The works "The Stobborness of Matter 1" and "The Stubborness of Matter 2" are action-tokens of forces employed in their changing. They consist originally each of a white metal bar. The first one is heated and bent and the second one is hammered until achieving this angle of 90 degrees to then be placed against an angle on a wall.
The work constitutes itself in revealing the profound tensions that took place when bending these hard objects. The question, which becomes clear by the title of the project, is to deliver some of the issues related to matter and its 'will' to remain as it is. One can derive this thought from the first laws of Newtonian physics: that a moving body tends to stay in movement and also that an inert body tends to stay inert. The very matter of these objects were making a clear statement of their 'will': wanting to remain as they were. The relations also are made by revealing not just the human force directly or mechanically employed to transform it but also the human will to change it. There are two different wills opposing and taking to the limit until one finally is neutralized.
The video has been latent since then going through process of edition. For the first time it is a video produced by me with more aggressive modifications of the image such as removing colours and slowing it down. Normally my videos have very little or no edition, revealing the visual world as perceived by the eye and the camera at the instant of the capture of the image. In this case, a surrealist scenario is taken to the extreme.
The title of the video "The Music of the Spheres" is a direct mention to Kepler's experiemnt with the same title in which, by the movements of the 6 known planets of his time, plus the moon, he composed songs by their velocities as distances from the sun in each part of their elipses around that star.
Althoug it is still the captured image, it is taken to another level of visuality and suggesting a new time for the obersavtion.
"Doing" is the first part, a detail, of a larger project entitled "Gerund". The process of making consists of engraving an MDF by laser with gerund verbs, in this case, "doing". Then it is pressed into a blank piece of paper leaving an embossed word in that surface.
These process are relevant for the reading of the work for the pressure, when having made a mark on the paper, becomes an index and the action is suspended in time, almost contiuously repeating itself over and over again while being observed. The process of tension is allways present in the fibers of the paper that were affected by the pressure. So it is itself, materially something like a gerund, an incomplete action that is still happening and suspended in the while. The gerund words are a verbal option to delineate this process of suspension conceptually, by the word, and in the matter, by the process employed.
"Appearing" is a work that speaks about the denseness of matter. Appart from visually constructing a dialogue over an appearence of a geometric solid made out of wood, by eleven stages in images and then, suddenly a twelfth stage revealing the objetc itself, the process to produce the work is a deliberate modification of the intensity of the image, suggesting a modification of matter. Using two photographs of a same spot, one with the solid and one without, they were manipulated to make the object more and more visible, 10% more in each image, making a conciliation between the absence, the presence and the produced stages in between. In the end, the object is present in its fulness.
"totem 1" and "totem 2" are two sculptures that bear within them deliberatly paradoxical questions. For originally totems are the central images geographically and symbolically in "primitive" cultures, they are normally made from materials derived from the natural world and deliver the questions of the spirit that relates to it.
An opposition is established between these two profoundly different vectors of matter: the logs, natural and deliberatly acquired from it's place of birth by imposing a stronger matter modifying it by a cut; and the metal shelves, designed to be aseptic and to receive objects that bear meaning instead of producing a narrative by itself. When these are put together, the logs over the shelves, it is invitable to question if that is in fact or if it is the shelves that are under the logs. It is a questioning of the tangibility and our apprehension of things. They become oposed and constructing a strong visual and symbolic discussion.
The same process occurs in "Totem2". In these works some questions about sculpture itself are delivered, for the base, what receives the work, the object over wich the mental 'action' happens, does not configure itself as a base: it is itself integral within the work. The entire dilema/work does not have a traditional base, for the work is the dilema, and the dilema is directly rooted in the experienceable world: the base is the ground.
"Eye" is the unfolding of a work/thought/process/image that has been present in my work since its very beggining. It is a recurrent appearence in my imagination and in my ideas, therefore it comes to be many times as works. It is this square that is described by its absence or by the memory of its presence in the given environment at a past moment. A shadow of its passage, the index of its past presence and the proposition of an openness for one to look through.
The latest version of "eye" is made by laser etching on paper. The decision to use this technique is relevant for the reading of the work for it has been written by light. It is light not just revealing matter but modifying it, under the will of the artist but without the presence of the hand. The image is created and materialized electronically. It is an attempt to reduce the noise between idea and execution by avoiding the quantity of chaos and chance in the production of the work, so present in the material realm.
Previous version of "Eye" made with golden spray over wall on the Exhibition "Orizzonti Dell'Uomo". Photo: Daniel Spalato
Laser cutter drawing "Eye"
Video of the laser cutter drawing "Eye"
My mental process have lately been articulating themselves over the questions of the matter. How does this tangible world configure its own limits and the ones towards our own existence, have been the main issues. If existing in this realm of experience is inherent for one's own apprehension of existence, then one should understand the literal an metaphorical modus operandi of the tangible to understand existence itself. In that sense I have been putting the prosaic to the test as a mental assignment. By the simple and the uncomplicated rethink the materiality and in that way reconfiguring perception.
In 2002 Nicolas Bourriaud published the acclaimed and controversial book entitled “Relational Aesthetics”. As polemic as it may be, in its core it bears deep questions about some of the modus operandi employed in the art world and in our perception of it.
The book mainly makes a statement about the works of a select group of artists that revealed, showcased and pointed out a tendency to be followed in the next years and that has been constructed in the ones before. Some of them were Henry Bond, Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Liam Gillick, Christine Hil, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Miltos Manetas, Philippe Parreno, Jorge Pardo and Rirkrit Tiravanija. The main thought that, according to the author, unites these artists is the creation of works that propose situations to individuals and groups as to have the art works as propositions of experience themselves.
The questions developed by him are of a profound relevance and wouldn’t have this wide discussion in the artistic realm if it did not have important questions to deliver to our times. Apart from that hysteria and overwhelming appeal to the informed public, sometimes it seems that the wrong questions are being made on that behalf.
A remarkably good example is the documentary “Art Safari : Relational Art” presented by Ben Lewis. This tv show is a slick and superficial example, as what can normally be expected from a tv show, of the wrong questions to make. Maybe not even just the incorrect questions, but, in the core, a slightly misunderstanding of the procedures and ideas delivered by Bourdieu and, as closely related to that, the entire processes of our contemporary western society as a whole.
The tv show in entirely written as to pose the superficial and incorrect question: “Is Relational Art a new ‘ism’?”. The presenter goes interviewing Bourdieu, Parreno and other relevant figures in this behalf asking if they saw what they were presenting as a new ‘ism’. He is convicted when he defends that contemporary art has been lacking ‘isms’ for the last 40 years such as surrealism, conceptualism, minimalism etc. Doesn’t that sound like the most stupid questions one can ask on this topic?
This reveals a natural misunderstanding of the wider public and press of the new paradigms of contemporanity. Throughout the 20th century we were all taught in that way as to have an ism as the consolidation of a serious artistic thought. Althought that may have been correct for that time, it does not proceed in the same ways in our. What difference does it really make if it is or is not an ‘ism’?
Probably a more relevant and elaborate issue to discuss would be that one of the origins of that thinking of the Relational Aesthetics that very much are forgotten, or deliberately omitted, towards its origins. As every main art movement, it is a statement of power. This case wouldn’t be different. Although not all the artists cited are Europeans, it is a very clear case of the establishment of a Eurocentric thought being held by a French critic and deliberately being defended as a relevant art movement by a powerful institution such as the BBC. Relevant artists, much before this 1990s generation, were discussing the questions that they bear in a more engaged way and in a difficult and marginal situation such as Marta Minujin, Helio Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Paulo Bruscky.
Lygia Clark, "Óculos Sensoriais" (1968)
Lygia Clark, "Diálogo: Óculos" (1968)
Carsten Holler, "Umkehbrille Upside Down Goggles" (1994/2001)
That becomes very clear when seeing, for example, Carsten Holler’s crowd-pleasing show at New York’s New Museum entitled “Experience”. One of the works consists of glasses that reverse the vision of the world (Umkehbrille Upside Down Goggles, 1994/2001). It is a curious and relevant art work, although the problem is that it is just the same of just one of a series of perception shifting glasses made by Lygia Clark in the 1960s.
Paulo Bruscky, “Expediente: primeira proposta para o XXXI Salão Oficial de Arte do Museu do Estado de Pernambuco” (1978/05)
Marta Minujin, “Obelisco de Pan Dulce” (1979)
Marta Minujin, “Obelisco de Pan Dulce” (1979)
Another example, also from Holler is his “Giant Psycho Tank” in which an observer can float in a warm salt water pool. On this behalf shouldn’t a reference be made to Helio Oiticica’s and Neville D’Almeida’s “Cosmococas”also first installed in 1973? And other works should be mentioned such as Marta Minujin’s “Obelisco de Pan Dulce” (1979) and Paulo Bruscky’s “Expediente: primeira proposta para o XXXI Salão Oficial de Arte do Museu do Estado de Pernambuco” (1978/05). However profoundly related to the questions mentioned by Bourdieu and clearly are the embryos for his thinking, they are deliberately omitted. One is entitled to wonder that this omission is a clear symptom of the strong will of trying to maintain a status quo within the art world, making aesthetic claims within an undoubtably geo-political intention, as to maintain power where it has been for so long.
Hlio Oiticica and Neville D'Almeida, "Cosmococa" (1973)
Carsten Holler, Giant Psycho Tank (1999)
Apart from these issues of pretentious originality (although clearly readable it is a claim negated by Bourdieu) some of the works created by these “relational artists”, although relevant, sometimes seem to be creating just a new paradigm for consumption. I am very closely aligned to what Ben Davis states in his article on Holler’s exhibition, that there is no problem at all with slides and pools and carroussels. The problem is when they establish a logic of strict consumerism. As he makes clear: the art world can use methods close to those of theme parks, but what has to be clear is that the aims are different.
Although Bourdieu mentions himself that “the new is no longer a criterion” one is entitled to position himself towards these historical issues and question, what is really out there, what is in its core, and what really constitutes it?
Lately I have been struggling with James Elkin's polemic book "On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art". Mostly the internal debates have established by his powerfull rhetoric in convincing me of some beliefs that were hard to get rid off, although he made strong arguments against them. The entire book goes on over the idea of something he would place like this: "(...) serious art has grown estranged from religion. Religious artists aside, to suddenly put modern art back with religion or spirituality is to give up the history and purposes of a certain understanding of modernism" (Elkins, 2004, p.22).
In the beggining of the book he states the following: "Frequently I will set spirituality against religion as its foil. What I mean by spirituality (...) is any system of belief that is private, subjective, largly or wholly incommunicable, often wordless, and sometimes even uncognized. Spirituality in this sense can be part of religion, but not its whole. Some of the artists and artworks I will be talking about are spiritual without being religious" (Elkins, 2004, p.1)
He defines "Art" for his own matters in the book, and to what I believe is a very coherent position, as "whatever is exhibited in galleries in major cities, bought by museums of contemporary art, shown in biennalles and the Documenta, and written about in periodicals such as Artforum, October, Flash Art (...)" (Elkins, 2004, p.1) opposing these two vectors: "Religious art will be one type of art and fine art [described before] another, and there will be no problem in the fact that one excludes the other." (Elkin, 2004, p.2)
All these statements generate an overall view of the authors ideas and intentions in the book. Very coherently he was very much convincing me, but empirism put a defying topic in my way to comprehend and assimilate Elkin's ideas. When walking through Paris, I encountered the church of Saint Eustache, a curious gothic construction around the neighbourhood of Le Marais. Inside, for my surprise, in a shrine located around the altar, stood an altar piece by Keith Haring from 1990. The piece showed, in a very Haring way, the birth of the Christ and him being held by this what could be an interpretation of the Virgin Mary with twelve arms holding her new born baby.
Despite what would be expected from this artist as to have critical position to this sort of iconography and religious dogma, he does not seem critical or skeptical about it any way. There is a distance of miles away between works that the author himself mentions as critical such as the ones by Leon Ferrari and Andres Serrano and this one by Haring. And curiously, not only he is an artist widely comercialized by the art market but is also shown by the most important contemporary art institutions in the world. By a matter of fact, he is also miles away from some other "manifestations" I witnessed inside the church of Saint-Sulpice, also in Paris, and that I could call as religion-trying-to-be-contemporary, or religion-trying-to-be-dressed-to-the-nines, as shown below, and that is very much what Elkins tries to seperate from his concept of Fine Art. They are just the original icons with a new presentation, full of colours and dynamic visuality, almost as inheriting a diminished aesthetic unfolded distantly from Pop Art, as I would add to what Elkins mentions: "typically, a modern-looking window will derive from a mixture of realism, expressionism, and cubism" (Elkins, 2004, p.3). And it is curious that, to me, they were so bad and disturbing, that they made a disservice to my aprehension of that church. They didn't bring people towards faith and they didn't produce the effects of what we could call and expect in a religious artwork as a "religious experience". They were just these terrible repainted sculptures of the Virgin Mary with funky colours in front of even worst paintings revealing a desperate attempt of a religious institution not trying to updateitself and its ideas to the new times and its new paradigms, but just dressing its Middle-age and Renaissance beliefs and aesthetics with a "contemporary look".
These, one can understand, as being precisely to what Elkins speaks of in the following, very clearly: "Most religious ar - I'm saying this bluntly here because it needs to be said - is just bad art. Virtually all religious art made for homes and churches is poor and out of touch". All that is very coherent and clear when one looks at the main picture and encounters this terrible art as the ones showed in Saint Sulpice, and what he does is to clearly state that this sort of art can not be placed in the realm of what we call "contemporary art". But how than to position a work like that of Haring's: placed inside a church, non critical, full of beliefs and produced by an accepted artist within the art world? The problem I believe in Elkins, although he makes a very usefull and interresting cartography of these religious works in art, is his strictness making one believe that it is impossible to exist any art-accepted-by-the-art-world with religious (not necessarily critical) works. His position creates prejudice and constrains to the artistic creation of the contemporaries, as so widely and perniciously done throughout history by religious institutions themselves.
Specially in art schollarship understandings should be kept open and accepting propositions. It can, and should, create landmarks for us to understand the set in which our production is taking place, as Elkins does, but also should keep away from prejudice and absolute affirmations, what Elkins unfortunatly does not, so when one is put towards a work such as that of Keith Haring's he isn't completly keen to discarding a good piece by a relevant artist at the first sight and does not constrain the upcoming propositions of future and present art.
Bibliography:
Elkins, J. 2004. On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art. New York: Routledge.
