NOBODY KNOWS WHAT ART IS | Enrique Rivera Jonas Mekas (1922-2019), a Lithuanian poet, filmmaker, and defender of experimental audiovisual art claimed: “Nobody knows what art is, where it begins and where it ends, though we are able to talk about the history of film and watch the classics again and again. I can’t talk about art, I don’t know anything about art . . . I have only tried to capture the present moment with my camera, the reality that surrounds me, and that has nothing to do with art, absolutely nothing at all . . . Beauty is another complicated subject: What is beauty? Being in the company of friends and spending a nice afternoon with them is beautiful”.4 Current circumstances are redefining our ideas about the present, past and future. How are we to understand time when the collectively constructed idea about what constitutes normal life has been irremediably fragmented? Disrupted time transforms our day to day existence. Which leads us to experimental audiovisual languages, overlooked by a film industry that has been subjugated by entertainment, these are narratives that zoom in on the perceptual distortions brought about by the national popular uprising of 2019 and the ongoing pandemic. It would seem that establishing what reality is has become an impossible task. The informal is becoming conventional and the margins are receding, revealing the troubling flipside of the story, shadowy, full of affliction, and out of place. Mekas claims that he doesn’t know what art is; these days we could say that it doesn’t really matter, since reality itself is no longer relevant. The overwhelming feeling of exhaustion produced by inequality and injustice has made it so that demands are mixed with rage, exploding like a cluster bomb, wounding the same bodies that had enforced the systematic degradation of the exploited in the first place. Art and on-site experience have become an antidote to the unfocused excesses fostered by oversaturation of information; our nervous systems are being attacked by a relentless and beguiling witchcraft that is hypnotizing us, paralyzing us, and trying to turn us into actual zombies. Fearlessly facing our bodies’ vulnerability to the elements strengthens one’s position within this context. Our immune systems, weakened by confinement, are reactivated, building resistance, helping to fine-tune our intuition and capacity for discernment in the face of the flood of information affecting our subconscious, conscience and unconscious minds. Does checking social media upon waking affect our dreams? Doesn’t each “Like” turn into a shot of endorphins that replaces a good conversation, a kiss or a heated discussion? And so an event, a fissure in 4
In defense of perversion is a text that remained unpublished until it was included in a selection of texts published by Spector. This version was taken from: Cuaderno de los sesenta. Escritos 1958-2010, Ed. Caja Negra. Buenos Aires, 2017.
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