painting in his studio or if he has gone out to find inspiration while contemplating the
world. (Fig. 10) When an artist emulates a writer the stage is set for conflict. For instance,
when in a previous exhibition RGG spoke of personal fetishes, he was not talking about
literature in the strict sense of the word, but rather it was a psychological oxymoron. We
could also think of heraldry with no genealogy, arising from pure desire, in an economy
with no violence, politics with no corpses.
Anti-remembering
Fig. 10.
Francis Picabia, Unique Eunuque, Au Sans
Pareil, París, 1920.
When we say “front and back” we are not referring to the perspective depth of the
depiction but rather to the architecturalisation of the painting, which although symbolic
and projective, is no less authentic. Architecturalisation is the same as saying public
exhibition, an opening up into the space of co-existence and conflict. In the series entitled
Antisouvenirs there is a whole series of devices for presenting images in a real context.
We are talking about very small canvases, installed as a mosaic, each one exhibited
individually and all of them together as a fragmented unit, which on the one hand
increases the sense of taxonomy and repertory and on the other, its desire to offer itself
as a project , a model, prone to being transferred into reality 9 .
The way these little projects are shown is something like a little exhibition
within the exhibition, a mini-catalogue within the catalogue. The variety of presentation
devices practically exhausts the repertory: from different kinds of panels for urban
advertising, bus stops and architectural murals to bases of photography sets and even an
offset machine that brusquely spits the printed sheet out. These are images of war and
violence – Libya, Mexico, Nigeria, etc. – that the artist no doubt took from the press and
Internet, but placed in a different physical context, on a different scale and therefore, for
both these reasons, with a different capacity for surprising the viewer. The truth is that
the dotting of these little pictures on the room’s wall is like an unfortunate constellation
or an explosion of sadness.
As we have already pointed out, the explicit violence of these images is
moderated or camouflaged by pictorial depiction, which turns them into a shapeless
mass, a smudge that tells us nothing but suggests quite a lot. This is not good: Von
Clausewitz himself, so famous for one sole sentence about politics and war, expressed his
mistrust of smudges and blurred images when he wrote “war is unconceivable without
a clear image of the enemy”. The layout of the elements of information of the media
image, so strategic and defined, so solid, vanished in the pictorial depiction as if it had
suffered an entropic catastrophe that turns the image into something fluid, or as Zygmunt
Bauman would have it, liquid 10 . This liquidity shows precisely the illegibility of the image,
the cracks in sense, and through them the collapse of political discourse and ideological
construction. If the Warhol of the Race Riots and the Car Disaster is still a distant heir
of Picasso’s Guernica , and in the end of Goya’s War Disasters , these illegible images –
or what is perhaps worse, almost illegible, as they seem to insinuate a wound but do
not show it– belong to a conviction that is now definitive: mistrust of the images of
semiocapitalism and its technologies of infoxication 11 .
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9 Ángel González García, quoted here at objective random, described the idea that Brancusi had about
the part and the whole. “Brancusi refused to sell single pieces, but accepted the sale of sections of
his workshop: little workshops that obviously made the permanence of the large workshop they had
been torn from necessary. Brancusi was concerned about keeping his pieces together, making no
distinction between actual sculptures, the different versions thereof, the corresponding base and the
raw materials, such as blocks of stone and large wooden beams. Everything had to stay together; so it
is not surprising that he bequeathed his workshop to the French State”. In “La zanja luminosa”, Pintar
sin tener ni idea , op. cit. p. 36.
Cf. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernidad líquida , Fondo de Cultura Económica (Buenos Aires, 2002) and in
particular, Zygmunt Bauman et al., Arte, ¿líquido? , sequitur (Madrid, 2007), pp. 35-48.
10
11 According to Franco Berardi, one of the people who coined the term, “Semiocapitalism is a method
of production in which the accumulation of capital takes place essentially by means of production
and an accumulation of signs: immaterial goods that act on the collective mind, on attention, the
imagination and social psychism”, cf. Franco Berardi in conversation with Verónica Gago, in Lavaca
http://www.lavaca.org/notas/quien-es-y-como-piensa-bifo/.