Gavin Jantjes, 'Introduction'
In: A Fruitful Incoherence: Dialogues with Artists on Internationalism. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1998, pp. 10-17.
To associate the word incoherence with art would seem to play straight into the hands of the critic who insists that the locus for the communication of artistic ideas is the familiar. It appears also to underline, for those members of art's audience who struggle with interpretation, that art is a difficult and confusing practice. The title is borrowed from Susan Hiller's writing, and proposes an alternative reading of accepting the apparent irrationality of the visual experience as a way to an enlightenment; that art offers an adventure into the unknown, or an engagement with the unfamiliar, in order to disclose, discover and disseminate information about the here and now. The research artists undertake in their studios often stumbles across discoveries and makes us viewers trip over our assumptions. Artists hold to the view that the harvest one reaps from these incoherent encounters is a form of knowledge about, or empathy with, the strange, different and new.
Making art is to say something about what one knows is an un-theorised and indirect way. Artists are meant to say what they know best by visualising their concerns rather than talking or writing about them. Yet, the simplicity and clarity of artists' comments on both the practice and theory of their profession have provided art history with some of its more profound statements. (Long may this form of commentary continue.) Susan Hiller correctly claims the visual arts to be a 'first order practice', distinct from the practices of science, architecture and literature, etc. Accepting such a position should not reduce artists to silent participants in the discourses about the visual arts. It is too often believed that having made a work, artists apparently have had their say and should thereafter vacate the field for the theoretical specialists. Verbalisation is regarded as an unnecessary, cross-disciplinary exercise that weakens visual imagination. This common and mono-dimensional view of the artists' position in discourse denies their complex communicative skills, a limitation that has led to one interpretation of post-modern art as driven by the discursive and curatorial disciplines, rather than the innovation and the vision of artists. Exploring the ideas of a new internationalism in the contemporary art of Europe with artists rather than just theoreticians is not to ignore theory, but to include within it the vital and down to earth voices of those solitary and independent adventures which provide the source materials for the theoretical texts about contemporary visual arts. The artists have not been asked to explain their work, but rather to comment on the issues arising from their practice that are of concern to both audience and maker. My conversations with them explore ideas on internationalism and hopefully bring a sense of the practical and the everyday to contemporary philosophies about art.
[...]
The paintings, installations and sculptures of Svetlana Kopystiansky display an innovative undoing of literature's dominance over the visual arts in Russian culture. Her painting in particular inverts reading into looking by foregrounding the visual as the way to say something about human perceptions. Meaning is not conveyed through words, but by their presence in the painting as tonal and spatial marks. Text is reduced to a pictorial element. Standing close to her paintings one recognises that they are indeed composed of words which describe a landscape. From a distance these words become a painted panorama. One sees text, but reads image. Standing back to get the bigger picture one removes oneself from the aura of literature. The break with her tradition is subtle, even diplomatic, for she has not sacrificed the Russian literary narrative of landscape to the Gods of Western material culture, as so many 'Perestroika' artists have. The aesthetics of her sculptures rests upon a Russian avant-garde which at the start of this century played a vital role in the development of visualisation. She has also kept faith with its literary exponents in order that they may remind one of a potential never fully realised because of the Russian revolution.
The acceptance of syncretism brings a double movement within practice which collapses the binary of centred and peripheral cultures, and returns one to an older and perhaps more honest reading of visual ideas as an evolutionary exchange and adaptation. Today we are constantly invited to consider the known with the unknown beginnings and endings of the hybrid image. How are we to interpret Huang Yong Ping's the History of Chinese Art and History of Modern Art - washed two minutes in a washing machine? Books , which one may regard as important resources for a young artist in China because they encapsulate the concise artistic traditions of both China and Europe, were reduced to pulp by jointly washing them in his mother's first modern home appliance. Is it a book work, a sculpture object or the residue of a performance work? To think of the modern Chinese laundry or ancient ritual washing as some form of purification and unification is to apply cliché. This work reflects European and Chinese notions of modern sculpture and performance art, but breaks with these traditions in as much as it does with the older tradition of Tao or the I Ching. The process of washing aims not to clean but to stress contamination. It points to the dominance of art historical texts, which aim to hegemonise the cultural future in both regions of the globe. Interested in making work which resists these hegemonies, Yong Ping confronts us with an object that signals an end to his, and hopefully our, blanket acceptance of hegemonic art histories. He opens a blank page for a new visual inscription.
The rhizomatic art object questions our system of evaluation and the known dimensions of time and space. What was considered trivial yesterday suddenly becomes dynamic and central to cultural understanding. The content of each archival box in Susan Hiller's ever expanding work From the Freud Museum becomes tools with which to name the word. Here can be found ideas and concepts one would otherwise describe with words. Found objects and text are brought together with an irrational logic that sidesteps logo-centric approaches to the reading of culture. With no system of interpretation for this work other than our emotional and intellectual responses, we come to regard feeling not as a lack of thinking but another way to consciousness. Together this growing collection of boxes open an array of microcosmic worlds each showing as well as telling something different. Their regular display in the vitrine connects to a body rhythm. One becomes conscious of one's body in space pacing and placing itself in the aura of each new microcosm. A physical and intellectual journey is under way.
The results of Carlos Capelán's mixing of worlds brings us full circle to the start of this century when ethnography was a privileged term in the creation of cultural hierarchies. Utilising trinkets and furniture from the European home, he points to institutional and museological strategies which established a Western/European cultural dichotomy of self and other. In his installations one is asked to consider ethnography as a self-reflective term and the terrain of the European home as one of the contemporary sites for field work. A sense of unease arises. The trope of any cultural identity is blurred and the edge between real and fake becomes unclear. The spectacle of his installations traps us in a mind game through which we discover our clichéd ideas about difference. Quotations from theory, literature and the everyday signify a heterogeneity of source material that democratically cuts across social strata. His installations map the floating, in-between world of the beyond and provide fleeting moments of stability, as memory recalls glimpses of a time passed before it slips into time future.
The viral age at the end of this century, signalled by the computer virus and Aids, reminds us that notions of an impervious identity or fixed or insular territory belie the constant process of contamination. As Europe desperately tries to protect its cultural body from being infected by the virus of difference, Marie Jo Lafontaine's photographic installations Savoir, retenir et fixer ce qui est sublime shows the rhizomatic and the hybrid having penetrated the genes of the population. One faces her photographs knowing that a corner-stone a Europe's identity has been transplanted to the beyond. The shock of having to accept notions of the bastard and the alien into a personal genealogy is both terrifying and exciting. Photography, which at the turn of the century provided colonial ethnography with absolute proof of difference, now returns with a frightening self-reflective beauty. Pictures of others once came to Europe from distant tropics. Here they come from the concrete jungle of the metropolitan inner city. They mirror memories of a colonial past and map a different future. Lafontaine is an adventurer who pictures this future in an open minded, matter of fact manner. She accepts a heterogeneous genealogy as the new sublime and portrays young citizens as blessed with a power that distances them from the constraint of all tradition. There is no matrix to their future. The open innocence of their gaze shows that they have no time other than the present. Their new found subliminal state melts our primordial terror of the beyond into a longing and desire to emulate their attributes.
The portraits of Marlene Dumas are no less compelling because of their manographic marks. Their raw energy and subtle beauty establishes a dialogue not only between every face portrayed but also between viewer and the community of individuals her exhibition evoke. Face to face with multiple images of humanity, we recognise the space between our selves and others as the vital space in art and culture, one we seek to bridge through means other than domination or exploitation. Whether lovers or neighbours, enemies of friends, we stand to learn more about one another through a dialogue which genuinely seeks knowledge about our differences. Her evocative drawings and paintings restate one's individuality within the group and, as one's eyes get to know the strangers in our midst, one's empathy for dialogues grows. Her full figure works, whether they depict babies or adults, aim to close the many gaps and misunderstandings silence buffers. Her self-assured belief that it is good to talk and that democratic progress is about dialogue, echoes in the recent liberation of her birthplace from apartheid. Her use of simple, some would say old-fashioned technologies of ink drawing and figurative painting connects past to present and recalls initial values of trust and exchange which made human progress possible.
David Medalla understands his work to be dialogic and in many instances participatory. Process stands at the centre of his performances and impromptus and it engages the hands, voice and minds of his audience. A Stitch in Time is a work which employs this dialogic strategy and offers a brief opportunity to indulge in the creative stitching of a personal mark onto a board tapestry of communal expression. The work invites one to reveal one's loves and hates, one's sacred or profane understanding of both art and life. There is a correspondence between Medalla's life style and the style of his work that makes it difficult to know if our transcripted conversation is an impromptu work, a comment about his artistic concerns, or both. The enigmatic convolutions of fact and fiction, of the real and the imagined, align to an oeuvre that can only be framed with an array of period titles which include Hylozoism, Synoptic Realism, and Transcendental Hedonism. Medalla is the living proof that the syncretic and the hybrid are ways in the world which disclose the heterogeneous interlinking of human cultures. By transforming the public domain into his studio and gallery, he demonstrates that syncretism is not an abstract concept but something revealed in hands-on and hard won public interactions.
What hybridity does not immediately disclose, is often revealed by its absence. Initially, the tactile and visual mystery of Chohreh Feyzdjou's objects seem to say very little about the different worlds which lay beneath their layered surfaces. They hold association to nothing and remind one of everything. Their ubiquitous, semi-transparent coating of dark lacquer veils every object with mystery and conceals a world whose memory seems real but whose name eludes us. The work speaks of ruins rebuilt, of an ancient world that reveals more of the present than the past. History in art is told through the object and a narration about the object. But here the objects evade narration because one cannot describe them with words. They seem more concerned with one's visual and tactile senses than with historical record, their look and feel inducing thought. They are not a form of ethnographic residue from which one reconstructs a culture. Chohreh Feyzdjou's personal ethnography, like that of all other artists, has shaped a particular vision in which traces of her diverse cultural experience reverberate. These ethnographic glimpses do not stand in for our conditioned notion of her national culture. The memories and emotions her work triggers belong to us and we retrieve them from deep within our subconscious. If there is a specific culture being referenced, questioned of criticised, it is surely our own in the first instance. If time is being framed it is not the past or the present but time continuum.
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Over the past decade the discourses of international visual arts aimed to transcend the differences of culture, gender and race. Today artists have moved on to confront what to them is the most important difference, that of visualising itself. Humanity's primary way of knowing and naming the world is through looking and seeing. The visual experience is a means of building knowledge outside the rules of discursive logic. Ever since art has been recognised as an autonomous discipline, its central dilemma has been the dominance of the discursive over the visual. This presented a tremendous challenge for its practitioners, irrespective of their location, how to transmit knowledge without speaking or writing down the facts, how to discuss, theorise and disseminate the visual without handing it over to the discursive domain?
Language and text are key concerns of all the artists in this publication. Even Marlene Dumas and Chohreh Feyzdjou, whose work by and large desists from the use of text, address it in absentia. Dumas' ironic yet poignant remark "If I want to tell you I love you, I can write you a letter. So why make an enormous painting?" underscores an artistic desire to communicate visually. But all these artists, whether they emphasise the structure of communication, the dominance of the written over sensory perception or the beauty of the spoken and written word itself, confront us with the problem of translation. Not merely the translation of one text into another language, but the translation of the visual image into meaningful thought.
If visual art is a form of language, with its own syntax grammar and concept of time, our contemporary art today resembles the moment immediately after Babel. In Christian mythology, it is a narrative about God's way of dealing with a human consciousness that attempted to displace the authority of the Almighty. Somewhat overlooked in this myth is the Godhead's recognition that the power of the word as a naming device in all creation has shifted from it to earthly mortals. Its divine retribution was to disempower humankind by confounding its ability with words. The artist's quest ever since has been to find an untraumatised means of communication, one that is not imbued with threat, confusion and heavenly wrath.
In a world overwhelmed by images which stand in for reality, and in which notions of mother tongues are as false as those of racial purity, one will only get a handle on the here and now if one is prepared to undertake the incomplete and seemingly impossible task of translation. Translation is not humanity's attempt to return to Eden and re-establish the 'one-voice' stability before Babel. It marks the navigation of another in-between, another beyond, where messages fall between definitions, and lose their clarity as their meanings pass from one language to another. The art of our time calls for its viewers to become conscientious and willing to participate in different thinking strategies. It asks that one remains open minded about the nature and difficulty of translation. One looks at art today not to learn how the rules of its grammar have been applied or even broken. Contemporary works of art are no longer made to a set of given rules. Each work evolves the parameters of its own language, each invents images which link the visual, emotional and spatial senses to one's thought processes. The grammar of art is not about the construction of coherent sentences but the strategic placing of images into the visual domain as free subjects, verbs and adjectives whose incoherence makes a fruitful cognisance.