objet perdu
ENCOUNTERING ART'S INFINITY
by Mário CaeiroENCOUNTERING ART'S INFINITY
Objet trouvé. In art vernacular this expression evokes unexpected solutions to an artist’s search, a sudden serendipitous manifestation of a more or less unconscious process. Like the trouvaille, which defines the moment in which matter and discourse, artist and public meet in a stasis, inscribing a new situation in the flux of the everyday, the term also presuposes the possibility of art being a process of achamento [stumbling upon]. It may become an argument, eventually a programme, setting out how art emerges, configures and institutes itself. But until what point shall we adhere to an art defined by the iconic image of the objet trouvé? Is there a possibility that a reconsideration of the concept will open up a path for the surpassing of what art is normally considered to be?
Since the conceptual derive, what matters most in art is not the objects that history keeps consecrating, in the form of retinal spectres, but their artisticity, a quality of artifact and artistic production that demands the simultaneous understanding of its contingency and processuality. Art objects become interesting discursive forms (discourse being ‘intentional speech’) – when art objects by means of propositions reconfigure the human and social. It seems to me that the mission of art, its cultural and civilizational aim, appears more and more as an ideology of encounter with the world, imposing itself upon that world simultaneously as vital impulse, labour and as an institution. In art then, the 'work' does not coincide with the 'object'.In art, the articulation of concept/object, according to certain configurations realizes the sortilege of expanding the confined character we tend to associate with representation and objectification. Between the mystical anxiety of creation and aesthetic control (the device), art is the continuous apparition of an event whose instrumentality is measured by the capacity to attain the status of cognition. Art shall assume its character of language and appear as tool and craft of encounter with the world, a device which affirms its own legitimacy.
Objet perdu. In gathering this set of artists and their works in an exhibition, I intended to objectify what I previously suggested was the essence of contemporary art. In order to establish a dialogical situation, a discursive fruition among peers, it was important that this event precipitated, if possible a self-reflexive attitude to the very concept of Contemporary Art. In this context, convention is to be preferred to radicality for several reasons. One being an opportunity to explore the humour suggested by the title and resist the dominant ideology of contemporaneity, one that confers attributes of a specific role as in ‘the market’, or the ‘cultural industry’ or as ‘communication’.
It was expected that the bridge between the intentions of the curatorship, the objects in the exhibition and the ideology of art would be kept immaculate in its historical ideal. This was the premise – iconoclasm doesn’t work on Thursdays [in Lisbon, openings are on Thursday]. But it is still part of the experience of contemporaneity, to demand from cultural consumption, that the spectator is invited to elaborate, to develop his/her own understanding, refining the critical and constructive toolkit manifest in the work. This is a determinant framework of contemporary curatorship, the core of its educational and formative function. So, when it was time to assemble the works in a persuasive arrangement, my intention was to first attribute value to the objects not by means of their prescribed role in a historical continuum – such of any aesthetical genealogy, namely of the objet trouvé – but to capture, in synchrony, its ethos of production.
In this approximation of the idea of Contemporaneity, I quote Giorgio Agamben. In «What is the Contemporary?», he uses the image of the starry sky to define as contemporary [here, the artist] those who aren’t blinded by the luminous points, but focus their attention toward the darkness of the firmament.
Aware, according to astrophysics, that in this darkness there are just as many lights and more, which aren’t visible just because they drift away faster than the light they emit, such an artist’s referent is something which for him is there but for others remains impossible to conceive and is therefore ignored: To perceive, in the darkness of the present, this light that strives to reach us but cannot – this is what it means to be contemporary […] to be contemporary is a question of courage, because it means being able not only to firmly fix your gaze on the darkness of the epoch, but also to perceive in this darkness a light that, while directed toward us, infinitely distances itself from us.Cultural and artistic production appears thus as a more or less relevant action in relation to the values of its time and inscribes in its time a unique and particular sensitivity, pointed to the void.
According to Nietzsche (and Barthes), the cultural sense of relevance, when looking with critical anxiety toward the sky, implies the immediate assessment of the irrelevance of the proposition of its knowledge, since it operates in accordance to values which the society of its own time aren’t capable of foreseeing.
About those who are genuine contemporaries, says Agamben: They are thus in this sense irrelevant [inattuale]. But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time. Following the logic of Agamben, the artist must be suspicious of recognition in order to keep himself precisely irrelevant. Only then does he speak with a voice of the future and of what is to come.
We are thus contemporary creators in that we manage to be at the same time relevant and irrelevant. It is the attention to the emergence of this specific awareness of anachronism that allows us to trace a dynamic path and define our relative position in our time. This diversion suggests that I am persuading the reader of the irrelevancy of some artists and their pieces and in particular of those which I put in dialogue in an exhibition with the programmatic title Objet Perdu.
In fact, this poetic recreation is a rhetorical operation, more than a philosophical one. By establishing this conversational premise for the artistic and curatorial practice, it becomes more of a convivial rather than a dialectical conversation. I say rhetorical since it is a persuasive inscription of the social in the public discourse. Making explicit an operative metaphor, Objet Perdu presupposes an aphoristic intention that desanctifies the aura of the objets d’art and approaches them with a quest for evidence of their cognitive mechanisms. The expression objet perdu links the Dada-Surrealistic filiation with the institutional frame of the proposal and the humour of the non-encounter with contemporaneity, in an anachronism.
This is why the seminal work in this exhibition is by Julião Sarmento. It is the a posteriori of my anamnesis, as a trouvaille, an epiphanic moment. It personifies the character of artistic condition in contemporaneity. Peça variável – 5 intervenientes [1976] presents the characteristic trait of the mise en scène that was to shape the future work of Sarmento – the elaboration of the theme of desire, that characterizes his more evolved and mature interventions. If the punctum of Sarmento’s work is this personal and fetishist perspective on desire, his long career has been a constant exploration and elucidation of this referent in works which, while keep pointing to an existential penumbra that continues to display an almost pedagogical simplicity of graphical, sculptural and audiovisual elements. In the context of my approach to the infinity of art, this Peça variável – 5 intervenientes is interesting because the artist derives his identity through the vision others have of him. In it, the multiplicity of views deepen the performative dimension of a kaleidoscopic self-portrait. As a conceptual – and autopoetic – self-portrait, the work reveals an instrumentality toward art, with a sense time would confirm. Peça... is a postulate which allies the existential exercise and a cognitive strategy of stumbling upon a function for art.In 1977, in Alternativa Zero, the statement-show by Ernesto de Sousa, this was one of the interventions which appropriated a coeval time in order to reconfigure artistic instrumentality. In the face of today’s contextual and relational shift in contemporary art, the historical sense of the piece – it’s contemporaneity – seems evident enough.
Though Julião Sarmento’s formal economy does not seems to be related to the ornamental dimension of a work which literally fills the eye, it is not so different to Simeon Nelson’s praxis. Cryptosphere [2008-2010], like Sarmento’s, is a rhetorical reaction to the social constructo. It departs from an examination of an historical asset – the monumental collection of early modern maps of the Royal Geographical Society as a design exercise – to comment on a logocentric cultural heritage which constitutes the graphical sum of world representation. The production of Cryptosphere resulted from an artistic residency lasting fifteen months in the RGS and involving extensive debate and discourse with RGS resident scholars. The result is the ironic compaction of philosophical and cultural mutations inherent in Western cartography during a period of more than a thousand years. It is a commentary on problems of the representation of space, for instance the absurd localization of mythical places – El Dorado, Eden, Utopia and Hell. The piece is to a certain extent an anti-object, the sum of all withheld and hidden information in a given system.
By operating in the domain of the ornamental, the modular and a scientific beauty, Cryptosphere rejects in its kairotic rhetorics any superfluous elements, in order to counterpose the vanity of cartography with a cryptic modality of drawing and the conventions of Western sculpture. Arguing for the validity of ornament (filtered out by minimalism) and the entitlements of art in the exclusive territory of science, it engages withand empowers an interdisciplinarity which high culture hesitates to accept. Nelson’s cognition, just as Sarmento’s, is a shot into the darkness…
On the other hand, it seems clear that, for the artists of Carlos and Anabela’s generation, the historical loss of the traditional object quality of art – base of the Duchampian iconoclasm – does not imply a trauma – a psychological trace which tints Nelson’s and Sarmento’s work with a subtle elegiac taste. In the materiality of those two young artists, one finds an authorial humility. Conscious of the irrelevancy of their gesture, this is an opposition that turns them into some of the most anonymous intervenients in the market; and their work’s residues become more than debris, but less than object.
The affective memories of Praia da Rocha [Algarve, Portugal] are debris of a lost reality. Its political dimension is thus highlighted by the poetic attention to the human referent. In the intimacy of the exhibition space, the works are sociological exercises, whose subject is socio-economic tensions. Establishing a continuum with public art, these chamber scaled interventions reflect the conscience that in the world always something is lost (the objects of our nostalgia) and something is found (art as emancipated inscription). Here, conscience is registered as a communication device, in the mental – and abstract – territory of political language.
If in Praia da Rocha the musicality of the spirit takes you to encounter the lost object of the Algarve touristic landscape, destroyed by urbanistic violence, the work puts forward a contrapuntal composition – a hit? – in which the concatenation of writings and voices from different times suggests the relevance of a micro-politics of memory.
Also Pedro Penilo proposes a critical reflection on alienation. Anunciação, Afeganistão is a graphical manifesto that denounces the neutrality of the media, presented as machinations of a dramatic distance interposed between the real (as the understanding of the world) and this same world reduced to a game of obscurities and manipulation. The work is the everyday reinvention of the cycle of signs and symbols, depicting the faith of the artist in the communication chain, though the awareness that the righteousness of the fight does not stop him remaining in the irrelevance that is assigned to him by art.
The artisanal character of the installation confirms a position which projects activism in the otherness of the artistic craft and not anymore in the illusory media victories that late-capitalism cynically concedes. For Penilo, as for Contador, the difference is constructed by a distance from the mainstream and its ideology. However what particularly distinguishes their work is a sensitive voice in that aspect of the sensible (Rancière) which is a pathos of affection.
Not surprisingly, serendipity played a role in this piece. I noticed, already during the revision of this essay, that the verses of Baudelaire which appear in the screen are from a prescient poem that announced cinema, twenty five years before its invention! It confirmed then, in extremis, the role of this work in the exhibition. In an exhibiton comprised essentially of inanimate objects, this cabinet points to the seductive intemporality of movement.
Mário Caeiro
Lisbon, January 28th, 2010
*Jean-Jacques Schul, «JLG, rapports secrets», Libération, July 12, 2006
