metropolis m

Postmodernism managed to dump any trust in past and present. Then or now, neither or either – both were a post-modern ‘whatever’. But not to Marta Kuzma, one of the two curators of Manifesta 5, who, in a trusted modernist manner attempts to restore a historical consciousness, as a lesson for the future.Art is partly the organization of materials, partly technology, and partly other matter allowing it to claim a special authority as ‘arts’. Its mystery remains in its capacity to produce meaning from the materials defined in the artist’s technique in terms of its making. In this riddle of art there is no solution to the puzzle but only more questions that return us to the work time and time again. Through the means of its productivity, art may find the key to its survival in locatin the means to display the infinite in the finitude of its materiality. This sustainability relates to a certain conception of historical time that allows for a distinction within the artwork between its internal organization and its external projection marking a gap between the world and the work that returns the work to reckon with the past if only so that the oresent may be freed from the hold of the past in preventing the past from determining the present’s self-conception. This striving for, this potential and ambition, is what enables art to transcend beyond the here and now and to seek out what Adorno refers to as ‘the something more’ or the ‘crackling noise’ that extends beyond the work’s rational construction as art’s apparition. The apparition, however, does not entail something phantasmagorical as it is art’s cunning in the form of irony which sabotages anything illusory. The paradox of art’s incomprehensibility and its enigmatic character is arbitrated in the way we relate to art and the way we relate to art is negotiated in the form of criticism. Criticism is what completes the work, not in the sense of perfecting it, rather to prevent it from being annihilated. The basis for criticism is nevertheless drawn from the level of production of a work of art to determine if what has been created is new or interesting in terms of production. In fact, the periods when the culture of criticism had been actively intermingled with the culture of production was based on particular social conditions when an active discourse resultes as a collaborative social form. However brief these historical periods were, the engaged culture of criticism was engaged in the Jena Group (1798-1800), the Soviet Avant-Garde (1913-1918), and the Conceptualist Movement (1961-1967),Ever since Baudelaire theoretically articulated the ‘new’ as bound up with the commodity character of art in works such as Flowers of Evil and Spleen et Ideal to codify the logic of negation as a means for art to retain its autonomy from the commodity, the new has become akin to death, and imagination with violence. It was also at this time that ‘experiment’ as a category in relation to producing art was adopted to signify what was fashionably deemed as modern and the primacy of construction methods above subjective imagination became fundamental for modern art. This turning the new back over onto ruins was further elaborated upon by Adorno in The New: Its Philosophy of History: ‘The aim of the current history of ideas is virtually to demonstrate that the new does not exist. Yet, since the mid-nineteenth century and rise of high capitalism, the category of the new has been central, though admittedly in conjunction with the question whether anything new had ever existed. …The new is necessarily abstract: it is no more know than the most terrible secret of Poe’s pit. …The new is a blind spot, as empty and perfect “thisness”.‘ 1

Work-in-progress

A contemporary example of a re-expression of the inquiry into the new may be found in the investigations by the German artist Kirsten Pieroth who explores its meaning in relation to the verb to invent as defined in the dictionary as: ‘1. to create or design or 2. to make up, think of (i.e. as in existing before but unknown).’Departing from particular items associated with the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison purchased at auction on the internet, Pieroth leads her investigation between the things that characterized a time when industrialization flourished and the present. Within an open-ended process of correspondence and research around the categories of authenticity, patent, license, and distribution, the artist refers to a series of fragments that compose this and former projects. In Manifesta 5, Pieroth divided this particular investigation into three inter-related sections – a letter of excuse written by inventor Edison for a dinner he was not able to attend due to illness, an original Edison brick built into wall that stands alone to support nothing, and an original Edison copy machine which the artist utilized to duplicate the log entries from a chart found on a local sailing vessel which recording page after page the words – ‘nothing to do’. The artist unravels the meanings of these artefacts certified as authentic to redeem their impotence and their evolved fiction. The letter of excuse although composed by the Edison cannot be patented as an excuse despite having been invented by the inventor, the wall built from the one original Edison brick serves no function, and the original copy machine is rendered obsolete and inefficient in producing meaningless messages. Establishing a ‘syntax of sites’, Pieroth proposes a set of coordinates that have little to do with the historical reality of Edison but display an underlying philosophical and conceptual structure, a mapping of physical and textual filiations, that only affirm Novalis’ claim that the impossibility of a modern work of art is made possible in the form of the expression of its impossibility. Situating works in progress as deconstructions that serve as digressions composed of various fragments is part of the ontological nature of contemporary art. These very strategies – groundbreaking and crucial to the model of work by the early German Romantics – emphasize the relationship of the whole to the part, the use of the fragment, and the logic of negation, reworked through Benjamin and Adorno, to arrive at a paradoxical concept of incomprehensibility as a key for the autonomous work of art. These strategies as first set in place by the Jena Romanticists has been shared by all avant-garde movements – from 1789 through 1968, when conceptualist artists entered into a functional or even reductivist relationship with reality to break with its falsification in a radical inversion. Duchamp, Benjamin, and Smithson had taken the real apart, de-created the real, and represented it through its part to illustrate an experience recreated by an intense investment of fragments of contents. As Smithson proceeded with syntactical rearrangements in the deserts of North America, Dan Graham in the suburbs of New Jersey, Broodthaers decontextualising the museum in Belgium, Bas Jan Ader searching out and exploring the rupture of the Cartesian method in Los Angeles, Holland and La Coruna, other modernities assumed a distinct conceptual shape at the time of the return of postwar critical thought to reflect living systems of poiesis while also exhibiting political engagement.

Between creation and destruction

In the Ukrainian SSR, a group of engineers employed to document the state infrastructure and factory interiors formed a clandestine collective in the late 1960s to approach the role of photography in forming perception under existing political conditions and amid the increased techno-bureaucracy of the Soviet Union. Their intent had been to intimate the dimensions of a politically transfigured everyday life. The research and activities of this collective have yet to be recognized by institutions either nationally or internationally and yet, the compilation of collected fragments, sketches, photos and papers may constitute the most important archive reflecting critical cultural thought and production within the post Stalinist period. In Franco’s Spain within the Gipuzkoa territory of the Basque country, the collective GUAR was formed by eight artists in the early 1960s as a private cultural production centre interdisciplinary. Jorge Oteiza, an artist who abandoned sculptural practice following his participation at the Bienal de Sao Paulo in 1957, was as the forefront of this collective and pro-active in seeking out alternative possibilities for cultural production. At the same time that Adorno was engaged in exploring the historical nature of function as illustrated through the construction of art finding examples in architecture, Oteiza expressed his views among his colleagues to pursue a new functionalist approach to the art gallery. He urged for the need to ‘depart from the concrete rationalism and geometric reasoning of place prevalent in previous decades toward the irrational, spontaneous, subjective, informal conditions of expression’. These experimental activities carried out throughout the 1960s had been supported by the industrialist and entrepreneur Juan Huarte who was inspired by these artists’ interest in collectivism and exploration of the industrial trope of the factory. Curators and cultural producers Peio Aguirre and Leire Vergara in the form of D.A.E. recuperated a film entitled Operación H. from the Basque film archive for their project in Manifesta 5. The film as produced by the Nestor Basterretxea and commissioned by Huarte, had never been intended as a work of art but an experiment as to how the artist might refer to the medium of film to extend the construction metaphor in relation to sculptural production. In recuperating the film, Aguirre and Vergara sidestep any categorization as curator or artist, to participate as cultural producers who recontextualize the original film as an expression of a group of amalgamating individuals who sought out a conceptual framework for sculptural production that resisted construction, while being linked to the processes of economic production prevalent throughout the Basque country at the time. Unintentionally, the film produced in 1963 arrives in 2004 as an art work. Failures in achievements of finality, are in some ways, their strengths – not belonging to the past, but as traces of the past that continue into the living present. The ambiguous nature of the new is that it is, perhaps, situated in the intentionless oscillating between creation and destruction. …With All Due Intent, Lawrence Weiner’s work for Manifesta 5 is, unintentionally, a title. Moreover, it is a fragment to be added onto the many other fragments (perceived as a litany of titles) that serve as thoughts by which to proceed. The artist’s work discreetly conceals as much as it interrupts. It is as much complete as it is incomplete. The logic of its construction as a sculptural device abides to a continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts- between force and law and the desire of withdrawel and unraveling. As exemplary of the artist’s work, this contributing title reveals the synthesis of two antithetical sentences interweaving the juridical and legal: ‘With Due Intent’, a criminal indictment of someone who has murdered with purpose, and a phrase of courtesy, ‘With All Due Respect’, inferring a passive retraction of will that allows others to proceed. The title holds a dissonance that recalls Friedrich Schlegel’s thoughts that once the end has been reached, it should start again from the beginning, alternating between chaos and system, preparing chaos for the system, then a new chaos. Weiner transforms the visual field into a textual one – one in which the physical properties of language lead to an understanding of object and language relationships that reveal new linguistic objects in locating, as if a new chord, that had never been previously heard but always existed before. Notes1 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Athlone Press, London, 1997, pp.18-21.