1999 Jet-lag Mambo – English

JET-LAG MAMBO

FIRST PART

Art is, according to Lacan, a received experience. Catherine David proposes it as a space of action for social avant-garde. For James Clifford, art is an ever-changing Western cultural category. There are more versions.

Beyond any personal sympathies, generalizations as these always remind me that Schopenhauer debated the question of whether the representation of the world was possible.

Is it possible to devise a representation of the world? I still believe the question is quite pertinent.

Schopenhauer, it is known, did not pen down his thoughts in mother’s milk. Nevertheless, the questions he poses have been foremost in my mind for quite some time. I would just like to add that my determination to approach his ideas became evidently complicated when I met the following claim:

“In a sense, to stand in two places is to stand in both presence and representation. For representations are not simply less real than what they represent; they are also real in that ‘representations are social facts’. They are not, in other words, just re-presences, but presences. They are part of ourselves”.

Sharon Stone

We were sitting in “Berlin Mitte”, words describing a place in Berlin which at sometime was crossed by a dividing line. Jimmie was pleased and tired. A gallerist had asked him to make some prints to finance a project I cannot recall. Maria Theresa was in Marseille, getting some use from a flat for which they had paid in advance. I think we were desultorily talking about what Gerardo Mosquera had once said: acting from a situation is so much better than representing it. But we started to lose clarity because the waiter serving us in that Indian restaurant (Archuna), unfortunately and elegantly mixed German, Spanish and a kind of English. Jimmie was slimmer, slower too. I guess missing Maria Theresa made him skip meals. But he was in shape. Moving his fingers in a salad with the parsimony of one who has repeated the gesture along the years, we talked about Berlin’s noises (building in the city is allowed to start at seven in the morning; thousands of workers wait with tools in hand for the foreman’s sign to start a hellish din). I recall that someone began to talk about the militaristic bad taste implicit in the notion of avant-garde and of the arrogance of the concept. We were bored. A bucketful of water fell from the third floor. It was one in the afternoon. A Turkish taxi driver became indignant without humour. He was soaked. A couple of tourists with a lanky teenage daughter stared suspiciously at the building’s cornices. Alfredo ordered a coffee.

I had not seen Jimmie for a couple of years.

Because if art is conceived as an ever-changing cultural category, its attributes will constantly find themselves negotiated within this undecipherable restlessness of interests, powers, information and debates carried along by contexts – Anders and Maria tell me. All of which would greatly complicate our life, that much is clear. (It simply won’t do!). Amid all these plagues of negotiations, the Van Gogh retrospectives and Guggenheim Museum franchises remain some of the few places offering stability. You can’t spend your time enquiring what the others will or want, they both assure, smiling, when I get out of the car at the square. This thing of negotiating is a plague! they say, amused, and wave their hands in a quick good-bye.

When I get nervous, thinking about processes and abstractions (ever-changing!), I look for peace in more concrete things. For instance, I try to imagine and put in order collections of dishes, hammers, fruits or chairs; in short, familiar objects. Don’t come now and tell me that chairs are so voluble as to always stand by the window on the lookout for “the ever-changing cultural category”! Chairs are serious objects. Or, better yet, I imagine a collection of fingernail clippings. Each individual with a collection of his (or hers) own fingernails.

Jimmie didn’t order a coffee, and I could see that he immediately regretted it. Through the window, I had a view of a building from the 19th Century, imitating a style from the 17th. Later, Alfredo and I took a taxi to get to a place in Berlin, the name I do not recall. A demonstration by thousands of roller–skaters interrupted traffic for twenty minutes. We had come to a stop in front of a monument evoking the arrival into the city of the Russian forces at the end of World War II. Night was falling. Bored while waiting, the driver thought we were looking at the warlike vehicles. Actually, we were watching a languid and endless dusk. One of the tank pilots had been a woman. We noticed that the driver was affected. He told us a story of people growing vegetables in the parks. After the war, there were no clothes to wear. The demonstrators finished passing by. We were silent until we reached the place where Karin was waiting. Later, she would tell us the story about her neighbour. Karin had invited her in for tea. Her neighbour could not accept. Karin did not dare ask for the reason. She explained, anyway: she had to iron her money. Karin said nothing. Her neighbour went on, sometimes it happens that you get crumpled banknotes. Some people carry them in a pocket, just make a ball of them and the notes get crumpled. Karin was silent. Her neighbour said she could not simply put banknotes in such a state back into circulation, and gazed at Karin looking for assent. Karin looked her in the eye. Her neighbour, every evening before supper, went through her banknotes and ironed the crumpled ones. Before taking leave from each other, Karin proposed we meet the next day to go and see the art collection being installed at the new Reichstag. I was interested in seeing the house where Brecht had lived on his return from exile. I had heard mentioned that from one of the windows, Brecht could see the graveyard where he now is buried.

Still, in spite of my ultimate desire for honesty, vagueness insists: Who are we? What are our desires?

The artists, for instance: In which hotel do they stay?

“It did not look like art!”, Germaine said with a happy smile. She was commenting on her own show in an Ottawa gallery.

If her art show, in an art gallery, did not look like art, then what she did was expand the notion of art, I commented, without much subtlety. Germaine looked at me. I hated to be rude. The notion of the alternative as a quarry for the renewal of the mainstream reminded me of a binge with Ron the day the toilets broke down in that snobbish place in SoHo. Another story of the SoHo. That bar had, as one of its attractions, the frivolity of individual toilets with transparent doors which, when locked from the inside, became milky and opaque. A horribly expensive contraption. Ronald J. and I, together with one of those persons who have affairs in the SoHo, were hustling around the ritual study of martinis and bootleg Cuban cigars, when the doors, Oh Fickleness of the Matters of the Spirit!, stopped turning opaque. Not that it is easy to topple aesthetic preconceptions like Formalism. Formalism has survived, in good health, the dematerialization of the art object, anti-art, bad art, non-art, the death of painting, the end of history and the attack of the installations and the post-Duchampian objects. Personally, I have always been a big enthusiast of the trend of post-Duchampian attitudes. Some collector has paid incomprehensible fortunes for a Van Gogh he has promised to take with him to the grave. A few years ago, a group of happy-go-lucky businessmen collectively bought a Picasso and cut it up into sections of a square centimetre. Each fragment was framed separately. Let us imagine solid gilded frames. Putting the pieces on sale, the profit shown generously exceeded the investment. The survival of Formalism is made visible not only when people pay high prices for concept art pieces of the sixties (a couple of pages with typed numbers). But also let us see – here is Formalism in good health! – a recent revision of the history of concept art proposes to reduce this movement of work using just the word or grammatical language as support. The Formalist notion persists, of course, in the urgent necessity for formal breaks. To our despair, some Chinese or other let drop the suspicion that “the void expresses itself through form”.

Our reflections on form made Nikos think about other things. As a Greek, as an Australian and as Nikos, the strategy of a proposal (i.e. the emission and reception of certain language structures) was the formal clause occupying his thoughts but Nikos did not consider it prudent to shift the attention in a conversation such as this one. Thus, without noticing, we changed subject. Germaine thought with intensity, with that absolute and unmerciful seriousness of some young people. Afterwards, she started to speak lively and with a profoundly joyful smile. Because her husband, who is a writer, had, at the time, begun working in a restaurant, a common friend assumed he was studying as a chef. The few times I heard Geoffrey say he was working on a text, I always assumed that he was writing recipes.

MY TRAIN TRAVEL THROUGH THE CANADIAN WOODS. As I had a day off, I decided to take a trip through the Canadian woods in an ancient train pulled by a steam locomotive. It was a short journey, conceived for nostalgia and leisure, to a sleepy village by the shore of a large lake. The trip gave me time enough to reach the village, go for a long walk, lunch and make my return the same afternoon. As soon I entered the carriage, I felt strange. I could not place the reason. One of my pleasures is that easy joke of trains: the feeling of being travelled. You sit in the carriage and the landscape parades while your body involves itself with the shoes or keeping organized whatever personal effects you carry. I must have had a bemused expression, because the girl who had checked my ticket approached me with the decisiveness of one who has the right to examine the other. She engaged me in a conversation that rapidly changed from the state of the weather to the book I had with me, and that I had absent-mindedly left on a seat. I read on the window-frame an admonition not to lean out of it. The girl had strong opinions on fate, and you see I have already surrendered to the pleasure of the story. She guessed a month and a sign for my birthday and she told me all she could about her own. She was slim, had brown hair, asymmetrical eyes and an easy and contagious smile. The uniform accentuated the impression that she acted with real impudence. I started to automatically reread the admonition not to lean out of the window. An obese lady travelling with her husband turned around in her seat and said she did not agree with the Zodiac’s determinism. It took me many readings to realize the admonition on the window frame was written in Swedish. The inscriptions in the carriage marking the services, the luggage racks and explaining how to open the doors, were all written in Swedish. The window curtains were the same that I had known during years of travels between Lund and Gothenburg, Lund and Stockholm, Scania and Falun and Uppsala and Boden: cloths of tough cotton with brown, orange and white-yellowish stripes. Without closing my eyes, I took a deep breath of the carriage’s smell. The lake was still there, outside the window. The obese lady wanted to change to the seat beside me, despite her husband’s demonstrations of discomfort. To make space for them, the girl in uniform lifted the book from the seat and pressed it to her chest.

I have done some truly weak projects. Vanity of the matters of the spirit! I sincerely regret the confidence that has been put in my ability to improvise under adverse conditions. More often than necessary, I have arrived to do a job and found the conditions to do it did not exist. The spaces did not agree with the information received beforehand, materials I had requested were not there, the technical infrastructure did not appear as promised, the support I had asked for would not arrive. A couple of times, I have managed to overcome the difficulties and, in spite of everything, I contrived to do something. On other occasions, I did not. Vanity of the matters of the spirit! Dizzy with institutional pressures, travelling, the immediacy of the opening and deeply rooted blindness, I have allowed these works to be presented even though I did not like them. Clumsiness of political strategies! I have exposed myself to professional ridicule many times!

Having said his farewells, Jimmie left his chair and, with his long legs, charged for the corner. We had dined at some tables on the pavement, in front of the place where Käthe Kollwitz’s house used to stand. The summer night dragged on,untroubled and calm. Jimmie walked with a roll like a ship, a white plastic bag hanging from his hand. He seemed to hesitate for a moment. He raised his eyes above the tops of the lime trees, to the sky and the roofs. Halting, he swept space a couple of times and, with his head leaning slightly to his right, he decided on a street. His steps gained speed until he disappeared among the cars. Alfredo watched him with an amused smile. Talking, we could say that there are no works of art. Just art. We could also say that, among the profusion of things of the world, some of them are read through these systems we call art. We could say it is the gaze of these systems, which looks for significance in the things of the world.

We could carry on saying it is the gaze of these systems which looks for recognition in the things of the world. We could say it is the gaze of these systems which looks for meanings in the profusion of things of the world. We could say, that morning of sun and tousled clouds was an end-of-summer morning, and that there was a freshness in the air. I was enthusiastic about the idea of leaving the city for a while. The first time we drove out with Alfredo Pernin, searching for red ochre in the Southeast of Sweden, we did not use the map I had with me. Alfredo, whose curiosity once led him to study geology, crossed the green hills, fixed his eyes on the electric wires, the fields, the roads and found his bearings in the landscape whilst murmuring to himself. After a while, he turned the car into a lane, stopped and said we could start searching there. We walked following a brook, between fields and fences. We came to a place where the brook cut a small gully. We dug into the gully’s wall and I already knew we were going to find the ochre. I know: at that exact moment, the situation, for myself, embodied the romantic. Back at the car, Alfredo rolled a cigarette and again looked at the fields around. The thing is, he told me, that beyond its being one’s purpose or not, the gaze explains. Cartography is, as so many other things, a convention to represent mental processes, he continued. Perception, even without verbally proposing it, organizes. I handed over the rags we were using to clean our muddy hands, and told him his discourse was very artistic. This did not worry Alfredo at all. To make myself clearer I assured him that it was perfectly possible to project a desire to organize knowledge. It was getting dark very slowly as it only darkens under the Northern summers. Alfredo started the car and we drove away, to have coffee at the corner of a small village lost among the beets. To Alfredo, any movement in the universe’s energy was an organizing endeavour, however much chance, chaos and the apparent whimsicality of certain phenomena would show us neither logic nor respect. He clarified that the question, in art, he was rather fascinated by was that these phenomena should have been so intimately associated with a person’s identity. I told him the tradition of the contemporary artist could not easily break with this atavism, and mentioned the story of the name changes of the Chinese masters. In this case, the cliché of the Chinese masters is appropriate. Whenever they acquired some prestige they would move to another province, someplace where they would not be known, at times even changing style and regularly signing their works with apocryphal names. Later collecting took care of cataloguing and collating. Soon enough, there were informative guides of the itineraries, styles and names adopted by each of the masters. In spite of the coffee being bitter and too hot we stayed sitting to find out where the other’s conversation would lead us. Alfredo calmly said that the incentive, in the urge for identity, in the cited example was the necessity to fetishise the object. I loved to respond with the classical answer that the artist’s identity is, itself, a fetishised object. Rolling another cigarette, Alfredo murmured something like this that what he frankly thought exhausting about the artists was the huge amount of work they invested into negotiating their projects at the moment of organizing knowledge.

In spite of their endeavours resulting in a formal renewal of the modernist repertoire, I cannot but feel sympathy for many artists who worked with the ideas we now call conceptualism. Most of all, I am enthusiastic about the project they called “ the dematerialization of the art object”. I understand that in this proposal, what they identified as the core of the piece was not any intrinsic quality of the physical object, which could be substituted or manufactured in the total absence of the “artist”, but specific ideas or notions trafficked by perception (“perception” meaning something more than the sum or combination of the five senses). Separate from the intrinsic qualities of the object, these notions marked, filtered and somehow appropriated by those choosing to assume the game, were conceded as specific heritage of each of the consciences involved in the process. This is, I think, an ethical proposal potentially implying a high sense of respect, by those involved, in the relationship with the other. It also appears to be a proposal of high subversive potential, as the simple fact of articulating a certain perception enables for the property of the piece to reside in each one’s disposition to implement a sense in it. It would be difficult to find, in this area, a radical democracy project more ambitious and paradoxical in its orchestration.

Peter Arnesson worked for a few summers as a taxi driver in Göinge, a region outside the main highways of Scandinavia. A broken landscape, with large areas still covered in firs and oak woods, Göinge seems at times as remote as it was in the age of the Viking farmers. Thinly populated and with sparse communications, the local administration arranged that on certain days of the week, the senior inhabitants could make use of a taxi to deliver their shopping ordered from stores in the vicinity. Wearing a uniform that clashed with both the remoteness of the area and the long-awaited summer sun, this was the part of the job Peter liked best: picking up the orders at the market, pharmacy and liquor store in the village and heading for the woods to deliver them.

I shall only tell the story of the visit to Petter Pettersson’s, aged 86; badly told and stumbling because, in the short hour and a half we were there, so many specific and insignificant things happened, my account could not begin to embrace the task.

We parked in front of the house and Peter sounded the horn. With tousled grey hair flying in the breeze, a white shirt buttoned all the way up and dark brown trousers, vest and coat, Petter Pettersson appeared in the frame of the door of a house hiding in the trees’ shadow. He went back in as quickly as he had appeared. “He is putting the coffeepot on”, said Peter. The rest was an uninterrupted tide in which Petter Pettersson enveloped us with fulminating energy. He showed us the light bulb he had in the living room. The only one, he said, as he did not need any in the other rooms, too many for a lonely old man. He, then, treated us to a short account starting with his great-grandfather, who had built the house, and continuing with that of his own solitude, a bachelor without children to continue family history. He showed us the old shotgun with which he used to hunt rabbits and told us at least three detailed and pertinent stories. After that, the story of the time he fell sick and was taken to the hospital in Lund, for the time a new medical marvel. He showed us pictures of the trip, the only one in his life, where we could see a young man sitting on the grass with some luxuriant trees in the background; pictures in front of a red brick building. He was wearing a white shirt. He was still proud of the experience. From the package of photographs wrapped in newspapers and tied with a purple ribbon, we had to look at the rest. Some were of people with stiffly done hair and transparent gazes. Petter had already forgotten who they were,but the three of us looked at them as if leaning into a well. Petter Pettersson had ordered a bottle of liquor, which we could not leave untasted, even though my friend Peter was not a fan of the beverage, and drinking could have jeopardized his job, as spirits and driving was a strictly forbidden combination. Peter, with the knowledge that, ultimately, the conversation was the part making the visit meaningful, always confronted the moment with the resolve of one who knows what has to be done in a given situation. Petter Pettersson cheerfully insisted in attacking the liquor, remembrances and his ideas about things. He philosophised on the world of senses (the body, in summer, feels as if life has a different purpose than in winter), on knowing, on reading (he did not read much because he had few books around him, but he always read and no reading had ever been indifferent; all books, whether good or not, are interesting), on youth (he suddenly lost the gist and started talking about signing on and sailing to Panama), on why he was not interested in travelling to Paris, and on the sounds he listened to, sitting in that same armchair,when he had nothing else to do.

Whilst talking, Petter Pettersson brewed coffee several times, sought and brought diverse objects and packages, served two different kinds of cookies, hustled the bottle of liquor, lifted the cat onto his lap and then put it down again on the floor every time he got up to look out of different windows, with the routine of one who has done the same thing for a long time. From the beginning, Petter knew that the moment would come for us to leave, so he had devised several stratagies to delay our departure. Peter Arnesson was counting on it, so he started to take leave with much parsimony, knowing we would not be on our way until probably the fifth attempt. Sometime later, departure was unavoidable. There were other clients waiting for their orders. Petter Pettersson knew that was the ultimate reason and he could no detain us any longer. He then made the final request, almost with sadness. He asked us that, before leaving, we should go by the pen to say good-bye to the cow. The three of us went out and around to the back of the house. In a fenced space under some dark trees was the cow. It ripped up tufts of grass with a muffled noise and flicked its tail systematically, chasing away mosquitoes. A large bird alighted on its head and the cow looked at us for a while,chewing. Petter Petterson went into the pen. He had put on his cap and straightened his shirt collar. He slowly walked up to the cow and stood in front of it, his hands in his pockets. He remained like that for a moment, he and the animal watching each other, and I had the feeling that we were all doing that, looking at the cow. He then turned and moved towards us with a shy smile. The cow followed him and let us pet it. It was warm and damp. Petter went on smiling, now with more assurance. He came out of the pen and walked us to the car. In silence he shook hands with both of us and stood watching ,without a word as we drove away amidst the blots of light piercing through the trees.

There are horrible places. There are those quite scary and horrible. Yet a chair has always appealed to me as a poignant place. In particular empty chairs. I know Jimmie does not like chairs. I hate armchairs. I mean, I like them, but for others. I cannot sit at ease in them. This does not mean I cannot enjoy the pleasure I see in people when they are comfortably lounging in an armchair. But it is different with chairs. I feel a deep attraction for empty chairs. I do not mind if they, occasionally, have people on them. But whenever this happens, I lose the chair and all I can see is the sitting person. On the other hand an empty chair is definitely, a chair.

There are sparks of genius, like the paintbrush, the scissors, the ball. Strategic inventions. I think the chair is an impeccable place. Empty and full spaces; the rhythm of its parts; what receives and what supports; the space that is, the one it generates around itself and (marvel!) the one it suggests. I wonder the Tao te ching does not speak of chairs more often. There the Self is addressed as a wagon and its parts; also thereabouts there is a mention of the hub of the wheel and the void of the cup. A chair is, basically, an affair of space and absence. I cannot fathom that Jimmie does not understand the paradigm of the chair. The joke of being and not Being there, its stupid witticism.

Art does not pretend to be true as other things are true. Or maybe it does. Art, perhaps, aspires to be true in the same way as anything else is. Maybe all that happens is actual. Although some things are truly interesting. The Chinese artists changed province, name and style in order not to be erased by an attachment to the self. Once, Oscar Hemer and I went to receive Gayatri Spivak upon her arrival at Malmö. She appeared in a wheelchair escorted by two huge policemen. They were all smiles. Oscar and I were pale, thinking that during the trip from Delhi, the Spivak may have broken a leg or injured her back. A seminar was starting the day after in which she was, without a doubt, the star. Once the wheelchair was left in our hands and we could start towards a taxi, Spivak happily jumped off the chair and gave us an effusive hug. Rescuing us from our amazement, she told us she had played the old game of the Ailing Lady, with the result that she had been well treated and, for once, had not been pestered for having to travel the world with a bloody Indian passport.

Primitivism, it has been said enough times, is a recurrent necessity of cultures that construct a classical conscience of themselves. The need for an archaic past, a development and, probably, a historical destiny, explain the need for the Primitive. What is surprising is to see how, in our present society, this myth of the Primitive has become generalized as popular belief. Hollywood advances it constantly. The massive success of the heroic Joseph Beuys confirms it. After a few days spent with exotic (non-German) peoples, recovering from an accident, Beuys worked for forty years until generating a vast shamanistic rhetoric from that experience. The idea of the artist as someone special managing the passage between worlds may seem simplistic, but enjoys good health. Another thing I remember from the time we went to receive Spivak is that she clasped in her hands a small wine-coloured purse. I found even more surprising, a small hat, coquettishly angled on her short hair. I think Spivak has returned to Malmö a couple more times. I have never seen Mattis again.

There is no better way to generate identity, defend identity, discuss identity and negotiate identity than contemporary art of the last 300 years.

But the strength of form is really paradigmatic. The codifications of value, either clear or fuzzy, always generate turbulences. From the horizon of Chinese aesthetics, based on the experience of the Chi, the difference in value between a painting, an accident or a stone is not functionally precise. All of which does not hinder excesses as that samurai who safeguards a manuscript valuable to his lord, sheltering in a cut he makes in his belly before being overwhelmed by the flames. If the void is expressed through form, the mode of relating to the contents may tend to considered negotiations with perception, the last one understood as it was by certain concept artists. The void may also engender horror, authoritarianism or pitfalls. Truism teaches us that the paradigmatic relationship with the forms is just one step away from the programmatic relationship with Good Taste. Truism exists. It is not known why the glasses of the toilets in that place in the SoHo broke down. Or rather, I do not know.

It is clear that one of the inconvenients of speaking of “organizing knowledge”, is that the idea itself awakens associations with activities which could be related to explanations or pedagogy. On that account, Duclós and Alfredo are right: in principle, any activity organizes knowledge. The dilemma is to reference that activity within the language systems. To put it otherwise: the problem is to make the experience of organizing knowledge work within the structures proposed by the languages. The Sufis say, at one time or other, that whatever is not transmissible, it is not an experience. Our need to generalize and transmit is powerful.

Taste and Attitude carry Ideology. The Academic hides the Self. Our art is crisscrossed by signatures and dates. Twelve percent of the world’s population now has direct access to a telephone. It is said that the personality test known as Rorschach is the only psychology test that works independently of specific cultural contexts. Written language is a problem. The Rorschach test is, let us say, an honest example of an arts-and-crafts basket. A bundle of wicker switches with mystery. If I read your cards with Rorschach blots, you read my reading; more switch bundles, more mystery, more wicker. If I read your reading, more wicker, more mystery.

The paintbrush is another brilliant invention. We have been told Homo habilis was the first to make tools some 1.6 or 1.9 million years ago. Now we are told the Australopithecus garhi, even 2.5 million years ago, was making stone tools to break open the bones of his meals and reach, so to speak, to the marrow of things. Furthermore, in the region where the remains of A. garhi were found, it appears there was no available rock suitable for the manufacture of the tools, which means that the A. garhi used to carry their tools wherever they went. We all understand what these discoveries imply: that by being able to reach the bone marrow, the A. garhi had access to a diet rich in energy and fats (which, among other things, would enable them to expand into tougher regions of the planet) and, furthermore, as a consequence of a richer diet, their brains would receive a greater impulse to increase their capacity and develop more complex tasks. Scientists believe that, once the process of manufacturing tools had started, this same exercise, combined with dietary change, produced a qualitative transformation in the use of the brain. What this text proposes to show, in function of the presented documentation, is that the creation of a technology is to be found directly linked to the demands to satisfy concrete needs, and that its own development generates other needs, not always foreseeable. I explained to Mónica that what entitled me to the white lie of being an artist, was that, in my work, I persisted in the use of the paintbrush. Mónica looked at me and I saw she interpreted my words as if I had assured her I did not smoke nor bathed every day. I also told her that, of my own free will, I had reduced my language of images to no more than thirty, and that I endeavoured to repeat them over a period of, let us say, ten years. I explained to her that if I could I would like to keep on doing this for a longer period, say, 75 years. She went on looking at me with the same eyes. I developed my idea that following the desire to establish historical vanguards, it could be said that the first global movement in art was the use of red ochre. She told me that history always taught her. Already a bit nervous, I explained I always tried to respect the audience’s intelligence. She smiled gracefully, moved her head, which I saw outlined against the sea, arranged her notes and returned an intelligent gaze. We have all seen apes making utensils. For instance, pick a branch, pluck certain leaves and use it to draw water from a hole. We have also seen animals committing suicide, or we are aware that human beings who have grown up isolated from other humans, develop hardly any language. Once, in Tuscany, a scorpion hurled itself on the tip of my paintbrush and wrestled for all its worth with it. What is brilliant about the paintbrush is that it transports matter from one place to another. To think continues to be a way to transform matter.

Jimmie opened a bottle of beer and passed it to Mónica. A French mining company had exploited materials which I now do not recall, in that small village in the middle of the desert. To facilitate the need for the engineers’ wives to attend mass, they had ordered a metal church from Brussels. The engineer who had designed the church was called Eiffel. The street was a dust cloud where the school’s children rehearsed the parade for the country’s National Day. They marched with a teacher full of vocation and a car with a loudspeaker playing music. All sang, more or less in unison: “It was a tiny, tiny bikini, with yellow polka dots”. They all wore uniforms. The air was very dry. Mónica said the occasion seemed favourable. That, at this moment, the world seemed favourable and that we should visit the metal church to look at the stained-glass windows.

It is not that art has become something that much different from what it was and that now it is only an activity existing in function of a context. The novelty consists, rather, that in certain cases, context has explicitly become a material in art. Sometimes a support or a context. This is why painting has lost criminality and becomes again interesting as discourse support. I mean that painting, stripped now of modernist certainty, is as interesting in its own way as chairs, art history, the name of the artist or the interpretative text. As I am writing this, I hear the news that in the State of Kansas, the Education Council has eliminated evolution theory from the students’ evaluation exams. It was not explicitly forbidden. Instead, they are trying to put it in conditions of survival akin to those the dinosaurs may once have had.

I once witnessed a long conversation with a sculptor colleague who proposed an interesting wish for his work: if the entire universe were to disappear, leaving behind just one of his pieces, he imagined the huge All could be re-created based on the information contained in the sculpture. Someone quickly pointed out that it was a commendable wish, as long as the universe could also be re-created, in principle, based on the information contained in anything else, for instance, the droppings of a fly. The colleague was infuriated by a comparison he deemed undignified.

I have the clear eyes and the narrow mind of the Celts, Rimbaud used to say. During the Tang Dynasty, in the 9th Century of our reckoning, a group of artists called Yi Ping worked within a so extremely codified tradition that they developed something we would not hesitate to consider as an anti-art attitude. Among other things, they used to run around the silk canvases onto which they threw colour, they sat to meditate on them, they dragged them around, or used their paint-dripping hair as paintbrushes. One of the critical instances of our immediate tradition appears when the system of symbolic production of art begins to be visualized as a whole and totality. In a kind of anthropological conscience awareness of art, the art object is considered as carrier of cultural paradigms. As an agent, eventually cathartic, of a symbolic weave. To respect the intelligence of the audience (or not) is part of the process where the work’s reception and emission have infected each other; that is the colloquium. René did not beat anybody that night, nor the following nights. Still, he could not free himself from knowing he yearned for that fight. With his hands stuck in the leather jacket’s pockets, he started on his way home. He routinely avoided pools of water, the corners’ apexes and the dark hallways. It would be interesting to produce works in which any text or descriptive label projected on them would be immediately fagocited and embodied into the piece. And now comes the turn of the truly unsustainable operation. Within this, I do not only wish to defend the work structures that make the relationships between object and perception the preferred resulting products. I also suggest proposing the vain aspiration that these actions should append themselves to the chain of the ten thousand things of the world, or, as the Argentines would call it, the flow of things. What is dignified and worthy of consideration is the ethical negotiation. Miguel and I have something which could well be called a profound friendship. From the beginning, although without being explicit, we proposed a mode of sincerity and confrontation in which with time, humour, respect, patience and a good repertoire of cheats would be included. It is known of the masculine inclination to build friendships between males in which rare practices of abstract thought are painstakingly woven. I mean, among men, recounting intimacies is not as important as the subtle architecture of more or less idiotic symbolic exchanges.

We went to see the metal church. I do not recall if the stained-glass windows we saw were the original ones or if they had been replaced. I do remember the light was soft and limpid, and a tiled, checkered floor. The solitude of the church was not very different from the solitude of the place where I had just bought cigarettes. A counter left to itself and a fan that was out of order. Through a rickety door, someone appeared who took my order and returned my change without a word. While we walked, I again went over a conversation we had about the convenience, or inconvenience, of a show’s curator having a hidden agenda not shared with the artists participating in a project. I recalled my experience with an Austrian curator. After installing for five days in Graz, just as the piece was beginning shape up, the curator, whom I had never seen before, came into the room. The show was, as we had begun to discover, an encyclopaedic recount of all the contemporary non-European, non-WASP artists who had worked in more or less international contexts for the last five or ten years. The curator was surrounded by an attentively listening crowd to which we were never introduced. The curator commented, amazed by my work and asked me how things were going. I told him of my sincere surprise at so many acquaintances represented in the project. With evident interest, he asked me if I had contact with any of the artists. I answered that, from a total of about forty, I knew, personally, twenty-two. The curator turned around and, confronting his retinue, explained (voilà!) this was what he had always known: that there were alternative networks for artistic production and circulation, marginal to the Western Art System. “They all know each other!”, he said, and pointed at me with contagious joy. This actual show, he concluded, would be the first to make such structures visible. He looked at me, love-struck, and I returned a placid smile. Before departing, followed by the group, he stuck his trunk up his arse, farted, and blew his brains off. We kept on working hard, I lost my concentration and the resulting piece was weak.I chatted with the colleagues and we proved his theory. Miguel has always intuited that working with art was a vain and necessary gesture. I never argued that there was some truth in the Sartrian sentence stating “One supports one’s vices so that the vices may support one”. The church was full of dust, just like those works on paper in Vila’s studio. The railroad’s Central Station in Santiago was also designed by Eiffel. In San José de Costa Rica, there is a school, aptly dubbed the Iron School, manufactured in Belgium.

The Spanish Colonial Period was very clear in its urbanization ideas. Cities were planned following a checkerboard pattern with streets and avenues laid out perpendicularly to each other. Further, even growth was theoretically legislated long before its actual happening. The streets, naturally, received specific names, often honouring saints. More recently, urban nomenclature achieved the most rational of proposals: streets were divided into streets proper and avenues, and again, into systems of even and odd numbers along two axes. This notwithstanding, in the daily practice of all Costa Ricans, places are described in function of other places and their more or less relative distances from each other. For instance: for a time I lived at 1348 1st Avenue, between 11th and 15th Streets. This address never worked in practice. If I ever gave it out, people would look at me with surprise and I was asked, with a show of obvious tolerance for my exoticism, if I could say it again, but “the Tico way”. Alternatively, I could be requested to be more specific and state the “exact” address. The exact version of this former address went: “30 metres west from Bansbach” (a music shop), or “50 longish metres east from the National Assembly”. More examples: “250 metres south of The White Horse, house with cypresses, by the security guard’s booth” (my second, and current address in Costa Rica). But there are more peculiar ones: “from what was the old shop…”; or directly tragic: “from the lady selling lotteries at Cinco Esquinas of Tibás…”; or directly memorable: “from the Burnt Dog…”, “from Oscar Arias’ home…”, “from the Invisible Friend…”, etc. In spite of other nomenclatures proposed by the State and the Municipalities, the urban practice of Costa Rican addresses follows this pattern. To describe a place, people resort to mentioning another, making it impossible for someone newly arrived to get his bearings in the city, unless he negotiates his situation with the local inhabitants. Nevertheless, even the most experienced inhabitants cannot escape negotiation: their better knowledge of the city notwithstanding, they always have to beseech others in order to adjust and trim the course. Cardinal points are a more precise reference, as they are recognized in function of the mountains surrounding San José. Still, there are four cardinal points and every place may potentially be defined in, at least, four different ways, depending on the direction from which one arrives. If using a compass is not quite common, I would dare to say it is at least more frequent than using a map (there are no maps with nonofficial references). For the new arrivals, the feeling of being in a place of infinite descriptions, of innumerable memories, of inexhaustible narratives, is generally overwhelming. Regarding social identity, Costa Rica is self-defined in function of political agreements of compact rhetoric on the Social Welfare State. And also, by the definitive absence of an army. We returned to the hotel that was once the abode of the French engineers, feeling the world was incomplete.

And the West: In what hotel does it live?

To construct is, finally, probably unavoidable. Whether by taste, by the explicit will of mental lucidity, or simply by accident, gazes and purposes construct.

In what hotel do the baskets live?

The notion of fragment exists insofar as we handle notions of totality or of structure. Tolerance, I suppose, is animated by an intuition of love or of death. Taking an ethical stance is not necessarily a discourse.

Art, which is not a thing, is what we human beings make of that situation. The text is also the reader’s mirror. Unlike a stone or a painting, always there and over which a gaze may sweep, the book is a closed object, opening only at the reading of the gaze. The text is like a fact we may, or may not, take into account.

There are no pathetic words per se, just in relation to a context. There is no lost time in a language.

Another word arousing phobias within me, besides the term vanguard, is the verb “to create” and all its derivates (adjectives and nouns) routinely applied to the activities of art. Creative, I think, are certain processes as those leading to the appearance of the scissors, the cup, the sexual exchange of genetic information, or cheese. The ground was moist and the stones displayed greening mosses. Without being unbearable, the morning was warm even under the spruce thick shade. The oaks dominated, with only a few sparse beeches, and there were acorns enough to fatten a herd of wild boars. Red and roe deer wood, I thought. I was looking for sloe and had hopes of finding some bilberries and mushrooms. Certain woods excite within me a curiosity for appetite, and I wander through them imagining good courses and animated dinners with friends. I do not think I heard anything, but I turned to see a shape barely showing through the scrub. I found a few fat and velvety raspberries and my mouth watered. I walked towards where I thought I had seen the shape, but some brambles were in my way. Believing that time spent walking in the woods is never wasted, I was about to take a detour to avoid the thorns. I picked a fistful of blackberries and ate them up with no hurry. I thought I could see a recognizable object among the brambles. I reached with my hand among the thorns until I finally could get out what undoubtedly was the leg of a chair. It was badly weathered and still had, sticking out on one end, two or three nails. I was still looking at it when, again, I had the feeling a massive body was moving in the scrub. This time around, I did not pay much attention. I had found that leg up in the mountain and my most current worry was to look for the possible remains of a chair. Shortly afterwards, I saw a chair back among the brambles. In spite of having help from the leg and a stick, I could not avoid hurting my hands and arms and they started to sting as if with rancour. The back was entangled in the scrub and I understood it would not be worth trying to get it out. I looked at it for a while, in that half-light of dry leaves and new shoots. Determined to do something, I went on looking for more remains, possibly more legs. Our relationship with food, somehow represents the function of alchemy, according to Víctor Grippo. The transformation of energy. Another example, although I cannot quite decipher this one, is the one suggested by Marx that anything imagined by one man, another is able to realize. Once, I was imprisoned together with the architect who had designed the place where we both were confined. Miguel says that all that happens is true. I abandoned the brambles and looked around. I returned home with a basket full with sloe, bilberries, chanterelles and cepes. Lying on its bottom was the chair’s leg.

Jimmie sat. He was happy. I noticed he was travelling with his back towards the front of the train, and I did not think it correct to sit in front. My embarrassment was not long lived as shortly after having shown our tickets to the conductor we moved over to the restaurant and Jimmie served from a bottle of wine that I had not seen arrive, I do not know whether because I was immersed in a tale or a commentary. We checked in at the same hotel, Le Compostelle, and we did not see each other again for the rest of the trip.

* Spanish for vortex (NT).

SECOND PART

DON’T LOOSE YOUR COMPOSURE

“Yo no quiero ser buenamoza”

Among the kidnapped Uruguayans, detained at the National Stadium of Chile in 1973, I remember the arrival of El Canario. Not one week in Chile, he had been arrested in a massive round up. Owing to the military frenzy, scrupulously paranoid and xenophobic, he witnessed the out-of-hand shooting of two persons, guilty of speaking with an Argentinian accent. When it was his turn for interrogation, he had no other option than to pass himself as mute. They thought him a Chilean. This and other confusions allowed him to arrive alive to the National Stadium, at the time converted into an infamous detention centre. He recounted that, sometimes, he would lock himself up in a toilet or draw himself into a solitary corner to pronounce a few words. He said that hearing his own voice helped him to know he was not mute.

I had just one conversation with him. We looked at the tiers full with prisoners and the empty playing field. Big rotating sprinklers rhythmically sprayed water on the grass. Above and beyond the last tier, we could see the solitary golden tops of the Cordillera. The night was falling. We were, as always, thirsty and hungry.

El Canario told me of his girl friend. He did not know where she was. He told me he loved her. And he told me he loved her even when she, sometimes, fell into a deep well where he could not reach her. He told me he loved her even if, sometimes, it was as if she were present, standing behind her own eyes, vibrant and watchful, seeing herself speaking beside her. He told me he always loved her.

Between words, we looked again at the sprinklers and the mountains.

After a while he told me, laughing, that in an anthology of German poetry from the twenties, he had read that: “…the more powerful you are, more you feel compelled to be elegant”. Still laughing, he also remembered it stating: “it is very difficult to give your best at work and, at the same time, to look down on your work”.

The rotating sprinklers had, at times, a hypnotic power on us all. The short profile of the mountain range burning in the evening sun, another.

In that conversation, El Canario showed me how Jack Kerouac and Guevara were similar: the travels, the escape forward, the text from Mallarmé, the fascination for the Other, the excesses, the heroes, the hair done like Elvis, the deep and nervous gaze, even the facial traits, the clothes, the snapshots taken by friends and the diverse rhetorics of the new American dreams. To see the similitudes was to speak, without naming them, of their differences.

September 19, 1918

June 1919

1507 Sarmiento Street

1743 Alsina Street

Why Marcel Duchamp travelled to Buenos Aires, in that South American spring of 1918, is a matter that has been much discussed. What is clear is that he stayed there till mid 1919. Two of his pieces are mentioned as originating in that city, and the addresses where he lived and worked are known (Sarmiento Street, Alsina Street). Julio Cortázar used to tell the story, passed on in Buenos Aires, about Duchamp’s will to meet Macedonio Fernández (the author of El Museo de la Novela de la Eterna). Macedonio lived in a hotel not far away, devoted to drinking mate and to systematically strumming a guitar, badly. In Córdoba, Argentina, I have met people close to Gombrovic (another chess player), who affirmed Duchamp never managed to be received.

In 1538, the first official martyrology of The Catholic Church comes out in print. It mentions Saint Josafat, celebrated since then, and until a recent revision, on November 27th. Saint Josafat had reached great popularity among the believers because of a text (The Golden Legend) signed by Jacobo de Vorágine where the biography of the saint was divulgated.

The Golden Legend had early antecedents. The original version had been written in Sanskrit, in India, in the beginning of the Christian Era. A few centuries later, an Iranian translation appeared (the character was named Budasaf), which was translated into Arabic (Judasaf) around the 7th Century. Of this one, there is a translation into Georgian (Iodasaph), from the 9th Century. In the 10th Century, Saint Eutimio Hagiorita translated this text into Greek (Joasap), which, in turn, was translated into Latin by the 11th Century. This is the version which, enhanced and, again, modified by the above-mentioned Vorágine, knows a massive diffusion in the West.

The original Sanskrit text was called The Life of the Bodhisattva, and endeavoured a divulgation of the life of The Buddha. As of the Georgian text, the life of this Indian prince, whose successive encounters with a blind man, a leper, an old man and an ascetic will always conform the fictionalized beginnings of his mystery, will start to acquire a Christian identity. Twenty centuries after its historical birth and seven after its Georgian version (and one cannot help thinking in the coincidence of the name Vorágine), the avatars of Prince Siddhartha (Josafat), The Buddha, are canonized by the Church of Rome.

Carlos Capelán