At The Fingertips
Brief notes on art and writing
by Andrea Franco
Why I Am Not a Painter, Frank O’Hara
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.
I
When I look at Margolles' series Recados Póstumos (2006) hanging on the wall of an office in Downtown, the first thing that strikes me is the size; the photos, which I saw for months on the computer in front of me, now seem too small. They don't have the power of the real building facades they show, and – because of my shortsightedness – I can't even read the inscriptions from two meters away. When I get closer, my nose almost glued to the glass, I see the messages, the suicide notes. It hits me like a wave hits a distracted tourist. I think about what would happen if someone took my private notations and displayed them across the city. I wonder whether it would be a tribute, a violation, or a reminder of my history. If those words would, perhaps, cease to belong to me. I think of how words and speeches circulate, how they travel. Written in a hotel room, in a bathroom, in an apartment. Probably written by hand and on paper. Transferred to cinema billboards. Photographed. Printed and hung in an office. A series of mediations where the referent is ever more distant, ever more anonymous, ever more decontextualized. And yet, the words – and words are especially good for this – are not ideas or distant concepts; they are body, a voice, a story. I think about what I would do if I worked here and were able to read this work every day. Would my myopia and the average size of the photos be, in that case, an advantage? I think about what it means to read a piece of work, if there is only one way to read it, if we only read what has words, and what happens to words when they jump from one surface to another.
II
In front of a text, there is never a first language, an original construction; one sentence transcribes another, and the meaning of a text cannot be other than the plurality of the linguistic, social, and cultural systems it evokes: the text is always multilingual. Recados Posthumos works on this multiplicity and the transcriptability of language. It works with the load that words accumulate and with the parallel loss of their discursive referents. In the self-reflexive use of language that this work takes on, it receives the politics and inherent history of borrowed words. Language is neither neutral nor objective, much less stable. And so, while steeped in the new meanings provided by the new context, these statements are also enlightened by the way they reverberate with one another. The movement works by removing a context to show its fragility. We might believe that what remains is the word exposed, out in the open, having to fend for itself. We could think that something similar happens with Any moment now... (spring) (2014), by Valeska Soares, where hundreds of selected and deployed book covers are in dialogue to form a reflection on the passage of time, the textual and visual supports on which our culture and memory are built. Also, perhaps, these covers highlight the fiction from which reality is woven. It seems that Soares' gesture consists of going through bookstores, second-hand stores, libraries, and dissecting, selecting, and arranging with her own, completely arbitrary criteria. The secret, Keneth Goldsmith will say in Uncreative Writing, is that the suppression of expressivity is impossible. The act of choosing and recontextualizing says as much about us as the story of our mother's cancer. This minority of fragments becomes a narration of the unnarrated or unnarratable, a way of rematerializing or restituting an experience of the world.
III
The relocalization of language is a well-known mechanism in this not-so-new digital era. In the last decades, we became witnesses – more than ever – of a growing transformation in the ways of reception, management, and circulation of language, and we quickly discovered the capacities of appropriation and the reproduction of content. That is to say, we empty libraries to occupy infinite virtual drawers that feed an ever-growing and interconnected archive. World culture has thus become a toolbox and an open narrative space where contemporary art functions as an immense editing island capable of making use of an unlimited amount of data, and artistic practice is turning more and more to remakes, ready-made, Djing, forms of collecting or archiving. In this sense, criticism and curatorship are perhaps, as Piglia intuits in Crítica y Ficción, one of the current forms of autobiography: someone exposes their gaze and their cut-out as a way of writing their lives. The question would be how we modify ourselves, at the same time, as spectators. In fact, the way we can read Walter Benjamin's Book of Passages anticipates the way in which we learned to read on the internet: we move through its immensity with hypertexts that forward us disorderly from one place to another, turning us into virtual flâneurs. In this context, we can think that digitalization has transformed us to an extent comparable to that of industrialization, and 'public opinion,' whose task was previously the control of social and political power, is suddenly filled with a chaos of voices that swarm disorderly, without hierarchies or canons, where multiple results compete with each other. And while this new digital publishing society allows anyone to be potentially heard, it also entails the danger that no one will be effectively heard.
IV
Sometimes, I am convinced that I have no data. I don't accumulate, I don't store, I don't hoard. My head is a rather lightweight machine that consumes and discards in equal measure. Maybe that's why I still need physical books – to touch them, to look at them on my bookshelf, to know that something is holding all the information for me. Maybe that's also why I can't read without underlining whatever I’m reading. To make my own clipping or leave a trail of crumbs in case I have to go through the same landscape again. Proof, for my future self, that I read those pages, even if I can no longer recall any of them. An attempt at fixation. The same with notes, notebooks, journals, diaries, and observations. To pass the word through manual writing is, above all, to pass it through the body. To inhabit language, to exercise mindfulness. Vânia Mignone's works transmit to me this way of working with the materiality of words. Phrases that, at times, seem to be sentences, titles, or declarations; that seem to offer a fundamental key to understanding a concept, but, deep down – or rather, on the surface, – what they transmit strokes as a need. The written letter is not a paratext of the work; it is the work itself. Not very different from what happens in Chinese painting, where the stamps are not only part of the composition of the image but are constitutive of the pieces, generating a space of juxtaposed dialogue between image and word – whether it is a signature, a phrase, a verse, or a complete poem. The writing, in these cases, also narrates in its pictorial dimension: the pulse, the pressure, the size. And its meanings and references can be as vast and wide as those of any image. I wonder what separates – if done with the same technique, with the same brush, with the same paint – writing from drawing. What is the image that the text offers us, and what is the text that the image offers us.
V
Shodō, or Japanese calligraphy, is the art of writing characters (kanji and kana) with a bamboo brush in India ink on rice paper. In this practice, the order and manner of executing the strokes are essential: we must know the number of strokes, their beginning, their direction, and their end. The shodō – which translates to the "way of writing" – is a discipline of great precision and concentration that takes years of effort to master, if it is ever achieved. It is also a compulsory subject during primary education in schools. Writing and painting become, at this point, one and the same thing; or, at least, a training that goes hand in hand. Something similar may have happened to those of us who were made to fill notebooks with the same word over and over again, hundreds of times, an exercise of repetition that becomes a physical skill, a drive. Many of the works in the Balanz Collection that deal with writing seem to focus precisely on that: paying attention to materiality to make meaning explode, not as suppression, but as liberation. Something that clearly occurs in Jair José - Em Qualquar Lugar (2013), by Voluspa Jarpa, where the testimonial document is laser-engraved on wood and cardboard, and thus, highlights a writing that is permanent and unalterable while also constituting itself as a void – the gap left by the passage of the text on its support –; or, in works like País Tiempo, (2007-2013), by Oscar Muñoz, where we are presented with sanded, burned pages of diaries altered in their physical substance. On the subject, Barthes says in Writing (1973), "The human desire to incise (with a point, a reed, a stylus, a pen) or to caress (with a brush, a felt-tip pen) has undergone many transformations which have concealed the specifically corporal origins of writing; but it is enough that from time to time painter (such as, today, Masson or Twombly) incorporates graphical forms into his work for us to be reminded of the evidence that writing is not only a technical activity, it is also a physically pleasurable practice."
VI
In Pope Star and Make Me (America) Great Again (2017), Dan Perjovschi also uses pages from the newspaper El País as a canvas, background, or support. The selection of a material intended to be consumed and discarded or updated in an almost immediate and massive way is, on the one hand, a form of conservation and, on the other, a temporal cutout of the individual. In a way, it transforms the wasted time of consumption into time recovered as an aesthetic experience. The selected information, which informs little of what is really happening, becomes a narration of the minor, of the contextual, of the systematic and symptomatic. The historical fact becomes the personal reading of that historical fact, which, in turn, illuminates the cut made by someone else – a journalist, the mass media – where not only the arbitrary and personal choice itself is revealed, but also the arbitrary and personal choice of the one who created and circulated the information initially. The copy-paste is again a key element with which the work works but is now intervened through calligraphy. Crossed with black ink, the journal pages do not become completely illegible, but present partial legibility: "Vamos a traspasar el poder de Washington al pueblo” [We are going to transfer the power from Washington to the people], “El gobierno admite fallos en la gestión” [The government admits failures in management], “Intento que el Evangelio vaya adelante pero me pego patinazos” [I try to make the Gospel go forward but I skid], “Los platos de ideología son refugios que te impiden tocar la realidad” [The ideological plates are shelters that prevent you from touching reality]. What appears in the foreground is handwriting with thick marker pen. The accumulation and textual flow in tandem with handwriting that, while crossing out, inscribes. Subjectivity, the artist's words enter into dialogue with mass culture through the puns "Pop Star"-"Pope Star" and "Make America Great Again" - "Make Me Great Again." Thus, there appears a reflection on the stagnant use of language and the shift, through humor, of the senses as a form of social denunciation, something central in Perjovschi's work.
VII
Linking one thing to another is probably what we would call a metaphor in literature – in other words, metaphorical thinking? “The union of two different things,” said Borges in one of his conferences held in Madrid in the 1980s. He then went on to say that nothing, no word, can be abstracted from its metaphorical condition, from all the possible or potential unions it keeps within itself. Ultimately, writing that has freed itself from its spatial ties (it wanders through different media) and from responding to a disciplined time of linear reading, of narrative, of chronology, can easily be linked to any object. You and I (2011), by Valeska Soares, and Patria (2011), by Cristina Piffer, explore this sense-creating form where a metaphor appears as the fusion and tension between a mental image and a real image, between concept and matter. A metaphor thus unites diverse elements – patria and fat, chained china and personal pronouns – not as a mere process of substitution, but rather as a way to expand the meanings of the terms while functioning as a resource of intensification. What is there of animal fat in the homeland, and vice versa? It represents an open proposal which meanings can continue to be prolonged and opened up. In a certain way, these works also take advantage of the possibilities of abstraction and concretion presented by language and images and attempt to embody words in a new way, modify their contexts, cross them, or make them legible. Perhaps, in this discontinuous, dynamic, chaotic world, these attempts of art – visual, textual, or visual and textual – are ways of appropriating and transmitting a fleeting and random ordering of reality, an intimate and arbitrary encounter with creation and reproduction, a form of unity between things.
