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JEXISTE

CONCEPTUAL MELODRAMA AND THE REPRESENTATION OF SUBJECTIVITY AFTER CONCEPTUAL ART

MARCELLO SIMEONE MASTER OF ARTS IN PHOTOGRAPHY University of the Arts London. LCC School Of Media

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FOREWORDS 3

INTRO KILL THE ARTISTS SOUL 8

IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACOLOUS 10

THE ARTIST HELPS THE WORLD 14

MAKING SOMETHING THAT LEADS TO NOTHING 18

SELF-EXPOSURE AND REPRESENTATION 21

CONCLUSIONS 22

BIBLIOGRAPHY 25

TABLE OF ILLUSTRATIONS 26

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FOREWORDS

Although I never felt completely at ease growing up in the beautiful but overwhelming

Naples, for I consider myself to be quite an introverted character, I was deeply influenced

by its philosophical (reflective) approach to life and its poetic undertones; the idea that art

is (after all) a valuable tool to intimately discover yourself and should never lack

emotional character is also part of this legacy. It was Plato after all who defended

philosophy as the product of Eros and Kant, before Hegel, who said that nothing great is

ever done without passion. (Golomb, Santaniello & Lehrer, 1999, p.127) Nonetheless, in

the history of philosophy and I would argue in our modern western (by now global)

culture, emotions have often been ostracized. In the history of contemporary art,

subjectivity and emotions have been made problematic by Conceptual art during the

sixties, for a series of reasons that I will mention later in details, but that are not dissimilar

from the philosophical ones. Emotions are by nature unreliable, subjectivity and systems

are always apart and for an art that needs to be rationally analyzed, and problematized

by means of standard (democratic) critical guidelines the individual perception and

experience of the world becomes a danger to its own existence.

Even in todays post-conceptual art landscape, the legacy of this avant-garde movement

remains well in place and as soon as one shifts the focus from the systematic or political

analysis towards a subjective or self reflective investigation, some objections may be

raised and they need to be addressed. A common objection is, for instance, that the

confession of the psychological self presents a fundamental obstacle to the ability to

develop feelings of social interconnectedness (Heiser, 2009, p.9) in other words the

unreliability of the psychological self as a source of emancipation. But we will come back

to this later...now I am wondering...Is it possible to make art that is emotionally intense

but is intellectually engaging and relevant today? Is there any space left for romantic,

existential or poetic discourse in todays post-conceptual art landscape? As a young man

I felt personally perplexed after moving from the 'romantic' south to the 'conceptual' north

- of Italy first and Europe afterwards. In the development of my own personality and work

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methodology I felt the need to adapt my thinking and behaviours to a different set of

cultural parameters.

At the time I felt (kind of) wrong with my need for the emotional in the art, but it made me

realise how cultural shifts and power relations define history, knowledge and who we are

in relation to others; the rational (repressive) power was already at work, outside and

inside me. It became clear (quite immediately) that my own reflective and creative world

had to exist and evolve in the gap between reason and emotion, pathos and detachment.

As for today, I dont think I have entirely resolved the issue and personally I continue to

have a quite problematic relation with feelings and as far as art is concerned I need a

work to be conceptually interesting in order to catch my attention, but I also strive for

empathy and some kind of emotional kick. I have therefore continued to investigate

possible strategies employed by artists whose aim is to create a strong connection

between art and life, using their personal journey into existence as an ideal starting point

to create conceptual works of art that if on one side provoke an intimate, sometimes

moving (emotional) response from the audience on the other employ specific tactics to

keep a door open for this same audience to participate actively in the construction of the

meaning (if any) or narrative (of any kind), remaining faithful to one of the paradigm of

Conceptual art: empowering the viewer and refusing to make art a one-way conversation

(or confession) in which, quoting a Bruce Nauman's work (2004), ILL TALK YOULL

LISTEN.

In many of these works the artists seem to be looking for some kind of meaningful answer

to an otherwise absurd reality, and although overtly dealing with emotions and striving for

communication (or love) there seems to be a certain skepticism deeply informing their

works. Some of their actions seem devoid of any common sense: falling from a tree,

walking on a square, pushing a block of ice along the street. In all these works there

seems to be an ongoing dialogue (or struggle) between the artist and himself. In

questioning the very essence of the artistic production through a series of futile actions

they somehow seem to question the meaning of life: what should we consider as an

'acceptable' and 'accepted' subject of artistic research? Does it have to be a coherent,

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uniform discourse? Does it need to be tangible or at least visible? Has all this effort as

artists (and living human beings) any sense? Do I have anything to tell you in the first

place? And ...what will you understand? In many of these works we won't find any answer

or conclusions but it is exactly this paradox that fuels our own emotional and intellectual

response (participation). Despite exposing their body to the eye of the camera these

artists seem to create an autonomous artistic persona that becomes the agent of a

personal/universal enquiry, concerned with a philosophical (and paradoxical)

investigation. There is a distance, provided by means of a subtle intellectual framework or

the use of irony that allow us as viewers to focus on the subject matter (sadness, love,

absurdity, crisis, failure) through, but more importantly beyond, the artist's own personal

real life.

The feeling today is that we live in the age of uncertainty, where all our beliefs are (to say

the least) under scrutiny, the political system proved to be unfair, God is dead and future

can not be seen through the utopian lens of socialism or the global capitalist promise of

indefinite growth and well being. Furthermore our emotional experience of the fast and

furious world is frustrated and buried under layers of functionalism, competitiveness and

lack of true, deep interpersonal communication. I am thinking of this contemporary man

as someone fully aware of the fact that the tightest system, the most universal

rationalism always stumbles eventually on the irrational of human thought; [he lives] in

that indescribable universe where contradiction, antinomy, anguish or impotence reign,

(Camus, 1942, p.23) and his only option is to keep on searching, an image that reminds

me of the myth of Sisyphus and, as we will see in a moment, not dissimilar to some of

those provided by the artists in this essay.

According to the Greek myth, Sisyphus was punished for all eternity to roll a rock up a

mountain only to have it roll back down to the bottom when he reaches the top. Albert

Camus claims that Sisyphus is the ideal absurd hero and that his punishment is

representative of the human condition: Sisyphus must struggle perpetually and without

hope of success. So long as he accepts that there is nothing more to life than this

absurd' struggle, then he can find happiness in it. Facing the absurd, Camus suggests in

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his book 'The myth of Sisyphus' (1942), doesn't entail suicide, but, on the contrary, allows

us to live life to its fullest and he identifies three characteristics of the absurd life: Revolt,

Freedom and Passion. He also identifies possible archetypes of absurd heroes and

(stretching the boundaries of my imagination) I could probably identify in those

archetypes the personality profiles of the three artists I have decided to include in this

essay: The Seducer (Bas Jan Ader), The Creator (Bruce Nauman) and the Revolutionary

(Francis Alys). Camus emphasizes commitment and refuse reconciliation, for him there is

a metaphysical honour in enduring the worlds absurdity. Conquest or play acting,

creation, multiple loves, absurd revolts are tribute that man pays to his dignity in a

campaign in which he is defeated in advance. (Camus, 1942, p.90)

The absurd man of today must confront modern societies, with a strong tendency towards

depersonalization; these societies get larger and larger and more intricately organised

and so on...but the problem of the person, of the individual as unique being can not be

completely assimilated into any framework whether it's bureaucratic, conceptual or

systematic.

Something of him is left out... (Barret, 1978) Being an individual in our globalised mass

society has become more and more an achievement rather than a starting point. That is

probably why I am interested in the micro cosmos of subjectivity, the way in which a

single individual reacts to life, his emotive response, his search for some sort of self-

ruling, the elusive grasp of an emotional balance that leads to his individual sovereignty,

a road to freedom and authenticity, his silent struggles and private revolutions.

Kierkegaard, under the pseudonym of Johannes Climacus, in Concluding Unscientific

Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846), writes the following cryptic line:

Subjectivity is Truth, using the term subjectivity referring to what is personal to the

individualwhat makes the individual who he is in distinction from others, his unique

relationship with time and the objects. A subject is a person with a past, a present, and a

future, different people experience these in various waysthese experiences are unique,

not anyone else's. According to Sartre, what the individual chooses and how he chooses

will define who and what he isto himself and to others. In that sense becoming an

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individual is a task to be undertaken and sustained but perhaps never permanently

achieved, the time bound nature of human condition requires that existing as an

individual is always dynamic and under way, never static and complete. And depending

on the circumstances it may also involve considerable risk. (Flynn, 2006, p.25)

After all, etymologically, existence means to stand out and in existentialist philosophy

living an authentic life means acknowledging ones distinctive individuality. Contemporary

man is often sleepy, cynically distant or distracted and incapable of questioning his

cultural beliefs; Spinoza believed that the thinker must act against the received wisdom

of the age [and] Kierkegaard wrote essays attacking the most potent forces of conformity

in the Copenhagen of his day, remaining isolated from his society as he sought in the

manner of Socrates to harmonize his life with his teachings. (Flynn, 2006, p.25)

Nietzsche envisioned well in advance the post-modern era and he believed that the herd

would succumb to nihilism, but (in the manner of Camus absurd hero) he believed that

free spirits would survive this plague by embracing this situation and creating their own

truths and values and he was especially interested in the idea of self-overcoming. As

pointed out in the introduction of Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy (Gemes & May,

2009):

Nietzsche considers freedom a kind of perpetual self-overcoming. Freedom is not a

metaphysical capacity to have done otherwise, nor the unconstrained expression of

one's identity, but:

(i) a psychological self-relation, a relation to one's own drives, desires,

commitments

(ii) a difficult achievement that depends neither on force of will or self-

knowledge, or reflective endorsement alone;

(iii) a paradoxical form of mindedness, at once affirmative and negative,

whole-hearted and ironic (a tension of the spirit)

(iv) a form of self-mastery or an expression of the will to power.

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The planning of tasks, actions, gestures concerned with self-overcoming seems to inform

the methodology of the artists in this essay, but the analysis of their artistic strategy

requires an understanding of what happened in the sixties and after with the advent and

legacy of Conceptual art, which de facto originated a deep, radical seizure between

reason and emotions, fragmentary and systematic.

INTRO - KILL THE ARTIST'S SOUL

Is the 1964 when Andy Warhol exhibits Kiss [Fig.02], a 16 mm film showing different

couples kissing in front of the camera. The film starts and there is none of what we might

expect: no romance, no violins. Instead what the artist is showing is a bare, dry series of

close-ups of people kissing for the duration of a film-reel. Black screen; the film begins;

the film ends; black screen and so on...

Fig.01 - 02

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The feeling is that the artists communication strategy is to carefully provide all the

ingredients for an emotional experience, even though this must never get to point of

investing our senses; instead we are left contemplating the screen and subjecting our

feelings to critical analysis.

In the meantime, in an attempt to limit the power of the art market and the role of the

author as a genius/creator, a group of artists declare self-expression dead. Everything

concerned with the ostentation of the artists soul must be avoided in favour of a new

radical approach based on purely intellectual resources, dematerialization of the work

and the shift in power from the artist to the viewer. As harsh as it may sounds the roots of

this new art are to be found in the political climate of the time, where very little space is

left for romantic plots; instead the artists employ a new radical, critical approach to art-

making, it is named Conceptual Art. The Conceptual artist affirms his authorship in

different ways, either becoming a kind of trickster subverting cultural codes or an

intellectual master; alternatively the very concept of authorship is suspended, and the

completion of the work is handed over to the audience. (Heiser, 2011) A growing number

of artists begin to work in a performative way, the ostensible equilibrium between

everyday life and art becomes the expression and metaphor of political and emancipatory

desires (...) The starting point is always the performers body changing from an

autonomous entity into an activist one. (Maude-Roxby, 2007, pp.68,70) photography and

video are the mediums employed by the performer to record the action, providing visual

documentation to the ephemeral gesture, and quickly become very popular mediums

among conceptualists.

Rosalind Krauss in her article Notes on the Index (1977) argues that the quasi

tautological condition of a documentary image should supposedly free artists from the

mystification of authorial mark making (...) Photography, Krauss argues, has at its core no

convention of style but instead it bears the indexical imprint of things in the world.

(Krauss in Witkovsky, 2011, p.23) Conceptual art establishes itself at the forefront of the

art practice, flirting with critical theory, whose role is to define the boundaries of what can

be understood as purely conceptual and tracing a deep sharp line separating reason

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and emotion, inwardness and outwardness, thus setting the rules of what is in or out,

but substantially limiting, in the process, what a pure conceptual artist can do.

IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS

It is for a Dutch artist to push these boundaries, seeking to accomplish the apparently

impossible task of being simultaneously a rationalist and a romanticist, his name is Bas

Jan Ader. In his 16mm black & white silent film I am too sad to tell you (1971) [Fig.03] he

virtually picks up where Andy Warhols Kiss had left us. In the film we see the artist

crying, sitting in front of a neutral, white background from the start to the end of the film.

Although we feel immediately moved, witnessing and participating in his inconsolable

sorrow, the methodology employed by the artist is essentially conceptual as the artist

carefully executes a set of instructions he has planned in advance. Furthermore we are

not given any explanation of the reasons why the artist is crying and for this reason we

are prompted to fill the gap with our own experience and imagination. What we are

confronted with, in other words, is a conceptual abstraction of a melodramatic feeling: the

artist sets up the scene, the light goes on, and he starts weeping; the light goes off,

message delivered. Ader is not telling us any personal fact, instead he has put a system

in place whereby we can both empathize and participate, we dont know whether he is

really sad but what is more important is that Sadness (and not the artist feeling sad) is the

subject matter of this work.

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Fig.03

Ader was a truly conceptual artist, his methodology put great emphasis on the detailed

planning of his actions and installations, that were recorded on silent films and

photographs. Despite working in California in the early seventies Bas Jan Aders work

differs from other body/conceptual artists of his generation such as Chris Burden (the

ultimate hero) or Vito Acconci, he was less interested in the physicality and used his

person as a medium to a different end, metaphysics. His work has also lighter aspects,

he was influenced by slapstick, in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and

much of his oeuvre exists and evolves in the tension between this heightened sense of

pathos (Burden) and irony (Keaton).

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Fig. 04

In much of his work Ader deals with gravity, and is concerned with the notion of the fall. In

Broken Fall (organic) (1971) [Fig.04] we see the artist hanging from the branch of a tree

above a ditch until he can no longer maintain his grip and lands in the water. In Fall 2,

Amsterdam (1970) [Fig.05] Ader rides an old bicycle alongside a canal, with both hands

on the handlebars but with a bunch of flowers in one hand; he takes the bend too wide

and plunges, still on the bicycle, into the water. In both films the artist deals with the

existential adversity of the everyday, much in the vein of Keatons slapstick films [Fig.06].

However, the works are neither an existential heroic nor simply its parody, but precisely

the short-circuiting of the two. In recent years Bas Jan Ader has become the

mythologized figure of the ultimately tragic hero who, crossing the Atlantic in a one man

boat and thus realising the second of the three planned elements of the piece In Search

of the Miraculous (1975) [Fig.14] died, disappearing at sea.

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Fig. 05

The artist becomes in 2004 the pivotal figure of Romantic Conceptualism an exhibition

curated by Jorg Heiser, whose aim is to re-establish a connection between the early

(Jena) Romanticism and Conceptual Art practice. According to the curator, Romanticism

understood not as a synonym for the kitsch of love and desire but as an abbreviation for

the cultural techniques of emotions and for ideas of the fragmentary and the open

appears as a central (though neglected, if not actively ignored) aspect of the Conceptual.

(Heiser, 2004) As Heiser himself points out in a later book, All Of A Sudden (2008),

Romantic Conceptualism works against the notion of the conceptual as a closed system

controlled by intellectual heroes. Slapstick is related to this insofar as it spoils the sublime

in Romanticism; Romanticism, on the other hand, spoils slapsticks contentment in fun for

funs sake.

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Fig. 06

THE ARTIST HELPS THE WORLD

Jena Romantics such as August and Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis and Schelling,

had no cult of the genius, and they did not valorise emotion above reason. What

was central to their movement was profound skepticism about the viability of

traditional attitudes towards truth, an intellectually rigorous theory of art that gave

particular weight to playfulness, fragmented writing, and the notion of literary

irony; a sense that the philosopher ought to be or become more of an artist. (...)

Schlegel defines irony as "logical beauty" and "transcendental buffoonery", a sort

of playful, artistic self-consciousness, the text reflecting on itself. It is a way in

which a piece of art or philosophy indicates its illusory, provisional, limited

character, while gesturing towards an unreachable, higher ground. (Norman,

2002, p.502)

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I am thinking all this sounds decidedly Conceptual and I am also immediately reminded of

a Bruce Naumans work, The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths [Fig.01]

a snail-shaped neon sign hanged in the windows of his studio in 1967. The work stated in

a style usually employed to advertise donuts or beer, the virtues of the artist as a

shamanic service provider. We dont know exactly how to perceive the meaning of this

work: is he sincere in the poetic sense or is he being cynical in the philosophical sense?

Is the work imbued with personal meaning or is total nonsense? Yet again a paradox

triggers the viewers participation.

Fig.07

However, irony is not cynicism, in many ways these are the opposite of one another;

whereas great art may breed irony, hopelessness gives way to cynicism. Irony is a

positive sign, a rebellion against mindless authority and oppression, whether personal or

political. (Morgan, 2002) In this respect I find particularly interesting the early studio

works made by Nauman at the end of the sixties, a series of black and white videos,

where the artist stages the narcissistic drama of the individual, trying desperately to

make something out of nothing. In Violin Tuned D E A D, (1969) [Fig.07] the artist is

shown sideways (he turned the camera at a horizontal position), walking in his studio,

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playing the same notes on the violin over and over again thus creating a hypnotic drone.

The title literally relate to the fact that the four strings of the instrument were tuned to D,

E, A, and D. In Slow Angle Walk (Beckett walk) - (1968) [Fig.08] Nauman records himself

horizontally in such a way that he seems to walk up the wall and with his body forming a

90 degrees angle.

Fig 08 09

He slowly moves his legs mimicking the act of walking and trying to keep his balance,

while his body remains firmly in the centre of the image. The process looks complicated,

both by its physical movements and in its calculation, if the artist-performer loses its grip,

he falls. In other works of the same period the artist, similarly trapped in his studio

performs similar absurd actions such as walking in an exaggerated manner around the

perimeter of a square or obsessively repositioning a T-shaped bar again and again as if

caught up in the problematic resolution of a conflictual and unstable situation of the self

[Fig.09 - 10]. Now, what is also very appealing to me, beyond Naumans performative use

of the body, it is the reductionist ethos of these early works where he goes literally back

to basics, in his attempt to find rational solutions to define art. In the manner of Samuel

Beckett, the artist shows a certain attitude for the non-drama, the play that exists within

the human condition, often perceived as a hovering sphere of the absurdist sensibility.

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Fig. 10

The works of Nauman and Beckett are often associated by the critics with

phenomenology and absurdism, bedfellows of existentialism and Nauman in his video

performances come very close to some of the characters created by Beckett such as

Vladimir and Extragon in his famous play Waiting for Godot, who enact their desperate

lives in isolation of one another in some unknown desolate place (Morgan, 2002, p.10);

his actions apparently lack purpose, he emphasizes through the repetition of his gestures

the slow (subjective) passage of time, confined and unable to escape, thus alluding (but

this could be my interpretation) to the essence of the human condition and the perennial

search for something that may fulfil human desire (the arrival of Godot or the creation of

the work of art).

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MAKING SOMETHING THAT LEADS TO NOTHING

Fig. 11

In the lengthy dedication that accompanies his book The Practice of the Everyday life,

Michel De Certeau calls forth the ordinary man and the common hero: The anonymous

hero is very ancient. He is the murmuring voice of societies. In all ages he comes before

texts. He doesnt expect representation. The writings of De Certeau are often associated

with the work of Francis Alys because De Certeau vindicates a sum of individualities

whose collective and operational tactics engage in silent resistance and transgression.

(Arriola, 2008, p.126) In some of his early works, as a result of this individual struggle,

Alys silently claims back his time by means of poetic actions that undermine the notion

of speed, efficiency, productivity, and therefore progress. In Paradox of Praxis 1 -

Sometimes Making Something leads to Nothing, (1997) [Fig.12] the artist is seen in a

video pushing a large block of ice through the busy streets of Mexico City until the ice

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completely melts down. Here one is immediately reminded of Camus Sisyphus rolling a

boulder up a hill again and again; both Alys and Sisyphus accepting and embracing the

absurd get free from the idea of life-achievement, engaging de-facto in a form of

resistance and transgression.

Fig. 12

Alys, unlike Nauman, doesnt work in a studio and he seems to be the prototype of the

nomadic (global) artist, he operates in the social interstices and political fractures of the

urban structure, his plots and scenarios spreads like rumours that thrive on the

fragmented stories and debris of everyday situations. He slid pillows into the broken

windows of Mexico City (Placing Pillows, 1990) and walked a magnetic dog collecting

leftovers and debris (The Collector, 1992) [Fig.11]. In the latter work the black and white

photograph is accompanied by with the following text: For an indeterminate period of

time, the magnetised collector takes a daily walk through the streets and gradually builds

up a coat made of any metallic residue lying in its path. This process goes on until the

collector is completely covered by its trophies.

Here again we have the feeling that the artist is voluntarily stressing the value of the

indefinite amount of time in which the apparently pointless gesture of recollection has

taken place and the daily (almost ritualistic) repetition of this action, in apparent, stark

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contrast with common expressions such as time is money, dont waste my time and

hard work, cultural products of the western civilization that emphasise speed, work and

profit above all. In Alys work the ephemeral gesture becomes an action performed to

express ethical meaning that is, in turn, accommodated to the political realm, and what is

intriguing for me in his work is exactly this fusion of ephemeral and ethical, poetics and

politics.

In A story of Deception (2003-2006) [Fig.13] Alys chases mirages in a country road in

Patagonia, again putting himself in the absurd (and romantic) position of try to capture an

atmospheric phenomenon occurring in a perpetually receding horizon. As the artist

explains, this poetic and ephemeral gesture can be read as addressing that very Latin

American political scenario where development programs tend to function in precisely the

manner of a mirage, a historical goal that vanishes perpetually into thin air as soon as it

looms onto the horizon; (Alys, 2006, p.98 ) For me though, the work (as for Bas Jan

Aders attempt to cross the Atlantic in a one man boat In Search of the Miraculous (1975)

[Fig.14] ) is a fantastic on-going dialogue between the traveller and his desires and more

generally remind us of the most daunting task any human being is condemned (at least)

to try to accomplish, the pursuit of happiness.

Fig. 13 - 14

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SELF-EXPOSURE AND REPRESENTATION

Ader, Nauman and Alys use photography and video in order to record their performative

gestures and allow the viewer to take part in their game of self exposure. But is their

conceptual use of the lens-based medium completely alien to representation and

authorship as suggested by Krauss in her Notes on the Index? In short my answer is no.

In Aders films and photographic series we have the feeling that everything has been

carefully staged; hes by all means an aesthete, there is a great deal of attention to

details, colour (when appropriate) and composition. We know from his biography that the

person assisting him in the recordings was his wife Mary Sue Andersen, who was very

close to him, and therefore very well aware of his visual concerns. Some Aders works

reveal a certain pictorial sensibility and his oeuvre is by large a successful effort in the

representation of the metaphysical; he was also notably inspired by Buster Keatons

movies and everything from framing, duration and costumes is there to recall that.

Naumans works are visually very minimal, but again his conscious use of the medium is

key to get the type of viewers response he is aiming at. The studio is empty; everything

is there to suggest the idea of the conceptual artist at work. Nauman turns and twists the

camera in order to deliver the uncomfortable feeling of an unstable psychological relation

with the self and the space around him. His body becomes an object in the world of

others. He plays with the idea of the mental self being penetrable, and vulnerable making

the viewer stands in the voyeuristic position of someone who can look right through him

into his mind. [Our gaze is thus experienced] as an actual penetration into the core of the

inner self. (Laing, 1969, p.110)

With Alys we land in the typical post-conceptual framework; the artists use of the medium

is dictated by several concerns. He is well aware of the conceptual legacy and refuses to

take responsibility for the actual making of the image; his aim is to contextualize his

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gestures in a life-like context and to preserve the experiential aspects of it. The visual

style of his work is generally amateurish, quality is average and framing is kind of

unintentional, but having said that, I would argue that this is a planned strategy and not,

as in the case of many seventies artists, a choice born out of true political antagonism

(Fluxus) or intellectual dogmatism (Performance Art). As post-conceptual artist, Alys

defines his own language, elusively avoiding strict characterization in style and almost

playing with the idea of the documentary, in order to permeate his actions with that lyrical

everydayness at the same time exploiting and reinforcing the myth of the ordinary man.

CONCLUSIONS

In the introduction I have mentioned the reasons why I am interested in subjectivity and

the use of poetic language within a post-conceptual art framework. My personal journey

from south to north brought the issue of the ongoing struggle between reason and

emotion to the foreground of my consciousness. What is more I always felt I had a kind of

all-too-deep fracture between the rational and emotional self right inside me, it is part of

my personality and influence a great deal of my perception of the world, often creating a

gap between a more poetic intention and the resulting more rational gesture. The

consequence is often a tendency of my works towards an emotional implosion. I always

had the feeling that somehow I needed to choose between reason and emotion or trying

to bridge the gap, but either/or (to quote Kierkegaard one last time), the strategy to live a

life poetically (and making art accordingly) has to confront todays deflationary use of the

term poetic, and be informed by the legacy of conceptual art and its critique of

authorship and subjectivity. It is in fact skepticism towards the idea of truth, genius and

creation stemming from the early conceptual experiences, that opens the gate to irony,

playfulness and to the development of artistic personas, central elements in the practice

of conceptual and post conceptual artists such as Ader, Nauman and Alys.

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My decision has been, to serve the purpose of creating a narrative, to imagine their work

deeply immersed in the existentialist tradition of living a life authentically (overcoming

one-self to be what one really is) and to compare contemporary man (crossing the desert

of values and the void left by the death of God in a semi-virtual reality made of subtle

ideological constraints, and depersonalized intimacy) to the Greek myth of Sisyphus. The

philosophy of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus, although dealing with a

dreadful acceptance of the fact that life has a structural absurdity as a project whose

only possible end is oblivion, find in the acceptance of this condition and in the making of

one-self as a living project good reasons to exist here and now; their approach to life is a

call to paradoxical non-conformity that despite belonging to the last century is in my

opinion still significant today. In this essay the artists becomes the anonymous fighters of

a not well defined form of romantic resistance; deceitfully inefficient heroes, masters of

the self, on a mission to accomplish the lyrical revitalization of language.

There always comes a time when one must choose between contemplation and

action, this is called becoming a man. Such wrenches are dreadful. But for a

proud heart there can be no compromise. There is God or time, that cross or this

sword. (Camus, 1942 p.84)

Bas Jan Ader, the seducer, would certainly agree that there is no eternal love but what is

thwarted, there is scarcely any passion without struggle. Such a love culminates only in

the ultimate contradiction of death. (Camus, 1942 p.71) His falls, his longing and the

search for new horizons at the intersection of the heroic and its parody seduce us all; he

is the most romantic of conceptualists.

Francis Alys, the revolutionary, who choose the ineffectual effort as weapon of objection,

the gringo taking to the street to claim his time back, resisting speed and productivity,

chasing mirages in a perpetually receding horizons, in harmony with the nomadic nature

of all poets.

Bruce Nauman, the creator, facing the drama of conception and the (all too

! 24!

contemporary) problematic relationship with the self in the micro cosmos of his studio, to

examine, to enlarge and to enrich the ephemeral island on which he has just landed. For

the absurd man is not a matter of explain and solving, but of experiencing and

describing. (Camus, 1942 p.91)

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alys, F. (2006) Fragments of a Conversation in Buenos Aires, in: Francis Alys, A story of Deception, Exhibition Catalogue, Portikus, Frankfurt Arriola, M., Goetz, I., Lockemann, K., Urbashek, S. (2008) Francis Alys, Exhibition Catalogue, Mnchen: Sammlung Goetz Barrett, W. (1978) Conversation with Bryan Magee on Heidegger and Modern Existentialism - From the 1978 BBC series Men of Ideas. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvfgAvtNulw [Accessed 16 June 2013] Beenker, E. (2007) Bas Jan Ader. The man who wanted to look beyond the horizon, in Bas Jan Ader All is Falling, Camden Art Centre and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Exhibition Catalogue

Camus, A. (1942) The Myth of Sisyphus, Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, Los Angeles, London: Berkeley Flynn, T., R. (2006) Esistentialism, A very short introduction, Oxford : Oxford University Press

Godfrey, M., Kelsey, R., E., Rorimer, A., Ruppersberg, A., Witkovsky, M., S., (2011) Light Years Conceptual Art and The Photograph 1964-1977, Chicago : Art Institute of Chicago, New Haven : Distributed by Yale University Press

Golomb J., Lehrer R. L., Santaniello W., (1999) Nietzsche and Depth Psychology, SUNY Press

Heiser, J. (2007) Curb your Romanticism Bas Jan Aders Slapstick, in Bas Jan Ader All is Falling, Camden Art Centre and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Exhibition Catalogue

Heiser, J. (2007) A Romantic Measure in Romantic Conceptualism, Kunsthalle Nurberg, Exhibition Catalogue

Heiser, J. (2008) All of a Sudden - Things that matter in Contemporary Art, Sternberg Press

Heiser, J. (2009) Moscow, Romantic Conceptualism, and after e-flux journal #29, November 2009. Available from: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/moscow-romantic-conceptualism-and-after/ [Accessed 16 June 2013]

Hong, e., Hong, H., Kierkegaard, S. (1992) Concluding unscientific postscript to Philosophical fragments, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press

Laing, R. D. (1969) The Divided Self, New York, Pantheon Books Nauman, B. (2004) Raw Material, Tate Modern, Exhibition Catalogue, London: Tate; New York: Distributed by H.N. Abrams

Norman, J. (2002) Nietzsche and Early Romanticism, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 63, No. 3, Available from: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00225037%28200207%2963%3A3%3C501%3ANAER%3E2.0.CO%3B2-5 [Accessed 16 June 2013]

Robert C. Morgan, (2002) Bruce Nauman, Art and Performance, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press Roxby A. M. (2007) Live Art on Camera, Performance and Photography, Exhibition Catalogue, Southampton : John Hansard Gallery Van Bruggen,C. (1988) Bruce Nauman:Drawings 1965-1986, New York: Rizzoli !

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TABLE OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 01 - Bruce Nauman, (1967) The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths - Neon, cm 149.9 x 139.7 x 5.1 - Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Fig. 02 Andy Warhol (1964) Kiss - 16mm film (black and white, silent). 54 min. at 16fps. 2010 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

Fig.03 Bas Jan Ader (1971) I Am Too Sad To Tell You - 16mm film, duration: 3 min 34 sec, Film still Mary Sue Ader-Andersen

Fig. 04 Bas Jan Ader (1971) Broken Fall (Organic) - 16mm film, duration: 1 min 44 sec, Film still Mary Sue Ader-Andersen

Fig.05 Bas Jan Ader (1970) Fall 2 (Amsterdam) - 16mm film, duration: 19 sec, Film still Mary Sue Ader-Andersen

Fig. 06 Buster Keaton (1928) Steamboat Bill Jr. (Film still) orig. 35mm silent film, duration: 71 min, Produced by: Joseph M. Schenck (USA)

Fig. 07 Bruce Nauman (1969) Violin tuned D E A D (Film still) orig. Video (black and white, sound) duration: 60 min, Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Fig. 08 Bruce Nauman (1968) Slow Angle Walk (Beckett walk), (Film still) orig. Video (black and white, sound) duration: 60 min, Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Fig. 09 Bruce Nauman (1965) Manipulating the T Bar (Film still) orig. Video (black and white, sound) duration: 3 min, Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Fig. 10 Bruce Nauman (1968) Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square, (Film still) orig. Video (black and white, sound) duration: 10 min, Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Fig. 11 Francis Alys (1991-2006) The Collector, Black & White Photograph, cm 100x80, The Artist

Fig. 12 Francis Alys (1997) Paradox of Praxis 1 - Sometimes Making Something leads to Nothing (Still from Video), orig. Video (colour, sound) duration: 5 min The Artist

Fig. 13 Francis Alys (1991-2006) A story of Deception (Still from Video), orig. Video (colour, sound) duration: 15 min The Artist

Fig.15 Bas Jan Ader (1975) In Search of The Miraculous (Film still) - Mary Sue Ader-Andersen