didier Trenet. BERLIN: Maria Eichhorn, Regina Möller, Christine Hill, Pit Schuiz. BOLOGNA: Eva Marisaldi. BRATISLAV: Roman Ondak. BUCHAREST: subREAL. BUDAPEST: Róza EI-Hassan, János Sugár. COLOGNE: Rosemarie Trockel / Carsten Höller. COPENHAGEN: Hendrik Plenge Jacobson. DUBLIN: Maurice O’Connell. ESSEN: Jitka Hanzlová. FRANKFURT: Tobias Rehberger, Tamara Grcic. GHENT: Patrick Van Caeckenbergh. GLASGOW: Tracy Mackenna, Douglas Gordon. HELFENBERG: Bernhard Fuchs. HELSINKI: Tommi Grönlund / Petteri Nisunen. ISTANBUL: Ayse Erkmen, Hale Tenger. KIEV: Arsen Savadov / Yuri Senchenko. KRAKOW: Piotr Jaros. LISBON: Roger Meintjes, Entertainment & Co. LJUBLJANA: IRWIN, Tadej Pogacar The P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum. LONDON: Mat Collishaw, Sam Taylor-Wood, Siraj Izhar, Catherine Yass. MAASTRICHT: Suchan Kinoshita. MALAGA: Rogelio Lopez Cuenca. MILAN: Luca Quartana. MOSCOW: Vadim Fishkin, Oleg Kulik, Dmitri Gutov, Valeri Podoroga, Yuri Leiderman. OULU: Esko Männikkö. PARIS: Huang Yong Ping, Fabrice Hybert, Marie-Ange Guilleminot. PRAGUE: Pavel Kopriva. RANHEIM: Mette Tronvoll. REYKJAVIK: Olafur Eliasson. ROTTERDAM: NEsTWORK. SKOPJE: Robert Jankuloski. SOFIA: Nedko Solakov. STOCKHOLM: Carl Michael von Hausswolff.
TALLINN: Jaan Toomik. TEL AVIV: Uri Tzaig. VALENCIA: Paco Vacas. VIENNA: Martin Beck/ Mathias Poledna, Gerwald Rockenschaub. ZAGREB: Ivana Keser. ZÜRICH: Susann Walder. NEW YORK: Rirkrit Tiravanija, Douglas Gordon. JERSEY CITY: Joseph Grigely. SEOUL: Soo-Ja Kim, Koo Jeong-a. SYDNEY: Kathy Temin. STRÁÑAVY: Roman Ondák.

Institutions: Kunsthal Rotterdam, Natural History Museum Rotterdam. Netherlands Architecture Institute, Chabot Museum., Villa Museumpark 9., Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam Center for the Arts, V2_0rganisation, Institute for the Unstable Media, Nederlands Foto Instituut, Witte de With, center for contemporary art, The Policegallery, Maritime Museum ‘Prins Hendrik’ Rotterdam.

Manifesta is a pan-European event, which aims to be open, fresh and ‘alternative’. Through publications, seminars, workshops and a massive exhibition it will serve as a stimulus to the free exchange of people, ideas and works of art.

The aims of Manifesta:

Manifesta will encourage reflection on a wide range of cultural, philosophical, political, historical and social issues relating to contemporary art in Europe.
Through its charter and its organisational structure it will maintain the maximum independence from political, commercial and sectarian influences.

Its Committee of Honour, International Board, Advisory Board and National Committee guarantee both independence and organisational continuity.
Independent curatorial teams will be appointed for specific projects and fixed terms of office only. This means that successive editions of Manifesta´s biennial exhibition of young and emerging artists will vary in curatorial and thematic approach.
The European Art Manifestation Foundation which organises Manifesta will work with all organisations and individuals willing to collaborate without prejudice or precondition, but will question established notions (aesthetic or otherwise).
It will have no part in organising prizes or competitions or supporting national rivalries. Manifesta aims to transgress the existing regional, social, linguistic and economic barriers in Europe.

It will give wider currency to fringe areas of European culture and place the artist at the heart of a continuing dialogue with curators, critics and a wider public. In this way, and through demonstrating the pluralism of contemporary art and its openness to contemporary realities, Manifesta will exemplify the important role that young artists can play in helping to make the new Europe a more exciting and culturally diverse place in which to live.

Statement of the Advisory Board of MANIFESTA, Summer 1994.

The inner dynamics of Manifesta:

Manifesta is not only an art show. The exhibition MANIFESTA I in Rotterdam in the summer of 1996, will be the climax to an intensive dialogue about new developments in the visual arts and will represent the first fruit of a new type of collaboration. Manifesta is a biennial event. It must have the ability to reinvent itself for each new edition. Subsequent events will takeplace in different regions of Europe. However, it is intended that a permanent administrative base for Manifesta should be established in the Netherlands, as a means of ensuring organisational continuity. For the necessary flow of information we use the most effective means of modern communication: Electronic Mail, access to the Internet and Multimedia data carriers such as CD-ROM.

Open Houses have been held in:

* CAC-Moscow
* Ludwig Museum Budapest
* Moderna Museet Stockholm
* De Unie Rotterdam
* De Beurs Amsterdam
* Soros Center for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana

http://www.manifesta.org/manifesta1/index.html

La entrada MANIFESTA I, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 1996 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

Curator: Rosa Martínez 
Konsthallen, Goteborg, Sweden. 6 Jan – 10 Mar, 1996

Selected artists: Ana Laura Alaez, Juan Luis Moraza, Perejaume, Manuel Saiz, Paloma Navares, Joan Brossa, Eulalia Valldosera, Pepe Espaliu, Paco Cao, Marcel.li Antunez

The other’s desire creates a fiction around me. And there is always a way of building a new reality. R.Z

In the climate of confusion and uncertainty marking the close of this century and after the long parenthesis of the eighties – during which artists appeared to be concerned solely with generating images recognizable to the market – a new generation of creators has emer-ged which, in some instances, coexisted half-concealed with media stars of the past decade but retained the flux of their individual poet-ics. Shunning all absolutist pretensions to conceiving an artwork as a specific object, they realise that art is a medium with its own laws but likewise capable of and necessary for linking up with other spheres of experience. These artists proactively search for new ways of articula-ting reality and representation and generate visions that help us to glean the meaning of our being in this world. Starting from their own experiences and reflections and, lacking any trace of cynicism or opportunism, they seek out the languages appropriate to them, while likewise expecting the viewer to flesh out the meaning of the work with his or her own interpretation.

We now know that aesthetics is not an aloof experience for, as Fromm says, aesthetic pleasure covers a series of psychological needs which partly assuage the suffering implicit in the civilizing process. And, as Benjamin Buchloch puts it, ideological interests also lurk behind the defence of the work’s autonomy. The aesthetic experience thus fills the void of that subjectivity whose basic structures rest on the social milieu and reflections on representation have to contribute to its forms of symbolic articulation.

Thus, when touring the works of the eleven creators featured at this exhibition, we see how the desire to unite nature and culture from the present, to question the relationship between sexuality and ideolo-gy, to deconstruct the linear illusion of progress and reinterpret history, to ironise about the servitude and perils of power, to play with fantasi-es of seduction, to confront disease and death or to question the very flux of representation, takes on a myriad of forms. Performance, sculp-ture, photography, video and installation serve these artists who, in this instance, hail from Spain, but who move within a global context of existential and ideological concerns as they explore with critical passion some of the ethical and aesthetic issues of contemporary life.

With the zenithal projection of his delicately poised tightrope walker, Antoni Abad sets out a vivid, disturbing metaphor of the perpetual return of all the existential and creative insecurity we live in.

Ana Laura Alaez deals in the language of affection and the rhetoric of appearance. She draws an enticing iconography that delights in stimulating what Octavio Zoya calls the ‘psycho fantasy of desire’ in her sculptures in which the body, at times elliptical, is defin-ed and enhanced by a lavish excess of adornment, raising it to a plane on which the stratagems of seduction attain their full power, while simultaneously relaxing on the plush cushion of pleasure and irony.

The work of Juan Luis Moraza, likewise concerned with the rhetoric of ecstasy and its clash with the law, enables us to grasp how postmodernism has revived the use of extravagance and superfluous-ness as a means of opposing the heroic, messianic purity of moder-nism. The sequence of high-heels in Extasis, status, estatua (‘Ecstasy, Status, Statue’) is an allegoric play on the intensities of seduction and the linear progression of women’s curves of erotic ecstasy.

Perejaume’s intimate relationship with landscape and with the codes and strategies of its portrayal has led him to maintain various courses of approach, analysis and reflection on the art/nature binomi-al with rare poetic delicacy. The process involved in Restauracio de dues pedres en el Port del Comte (‘Restoring two stones in the Port del Comte’) reveals a desire to heal the wounds inflicted on nature which, in the light of late-capitalist, tourist consumer culture adopts the guise of merely picturesque recourse, whereas in El pessebrisme del Quadrat negre (‘The Manger-like Black Square’) he questions the value of all essences through a sculptural configuration in which the cracks in Malevitch’s oil turn into a gigantic metaphor of breakdown.

Obsessed with the possibilities of scientific knowledge of the world, in his Archipielago Logico (escala humana) (‘Logical Archipelago – Human Scale’) Manuel Saiz stresses the indifference inherent in an element of a series which contains all the information required to reproduce other, similar elements. The idea of difference and repetition and, above all, the friction between implicit mathematical structure and applied natural materials confront the viewer with the apparent opposition between programmed order and the disorder of growth, thus highlighting the complexity of theories on the potential for uncertainly we still perceive to be inherent in nature’s workings.

Paloma Navares has long been interested in the deconstruction involved in portrayals of the female body in traditional painting. Her depictions of Venus, nymphs and Eve are set in a world of dreams and silences that call into question the role of woman as an
object of contemplation by the male viewer. Her joint endeavour with another female artist – Paloma Muñoz – in the work, El nacimiento de dos luciernagas (‘Birth of Two Glowworms’) expresses a desire to find new forms of relationship and the power of illumination emanating from the gaze of woman.

Joan Brossa’s Les codenes de Damocles (‘Damocles’ Chains’) is an ironical structure which, relying on a significant interplay of associations between words and images, alludes, among other things, to the need to sanitate power – all powers. He continues with renewed vigour along the path of political critique which, in an intelligent con densation of surrealist and conceptual poetics, has characterised many of his poem-objects.

With her series of photographs entitled H Vocente (‘Recumbent’) and her installation, Esfanteria para un lavabo de hospital (‘Shelf for a hospital bathroom’), Eulalia Valldosera presents disturbing reflections on the body, its relationship to objects and the inversion between interiority and exteriority, all conveyed through an interplay of light
and shadow with changes of intensity that set up an energy circuit which admits viewer interference but loses all meaning once the light has gone out.

The last performance of Pepe Espaliu’s El Nido (‘The Nest’) in which, over a period of eight days, the artist gradually stripped off while founding a circular platform set around a tree, is an allusion to the physical attrition of the roundabout as a metaphor of life and the dynamics of plunder and dispossession as they approach the empty, menacing silence of death. His sculpture, £; poseo de/ am/go (‘The Friend’s Walk’) focuses on the need to help others in their struggle against AIDS, while Luisa talks of the multiple emotional, ideological and social prisons we find ourselves locked in.

The work-in-progress entitled Rent-a-Body, by Paco Cao and the performance, Epizoo (‘Epizoon’), by Marcel.li Antunez resort to the artist’s actual body as the basic framework of the artwork and require direct, active involvement by the audience.

Paco Coo rents out his body for a modest sum, depending on the use and functions required of it, in an ironical send-up of the growing tendency in our society to hypostasize the human body In Ep/zoo, Antunez’s body is seen hooked-up to a computer by pneumatic cables. Spectators are invited to use the computer and play with the animated pictures of the artist. Such interaction actually impinges on Antunez’s body, providing a broad reflection on virtual violence and real violence, while billing the audience as the authentic creator of the work.

All these works are presented as phantasmic reflections of our status quo – they are truths only in that they stand for something other than themselves and, like all language, are an artifice capable of generating unintelligibility and fiction, but reality and meaning, too. The life of metaphors these artists offer us raises human relationships to a poetic level and is yet another way of narrating desire which, as
Lacan would have it, generates pleasure precisely because there exists a phantasm which, by setting up a dialogic interaction, enables new possibilities for reality to be generated. Hence, these metaphors create new worlds of experience, transmute our awareness with warmth and, by eliciting our involvement in creating a language, beckon us to create poetic emotion, reality and life.

Rosa Martínez

La entrada Thinking of You, Konsthallen, Goteborg, Suecia, 1996 (Inglés) se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.