Fig. 13.
Harwey Dunn, Caja de esbozos del artista /
The artist’s box of sketches, c. 1914-1918.
La caja de dibujo del capitan Dunn, que
le acompañó en el frente durante la I
Guerra Mundial, es un ingenioso sistema
impermeabilizado que hace correr un rollo
de papel sobre el centro del soporte. Permite
dibujar la acción secuencialmente, como si
se tratara de un story board cinematográfico,
en un campo de batalla que ya se había
transformado, gracias al uso documental de la
cámara de cine, en el mayor plató de la historia
/ Captain Dunn´s box of sketches, which
accompanied him on the front during the First
World War, is an ingenious waterproof system
with a roll of paper in the middle. It enables
sequential drawing, as if it were a storyboard
for a film on a battlefield that thanks to the
documentary use of the movie camera, had
become the largest film set in history.
Earlier we were talking about something like an anti-Guernica, and now we can
also talk about the idea of anti-publicity or even the counter-image. Large mural panels,
bus shelters, devices from which advertising images exercise their power of activating
desire, huge screens on building fronts, have all been taken over by these counter-
images that show – once again – the other side of the consumer coin, the fatal spectre,
the corpse hidden behind the flames of seduction. And let us not forget that the World
Press Photos, in which images are invariably awarded prizes for pathos, composition and
exemplarity, follow the technical rhetoric of nineteenth-century historical painting. We
should not forget that the media try to seduce us too, even though it is through horror,
and that they do so, after so many human tears, with decidedly solid images. (Fig. 11
and 12)
Together with this collection of warlike postcards, there is a machine that could
very well have been used to make them. The name is very explicit - Cápsula-atalaya del
reportero pictórico de la historia, después de Goya ( Capsule-watchtower of the picture
reporter of history, after Goya), a kind of camera obscura, i.e. pre-photographic, which
would have been used to document modern conflicts, an antiquated apparatus that faced
with the desired objectivity of the photographic camera, would show all the differences
of subjectivity. Inside its deep black are samples of Goya’s Disasters, the artist as a “war
painter” before today’s war photographer, together with a video screen showing some of
the artist’s watercolours, like a “(war) logbook”, to use his own expression. And a violently
illuminated pistol. (Fig. 13)
I know how to see it the other way round
How would the sentence “Dábale arroz a la zorra el abad”* correspond to one, two or
various images? Possibly something like El tránsito vacío … (The empty transit…), the
huge installation consisting of a picture and theatre drops. In the first place, due to the
double route or return trip proposed, from one plane to another of the depiction, like
the famous palindrome we have just quoted, readable backwards, but which can also
be deciphered inversely. Secondly, given that the openings made on the double plane of
depiction leave the image naked, they show their fictional structure and evidence their
rhetoric of two faces, plane/counter-plane, if we were to use cinematographic language.
Marcel Duchamp, who also dabbled in aller-retour writing in Anémic Cinéma, built up
a large picture of glass, totally transparent, so that beyond the sexual phantasmagoria
it depicted, viewers could see the open air, the exit from the cave of depiction. In El
tránsito vacío…, just as in Espacio de trabajo, the sections on the plane of depiction, little
windows, show the existence of a real world in the background of the pictorial fiction.
Now we understand the spatial layout of the eight images in the form of a theatre drop
much better. In Espacio de trabajo , the two little windows, like eyes drilled in, indicate
that not all the painting was done in the studio, while in El tránsito vacío …, by trimming
the screens, they show that reality does not all fit in the means, that there are possibilities
of drilling into its rule and its inexhaustible flow of images, and that paradoxically, the old
and slow art of painting is one of them.
El tránsito vacío … was built as a series of screens that cut through reality,
but in contrast to the “total screen” on electronic media 12 which abolished the distance
between the main actors and the action, between the subject and the object, between
the real and its double, creating an unbearable promiscuity of signs, the orifices on the
pictorial surface of this piece – obtained precisely by deleting electronic screens – let
air come through, they put the world back at its distance and perspective and place the
viewer before an experience of real observation. The interesting thing is that RGG does
not carry out this operation in the presence of the object, appropriating it as readymade ,
but precisely by means of a fictional device like painting.
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* A palindrome in Spanish, like the sentence “Was it a car or a cat I saw?” in English – the Spanish
sentence literally means “The abbot fed the fox with rice”. The title of this section in Spanish (Sé verla
al revés) is also a palindrome. (Translator´s note).
12 Cf. the brief article by Jean Baudrillard, “Pantalla total”, in Pantalla total , translated by Juan José del
Solar, Anagrama (Barcelona, 2000), pp. 203-207.