Chus Martínez

De perdidos, al río: All In

Art is not synchronised with reality. The expression “art and its time” does not allude to the shared dimension between contemporary production and our life. Rather, this expression states that art inhabits a temporal dimension that is never fully or partially synchronised with our biological life. How then can we possibly interpret it? Therein lies the rub of this paradoxical state; this mismatch between us and art: rather than interpreting, we sense that those realities and dimensions to which art alludes will indeed come about. History, the act of venturing, generation after generation, into this practice and its logic, prepares us to read in the art of the present what will happen in the future. Journalistic logic and the mentality of the chronicler insist on making us believe that art speaks of its present. It certainly almost seems that way at times. However, I am convinced that such a thing is simply impossible and that the clues to our present lie in the works, practices and discourses of the not too distant past. Very recently I gave the Ljubljana biennial the title of The Oracle. At the time I insisted that the title responded to the interpretation of the place in which the works situate us as a privileged space from which to ask fundamental questions. Today, however, I want to insist that the oracular dimension of art comes from its capacity to see, before any other substance, what is going to happen. This trait, far from helping us better prepare for the future or warning us of our pending duties, only provokes disbelief in a lazy species like our own.

In short: those who best interpret our present are in the past. I will give some examples that haunt me lately, just to make it easier to understand what I am talking about. The first time I came across the work of Ocaña (José Pérez Ocaña) was at an exhibition in Barcelona, Trans Sexual Express: Barcelona 2001 – A Classic for the Third Millennium, curated by Rosa Martínez and Xabier Arakistain at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica. I would later see a retrospective of his work at La Virreina in 2011: Ocaña, 1973 – 1983. Actions, Performances, Activism. It is very difficult for me to describe the work of an artist and visionary who saw reality and trans logic as the only possible way of thinking in a historical moment when historical and political identity, not just gender, was radically binary, static, inflexible and deterministic. When one looks at Ocaña’s performances and actions, one realises that it is not just a matter of affirming his identity, but of taking upon himself the weight and responsibility of a radical and complete gender change that he adopts for us. I am not an expert on the subject and I do not want to irritate anyone with my reflections. I would merely like to register my absolute admiration for an artist so radically political that he could not be taken seriously in his time, so visionary that he can only be seen today as someone who understood that the real way out of the radical shift to the right is through an essential physical transformation, and not just a change of ideology. In the Ocaña of that time I see not only a visionary of self-determination rights that challenge biology and affirm identity as fluid and liberated from any imposed canon. I also see an artist who knows that in a time of political and cultural transition such as the one he lived through, much like our own day, regeneration cannot be expected without changing gender and species. This does not mean that we all have to go through this trance on a physical level, but on a logical or epistemological level. The great transformation needed to reverse certain political processes is physical and not merely ideological. We forget that COVID was a physical process and that it had a fundamental impact on all the habits that determine aspects of our behaviour, which are fundamental to understanding the attraction to certain forms of relationships, from eating relationships to make-up to workplace relationships. The change seen in thousands of communities in the aftermath of the pandemic facilitates certain simple ways of being and belonging in the world and that facilitate the introduction of simple but diabolical narratives.

Gender change is presented in Ocaña, for example, as a great tool to halt the right. If emboldened, moralistic masculinities were transformed into smiling, folkloric female figures, it would of course be possible to continue their toxic narratives, but it would be much more difficult to maintain the populist identification game with the impoverished working classes who seek in those narratives an escape valve, but also a stable community. What I am trying to say is that in Ocaña saw, lived and presented his gender change, in an even more radical way than today’s artists, as an alternative to the far right.

Something similar could be said of the work of Harun Farocki, also disappeared, and its relationship with the rise of military culture and mentality. His work, all of his work, was obsessed with military visualisation. Military visualisation is not synonymous with war. It names the Darwinian dream of a community, the military community. With its superior vision, detached from a mortal body and capable of providing an all-powerful image that enables total destruction. In his work, the image is not a reflection of reality, but the instrument that serves to ponder the possibility of a world ruled by violence. Today, when we talk about artificial intelligence, we talk about machine learning; the machine’s capacity for self-learning.

This was already a central concept in his work. Eye/Machine is a trilogy made between 2001 and 2003, which I saw for the first time in the same period of time when I saw the work of Ocaña. This time it was at the Green Naftali gallery in New York in 2002, when the third part was yet to be completed. In this work, Farocki introduces an idea that is as fascinating as it is topical: the operative image. In other words, an image whose mission is not to be seen, but to do something, to serve some purpose. These are the images generated by war machines, drones, highly automated weapons with the mission of detecting targets and destroying them. These images no longer represent the world. Something similar, to radicalise the concept further, could be said of binary bodies. They do not represent the world either; they are reintroduced into the contemporary narrative in order to destroy it. That is why it is important to change them, to mutate, to become others. Ocaña and Farocki are very close.

Although many of those who interpret Harun Farocki’s work insist on presenting his work as a denunciation, his work was actually a revelation. Nothing in it denounces, since it was so visionary that it lacked the parameters to influence the prescriptive, what should be done. His work, in fact, uncovers, almost for the first time, the widespread and profound desire on the part of the industry for the destruction of an image other than the one to which art, film and photography had accustomed us. Once discovered, the image is terrifying, so much so that one does not know how to act, as there is no turning back.

Another artist who discovers another gaze, another way of seeing, which in no way coincides with the human gaze or is synchronised with a cultural idea of gender and identity, is Joan Jonas. In Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972), Jonas proposes a vision that goes beyond the human. With just a few elements — a spoon, a mirror, a monitor — she constructs a ritual of interconnection. Rhythmically tapping a silver spoon against the mirror, a percussive sound loop is generated that is simultaneously recorded on video and reflected on a flickering CRT monitor. Here, coexistence is not a metaphor, but a real structure. Human and non-human systems — gesture, sound, glass, machine — enter into a feedback loop where presence is disintegrated and perception is shared. Jonas makes us feel that mutuality is not a symbolic idea, but a material fact: the body, the object and the image are intertwined in the same choreography of sensibility and reciprocity. In numerous later installations such as Reanimación, produced for dOCUMENTA 13, which I co-curated, Joan Jonas introduces a theatre of forms and elements where the human figures on stage — the artist, usually accompanied by children — play and dance with images projected on circular paper screens which they hold using a rod to “catch” the faces of the fish projected on them. The central idea of Joan Jonas’ work is that co-existence is not just a question of the presence in space of the various species and elements that make up the ecosystems of our planet. Co-existence is a way of naming the complex but perceptible and comprehensible relationships between the different forms of intelligence that exist. Her approach to technology — creating performances with a very deep interest in establishing almost naïve relationships with everything around us — manages to awaken the idea that imagination is a tangible matter, a substance that is not purely virtual, but that really exists and is tangible.

Artistic practice does not respond to anything in particular, but rather has the particularity of anticipating the present. Art, as a whole, acts as a living organ, a sensor capable of perceiving the omnipresent logic and giving it a form that becomes eloquent insofar as we understand the meaning of our actions and their implication. Art does not interpret the present, but precedes it: “the oracular dimension of art comes from its capacity to see, before any other substance, what is going to happen”. This connects directly with the ideas outlined by Karen Barad in a text published only in German, Verschränkungen, and by Laura Tripaldi inParallel Minds, who both understand matter, time and perception as intertwined, non-linear phenomena. According to Barad, matter “speaks” and time is not chronological; she gives us the idea that matter has agency, and that knowledge, time and identity do not pre-exist, but emerge relationally. Similarly, for Tripaldi, intelligence is not exclusive to human beings. Tripaldi proposes that matter is not passive, but has its own way of thinking and organising itself, different from that of humans. This material intelligence is silent, non-discursive, but real. And so, art —as vibrational matter— can be seen as an agent that foreshadows or materialises what has not yet been codified by culture.

Understanding the tension between a world that strives for values of coexistence and equality and freedom, and that same world and its thirst for violence and destruction, is fundamental. However, this understanding does not have a literal, illustrative sense, nor a moral belonging to a certain group or community. Artistic practice is made of a substance capable of subtracting itself from a present that wants to capitalise on it. At the same time, today, the surrounding structures resemble animal traps or trawl nets as never before. The inability of the public authorities to sustain their confidence in art and the institutions that support it is such that public sector workers and professionals, like myself, are almost like court-appointed lawyers. Minor civil servants with the capacity for judgement and knowledge, but relegated to a role that makes us appear almost as a group of individuals discarded from the reality that really pulls the strings. Increasingly, the ideals and values of the common good are at odds with a powerful culture in which democratic realities are either suppressed or ridiculed in the face of a tsunami of legal, political and action aberrations. Art, although increasingly subject to conditions of silence and of economic and ideological adaptation to these new states of democratic relativism emerging everywhere, is still capable of pointing us in the right direction. Interested as never before in the relationship between consciousness and language, in fantasy as the engine of a revolution in the relationship between practice and spectator, in fantasy as the language capable of sublimating this new wave of religiosity and authority that never ceases. Art, in other words, knows the importance of the questions that will define the early decades of our coexistence with programmed and self-programmed machine intelligence. He also knows how unfortunate we have been in the last century in describing and implementing different forms of political organisation capable of giving birth to social invention. The total lack of social invention sits at the basis of the recurrence of old but effective models of submission and power.

If we had invented another way of organising our social relations, we would not have such a strong feeling of failure and déjà vu. A feeling that also corresponds to many facts, although not everything returns, because we are still waiting for the return of a new and powerful vanguard.

The inability of the public authorities to sustain their confidence in art is not just a contextual issue, but a structural one. Since the global economic crisis of 2008, culture has been treated by European governments as an expendable cost, rather than a strategic investment in collective sensitivity and a shared future. The European Parliament has pointed out in its report on cultural industries that culture was “one of the sectors most affected by budget cuts”, suffering what can only be seen as a gradual abandonment of the public imagination. It was not just a question of reducing funding; it was a question of withdrawing the legitimacy of art as a tool for transformation. Institutional impoverishment has crystallised in forms of chronic precariousness, subordination to the market and a growing symbolic marginalisation of those who work in the sector. In this scenario, art does not disappear, but mutates, assuming the form of a lateral, almost clandestine practice, beyond the centres of decision making, although more alive than ever on the margins. Perhaps there, precisely there, lies its new oracular power.

What is clear is that the public authorities identify what needs to be done in rearmament and not in education or culture. It is also clear that those of us who defend democratic, egalitarian and ecological values are mostly ethical and gender minorities, who will soon be like an ornament in a dying or already corpse-like system. In front of us, a healthy and robust sector, the private sector that is governed by other rules, that is secure and whose individuals are not subject — in the field of art — to the same judgements and attacks as those who daily expose themselves in the defence of “old democratic values”. Faced with this situation, one might think that the only thing to do is to throw in the towel and let oneself die. However, nothing could be further from my opinion. Assuming this condition of the marginalised, subject to the whims of capital and the powers of the market, an important part of the press is fundamental to restarting and reinitiating oneself in a new joy. In Spanish there is a colloquial expression “de perdidos, al río.” Literally, “from lost to the river”. What it captures is that sense that if you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose; that sense that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing properly, and going all in.

The lost, the left behind, the excluded and the despised must not only figuratively throw themselves into the river, but must form it first. Don’t get me wrong; I am not appealing for solidarity, but rather to that sense of being utterly fed up and tired, perhaps even a certain cynicism and malice directed against ourselves as a force capable of creating a bond. Let’s call it productive hostility and think of it as an evolved form of empathy. If empathy were a first step in meeting and respecting the other in the hope of finding a new pattern of individual and institutional behaviour, productive hostility assumes the limits of empathy and uses bad language as a social force before it turns into antagonism and hatred. Extreme social polarisation, in short, makes it very difficult to appeal to empathy with groups with whom one has little or nothing in common. In such a state of affairs, empathy only succeeds in establishing self-serving power lobbies. No one is under the illusion that the far right and the ideology and practice of unbridled capitalism are driven by empathy. Complex as it is to relate worlds that detest each other. In fact, if it were up to them, we could stop talking about bridges and relationships. They don’t need us to finish us off. However, it is we – those of us who in a highly general and imprecise way still defend the possibility of democratic legislation and its necessary improvements – who need a greater number of believers in order to re-establish confidence in the values of the common good. I readily accept that these values must also change and be radically transformed. But to get there we need to connect with those who do not understand. Those who fear us or despise us. For this reason, in my simplicity of thought, I believe it is important to establish cultural, political and institutional practices capable of enabling hostility as a socio-pedagogical method capable of bringing us out of this paralysis and giving us back a minimum of confidence in action and diction. To be able to do and say something is important to re-constitute ourselves as a society.

Here’s hoping!