8 CROCHETED BODY ALEX FRANCÉS
Texts: Alex Francés STORY OF THE PRODUCTION OF 8 CROCHETED BODY Aramis López DOING THE WORK OF MAKING A BODY Ignasi Aballí BEING BLIND IS LIKE NOT BEING BLIND Valentín Roma THE ART OF MAKING A WORLD Montserrat Rodríguez Garzo THE DOSAGE OF THE MOTHER Alex Francés VUIT
Photographs: Alex Francés
© Photographs and texts: The authors 2014
8 CROCHETED BODY ALEX FRANCÉS
Alex FrancĂŠs
STORY OF THE PRODUCTION OF 8 CROCHETED BODY Crochet-braid-rebind Without giving up what is traditional in the practice of art, to put forward a proposal for a new teaching residing in the contemporary aesthetic experience. To crochet a body for myself with the greatest physical intensity up to the limit imposed by pain.
Listen to the Voice of Buddha, Stop your Sericulture, 1993 B&W photomontage 53 x 104 cm
BEFORE CROCHETING, EMBROIDER Some things cannot be seen if you do not touch them. The first job I had to do was a small circle made with relief embroidery, something I began with a 3-hour course at a haberdashery run by some very young people. I went there thanks to a friend who was running it and later started me out in crochet, someone I will always be grateful to because of how much she has brought about. Sitting at the table in the company of at least 12 young women, I began to embroider this circle which turned out to be fairly uneven. In spite of
this disappointing result I took it as a challenge, and with a lot of practice I managed to give expression to the project I had in mind: to put a simple little drawing of my silhouette created with small red marker pen dots on an embroidered tablecloth, giving the small sketch the dimensions of a life-size self-portrait of my body.
Untitled, ca. 1990, Ink on paper, 12 x 24 cm
THE BANQUET This new version of the drawing was embroidered in black thread on black fabric with some details in brown and blue. The piece was created with the intention of making a palpable drawing, a touchable reproduction of my body, the text which is offered.
The image and the real The image is not an essentially visual phenomenon but rather an internal production made up of prior information and the contingencies that can be gained via the five known ways. It is at the same time related and unrelated to the real. It is the place of production of reality for the being. This drawing has obsessed me for a long time. The truth is that I do not remember exactly when I did it, but I have always wondered why I should know with such certainty that it is this one, and not any other, which retains me and depicts me as an emblem. Perhaps because it comes from an insistent act of inscription and because it is transcribed in other works that reiterate this process of investiture, which is both current and at the same time out-of-date, as seen in La siesta de la conciencia (The Siesta of Consciousness), a piece from 1992 which consists of a silhouette made from circular wooden cross-sections and a montage of black and white photographs in which a body is reassembled and stretched out on a sliced log with its back to the viewer. Photographed in black and white by sections so as to be able to reassemble it later on while stretching it out, this reconstructed image refers to a recurring dream in which I felt my body being repeatedly stretched and shrunk in a sometimes pleasant, sometimes anguishing cadence. It was a feeling as if the consciousness of my body was being subjected to a double force that was expanding and contracting it at the same time without me being able to stop it, in a division in which my consciousness was both inside and outside my body. The life-size wooden silhouette accompanying this montage of photographs was based on this drawing and formed a regular-irregular pattern of circles joined together, leaving areas of different shapes and sizes inside. In two of these holes the Hungarian words hideg, meleg (cold, heat) are written on the wall in blue and red respectively.
The Siesta of Consciousness, 1992 B&W photomontage and pieces of wood 220 x 180 cm
SANDING, CLEANING, WASHING OR POLISHING; A BODY RUB WITH OBJECTS Sanding Wearing away the skin of objects, rubbing them until they are soft to the touch, thinking about who is going to touch them. Cleaning The clean, the pure, cannot be the untouched, since by definition that which is stain-free does not exist outside this material world. For me, purity lies in the intrepid and continuous effort to clean, to polish what is stained. Staining and cleaning are parts of the same painful process that leaves behind a trace line, a mark on the drawing.
Washing There are days when I mop the house two or three times. I do it while thinking about this text which I write in my head while methodically mopping the floor following my routine sequence. I also really like doing the washing-up. The flow of the water and handling the objects relaxes me. These daily chores have made me realise the importance of tactile vision; the best way to tell if a pot is really clean and free of rings is to rub your hand around it to feel the subtle differences that the eye misses. Here touch tells me what vision cannot, reinforcing the idea that the image is something recomposed, the result of a network of information about prior knowledge and experiences that comes together in an internal representation which we call an image. Polishing Burnishing like one who shines a hammered bronze mirror so that our image is clearly reflected in it. Also piercing it point by point, sewing it, embroidering it. The pleasure and pain of repeating Repeating an action drains it of its original meaning. That is because when equal and repeated actions are strung together, monotony cancels out their particularity, so that the intervals no longer function to separate unique or distinct entities but rather repetitions, equalities. Equal notes at equal intervals produce an effect that brings out unseated thinking, separate from the sense of the countable. (The countable is that which can be reduced to numbers, but which can also be named.)
THINKING ABOUT EMBROIDERY
The Banquet, 2012 Embroidered tablecloth 100 x 180 cm
Repetition and progress I was embroidering in the summer. I needed a lot of light to be able to make out the black stitching on black. Embroidery is precision work where you have to keep an eye on lots of things; it forces you to concentrate on the design and follow precise plans and well-drawn lines. Sitting in a low chair with my back to the window, using the light of the long days of summer and in a position that inevitably brought to mind maternal images, I began the tough task of trying to embroider that huge surface covered in irregular circles drawn in white on the black fabric. But I soon realised that filling a surface as large as that would be a huge job. So during the process the possibility came up of not completing the design, suggesting it just in parts and building in the chance designs that emerged as I traced paths from one circle to another. That was how the idea came about of working on the model of the original drawing to produce a design that would involve choosing some points and excluding others as part of creative decision-making on a fixed pattern, creating
pathways between complete and incomplete circles and leaving empty areas that could be interconnected by the imagination to complete the image.
8 CROCHETED BODY My children are born as abortions from the body, deformed and incomplete; they are the partial organs of a future body, bags with anuses that form spaces for circulation and restraint, extended networks in a placental medium belonging to a glimpsed interior.
8 Crocheted Body, 2012 Photography, 92 x 212 cm
THE NURSE MOTHER
The Nurse Mother, 2013 Cotton crochet work and laboratory pipettes 30 x 100 cm each one
The dosage of the mother Scenes from an early and imprecise age have come to the surface throughout this process, a glimpse of maternal work from below, from the smallness of a body that witnesses, in amazement the precise handling of all kinds of instruments. To my eyes this woman seemed superhuman, even brutal, due to her determination to provide food and care and also to administer pain when needed. Manipulation Manipulate, control with a hand, with a hook, with an arm; seduce and caress the material that resists, direct it bearing in mind its resilience and let yourself be dominated by it. Drop, stop, let things be. Give this thing its shape and find its position on the flat surface look at it, photograph it, make myself in it.
STORY OF AN INJURY Using pain Such was the intensity and unbridled enthusiasm of this first part of the production that I ended up hurting myself and inflaming the tendon of my right thumb, an inflammation that ran right up my entire arm. It hurt a lot and meant I couldn’t make a thumb-finger pinch grip which is of course essential if you want to handle something. It was here that the limit emerged as an essential element for production, as a barrier that enables the creation of meaning. What I did Crocheting with braided hemp rope or long-line is tough and even more so if it is the first time you have done it, but the result is very interesting. There is for me a natural connection between rope, wood and flesh, so that seeing these rope-flesh bladders grow in my hands was a real and painful pleasure closely connected to procreating, to entering deeply. Such was the force the material gained on being twisted that it literally guided and led me, demanding to be shaped and finished, conveying to me the sensation of completing a body piecemeal in which each element suggested an unknown and, after a while, familiar function. Then wash, burn, dye, dissolve, rub, dip, rinse, dry… Compel friction and wear, alternately repeat actions for adding and removing coloured glazes, dyeing, washing and drying. The Voyeur Sort, organise, compose, show, hide … Taking pictures of objects has, as always, meant the pleasure of looking and possessing, and also of reading and offering, and even a way of accepting. At all events they round off the action.
THINKING ABOUT CROCHETING Make a place for the drawing and text with a thread. Control and loss of control Crocheting the way I do it involves a twofold strategy. Firstly, I begin with a preconceived idea which is in turn supported by the same image, the same desire: literally to make a body. Then secondly I let myself be carried away by my impulses and much more specific, one-off decisions, immersed in a specific time and a process, letting the piece take shape from the results of these decisions, alternating control and loss of control, in a passage that enables interruptions, inaccuracies and arbitrariness to emerge on the pattern. Duplication of attention and internal dialogue Reflecting while I crochet is thinking supported by an action. What you get is a braid of thinking and acting. When crocheting you give your attention the chance to go down parallel channels, since by performing an action that is repeated part of your attention can move elsewhere. It is as if by creating this duplication of centres of attention you can access or facilitate internal dialogue, achieving more fluid ways of thinking. Braid of actions A Mรถbius strip has only one side, although it appears to have two; the duplication of attention displays a parallel structure, dual in appearance, but which leads to convergence; a parallelism which twists to create bows. When you cut a Mรถbius strip lengthways you get two different results depending on where you cut it. The result of cutting exactly halfway across the width of the strip is a strip that is longer but with two twists; and if you cut this strip lengthways down the middle of its width again, you get another two intertwined strips. As you cut each one lengthways, you get more intertwined strips. It is like a stroller walking along lost in thought, daydreaming only in part since while they are enjoying their inner dialogue they are also enjoying the very action of walking, intertwining in its course both experiences into one, yet double at the same time, which reciprocally stimulate each other.
Crocheting using a Mรถbius strip gives you the strange sensation of creating an object that opens and closes in on itself, that twists and grows both inwardly and outwardly. I find it curious crocheting something that actually lacks concrete utility and does not belong to any of the forms of art either; it is in fact more related to traditional craft practices. It is crocheted things that sometimes remind me of strange objects of worship. However, due to the technique and the material used they resemble something utilitarian, they seem made for the body, as often happens with crocheted things: shoes, rugs or clothes. However, these as yet unnamed things are only there to produce an aesthetic effect, like whims located right on the edge of the utility of things.
As Yet Unnamed Things, 2013 (detail) Cotton crochet work 5 pieces of various sizes measuring between 30 and 50 cm
REGULAR-IRREGULAR, OVERFLOWING In this iterative process of stringing together loops, adding pieces neatly, there is sometimes uncontrolled tumoral growth that reminds me of cancerous cell growth and some of Pepe Espaliú’s drawings. In this regulated process of adding stitches an outburst appears, a moving away from the line in an unexpected direction, an arbitrary decision that will determine the entire result. It is a compulsion, a decentring around which the piece will turn from then on. It is as if the urge were released and I could do nothing to prevent it; just stop, rest and resume later on to redirect it, accepting the new possibilities that this decentring opens up.
BLACK
Black, (detail)
Black, 2012 8 + 1 crochet work objects made of long-line, plaster and other materials 8 + 1 bases measuring 60 x 40 x 60 cm
Number 4, black mummy foetus, almost black shiny black bone. I do not know absolute black.
Black, piece number 4
Thinking the bone I understand the bone as the super object that substantiates a topography divided between here and there. Seeing the bone is to go beyond that limit. Number 9, two pieces separated by twisting and brought together in the image.
Black, piece number 9
ARMOUR
Armour, 2012 9 painted crochet work and plaster objects on a wooden board measuring 82 x 130 cm
Invest a body At first it was all there, the 9 weapons laid out on my table 1 red, a punch, a phallus 2 meadow green the burgonet, the good 3 dark blue, the helmet, a mask to reveal the face inside 4 and 5 yellow and orange, two vomits, rewards 6 sap green, the seat, the own 7 dark blue, a key, the voice 8 meadow green the emptying of Brothers, the Opening 9 In Loop
Did I mould myself from that (which was already there)? Is it that (which I conceived then) what makes me now? Is it that which I imagine (now) that measures? Is heritage a body? Is it a dress for real life?
9 In Loop (Piece number 9 of Armadura is this double engram, an internal configuration which is not available on the table, an intimate object whose image we can only see rotating on a monitor).
In Loop, 2012, video, 8’ 54’’
Silence
Aramis LĂłpez
DOING THE WORK OF MAKING A BODY 8 crocheted body by Alex FrancĂŠs arises not so much as a fracture in his work but rather as a new joint in his body as an artist. Paradox is the form of this new joint: it is a joint that allows new movement for his limbs; it is a new joint for a new set of possibilities. As a way of thinking, paradox means all ideas can be taken as valid. William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Augustine of Hippo are examples of the persistent use of contradiction and how when reiterated it implicitly leads to hidden affirmation. Contradictions are typical of the work of an artist and mark the matters on which works of art are founded: the object/body of art, the construction of the image, the creation process, the place of the spectator, the polysemy of images or the sensual and sensory in perception. The first of the paradoxes in this series by Alex FrancĂŠs is that they are works created to be viewed primarily by the blind; works in which the gaze is not the captive of the sense of sight, nor outside it; works owed to all the senses and sensations, and none in particular; works to foster the development of cognitive maps; works for the intellect. In his Story of the Production of 8 crocheted body, the author tells us how after attending a needlework course, he embroidered a tablecloth with the silhouette of his body. In 1990 he did a small drawing with dots which is the basis for this embroidery (The Banquet, 2012). He continues to produce works using traditional crafts (crochet) and has started making objects that in principle are shapeless, reminiscent of internal bodily organs, hitherto nameless organs which perform necessary but unknown functions, which are parts of his body, which are the parts which make it possible to talk about his body. Thus came about the first of the works, 8 cos enganxat. It consists of several pieces crocheted with long-line. Their shape is due in large part to the production process itself: the tension of a string as strong as long-line tautens the object and the result is the combination of the shape desired by the artist and those imposed by the material. An earlier attempt to assemble a body is the photomontage Listen to the Voice of Buddha, Stop your Sericulture (1993), in which images, which are fragments of his roped body, conclude a puzzle that looks like a complete image but in which there are inconsistencies in the continuity of the rope that is wrapped round him. It is a piece that is a self-reference
in the idea that emerges as the production of pieces advances: building his own body-image. Previously Alex FrancÊs had worked continuously with the image of his body, with a literal image, placing it on stages or scenarios, marking the paradox of the relationship of a natural environment and his body, the smallest unit of social artifice. In this new stage it is not just a question of referring to his body but also developing a body based on objects-images-organs. They are created as organs by calling them organs and by materialising them and giving them a function which designates, defines and enables them. It is not creating a man, it is not moulding the figure of a human being with clay or thread, neither is it creating feet and arms and heads and putting together the puzzle that is a human being; his work of weaving a body is more like creating a dictionary, a thesaurus of functions of the individual and the parts into which they can be divided or multiplied, added or subtracted, integrated or derived. In this case the artist’s work is not limited to creating objects-images-organs as he also draws up grammatical rules for creating sentences using images as words. The objects-images-organs are grouped into three body-part-works, into three named and titled series; each one is the parts that make up a body. In 8 crocheted body the objects that comprise it are those inside the body; they are hearts, spleens, bladders, livers or lungs, the ones which perform the functions of an organic body. In a literal body they would perform assigned functions: blood purification, digestive or reproductive functions; but in an image body they are organs that are defined by the viewer’s gaze and the result of the definition may be unclear, even contradictory. The perception of each viewer is each of the possible semantic meanings in the body dictionary.
8 crocheted body, (detail)
Black refers to a support for the body, a skeleton that maintains consistency and integrity, which brings together the body and marks its boundaries from within; it is the hard part of the body. The pieces are arranged in diptychs: each pair of objects is complementary, not contrary; through paradox they mark their functional and semantic content, gloss/matt, painted or not, sharp/rounded. The skeleton is the part of the body that will last longest when the body has no life.
Black
Armour, made and worked as an exoskeleton, delimits the body, protects it, makes it visible and enables its social insertion. In Il cavaliere inesistente (The Nonexistent Knight) Italo Calvino presents the perfect knight, the fulfiller of all rules, courteous in all his actions, invincible in battle, and yet lacking a body. The perfect knight is only his armour; inside there is only his voice, he has no body; he is only the actions he performs, the words he speaks, the thoughts he has. Every part making up Alex FrancÊs’s armour is one of the functions and virtues of a body but without the body itself. The primary task of the artist is to look at that which is not looked at.
Vuit is a piece with no body, it is an intangible object. It is a record of the relationships that objects-images-organs have with their viewers. It is an experience that to date has only three chapters: Nuria, Ricard and Vicens. Three blind people, two of them from birth, who during a conversation with Alex FrancĂŠs are given objects belonging to each of the parts by him and they talk about them. There are big differences between the comments of those who at some point in their lives have been able to see and those who have not. Nuria, who has seen, tries to find similarities in the shapes of known things: flowers, arms and heads. Meanwhile Ricard and Vicens gently and slowly touch the edges of the objects. They draw up a topography of the shapes which enables them to then compose an overall image, an image built without the input of the sense of sight. The morphology of the organs that Alex presents to them is completed with a series of pieces of information which, in addition to touch and smell, come from the conversation between the two of them. Alex explains how he has made them and Ricard tells him about what touching a shiny surface suggests. When Nuria thinks she has recognised an organic form she talks about how after thirty years she has almost forgotten her visual image of it and how she now builds her images with a mixture of memories and emotions. And then there is us, spectators of the experience, watchers of those who look. We are witnesses of an aesthetic activity as voyeurs, onlookers of the appreciation of beauty, because the objects-images-organs are beautiful, attractive, both to our sight and to their touch. And there is also the beauty of the movement of hands on the works, of the features on the faces of those who do not see and those who watch them, of the silences while touching and of words. We have already gone through a decade of the new millennium; this is the second time that Christian culture has done so, and this time it does not seem that anybody attaches any special importance to this fact. All the paradigms are changing and we do not know whether we are witnessing such a radical change in knowledge and culture as the one that took place with the emergence of new media (film, radio, television) in the last century. Yet with these media for transmitting information we have shifted from an accumulation of knowledge based on words to a pre-eminence of images as a basic element in the understanding of contemporary culture. An image is an intellectual reference of a reality and, as such, the image may take many forms; it may be understood but not explained, it may be
stored in the bottom of the cerebral cortex or in the heart, it may be a lie or the truth, or what we want or what we need. Yet this artistic proposal seeks to expand or delimit the definition of image by talking about it, and by talking about it with people who build their images very differently, talking and looking with the blind. Classical philosophy, basically from Plato onwards, gave art the function of imitating nature by building objects or images capable of representing it. This restricted function of art restricts it to a notarial instrument, to attesting to the beauty of God’s creation. The artist, the intellectual, has spent centuries moving away from this simple conception of what constitutes art. It was Oscar Wilde in The Decay of Lying, in 1890, who suggested that: “Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life. For what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.� Art indicates what the mind perceives; we would not be able to recognise beauty if art had not marked it for us.
Vuit, video installation, 2014, 57' 01'', (detail)
Vuit, video installation, 2014, 57' 01'', (detail)
Ignasi Aballí
BEING BLIND IS LIKE NOT BEING BLIND "But can I believe that I see and be blind, or believe that I'm blind and see?" Ludwig Wittgenstein. Remarks on Colour
It is 3 August 1977. Jorge Luis Borges is getting ready to give a lecture about blindness in the Teatro Coliseo in Buenos Aires. In the centre of the big stage there is no more than a table and a chair. On the table there is a glass of water and two microphones. As background, a curtain. The woman who at that time was his secretary, María Kodama, takes him by the arm and accompanies him to the chair. Once seated she shows him where the water glass on the table is by taking his hand in hers. Borges touches it, touches the table, its edges, sips some water, touches one of the microphones with his right hand and strokes the arms of the chair in which he is sitting, thus recognising all the elements of the place where he is. As this occurs, the loud applause of the audience that fills the room rings out and they get ready to listen to Borges talk about blindness, about his blindness. He begins by talking about what he can see. He says he can make out some colours, such as blue and green, along with a colour that has always been faithful to him, yellow, which still accompanies him. He says that people believe that the blind live in the dark, in blackness, but he in particular misses two colours he can no longer make out: black and red. He would like to live in a darker world and not in a kind of greenish and bluish haze that is the world of the blind, an undefined world out of which only the odd colour emerges. Blindness was not a misfortune for Borges and should not be viewed with pathos. Blindness is a way of life of men, like any other way of life, and he says a phrase that I think sums up his entire lecture: “Being blind is like not being blind”. Borges goes on to say that blindness is not a misfortune for producing art, but rather it is an instrument and the start of something new. Blindness is a gift for someone who has an artistic vocation. Because, he concludes, who can know more about themselves than a blind person? You can see the video of the lecture on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vaom4uQ14w0
José Saramago’s book Blindness begins as follows: “The amber light came on. Two of the cars ahead accelerated before the red light appeared. At the pedestrian crossing the sign of a green man lit up. The people who were waiting began to cross the road, stepping on the white stripes painted on the black surface of the asphalt…” Immediately afterwards, a man who is trapped in a car that does not move when the light turns green cries out in terror: “I am blind”. In 1986 artist Sophie Calle produced a work entitled Les Aveugles (The Blind) in which she asked a group of people blind from birth to tell her what their idea of beauty was. Several of the opinions she gathered more or less explicitly alluded to colour. A girl told her beauty is green. A man said he particularly liked blue because he associated it with the sea. A woman said she liked blond men with blue eyes. Another, by contrast, said she did not need images in her brain and that since she cannot appreciate beauty, she had always run away from it. I started this text by referring to three stories linking blindness with colour because colour is one aspect that we can see in the pieces that Alex Francés has made for the 8 cos enganxat (8 crocheted body) exhibition. Some of these series consist of groups of small elements (which we might call “bodies”) of sculptural objects with a somewhat primitive and artisanal appearance, of archaeological objects that suggest parts of skeletons or remains of other materials, mostly made with crochet work in hemp long-line, a material with a rough texture easily recognisable to the touch. In some of them he has only used this material (8 crocheted body), but in the group entitled Armadura (Armour) and in the bodies made for his En cinta (In Loop) video, for the Incorporación azul (Blue Incorporation) photographs and the two components of his work Hidegmeleg, they are coated with a layer of paint in different colours, all very intense: red, meadow green, dark blue, bright blue, yellow, orange, sap green, brown, maroon, black, etc. The paint not only endows these objects with colour but also gives them a much more consistent and rigid appearance, more hermetic and closer to sculpture than in those cases in which the pieces are unpainted, and they maintain the flexibility characteristic of a material such as hemp long-line. The series of objects entitled Cosas aún por nombrar (As Yet Unnamed Things) (a title and artwork which for various reasons reminds me of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, perhaps because these as yet unnamed
forms, waiting for a name, are probably unnamable) is composed of five components made with dyed cotton thread. Unlike the Armadura series, this colour has not been added after the making of each piece, when the object was already finished, but it is the material itself, the cotton thread, which has been coloured before giving it a particular shape, crocheting it. In this case the as yet unnamed objects have not lost the inherent flexibility of an object crocheted with cotton thread. We could describe them all as shapeless, that is to say with an indeterminate, indefinite, shape that does not remind us of anything we can name. Frederick R. Karl says that a Beckett hero “has long ago refused complicity with objects. Or else, objects have remained outside his attainment. In every instance, he is divided from the rest of the world, a stranger to its desires and needs. The dichotomy between his own mind and body finds an analogy in the outside world in the dichotomy between people and objects.” But these “as yet unnamed things”, these bodies, which might represent the fusion between subject and object, also lose or change their original shape when we handle them. They adapt to our desires because they are soft and flexible, empty shells that only manifest their external appearance, their dress, we might say. In the series entitled La madre enfermera (The Nurse Mother), objects crocheted in cotton and dyed in different colours are combined with laboratory glass pipettes to give them a much more organic look, as if they were fragments of mutilated bodies that are difficult to identify or even entrails laid out for study or analysis. In his treatise Remarks on Colour Wittgenstein discussed the difficulty of naming what we see (and especially colours) based on his philosophical-conceptual or logical-grammatical thought. This text is not addressed to artists (painters) or scientists or psychologists, possibly interested in the study and use of colour, but rather it is a linguistic study about an aspect of reality such as colour, especially suitable for philosophising: “13. Imagine a tribe of colour-blind people, and there could easily be one. They would not have the same colour concepts as we do. For even assuming they speak, e.g. English, and thus have all the English colour words, they would still use them differently than we do and would learn their use differently. Or if they have a foreign language, it would be difficult for us to translate their colour words into ours. “79. Psychology describes the phenomena of seeing. For whom does it describe them? What ignorance can this description eliminate?
“80. Psychology describes what was observed. “81. Can one describe to a blind person what it’s like for someone to see? Certainly. The blind learn a great deal about the difference between the blind and the sighted. But the question was badly put; as though seeing were an activity and there were a description of it” The nine objects in the Armadura series have been designed to carry out an experience with blind people, in which they are handled by the blind people who then explain what this aesthetic experience has meant for them. The blind cannot see these objects by sight and therefore cannot see the different colours in which they have been painted. They can see the objects by touch but can you distinguish colours solely by touch, with the eyes of your hands? Or by touch and smell? Do colours have different qualities for the sensitivity of the skin? Do they have different smells? Or even do they have a different sound or taste? Perhaps we could establish here the difference between feeling and observing. These small, shapeless, abstract, organic objects, created to be touched, held in the hands in a relationship that is body to body, or skin to skin, do not refer to anything, do not represent anything concrete, or they represent themselves, at least for those who observe them with their eyes. They are crocheted forms defined in small volumes, some with holes and inner cavities, others with an epidermis as a breastplate. They are objects designed to be touched, not to be seen, or to be seen with senses other than sight. However, is not colour the part of them that is offered only to the eyes of those who do not touch them because we can already see them? Either way, for the blind people who do it the experience will mean replacing images by words, or by silence if that is the answer they decide to give. As their name suggests, the visual arts take the sense of sight as their key link and are absolutely dependent on it. Most works of art throughout history have been aimed at the gaze, are made and designed to be perceived with the eyes. This predominance of the visual over other senses must be questioned, especially by those who produce and put into circulation new images. It is essential to take a critical eye to this hegemony and rethink what it means to see and what the place of the visual is at this time when we have almost reached a point of collapse. It is true that often we do not have a complete experience of something until we touch it. The eyes are not enough to explain and understand the characteristics of what we have before us. Emile Zola said he had not seen
anything completely until he had a photograph of it. Seeing the world represented, turned into an image, or touching it, are experiences that provide us with a better grasp of it and they add layers of critical information to the precariousness and inadequacy of the gaze. Borges began his lecture by explaining his relationship as a blind person with colour. But we know that matter is colourless and that colour is just the way they look to us. The objects Alex FrancĂŠs has made to be handled by the visually impaired are also painted in bright colours, probably not to be seen with the eyes, but with other senses and other sensitivities.
Vuit, video installation, 2014, 57' 01'', (detail)
Valentín Roma
THE ART OF MAKING A WORLD "I do not prove or demonstrate anything about the texts which narrate the painting; I just stir their waters." Jean-Louis Schefer, Choses écrites (1988)
The emergence of Penelope in the middle of the Odyssey is a kind of abrupt shrinkage with respect to the narrative development of the great classical epic. Homer interrupts the exploits of the hero, and the frantic happenings of his endless journey, by this character that unlike the rest barely moves through a few physical spaces, practicing a kind of fertile immobility. In this respect Penelope brings inappropriateness and with it wrecks the habitual excitement of the epic journey. Nonetheless, it is surprising to what extent the poet avoids any type of plasticity when tracing his portrait of the young wife; indeed, he prefers to liken her to a discursive interruption, a figure of speech or a resource of writing itself. This is because three different delusions seem to come together around Penelope: one is giving real substance and productive value to time; another is checking the materials of the chronology; and finally, the psychological delirium of waiting. They are all set within a single image, that of the young wife weaving and unravelling the shroud of Laertes, her father-in-law. It is certainly right to observe in Penelope an accurate and perverse metaphor for the passivity imposed on women by patriarchal systems. However, it should also be said that Odysseus’s wife recreates in her person an absolutist blindness, a lack of vision that has nothing to do with the optical but does with a certain blackout about the state of things and the consensuses that structure the world. In this way Penelope rebels against some forms of self-denial, but above all against any form of rebellion in a way that is extemporaneous and anachronistic at the same time, since in her gesture she inhabits both the ancient cynical ataraxia and the future nihilistic cynicism. In his poem This Happened, C. K. Williams describes another bright and beautiful young woman, leaning against the window frame of the school during the break between classes, who on being chided by a teacher—in a condescending and bantering tone (“be careful, you might
fall”)—takes an unexpected decision, an impulse or a fancy, and without hesitation, smiling, lets herself fall into the void, abandoning the world and abandoning herself while this happens, maybe just to inhabit one last time within herself. Two young women separated by thousands of years yet joined by a dramatic gesture and intense political connotations; that of precipitating waiting and that of precipitating oneself into the interior of dejection and courage. What did both of them cease to see when one of them looked at her hands weaving, while the world was going on out there, and when the other threw herself towards the ground with her eyes closed, perhaps waiting for the eternal kiss and space of the unattainable? In his work 9 En cinta (9 In Loop), part of the series entitled Armadura (Armour) (2012), Alex Francés seems to pick up Penelope’s dictate and the dictum of C. K. Williams’ young student. The artist calls the nine objects that make up the series “weapons” and, like Homer did with his character, this name is not due to the morphology of the different pieces but rather the fact that they embody a certain possibility of openness, that they are power and, indeed, exorbitant power. There is an unwritten tradition which is very popular among women in La Mancha and which consists of making different bedspreads throughout their lives: some for their daughters and daughters-in-law when they are pregnant, others for some of their dead during mourning. In both cases the duration of the work is set in advance: nine months in the former and 365 days in the latter. Furthermore, the purpose of these products—which, incidentally, are usually crocheted—is also common: they will accompany their chidren in their journey towards setting up their own home as part of the marriage dowry; in the case of the deceased they will be kept in their wardrobes in case one day they need them and come back from the other world to pick them up. These two passages, from nothing to life and from the other nothing to this world, may well respond to what Alex Francés calls, with respect to the two objects of En cinta, “engrams”, in other words neural structures triggered by the excitation of the nervous system, as if the movements of transcendence were to reappear converted into simple tics, into solely epidermal vibrations. From my point of view there are three major challenges in Alex Francés’s work which are urgently expressed. One is the desire for adventure, an impulse shorn of the epic rigours or examples of heroism, an impulse released from any sexuality and therefore all complete and
undetectable lechery. Another is the attraction towards what stretches time: bodies exhausted by pleasure, as Marguerite Duras would say, or bodies learning from pain, according to Adrienne Rich’s verse; hands trapped somewhere between work and violence; eyes dreaming of dark overflows but which recount the brief twists of a crocheted object. And finally, we find the glare of the weightless, of what hollows out the heaviness of any meaning, which demands attention from the bottom of ideas that are only restrained, only rhetorical. We then see—we see here—that all the incarnations mentioned so far come together in Alex Francés’s work: Penelope weaving and unravelling the hours, C. K. Williams’ young woman who bursts and goes through the void, and Homer himself caught in a stupor. More than fifty years ago Clément Rosset, perhaps the only philosopher to have written about his own depression, launched a concept, the tragic, which synthesises everything I am trying to say, agreeing perfectly with the deployments raised by the 8 cos enganxat project. Thus the French thinker posed two paradoxes as a basis for a sense of tragedy: jouissance and the moral, that is to say, acceptance of happiness against every reason that you have to sink into despair and resistance to accepting reality, however undesirable the latter may be. Beyond the individual mechanics of the two, what interests me about Rosset, and where I think he meets up with Alex Francés’s work, is that both suggest a questioning of what is happening to us without escaping to anywhere, understanding that there is some universal and democratic nobility in the tragic, that perhaps the only lucid way to be in the world is to recognise oneself in each of one’s imperfections, remaining with each of one’s disasters. The structural simplicity of the objects in 8 cos enganxat (8 crocheted body) does not constitute, I repeat, a formalist achievement, but rather the enunciation of an impetuous question, fired hard towards this other side: how much of this simplicity are ready to digest, who in some way are simple? What degree of structuring can we accept as we embrace all the destructuring? Faced with an issue of such enormous dimensions, all that can be done is perhaps skirt the usefulness of the word, walk around the perimeters of things and their functions. And this is what Alex Francés explains with his text which recounts how the 8 cos enganxat (8 crocheted body) project was produced, a text that, following Clément Rosset, has the same tragic status as the manufactured, coloured objects arranged on various media. Because that narrative report which is read as if it were a confession and,
even more so, as one of our typical confusions, seems to have on its horizon not the truth but rather an outrageous and inalienable ardour. There are forms of writing where blindness is imposed by way of antidote to any glare, especially if it comes from those lucciole, those fireflies in which Pasolini believed he saw the fire about to go out but still alive in the village. There are ways to deal with art committed to the search for virtue, to the pursuit of virtuosity that will possibly expand the world’s skin, leaving as a result a terrain of chasms, scars and peaks for someone to conquer for the first time or again. Nevertheless, as Anne Sexton put it, and as Alex Francés’s objects seem to subscribe, “Our hands are light blue and gentle. / Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.” Or put another way: sometimes all the masks fall at the same time and nothing extraordinary happens, but who offers their face to this reality which has been reduced to a few basic lines? Who gives their gaze to things?
8 cos enganxat, 2012, objetos de ganchillo de palangre de cáñamo y tarima de madera, 200 x 300 cm
Blue incorporation, 2012, photography, 80 x 108 cm
Montserrat Rodríguez Garzo
THE DOSAGE OF THE MOTHER INTRODUCTION This article, a commentary on the fundamental hypothesis1 of Alex Francés’s work, comes from the stopping of a story. We were looking at 8 cos enganxat (8 crocheted body), thinking about the encounters, the generation of detours and what can be said about these manifestations, when the artist, talking about La madre enfermera (The Nurse Mother), interprets it thus: “it is the dosage of the mother”. This observation closes the dialogic aspect sustained in this time of work and directs the commentary to think about the hypothesis Alex uses to argue this point in his production.
1
“The image is not an essentially visual phenomenon (…) It is the place of production of reality for the being”, in
1. THE GAZE INFORMS Dosificar (measure out). La madre enfermera (The Nurse Mother). This mother, signified by a crocheted body and pierced by a pipette and its accompanying syntagm, measures out, divides or graduates the doses. The meaning established suggests an identity in which the meaning of the second term is ambiguous; so in this saying that determines an identity, something of the order of différance2 is brought into play by emerging that which is not meaning. We will surround this impossibility by looking at a meaning; perhaps at another time we will address the slippage, but for now we will take the interpretation advocated by the artist to define significance: La madre enfermera (The Nurse Mother) is the dosage of the mother; it is, if we read the term dosificar etymologically, what the mother gives of what is produced. Dosificar, made up of dosis and –ficar, means divide or graduate the dose of a medicine; dosis is a Greek term meaning the action of giving and –ficar is a Latin compositional element that forms verbs meaning to do, turn into, produce; thus etymologically dosificar means the action of giving what has been produced. Moreover, ficar, from the Latin figicare, means fix, secure one body in another; a curious correspondence between the meaning of ficar and the composition of La madre enfermera, the result of fixing a body in the fabric of another body. Let us continue to explore dosificar. It is obvious that in this term “dos” [two] is pronounced and also pronounced is the position, the stillness of that which remains fixed, dos-i-ficación3 dealt with extensively in No dos sino dos4 which, articulated in 8 cos enganxat (8 crocheted body), is a paradigm of the suture, of the most typical of a way of doing things with the discourse it represents. We will consider the literality of the term associated with what is pronounced to continue working with some manifestations of the sinthome fabric5 which the artist, also literally, operates with. The stepby-step realisation of dosificar, meaning in a crocheted figure, pierced and accompanied by the verbal fabric, will enable us to place the
2
Différance denotes difference, the condition of signification and the differentiating act. See Derrida, J. Positions. Pre-textos, Valencia, 1977, for the reasons behind the neologism différance. 3 Ib. Note 1 4 Francés, A. No dos sino dos (Imágenes de la filiación, imágenes del doble), Fundación Chirivella Soriano Comunidad Valenciana, Valencia, 2009. 5 Sinthome is a Lacanian concept which addresses the subject’s use of their relationship with language, with the uniqueness of their working with it. Lacan’s sinthome is the interface between signifier and body; behind this conceptualisation is the Freudian drive, a still mythical connection between the psychic and the somatic.
inscription of this object and locate the topicality of one of the detours that Alex mentions in his account.6 Let us now turn to the fundamental hypothesis of his project, here embedding what he thus formulates: “The image is not an essentially visual phenomenon (...) It is the place of production of reality for the being”,7 a complex sentence and the subject of this commentary, with which we shall endeavour to think about the meaning in question, that of sight, associated with the image, and what affects visibility and the instinctual dimension, the gaze, articulated in the desire, in what is missing, and its relationship to the uniqueness of the sinthomatic doing. With reference to the gaze and artistic production, we may recall Lacan’s developments about the gaze, an object which is incorporated in the visual and predates the subject.8 In Seminar XI, especially dedicated to thinking about the gaze, Lacan argues that the artist seeks to impose t himself as a gaze by giving the other something to see; demonstrating their gaze in the eye of the other, thus causing the viewer to move away from his own gaze. The gaze is a mysterious object, the object of the scopic drive the subject demonstrates linked to the cause of their desire.9 This object predates the subject and constitutes it, the effect of its appearance. The vision comes from the eye and is related to the image seen, while the gaze comes from what exists towards us because what is visible is in the field of the Other, of language, a fact that cleaves the sighted subject from the subject who looks. The gaze, the matrix the place. “The image (…) is the place of production of reality for the being”, a space that can be occupied, a mode10 presenting the uniqueness of the occupation. Leibniz11 gave the name geometry of position to purely geometric, linear analysis which can define the situs of bodies and the properties which come from this position, regardless of the quantifiable. This is the first mention of a 6
Alex Francés invites us to collaborate with this project by referring us to the Story of the Production of 8 cos enganxat, an account of the events that locate the current state of his productions. 7 See Note 1. 8 Lacan, J. “What is a Picture?”, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Paidós, Buenos Aires, 1973, pages 112-126 9 Ibid, page 91-92. “The gaze sees itself (…) The gaze I encounter—you can find this in Sartre's own writing—is, not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other (...) Is it not clear that the gaze intervenes here only in as much as it is not the annihilating subject, correlative of the world of objectivity, who feels himself surprised, but the subject sustaining himself in a function of desire?” 10 The mode, in physics, is the special form that a phenomenon can take; in philosophy it is the special, variable and fixed form that can sustain a being without ceasing to be the same. 11 In 1679 Leibniz (1646-1716) published Characteristica Geometrica, the result of the study of topological properties (in modern terminology) of figures. He proposes, besides the coordinated representation of figures, that as algebra defines the magnitude of bodies there has to be a purely geometric or linear analysis to define the position of bodies.
geometry that is not about what is measurable; we refer to the geometry of surfaces due to the co-incidence in the nominal, we talk about the situs of bodies and image as a place and its properties, and because from beginning to end in 8 cos enganxat (8 crocheted body), Alex Francés proceeds with topological evocations. We will not develop this use, but its dominance is such that not to mention it would, through absence, be to insist too much on its presence. This handling comes from the depth of expertise, beyond intent: he does not make referential use of analysis situs beyond that concerning 9 En cinta (In Loop),12 but rather forms a concept once the work has passed and thereafter investigates references affecting its formalisation. With no intention of exploring the topological, we find a curious resonance, that of Euler’s formula13 for a polyhedron in No dos sino dos14: v – I + c = 2 (v is the number of vertices of the polyhedron, I the number of edges and c the number of faces); this formula was rewritten by L’Huilier and thus names the first result of the topological invariants, a property that shows the biunivocal correspondence of the points on a surface and those of their possible transformations: the body is transformed without the quantifiable being changed; this constant which in topological terms is called invariant is the common place in the work of Alex Francés. Things about two. We shall now cite three uses of this kind of surface in the path we are discussing. Firstly, the title of the exhibition, 8 cos enganxat (8 crocheted body), which is the number image of the internal eight;15 again we can cite Lacan in Seminar XI16 turning to topology, to the internal eight, as a reference to process that which affects the interior and exterior produced by the transfer in the analytic situation. This relationship does not fall within speculative inter-subjectivity, the relationship between two; although there are two in the analytical device, what is at issue is a subject, that of the unconscious, the effect of the transfer. Secondly, 9 En cinta (9 In Loop), where the Möbius strip materialises, built by a texture of knots. And thirdly, there is the core running throughout the work; the 12
Piece no. 9 of Armadura (Armour). Euler gave an incomplete demonstration of his formula in 1752; later on another mathematician, Antoine-Jean L'Huilier, continued working on Euler’s formula. He proved that it is true for solids without holes, for a solid with g holes and proved that the invariant is given by the formula v – e + f= 2 – 2g. 14 cf. Note 4. 15 With respect to the internal eight we refer to Bermejo’s definition: “(the internal eight is a) double nonintersecting circle (...) an untied knot offers the possibility of containing a surface called a Möbius strip. Technically it should be said that the internal eight is the inside edge, which repeats the Möbius strip or that the Möbius strip is the surface of tension with the internal eight”. Bermejo, C. “La superficie de tensión del agujeroborde de la castración –fi”. www.carlosbermejo.net 16 Lacan, J. “In you more than you”, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Paidós, Buenos Aires, 1973, page 271-284. 13
knot, the explicit formality of Alex Francés’s current work and the foundation of the topological aspect of the geometry of knots. 2. LOCATING THE INSCRIPTION La madre enfermera (The Nurse Mother) participates in the common part of 8 cos enganxat (8 crocheted body) but cuts the relativity of the contour by introducing an object free of the texture of knots, which thus affects the consistency of the figure: we are talking of the geometry of the position and consistency of the figures, not about the extent of the surface shown in previous productions describable in Euclidean, measurable terms. In the embroidered works the dynamic between the two elements, the medium and the thread, is the crossing; in previous works other types of fitting or suture are sufficient to present articulated surfaces which mean the image of a body; in all these productions the dynamics of both elements does not alter the surface and their logic is that of incorporation, while the productions generated from La madre enfermera involve cutting, removal. This was announced in 9 En cinta, the ninth piece in Armadura (Armour), which the artist interprets as investing a body and of which we only have a virtual image. The topicality of a detour. Suture, fitting, crossing and knotting are the four procedures used to materialise 8 cos enganxat (8 crocheted body). 8:Vuit. Alex draws the number, he does not name it, in the heading that presents the show and in a language in which the signifier Vuit (eight) immediately evokes the buit which means empty in another language. While voiceless reading directs the interpretation toward the sign delimiting meaning, the voice brings homophonic ambiguity by referring to a concept that names the foundation of constructive power, the buit, the emptiness that is the construction needed for The Thing17 to take place, the necessary evacuation giving rise to the object which for a subject represents the absence18 and cause of its desire. Moreover, drawing the number eight in the context of production in which the topological surface is present also refers to a previous figure, 9 En cinta (9 In Loop), structured as a Möbius strip19 whose edge, as noted above, is the internal eight. There is no possibility, unfortunately, of pausing here at 17
Lacan, in the seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, takes the most primitive artistic function, that of the potter, to approach the logic and chronology of the organisation of the world, placing the primordial Other (the mother, at this moment of the theory) in that emptiness which is the construction of the vessel, the place which in the Heidegger of The Thing houses the being of the world as a place of creation. 18 This object that Lacan refers to as object a has two values: the object which presents a pleasure, named plus de jouir, and that which represents the cause of the desire, the lost object. 19 A Möbius strip is a topological, continuous and non-orientable surface: it has only one face and one edge so that its points are involved in the exterior and interior at the same time.
the keys to this structure, but we can mention that the reference to topology is a resource used by Lacan20 to present the logic of the subject and its incarnation in the transference relationship. In 9 En cinta (9 In Loop), and here the artist stresses games of meaning, we only have the virtual image available to the eye; the reference object is subtracted from the viewer’s potential encounters and we virtually see the meaning of a previous position, an earlier mode that discloses, by participating in the same logic, a “before and after” space where duality is appearance, because the artist weaves a compact, one-sided surface which we know virtually and by that to which it gives rise: La madre enfermera. The stopping causes. Receiving the stopping of the story evokes a stage of the bullfight that says of the position: the essayist, motionless there, waiting for the onslaught to go in for the kill. Go in for the kill, so that stops, is what hurls us into the impossible possibility of writing about the work of an artist, writing beyond that being able to see that which has already been seen, writing the fantasy that “that which does not cease to be not written” stops,21 to try to address what happens, the real. In this attempt to combine the texts there must be writing, the conjectural must have a place, let the fabric speak of who writes and what is said to be absorbed in the exhibition of the work, that the work gives it a place, as if it should be possible that another or the Other should authorise the texture. We dare say that this version we give of the writing resonates in that which organises Alex’s work; that kind of spectacular variant in which, although there is no creation ex nihilo, a key operator in Lacan’s research is recreated, The Mirror Stage,22 a structure that makes explicit the mechanics of subjective constitution, that which it says about the particular use by the subject of the language that builds it, its unique incorporation into the world as a reality to be built. The Mirror Stage as reference and soft logic as a system give rise to hope that a question may come up which has an impact on the fundamental affirmation of the artist: the image is not just visual, an axiom that results from an extremely long task with thinking about what results from viewing and looking, from the being seen in the margins of visibility. “The margins of the visible” raises the delimitation of the strictly 20
At the end of the seminar The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan presents topological writing, a Möbius strip which he calls an interior eight, with which he tries to show the detention of a subject in an analytic treatment. Lacan, J. “In you more than you”, Seminar 11, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Paidós, Buenos Aires, 1984, page 279. 21 The necessary, repetition, is that which does not cease to be written, the real, the contingent, the impossible to say. 22 Lacan, J. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience (1949)” Writings 1, S. XXI, Buenos Aires, 1984, pages 86-93.
physiological, the perceptive of seeing, a function associated with the visual apparatus of which the eye is the key organ giving access to the phenomenology of the visible, to the facts of visibility. Another doing is that of the gaze, making complex that to which we referred in the previous chapter, mark and marker of subjectivity in which seeing is not the main factor. We thus close to continue thinking “The image (…) is the place of production of reality for the being”: the image is not only of the visual, but rather participates in that which the unpresentable presents of the visible, a presence outside the image, the pure remains of the act, consequence. The image is not only the visible but also knowledge in presence, a sign of the invisible, of that moment of madness that takes place in every decision.23 The image is not only from the visual, it is the re-presentation of a mode that lies elsewhere, it is the part of this which is presented again; it is repetition, the part of repetition which is presented outside its representation.
Alex Francés
VUIT Vuit24 is a project produced by The Virreina Centre de la Imatge. This filming enacts a listening and interrelational device between bodies: the body of the artist, the body of art and the body of the spectator. This device includes the receptor (in this case blind), unguarded and missing something so necessary for the aesthetic experience. To a certain extent, putting the body of art into the hands of someone who is born without vision, or who has lost it at some point in time, is like returning to the starting point and opening up to something unknown, both for them and for us.
23
Following Kierkegaard, in The Gift of Death Derrida approaches freedom as what emerges against a background of undecidability, the condition of the act. Donner la mort, Paris, Galilée, 1999, page 94. Spanish translation: Dar la muerte, translated by Peretti, C. and Vidarte, P. Barcelona, Paidós, 2000. 24 The Catalan word vuit (eight) is a homophone of buit (emptiness).
Vuit Video installation for two screens Duration: 57' 01'' Project: Alex Francés Production manager: Julia Sieiro Cameraman: Maria Gestoso y Diego Barrero Post-production: Daniel Sanz Coordination: Aramis López Participants: Nuria Anguera, Ricard Cordoncillo, Paquita Garcia, Ivan Molinos, Ambros Torelló, Joan Vilajosana Acknowledgements: Asociació de Discapacitats Visuals de Cataluyna, ONCE, Vicens Tubao, Roser Figueres, Josep Inglada, María Inglada, Santiago Moese, Francisco Juan, Mercé Luz Arqué, Gabriel Gorce, Maria Gloria Tort, Irina Torelló