Fig. 15.
Esquema del Sephiroth, Manuscrito de
Salónica. “El mundo fue creado a través
de diez palabras” ( Zohar ) / The Sephiroth
scheme, Thessaloniki manuscript. “The world
came into being through ten words” ( Zohar )
It would seem that everything is exhausted in its complex formal structure,
in the interplay of specular spaces and complicity with the expert viewer, and yet it is
precisely through these perforations, these tears in the pictorial tissue that reality crawls
in, where the sign acquires a body and establishes a distance from the pure signifier.
The plane of the depiction is broken and the air of reality comes in through the orifices.
Through these perforations we come into contact with the words in the palindrome as
elements of a narration that is now not just circular, self-referential, but made of flesh and
bone, and we discover that a clergyman, perhaps not overly scrupulous, fed a fox – the
Spanish word can also mean prostitute – with rice.
The visual palindrome that in El tránsito vacío … takes the stage like a physical
route the viewer should take, is resolved in other cases as a pure specular image, with
a mental route, like in Reconstrucción no revelada de un ocaso material ( Unrevealed
reconstruction of material decline ), which looks like a stage, an altar or a gallows pole,
in which the pictorial image remains unchangeable while the backing cloth shows or
suggests not so much the binary alternation of a switch – ON / OFF – as the palpitation,
more political, of the ON on any screen and the NO in the disobedience of turning it off.
When we turn an electronic device or the printed means off – it makes no difference
which – the viewer finds that he can adopt a more complex and inquisitive attitude, and
instead of being carried away by the docile ON he finds he is capable of freeing himself
from it by saying NO and turning it off. Furthermore, instead of those abstract places on
the map of the world – Airegin, Aibmoloc, Ailamos , which tell us nothing – he realises
he is finally able to visit real places, the reality of conflicts in Nigeria, Colombia and
Somalia. And all of this in order to escape from the loop shown in Un momento antes…
( A moment earlier …), in which like a coin that has only one side – the emperor’s face,
the side of power – with no possibility of tails, the sentence Los medios que posibilitan la
representación de los medios … ( The media that make it possible to represent the media
…) joins vertiginously with itself to infinity. ON / NO suggests an alternative for the viewer,
enabling him to escape from the self-referential loop, to lay hold of the serpent’s head
and stop it biting its own tail, putting an end to the vicious circle.
Machine of misunderstanding Nº. 2(5)2, or the Cabbala reflected
Nowadays we take it for granted that art is a system of communication, but since when
has it been so? We know that art in the Paleolithic was a practice restricted to the
initiated, that the classical canon belonged to an elite who never thought of sharing
it. It might date from the age of cathedrals, the hackneyed “Bible in pictures” for the
immense majority of illiterates, although I think that a good description of the Bible
from the pulpit would be more descriptive than any carved column, and in any case,
the column would be an illustration of the sermon in stone. Or maybe it comes from the
Industrial Revolution. This is quite possible: an open society, with no taboos or fetishes,
transparent, when commerce – of anything, including ideas – was more profitable than
the simple ownership thereof. Communication is one of the highest forms of commerce.
Another kind of opacity, however, was opposed to this bourgeois transparency: mythology,
alchemy, symbolism, dark and impenetrable forms and images, which should remain
eternally inaccessible, ideas and forms born to remain in their place, not to be taken into
the flow of communication. Art created to remain an enigma, like a permanent secret. But
beware, we are not talking about occult freaks. Tristan Tzara, in his First DADA Manifesto
in 1918, described a key idea in this orientation towards the incomprehensible: “We need
powerful, straight, precise and eternally incomprehensible works of art 13 ”.
I am sure readers will forgive me for this historical diversion, just as at the
outset of this text, but I think it is necessary to explain why RGG installed a kind of
camera obscura at the back of his exhibition – an architectural extension of Goya’s
Capsule-watchtower – in which sense appears to have no bearing, in which – worse
still! – the artist wants to keep for himself more than what he gives us. He would seem
to be selfish, showing but not sharing. RGG opted for the symbolic machine, the one
that does not move itself and so activates the imagination. A table, a mirror, an apple, a
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13
Tristan Tzara, “First DADA Manifesto”, published in DADA (Zurich, 1918).