Ticio Escobar

The Illegible Proclamation

On the work of Capelán – Ticio Escoar

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

Adorno.

Introduction. Two scenes.

Generally speaking, critical approximations to Capelán’s work take the figure of exile as their starting point. Such an approach is legitimate; undoubtedly Capelán’s displacement – he abandoned Uruguay to flee dictatorial repression – forcefully marks his artistic itinerary. This essay will also take up the figure of exile but that of language rather than politics (although political exile is also implicated): the radical displacements induced by the failures of representation. Perhaps the evictions and displacements suffered by Capelán have sensitized him to the estrangement of the gaze. If so they have facilitated access to the playfulness of art which strives to mend the ruin of place from afar: those strange games capable of forcing open parallel spaces where language resounds either as image or as writing (traced on the limit, suspended over silence). Spectral images from which to glimpse the skittish paths of meaning.

I therefore approach Capelán’s work insofar as it is caught up within the contemporary failure of representation: the catastrophe that forces language into violent contortions and extreme situations. Faced with the insufficiency of the symbolic the only option is to assume radical mobilizations and desperate assaults. The failure can be located in two scenes. The first refers to the political representation of identities. The second to the representation that mobilizes the work of art. In order to facilitate exposition, my essay will consider both scenes separately, but they are inextricable insofar as they concern the politics of the gaze.

On the one hand, the shifting positions, the litigious encounter of gazes, marks the oscillating recognition of subjectivities (whence does an identity come from?). On the other hand, the missed encounter between things and their appearances (the failure of representation in art) not only twists languages, but upsets the labor of the gaze. “A work resists,” says Didi-Huberman, “if it dislocates vision.” He proposes therefore to consider, alongside form, this “fluctuating notion”: the gaze.[1] If, lacking a previous metaphysical guarantee, the work of art finds itself subject to the contingencies of its mise-en-scene, then it ends up depending on its positions and displacements before the gaze. Its auratic investment obeys a “minimum distance” (Benjamin): an always fortuitous distance, marked by the provisional position of the object and freed to the vicissitudes of desire (which is responsible for the fluctuation of the gaze).

But the scenes in which representation fails are also linked because both share a political status and imply an aesthetic dimension. “For representation to convey the human, then, representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure”[2]. Against the immobilization or melancholy produced by the loss of faith in the symbol all that is left is the representation of representation: a painful contortion of language through which it offers up its wants to the gaze, searching thus to dress up its lack with images. This complicated operation is the peculiar calling of art.

The Scene of Identity

The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed the return of the figure of identity to the agenda of the debates of cultural criticism after a long period of exclusion. But its concept had changed in fundamental ways. The so called “identitarian turn” began to use the term not to name a substance but a contingent historical construction. Thus, the term comes closer to designating a historical process (and therefore, a variable one) of identification rather than a fixed identity, predetermined by essential notes. To a greater or lesser extent, identities correspond to a variety of processes of the formation of subjectivities and to strategic positions. They are not exhausted, therefore, in exclusive configurations: individuals and social actors can assume multiple, discardable identitarian formats according to the various ways they slice up their positions of enunciation. That is, their presentation is their self-representation.

At this point representation and the gaze return, because subjects “represent themselves” only to a extent. On the one hand, the Cartesian subject (in possession of its own enunciation) has collapsed. On the other hand, traditional systems of representation based on great fixed unities (the Nation, territory, class, political parties etc.) have fallen away; in their place there have emerged matrices for identification, constituted both by globalization (cultural industries, on line communities) as well as new models of subjective inscription (determined, for example, by personal affinities, gender, sexual preference of aesthetic, ethnic or generational differences)[3].

The classic mechanisms of representation of the self-same and the other are thus disturbed. And this has consequences for the difference of so called “Latin American art”. Enunciated from the center, art produced in the peripheries occupies the predetermined place of the other, that is, the other face of the exemplary identity exhibited by the Western I. This scheme is based on an absolute disjunction: center and periphery occupy the extreme terms of a binary opposition which turns the other into the subaltern inversion and reflection of the self and does not admit of third options. According to this diagram, Latin American art, which seeks to affirm its difference, faces the following dilemma: either it understands its works as pure opposition to those produced by the mainstream (a gesture which signifies the negation of these and which reiterates the asymmetry negatively), or else it over-represents the markers of its own identity in an exoticizing register.

The best art produced in Latin America tries to avoid these false alternatives. The work of Capelán is part of this attempt. It assumes that the conflict between center and periphery are still operative even if takes place through complex transnational relocations. But it also assumes that such opposition must be deconstructed, assumed as a contingent tension, a conflict that can be approached according to variable historical conditions. Once the terms center and periphery are disconnected from the determination of a transcendental contradiction, the difference of Latin American practices can be understood not only through the inversion of the hegemonic model, but also through diverse, pragmatic positions, dyed by particular interests and circumstances. This critical posture leaves aside all pretension of foundational authenticity and all attempt to erect the contingent features of Latin American production in consecrated archetypes of identity. And it allows Capelán to discuss the folklorization of alterity and the stereotypes of memory using strategies that appeal to the wanderings of the gaze: through “hooks,” according to his expression, which confound pre-established meanings.

The places of exile

“I seek to avoid holing myself up in the figure of the exile because I am enamored of language”, affirms the artist[4]. The loss of the country of birth, the distance, the vicissitudes of the political refugee, the nomadism of one who must wander continuously, who must return and leave, because the home country has bifurcated or multiplied (and been displaced over and over again): Capelán does not take on any of these melancholy figure of privation and uprooting thematically but through the coercion exercised over language so that language can name that which lies beyond it.

The artist courts the lack opened up by exile. The artist circles it, attempting to find the signs to name it. The artists ends up turning writing into image, inventing an oblique language which faces it swiftly. How to offer an absence to the gaze? How to recover an impossible place, return to a place that is elsewhere, remember a country that, scattered by many memories, has been turned into many countries or many different places? Only if one assumes the darkened detour of the word, which reaches its limits and becomes a ghost of itself, echo of its own voice, shadow of its stubborn writing.

Masked Portrait

The gaze deforms: only deforming the image can it find, for a second, an adequate angle. The anamorphosis of portraits requires a sideways glance in order to reconstruct, in the moment of its own subtraction, the rapid contour of that which does not have an exact contour, of that which does not have one single contour. The self-portraits of someone who is one exiled are distorted by different gazes. They are crushed, turned into shapeless stains whose key cannot be found by the direct gaze in its attempt at a literal reconstruction of the deranged figure.

But the portraits are shaken by the insistence of the defeated symbol as well as by the reiterative work of a vacillating memory: some self-portraits are superimposed on successive drawings whose lines cross, where profiles are multiplied and figures vacillate. “They are stuttering portraits”, writes Capelán. They are traced with stubbornness, reiterated again and again as if the last drawing had been swallowed up by the wall or needed to be mended. The subject of exile is multiple and emerges decentered. It lacks a surface of homogeneous smooth inscription: its angles distorted, it does not stick to any surface and ignores the strictures of the plane. It becomes a knot of tangled lines. The work of memory (the attempt to represent a displaced sameness) requires the obsessive reiteration of a silhouette which can not be completed. It summons the presentation of the face in corners, behind other works, in spaces that are crowded or badly lit. Like prehistoric cave paintings (which the artist evokes in his own occasional paintings on rocks), what is important is the fact that the image answers the summons, even if it is confused with previous images and even if light is not enough to reveal it. The magical performativity: the pure force of the invoked form. To paint a face on one own’s face is also a performance: like the mask (which Lévi-Strauss likens to facial painting) it corrects one’s face from an exiled self-perception.

The appearance of the invisible

“Darkness always invite a gaze”, Capelán comments. Memory obliges one to squint, to refine the gaze, to imagine what has been erased by distance or shadows: that which can not be plainly distinguished. In some works – like those presented in the Bienal of Venice in 1995 – Capelán produces darkness to force the gaze to confront nothingness: the non-place where lost objects and transfigured lands can be found, the emptiness which territory leaves behind when it is displaced. (The murky region where that which cannot be shown – but which demands to be shown – awaits).

House Taken Over

The artist’s invasion of abandoned houses, undertaken between 1985 and 1987, can certainly be seen as critical, ironic reflections on the institutionality of art. But they can also be considered attempts to compensate imaginarily for the mythic lost place. A ritual of mourning for the uselessness of return, the impossibility of origin.

The rite can also be traced in the montage of chaotic domestic spaces, installed compulsively and with great attention to detail in successive occasions. Freud distinguished between simple rememoration (Erinnerung), which pretends to identify and restore, intact, the primordial scene, and “working through” (Durcharbeitung), which disorders the sequence of time and leaves the question of meaning (the suspense of happening) open in the past. Lyotard understands this term as an operation that does not attempt to restitute the original scene, but presupposes “that the past itself [. . .] gives [to the mind] the elements with which the scene will be constructed”[5]. This is the space that Capelán seeks to install: not the scene which faithfully replaces the original place, but the scene which represents the impossibility of representation. That is, the one that opens up the play of significations which can overturn the memory of the original home in order to turn it into a reservoir of meaning.

Earth

In a suffocating installation (titled The House of Memory 1996), giant windows interrupt passage. They carry small mounds of earth brought by friends from different ends of the earth (one cannot but hear the echo of Heidegger’s name for earth, Welt, the compact, dark material which refuses to be deciphered).

This small rite is one way of naming the heterogeneous territory that is one’s own and also alien. It is a way of building identity according to group affinities (a social modality which, according to the artist, is closer to the punk concept of the urban group rather than the hippie idea of community). It also suggests a way of diagramming geography through affects and sensibilities and through the geometry of strictly visual configurations. Each pile of earth is symbolically marked: it comes from the soil of a site that is privately consecrated (it is composed of elements imbued with the work of memory). The artist constructs the ground of the scene collectively, half-way between the public and private. The artist traces a map.

A map

Deleuze and Guattari use the term map in opposition to tracing[6]. The latter seeks to copy space faithfully; the former to reinscribe geographies in order to open them up to multiple coordinates of meaning. The tracing tries to duly reconstruct the features of the represented territory. The map seeks to admit the pressures of desire to reinvent frontiers and invert the position of the cardinal points; imagine entries and exits not registered by world maps, approximations and distances that are impossible, and the mixed soil of strange lands[7]. Capelán includes maps of his country in his installations, but he also calls his installations maps, insofar as they promote cartographies and topographic schemas: encoded writings, diagrams of random itineraries and floating positions: points which exist only as gifts to the gaze.

The borrowed letter

Sometimes the friends don’t send mounds of earth but sealed envelopes which are displayed, unopened, in frames or windows; they are both offered and withdrawn from the gaze. The distance which the labor of memory needs is established on blind spots. (That is why the letter too close at hand evades the gaze.

THE SCENE OF ART

Hooks

The second scene where the failure of representation operates is art. The system of art always constructs itself from maneuvers of representation, which substitute an object for its image and turns this sleight of hand into the principle of new truths. We know that the classic conception of representation, based on the complete appearance of the object, has failed. And this failure – the impossibility of reaching the object – marks the sphere of art with negativity, and colors it with melancholy.

Thus the critique of representation is part of the current agenda of art. At least since Kant, since the beginnings of modern art, art is defined precisely as the transcendental conflict between subject and object: a complicated history of crossings and missed encounters, of promises and deceits. The kingdom of the aesthetic – that of the sensible appearance, that of image – is a result of the inevitable theatre of shadows: the confused waiting room which precedes the kingdom of art. When the walls of this kingdom fall – when the autonomy of the aesthetic form is cancelled – the situation is even more complicated. How to represent that which is outside if one can no longer clearly distinguish an inside? In principle Hegel foretold the dislodging of the aesthetic by real things or by their concept. But the fact is that art continues to function and that its institutions have, in fact, strengthened, fed in part by the interests of the international markets. The questions are not resolved on such slippery terrain, but the scene of art is not cancelled either.

There is a provisional way out, an emergency exit: it is true that the metaphysical concept of representation (mimesis as the realization of presence) has collapsed but contemporary art – much like its theory, from which it does not differ overmuch – has been able to make this lack fruitful. Butler’s formula – in which the failure of representation can only be resolved by its own exhibition – can be cited again here. The power of contemporary art resides in the very impossibility of the encounter between sign and thing, its economy is set in motion by the fact that its anxieties are not consummated.

“Art lets go of the prey for the shadow”, says Lévinas[8]: opting quickly by the seduction of appearances. But, unsatisfied with mere illusion, art wants truth in both. Art does not renounce the real prey. It attempts to hunt it down underneath the veil which conceals and highlights it. Art is aware of the traps of representation, but tries to use its artifice to reach the real. It wants to mock the limit of the scene, name that which is unsheltered, history in all its misery and greatness, strange cultures, personal shipwrecks. Even further: it wants to reach both uncertain reality and the inaccessible real[9]. In order to do so, it must mock the circle of representation even if it can’t undo it. Its only resource are images which can, for an instant, sustain themselves beyond the limit and flicker like lightening across the blackest depths of that which cannot be named.

Capelán works this imprecise scene, assuming the ruses of fiction to graze the elusive body of that which announces itself and withdraws. One of his figures captures this attempt well: that of the hook. This dispositif is similar to the Lacanian lure of the gaze: it is the trick that assures the object’s appearance and sustains its aura. The artist says that he uses a hook when offering the spectator a lure in order to attract and challenge his/her gaze, and later, in order to disconnect the spectator, forcing him/her into foci, biases, and changes in points of view that open new perspectives of signification. This creates the possibility of escaping from the circle of representation for an instant and imagining what must exceed it.

Hooks imply games of irony, one of the fundamental mechanisms that art uses to distance itself from its own setting, observing it, commenting it, as if it were something outside itself. Some of Capelán’s paintings, in which he paints with his hand instead of a brush, constitute a hook because they exhibit manual dexterity but advance concepts that have nothing to do with the art of painting. Threatened on one side, and attacked on the other, the observer is forced to remain on guard, distrusting that which is seen, forced to track meaning where it does not appear. The trajectory of the gaze is held in suspense—it is suspicious of the presented object and assumes something beyond it, an interior, an invisible side that hides the key. Ordinary, vulgar objects, framed and exhibited as works of art, are also hooks, as well as the presentation in a traditional format of objects that could only be considered artistic in a contemporary register (that is to say, they do not acquire their “artistry” from intrinsic properties, but rather from the mechanisms of their exhibition). In a certain sense, we could say that writing acts as a hook: it exposes the word, but it in the end, acts as image.

On the Illegible

Seeking to trespass the limits of the symbolic order—the threshold of the scene of representation—Capelán forces language to its extreme, exploring its most remote margins, pressuring it to turn into image, writing, so that it opens up to that which is undecipherable in it. Derrida, let us not forget, maintained that reading meant acknowledging a principle of illegibility. If language is not capable of making its meanings transparent, then those meanings must be sought out in the wandering drifts of the sign, in its excesses and failures, in its silences and the spaces between.

This search harbors ethical and political meanings: it implies mistrusting language’s omnipresence, disputing its unidirectionality, challenging the power of its fixed codes. Toward this end, Capelán invokes cunning tricks in order to destabilize the signifier and provoke the proliferation of meaning. These hooks seek to revert the hollow opened up by representation: the emptiness left by what is missing. The attempt to outwit the impossibility of grasping the real requires diverse strategies that escape the grammar of form: “The questions which count,” says Fabri, “are tactical rather than syntactic.”[10]

*

His 1986 piece, “The Primitives” tackles the indeterminate conflict between image and text by manipulating a book. The volume is invaded by figures that come into tension with words and illustrations; they usurp their space or negotiate with them over third spaces. For example, in the chapter The primitives Capelán’s drawings interfere with the contents of the essay, demanding that a European ethnocentric ethnology be read from another place and that ethnographic photography itself be questioned. This operation constitutes, on the other hand, a certain position in relation to particular questions, once again concerned with representation, that keep contemporary art awake at night. I am referring, in this case, to the problem of “content-ism”. Once formal autonomy has given way, art takes up different epistemological discourses such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, etc. But if art can no longer hold onto aesthetic form as a divider, how can it avoid dissolving into these different fields? The question does not have an absolute answer because form and content enter into contingent and variable debates that are, a priori, unsolvable. Art opens itself up to extra-artistic contents, but these must be, albeit minimally, determined by material form so that they might appear before the gaze. Capelán’s piece faces this problem directly: it maintains an extra-artistic discourse (a critique of anthropological colonialism), but it does so from debates about aesthetics: the strength of the stroke (accentuated by its affiliation with a certain characteristic tendency of Latin American drawing), expressiveness, the command of graphic space, resources of visual composition, etc.

*

Other distortions of the destiny of the book should also be considered assaults on linguistic self-sufficiency. In certain performances that Capelán carried out in the houses he took over, characters sat atop piles of books, tearing pages out of them and tossing them in the air until the books were left mangled and dismembered. In contrast to a certain interpretive naiveté —which arrived at the conclusion that this gesture was an act of neo-fascist vandalism—we could read this action, from a Derridean perspective, as the triumph of the text over the book, in which the aphoristic, disruptive energy of writing acts before the book’s encyclopedic logocentrism: this is why “the destruction of the book (. . .) denudes the surface of the text.”[11]

Likewise, the successive presentations of books, fixed or flattened by pieces of rock, expose writing’s revenge against the book that remains closed in order to keep watch over the illegible and ensure difference; the failure—but not the annulment—of meaning. The tightly closed nature of books requires investigation into other codes that will not reveal the final answer, but will be able to inhabit a productive space for the search. (When I asked Capelán about those sealed volumes, he firmly answered, “I don’t speak about that.”)

I suppose he would also refuse to talk about the burned books whose ashes were preserved in bottles as if they were urns. However, he did relay to me the story on which this work is based: a woman, who was unable to remember the tragic experience she suffered at a Nazi concentration camp, found herself with another woman, who did remember her own experience. This confrontation with the emptiness of her memory, realized through a detour through the memory of the other, moved her to such a degree that she spent the whole night obsessively writing that which she had forgotten. But, how to record a missing memory? How does one make emptiness into a sign? Along these lines, Lyotard offers the question (that would seem to refer specifically to this case): “The point would be to recall what could not have been forgotten because it was not inscribed. Is it possible to recall if it was not inscribed? Does it even make sense?”[12] And later he replies: ““It makes sense to try to recall something (let’s call it something) which has not been inscribed if the inscription of this something broke the support of the writing or the memory. [. . .] So there is a breaking presence which is never inscribed nor memorable.”[13] Lacan says that what has been foreclosed and not admitted into the symbolic order returns as the real; so how to now admit this unnamable real?

Let us continue now with the story: finishing her writing, the woman burns the papers that sustained it. She burns, at the very least, the calligraphic strokes of an inscription (we don’t know if she burns the register of language). She saves writing, rendering it illegible, displacing a truth that could not be sustained by words or paper: not even by memory. Capelán completes the gesture of saving the ashes, residues of other texts, in sealed bottles. The enigma is saved as well as the possibility that language cannot be sealed and that there is a place (always differentiated) for a presence that destroys even if it is nameless.

*

The Project Post-Colonial Liberation Army (Dematerialization) is displayed through manifestos which, by way of aphorisms and sharp pronouncements, depart from certain strategic postulations of the system of art, in order to reposition them within the context of a diverse set of pragmatic questions. The work is composed of printed texts that are piled upon the installation floor so that spectators may take them: but sometimes the texts escape from the format of a sheet of paper and circulate anonymously on the Internet (disseminating themselves according to the logic of the net, creating unease with regards to their motives), or are framed as if they constituted pieces of graphic work. In this way, the project invokes ingenious language games in order to disorientate the fundamentalism of military mottos and canonical pronouncements about art.

The work is ironic with respect to the rhetoric of art systems, particularly avant-garde manifestos and the revolutionary proclamations of modernity. But, like all truly ironic gestures, it does not attempt this in order to judge and condemn intricate theoretical operations and old Leninist formulas, but rather to wink at them complicitly and playfully challenge their axioms. In this way, it attempts to enable re-readings capable of undoing the dogmatic solemnity of texts and putting other questions into circulation, camouflaging them in theoretical orthodoxy while undermining it. Capelán replaces the figure of revolution with that of re-materialization, a term which he turns into a synonym of, or at least an equivalent notion to, the Derridean concept of deconstruction. He seeks, as such, to infiltrate enemy terrain in order to unsettle the orthodoxy of its convictions and create the possibility of parallel readings. This irony makes possible a “writing of writing,” a reflexive distance through which the transgression of desire can sneak past.

The work leads to an ethical question: it is linked to the imperative to construct alternative subjectivities through which to assume political positions before history, beyond the models of the avant-garde or the codes of party politics. That is to say, the imperative to construct flexible identities, ready to participate in the public sphere through contingent positions, ready to transgress the symbolic order—the very system of representation—in order to see what takes place outside the scene and suggest new exits. This position does not forget the tragedy of the dictatorship but invents other images so that it does not turn into a cliché. “They fucked us over, they tortured us and we keep on going, kid,” says Capelán in his peculiar central-South American tone. We keep aspiring to create worlds of meaning.

Bookcases

There is no such thing as objects that are intrinsically artistic: objects become artistic (or not) according to their contingent position before the gaze. The spectator sees and is seen by the object displayed (Benjamin, Lacan) and at a certain unknowable and extremely brief point, at the intersection of gazes, a disturbance, a spark or short-circuit is produced in the object’s signification; at the end of the day this is more or less what we call art. “Anything that is put on display in a glass case creates relational diagrams,” says Capelán. That is to say, mise-en-scene, the presentation of diverse objects before the gaze—independently of their aesthetic qualities—constitute an aesthetic operation; these acts force us to imagine conformations and categories, oppositions, and constellations.

Capelán employs this principle in order to construct “hooks,” gaze-hunting devices. With the tiny, crescent residues of his own fingernails, he writes or draws ambiguous figures that suspend the signified, causing it to oscillate between the game of forms and the materiality of corporeal remains (and their dense meanings). Freely dispersed, the associations are demarcated by the ordering work of forms that sketch out unknown writings, representations of clouds or maps, or purely abstract geometries (such as the decorations of Guaraní earthenware throughout the entire Southern Cone of South America where the ornamental motif is constituted by sharp ridges etched in by the rhythmic pressure of nails on clay).

At times what is exhibited in the display case is itself a taxonomic diagram (the order of any classification whatsoever) or the very economy of repetition (the sequential ordering of one single object that insists on reiterating its presence, and by doing so, altering it). On the other hand, the display cases point to the figure of the collection that at the same time mobilizes imaginary representations of historical, aesthetic, and social categories.

But the display cases not only generate formal associations and awaken significant resonances; they also represent themselves. (Let us not forget that representation always contains an instance of self-representation: the preferred artistic moment, since it creates the possibility of distance, reflection, and irony). The shelf has a visual presence that impacts the configuration of the installation space. But it is not simply any material presence: it is the very device of representation. The display case erects a space to create the illusion of the scene. Lacan calls this artifice, which acts as the scaffolding of desire, bâti[14]: the artist creates a theatrical assembly in order to seduce the gaze (a hook Capelán would say), that is to say, in order to conceal/reveal the object; to overturn it through impulse and to imbue it with aura.

The Truth of the Walls

For Capelán, exhibiting the mechanics of the exhibition constitutes a political gesture that allows him to critically reflect on the system of art: its institutionality, its circuits, discourses and myths. He begins by reviewing the inscriptional structure of the work, the material support of the representation. The walls of the exhibition hall are not neutral; they are the parergon, the context of the work that intervenes in its display. Capelán continues to feel interpellated by the “historical truth” of the walls; for this reason he contemplates their imperfections, their angles and his own presence, subverting the exhibition’s codes and exceeding the virtual sector that, to a certain extent, frames traditional vision. The same wall becomes the background of the painting or drawing; a background that does not acknowledge the conventional itinerary of the gaze and that forces it to circulate against the grain , to wander up and down, and hunt for signs of the ground.

On the other hand, the anamorphous drawings require brusque perspectives, inclinations and displacements constrained by the fluctuation of the gaze. Lastly, Capelán commonly uses improper surfaces for plastic and graphic inscription: rocks, printed papers, leaves, roots, his own face, supports which have bulks and hollows which shatter the smooth surface of the plane and break up its homogeneity. These operations allow us to understand each work as particular: each one depends strictly on the conditions of exhibition that refer to the outside of the scene. In each of his shows, Capelán contemplates the conditions of the white cube: the place of representation is never sanitary, we find it contaminated by external vicissitudes, impinged by contingencies and accidentes that continually permeate and redraw the scenic circle and reverberate in its interior, intercepting the possibilities of a self-sufficient work of art.

At times this discussion requires drawing other, broader contours that contain (almost always) the first. The theater within the theater, the display case within the display case. The scenes from the series Maps and Landscapes (as with others) constitute not only the exhibition rooms of works of art (writings on the wall, framed paintings, objects displayed on the floor, or on pedestals), but exhibited art; the installation signifies in itself an appeal to the gaze, a mise-en-scene of the very interpretive space, whose crowded nature acquires its own value of presence: those games of illumination, the painting on the wall (sometimes made of mud), the corners, the ceiling and floor, do not adhere submissively to the works they contain. Instead, they battle with them, vying over meaning and negotiating intervening space. For example, museum walls, painted entirely by hand, redirect the meanings of the exhibited works, interfering in them with strong connotations: the use of cheap labor referred to in Europe as “sudaca” (“southern shit”) work, the idea of the museum’s tactile appropriation, the sensual dressing of walls whose physical consistency is thus stressed etc.

These Works of Art Are Not Works of Art

The series Do the Natives Have Souls? is based on thematically unclassifiable digital photographs. Assuming the figurative technique of Rorschach’s test, each image is laid out as a unity constructed from internal splitting and reflection, the game of identity and difference. The virtual axis that divides, symmetrically, the photos and permits the inverted duplication of its parts means that it is not possible to determine which is the original image and which its copy, which the front, and which the back. This meaningful suspense reinforces the meaning of the title that perhaps constitutes the scaffolding for the piece *: the colonial discussion concerning the very humanity of indigenous peoples. To install so inhumane (and so soul-less) a question on a formally beautiful image, one that is centered and exact although ambiguous in its truths, constitutes an incisive irony regarding systems of art. On the one hand, beauty as the coronation of the completed form, as harmonic synthesis that leaves no trace and generates satisfaction. On the other hand, the insolence of a question marked by a savage past: a history that cannot be forgotten because it continues to have consequences, further producing discrimination, misery, and insult.

It is not by coincidence that this series constitutes an homage to Magritte, depraved specialist in the theater of representation. It becomes impossible to define an artistic operation, but among the infinite attempts to do so we could say that art means putting a sign of interrogation on things: instilling suspicion as to the transparency of the signs that name things.

*

Now then, a radical work of art always seeks to bind this suspicion with that impossibility of defining art itself. That is to say, the same concept of art is labeled with an unsolvable question that prevents its closure. Or with contradictory answers that subject the concept to the paradox. The work exhibited in the National Museum of Montevideo (2005) includes, among other works, some parrots who, positioned in individual cages, insistently repeat the phrase, I am art, while others repeat, I am not art. Some birds better succeed in repeating this phrase than others, but in general, the message that is transmitted is, obviously, vacillating and confusing.

The readings this piece opens up are varied and, for the most part, concerned with the limits of language and the fate of the museum as an institution, but the very existence of broken record is uncomfortable: it alludes to the repetitive chatter of certain discourses about art, it fosters distrust as to the status of the work of art itself (what is art?, what is it not?) and it problematizes the validity of resources that prove to be, once again, politically incorrect (such as the use of live animals).

*

The only piece Capelán has created under the name video is not undertaken with a camera. The series “This is not a video” (“Ceci n’est pas un video”) puts in question the normative discourse surrounding artistic genres, dismanteling classifications based on the fetishization of technical processes. The work consists of 48 highly aesthetic, semantically neutral digital images (representing skies, airports, and quotidian places), positioned, yet again, according to the iconography of Rorschach’s test and subtitled with pieces of text referring to the content of the work. In This is not a video, the movement is not produced by the photographic work of the camera, but rather by the displacement of the spectator who traverses the exhibition.

This operation allows the artist to make an ironic commentary on the loss of the notion of the “image in motion” that characterizes video. This is so because today, by and large, videos, while continually vindicating the purity of that which they name, are increasingly produced by means of animated computer programs: the camera creates a filmic spray to be digitally edited later, without real successive movements. More than denouncing the supposed adulterations of a technical process (that of video in this case), Capelán seeks to prove the contingency of aesthetic categories: its does not matter if a work of art is or is not a video, but rather whether or not it proves capable of mobilizing meaning. On the other hand, the wink to Magritte obliges us to once again frame the question within the context of the slippage of the image and the misunderstanding of the representation: they do not disavow the truth of the work, but by displacing it and confusing it with its own shadows, they oblige us to look for it, again and again, elsewhere.

*

Schopenhauer’s, The World as Will and Representation, asks if human reality could be given adequate meaning by images and concepts. Capelán works off this premise by questioning, once again, the possibilities of the language of art in venturing beyond the realm of the representable. In Jet-lag Mambo (2000), Capelán presents a painting surrounded by quotes and comments written on the wall and referring to the text of this German philosopher. The painting, made from dirt, fruit juice, and breast milk (that of his wife, collected while she was breast feeding) is found in a constant process, the consistency of the image depending on the action of heat that, upon bleaching the organic dyes, produces rust. The same materials have strong signifying marks: breast milk, for example opens an intense and vast spectrum of associations. Without denying other resonances, I am interested in underlying aspects within the effects of this text linked to the problem of representation: of that which exists and is not shown in full, of that which appears and ebbs away, of the invisible that, as Wittgenstein would have it, should be shown.

It is these materials themselves that initiate the game of presence and subtraction: when the organic dyes of the painting recede, all that is left are the faded, rusted traces. The vestiges have an oscillating and spectral status: they are signs of things but also part of them. The veiled traces that point to milk are not only images of it, but real milk that produces its own self-representation in the theater of the scene. And, in the process of doing so, becomes its own sign, even while furtively conserving its own entity (it impregnates the medium, injecting itself into its thin body, dying it from within; producing, perhaps, a dry stain on the other side). This indeterminate character, between its real presence and its mere appearance, between its outline and its evaporation, situates it halfway between the sign and the thing. And this demands the irruption of other meanings.

During the dictatorship, clandestine communication between militants required invisible writings: they employed dyes made from lemon juice or diluted starch so that the message in white could only be revealed through the use of heat or an iodine solution. Once again the illegible and its diverted codes. The true content of a representation is a representation, a manifestation and avoidance of the gaze. This is why Derrida says that “The illegible is not the opposite of the legible; it is the space that provides the occasion or the force to return to the beginning” [15] Capelán would say that the illegible is a hook: a ruse to trick the fixity of the legible and track the meanings written in white, between the lines, or on the other side.

*

Facing the illegible, on the brink of representation’s failure, art does not resign itself to ingeniously employing the fort/da pendulum of the gaze, as if it were playing in the dark in a room of mirrors: in the frustration of full presence (and of the pure gaze), it seeks the occasion or strength to begin anew the search for signification. Or, what is more or less the same, to open up a space for the question. Amongst other definitions given to the term “hook,” Capelán refers to this strategy as “hurling a stone in the air and waiting for something to happen.”

As such, the artist’s attempt to control the entire process of signification within the work of art is challenged; the intention that his/her message will dodge interferences and noises, to arrive intact at its receptor. Because of this, Capelán invents conditions so that something takes place: he opens a scene of anticipation. Heidegger refers to this opening as Lichtung: the clearing left by the work of art in order to await the event. In the midst of cramped dwellings, of overwritten pages, of images stacked upon each other, Capelán introduces a sharp break or decoy that unhinges the stage and fleetingly cracks it open to imminence.

Asunción, May 2008

[1] Georges Didi-Huberman, “La emoción no dice yo. Diez fragmentos sobre la libertad estética”, in Adriana Valdés, edit., Alfredo Jaar. La política de las Imágenes, Metales Pesados, Santiago de Chile, 2008, p. 41.

[2] Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London; New York: Verso, 2004, p. 144.

[3] The return to primary forms of identification (provided by the “organic community”) risks the promotion of identitarian straightjackets and endangers the collective strategies required by the public sphere (especially in Latin America). It is necessary therefore to affirm the need to articulate partial identities in projects geared towards consolidating the public sphere. The conjunction between figures of identity and citizenship has considerably opened up the space of the political.

[4] Interview with Carlos Capelán on April 15, 2008 in Asunción, Paraguay. All quotes from the artist are from this interview.

[5] Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 31.

[6] Deleuze, Gilles and Féliz Guattari. On the Line. Trans John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983, 25.

[7] The tracing and map can be related to the previously cited figures of rememoration y working through.

[8] Emmanuel Lévinas, La realidad y su sombra, Libertad y mandato, Trascendencia y altura, Editorial Trotta, Madrid, 2001, pág. 52. [Reality and its shadow. Collected Philosophical Papers. The Hague. Martinus Nijhoff, 1987. (pg?)]

[9] The term “real” is used in the Lacanian sense of that which escables the symbolic, that which cannot be represented.

[10] Paolo Fabri, El giro semiótico, Gedisa, Barcelona, 1999, pág. 105.

[11] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Johns Hopkins Press: Baltimore, 976, p. 18.

[12] Lyotard, op. cit., p. 54.

[13] Ibídem, p. 55.

[14] See this concept in Mayette Viltard, “Foucault, Lacan: La lección de las Meninas”, in Litoral. La opacidad sexual II, École Lacanienne de Psychanalyse, Edelp, 28, Córdoba, Argentina, October 1999, p. 129.

* Here I refer only to a single line of connotations but it is evident that the reference to the image of the psychodiagnostic text mobilizes another register of meaning, linked to the representation of the subject.

[15] Jacques Derrida, Posiciones, Valencia, Pre-Textos, 1977, pág. 161.