THE BEYOND AS INDUSTRIAL FACT

reproduce el mandato que pudo verse grafiteado sobre algunos muros de Chile durante la sublevación social de 2019 y 2020: “OTRO FIN DEL MUNDO ES POSIBLE”. No es, entonces, que sea más fácil imaginar el fin del mundo que el fin del capitalismo, sino que hay una actitud artística para la que las realidades fluctuantes se enciman y se encaraman en el límite de lo conocido. Este raro híbrido entre los paradigmas de la inmanencia y lo transcendental habilita la posibilidad de pensar una respuesta desde el arte frente a la crisis que implica la mecanización de la vida humana y la reducción de lo vital a un estado –simbólico o literal– idéntico al de aquellas cosas que no están vivas.

En todo procedimiento quirúrgico hay que exponer lo que está oculto para empezar a sanar; la utilidad histórica de los y las profetas fue la de traducir la abstracción de los sueños, de los arrebatos mentales llenos de imágenes y palabras, con el fin de prevenir o rectificar el rumbo de la historia. Los mecanismos larvados de la producción del deseo, los fetiches posindustriales, los subproductos impensados de la lógica de la hiperexplotación: todos son fundamentos que deben ser reintegrados a un orden sensible por algún profeta moderno, aunque más no sea desde el absurdo o desde el capricho. Este trabajo tiene que ver con la idea de un papel emancipador de la fabulación artística, que se expresa en Aráoz como un arreglo de elementos interhistóricos, intermateriales; humanos, no-humanos, capitalistas, poéticos, embalsamados, vegetales, musicales, informáticos.

Aquel viaje que no se hizo terminó convertido en algo más: su sustancia perduró en transformaciones anímicas y objetuales; en lecturas compartidas, jarrones, jornadas de trabajo con asistentes, borracheras. Ese primer impulso se condensó en una miríada de otras cosas que acabaron funcionando como una especie de hogar, un hecho material que preserva el deseo y lo vuelve visible, que ordena los signos demasiado veloces del caos sin necesariamente reconducirlos al capital.

Philip K. Dick planteó la urgencia por superar “la falsa idea de que una alucinación es un asunto privado”, y esa pareciera ser la tarea que desde hace años Aráoz está tratando de llevar adelante. Socializar la sustancia amoral y sin materia de la alucinación, materializarla al transformar los objetos del mundo en agentes públicos al servicio del deseo. Un más allá como hecho industrial. Dick citaba además a San Pablo, que en sus Cartas a los corintios decía que tener el don de la profecía y comprender todos los misterios del mundo no significaba nada si falta el amor. Aráoz sin duda pertenece a una familia menguante de personas artistas, aquellas dedicadas a amar cada objeto, a hablar con cada animal, a atender cada deseo del mundo, los nobles y los que se proyectan al ras del suelo, los ruines, los poco dignos. Si el romántico era un explotado por el deseo, la subjetividad posromántica de Aráoz es la de un profeta hiperexplotado por ese nuevo deseo que incrementó su masa y su velocidad, asistido por la microelectrónica. Su obra podría leerse en términos penales como una tentativa, un delito que está en marcha pero que aún no se consuma: profanar el arte y obligarlo a contagiarse aquellos atributos antigénicos del capital; hacer que el arte pueda alcanzar al capital en su capacidad de desterritorialización rápida, que pueda servir para reorganizar la materia con una potencia expresiva emancipadora, que sea un consorcio de poderes integrado por todos los reinos, por todas las sustancias.

BY ALEJO PONCE DE LEÓN

my coral revolver with a mouth that attracts me like the eye of a well scintillating frozen like a mirror in which you contemplate the flight of the hummingbirds of your glance lost in an exhibition of white framed by mummies I love you

Benjamin Péret, ‘Hello’, 1936

At one point, this catalogue was conceived as the log of a journey because, at one point, this exhibition was conceived as the material follow-on from a journey. A journey that, like Lucifer´s trident, forked into three destinations: the south of Argentina, where someone with a sick relative at death’s door was firing ceramics in an anagama kiln; the subtropical north-east borderlands, the mines of a jungle colony replete with amethyst, a purplish mutation of quartz, symbolising chastity for medieval Christians; between the rivers Paraná and Uruguay, the last stop was the Corrientes Municipal Historical Archive, a shelter for censuses and documents on a variety of provincial affairs. Book and exhibition were interested in the Corrientes neighbourhood of Cambá Cuá: a stony riverbank where the largest regional township of freedman, free blacks and veterans of the War of the Triple Alliance settled.

This journey, which was never made – and may never will be – still possesses some kind of existence, as this text tries to show. It lives in the form of a mental image projected through a script, like landmarks on a map explored with a finger on a mobile phone screen, or like other ceramics and ores fired in other kilns and mined from other pits. The will to sweep a territory for diverse cultural and prehistoric materials in order to display them later on in a municipal exhibition hall and gift the public a moment of uncertainty and excitement was what might be defined as a ‘desire’. In a strange transfer, that first desire, in which the heat of the road mingled with the cold of a southern forest and the glint of minerals with the static monochrome frequency of an archive, was eventually deflated in this book and in the exhibition held at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires.

For Jean-Louis Schefer, the image is that which has no place, bringing it close in some way to desire. The amethyst, on the other hand, does have a place: caves in Misiones where the iron-rich magma, cold for hundreds of thousands of years, hardened into a sharp-edged purple stone, on which a Polish immigrant once slashed open her hand and bathed the basaltic soil in blood. A black Brazilian soldier exiled in Corrientes during the nineteenth century has a card bearing witness to his time in the world, encapsulated almost two hundred years later in a piece of computer data. The colour red has its place in the world, as ‘the banner chosen by the people’, the colour of the popular saints of Cambá Cuá, San Baltasar [Saint Balthazar] and Santa Librada [Saint Wilgefortis]; a colour that trims the sky when there are processions, that vibrates at a distance and is therefore associated with a transcendental power of furious astral protection. It is thanks to the sonic technology assembled in industrial parks that the senses and steel beams are shaken with the techno in Berghain; the same goes for the digital images and memes, which circulate rapidly round printed circuits whose manufacture is overseen by suicidal employees in Shenzhen. If all things have their

place, is the place of desire on the inside of them? Or, as Schefer says about the image, is desire that which is not really anywhere?

Falling somewhere between sculptural informalism and applied design, taxidermy and holograms, M.R. James and Marosa di Giorgio, crime and creation, Nicanor Aráoz’s ways of making seem to want to bring together the separate continents of desire and material condensation, and to provide a tangible correlation to what Étienne Souriau has defined as ‘the art of existence’ inherent in all things. This persistent backdrop of tension, cyclically evaluated throughout history in terms of idealism against materialism, for example, or madness against reason, could not be said to be resolved through the intricate semiotic and material configurations that the artist deploys in his works and exhibitions; the claim that Aráoz functions as a choreographer for this eternal courtship dance between the majesties of two conflicting realms is closer to some kind of truth.

Against the worn-out traditional typification of installation art as an organisational action upon the hardware of civilisation, Aráoz sets an almost visionary response manifesting in rhythmic, baroque form: an epiphanic redemption of all tension via entropy. Without being actual chaos, his ars poetica is structured as an assault on the semiotic order, a cross-contamination between matter and desire, capital and dream, with mutagenic effects on both fields. This response departs both from exhaustive programmatic work in a single substance – a trait of the post-war European sculpture from which he draws various resources – and from the trend towards taxonomy and the scientificist categorisation of elements seen in many galleries around the globe over the past few years. Aráoz’s work responds to the technical intelligence and excess of self-awareness to which today’s artistic scene is prone with bursts of non-scientific inspiration. ‘Arrows shot almost simultaneously by the idea,’ a most delicate absurdity supported by lootings, impulses, intuitions. So, when he mixes plaster with curly sheep’s wool or photocopies with mashed potato, he is doing more than creating the conditions for Lautréamont’s chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella. Observation and fabrication merge through his psychedelic arbitration.

Criticism – what’s left of it – seems, if not incapable, then uninterested in the issues of the material production of art. Nearly ten years ago, Pamela M. Lee considered that if a critic were ‘given the choice between a meditation on aesthetics and politics, say, or on the latest shoptalk about rapid-prototyping technology, the decision seems made in advance.’ Why then separate the spectacle of the world, which pours down on the ruined machinic confines of the libido, from an art that exists in that same world, when it is an art supported by financing instruments identical to those used, for example, in real estate? Why separate our desire for its enabling fetishes: songs, underwear, trainers or tattoos? This is not a vacant, crystalline world, even if galleries and museums want to make it seem so.

If criticism cannot function as an interferometer to gauge the complementary dynamics between these spheres, Aráoz’s progress – from his early installations, in which he included biscuits and lorries, dissected hummingbirds and cupboards, to his subsequent focus on the centrality of the body in sculptural practice – does seem to have served to delineate a materially lucid imagination capable of reflecting this instance of contradictory total integration between

the terrain of desire and the results of post-industrial hyper-exploitation. As if paraphrasing Suely Rolnik, who claims that the unconscious is the sphere of production for the territories of existence, Aráoz’s progression shows that art should not be seen solely as iconography and gimmicks of representation; art is an object of the world, and the ‘beyond’ embodied in it is therefore an industrial fact, a compound of synthetic polymers. There is in his work no development of the unconscious to put political and social reality into perspective, but just the opposite: an intense display of reality – its homicides, motorcycles and sculptures – that serves to put the weight of the unreal into perspective. Hell is an eternal plastic lair; heaven, the recording of a multi-coloured light field on a photosensitive film.

In Brazilian Portuguese, it is quite common to use the noun phrase sonho de consumo (consumer dream) to talk about products or experiences that lead the subject’s libido in the realm of capital. In The Creators of Shopping Worlds, Harun Farocki revealed how architects, entrepreneurs and surveillance technicians design shopping malls that shape their visitors’ desire, reaffirming the notion of capitalism as a molecular regime capable even of conditioning our future synapses. If desire is first and foremost chaos, capital tries to normatise, appease and refocus it through meta-languages and phenomenological, architectural and sensory over-codifications. Now more than ever, contemporary art can be said to be one of these metalanguages, a common deterritorialised code that assists capitalism in prolonging its existence on earth. But Aráoz’s spectacle is devised by a subject who was himself created by the over-codifications of the spectacle of the world and not specifically by the undifferentiated language of contemporary art. His show is sometimes animated by the antigenic intelligence of capital, which mutates to try and keep up with chaos and poetry, and sometimes by this very poetry, which is the liquefaction of the semiotic order. Desire’s place then would seem to be Martha Graham’s Embattled Garden, a devastated Eden that is also Marosa di Giorgio’s Guerra de los huertos [The War of the Orchards]. Our bodies’ place is in the world and, inside a museum, Sueño sólido [Solid Sleep] is a place for the world, for traces of its war between chaos and desire as filtered by capital.

In terms of the discourse declaring the ‘end of history’, the global corporate architecture of cities is unimpressed by time. Rather it tends towards mechanical self-preservation through virtualising cultural and technological devices, as if cities were future venues for their own pasts. Contemporary museums work a bit like this, as agents articulating those accounts of a time that has already been and gone, and of another that is to come, by examining the remnants of reality contained in a work of art. Aráoz delves into these virtual realities, the darkened narratives of the history of the masses and their material detritus. However, his passionate relationship with the fetish forces him to link himself in a unique way with the factory of serialised subjectivity which, as I see it, is the matrix of capitalism. The cultural fetish in his work is an observation on the distribution of the sensible, not in critical terms, but geared towards an attempt to recover desire as a field, an essence, a primal instance in the life of all things.

Understood as a pop turn in Masottean terms, the importation into this exhibition – or this very book – of such exogenous pre-existing languages as suggested by a flower or kendo facemask speaks of a curiosity about the origins of desire. Sueño sólido comes from an interstice where ready-made objects

merge with idiosyncratic sculptural expressions, where the manufacturing material itself – a powerful semiotic – has no form or dissolves into irreversible deformations; art and its industry of emotions fills the air like music from a juke-box: filtered by capital as it is, what the songs spark is also a mystery and inescapable desire.

Without going into psychoanalytic definitions, the fetish as an object of desire is in Aráoz split in two: an object of normalised desire (pre-existing and belonging to the fields of the cultural, the sexual, consumption and so on) and an unrecognizable object of desire, a new spatio-objectual articulation, a reflection of the spectacle of the world that in turn becomes spectacularly unrecognizable. For Baudrillard, fascinated by the hyper-real object that revolves around itself as it approaches the void, contemporary art’s ‘only magic is the magic of its disappearance.’ Aráoz, on the other hand, reinstates art’s visionary, hallucinated presence as a consummate object of an impossible desire, as an existence of the non-existent. For the same reason, alongside the invisible, what is ‘more visible than the visible’ also appears in his work: luxury store exhibitors, crime, superstars of the music industry or, indeed, contemporary art itself, seen as a depraved display of economic resources. Everything that Baudrillard called ‘obscene’ is actually nothing but another facet on the quartz of desire.

At this juncture, a dual dynamic is consolidated that is highly typical of Aráoz’s practice: the dissection of the cultural fetish understood as a perfect product of a system of industries and the violent dissolution of its component industrial material (latex, plastic, iron, expanded polyurethane and so forth). Without having a precise knowledge about the structure of the world, his choreography of things works as a unifying, lyrical action between reality as codified by capital and a substantial, unsemioticised reality. His question is how to get things back to that primeval state of desire: how to make the cylinder capacity of a motor-bike desire, how to make a rat’s intestines desire, how to return the microscopic enlargement of the cross-section of a cat’s eye to desire.

Aráoz thinks like Roberta, the Ionesco character who, using a radical language, appeals to total semiotic unity to try to clarify the wars of the world: ‘In the cellar of my castle, everything is cat. [. . .] All we need to designate things is one single word: cat. Cats are called cats, food: cat, insects: cat, chairs: cat, you: cat, me: cat, the roof: cat, the number one: cat, the number two: cat, three: cat, twenty: cat, thirty: cat, all the adverbs: cat, all the prepositions: cat. It’s easier to talk that way.’

It becomes easy to talk following in the footsteps of such integrationist apocalyptic instruction that takes a stand against lack and prohibition, that claims things for itself and that in a way reproduces the sacrament graffitied on Chilean walls during the social uprisings of 2019 and 2020: ‘ANOTHER END OF THE WORLD IS POSSIBLE.’ It is not then that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but that there is an artistic outlook for which the fluctuating realities stack up and teeter on the edge of the known. This rare hybrid among the paradigms of immanence and the transcendental opens up the possibility of thinking up an artistic response to the crisis that involves the mechanisation of human life and the reduction of the vital to a symbolic or literal state that is identical to the state of things that are not alive.

In any surgical procedure, what is hidden has to be exposed in order to start healing; the historical utility of the prophets was to translate the abstraction of

dreams, of mental raptures full of images and words, in order to halt or correct the course of history. The secluded mechanisms of the production of desire, the post-industrial fetishes, the unthinkable by-products of the logic of hyper-exploitation are all fundamentals that have to be reintegrated into a sensible order by a modern prophet, albeit through nothing more than the absurd or the whimsical. This work is bound up with the idea of an emancipating role for artistic invention. This is expressed in Aráoz as an arrangement of human, non-human, capitalistic, poetic, embalmed, vegetable, musical, computing inter-historical and inter-material elements.

That journey, which was never made, ended up becoming something else: its substance endured in spiritual, objectual transformations, in shared readings, pitchers, working days with assistants, bouts of drunkenness. That first wish condensed into a myriad of other things which ended up functioning as a kind of home, a material fact preserving the desire and making it visible, that ordering the overly speedy signs of chaos without necessarily refocusing them on capital. Philip K. Dick underlined the urgent need to get over ‘the false idea that hallucination is a private matter’, and that would seem to be the task that Aráoz has for years now been trying to carry through: socialising the amoral, immaterial substance of the hallucination, materialising it by transforming the objects of the world into public agents at the service of desire. A beyond as an industrial fact. Dick also quoted Saint Paul, who in his Letters to the Corinthians said that having the gift of prophecy and understanding all the mysteries of the world meant nothing if love is absent. Aráoz undoubtedly belongs to a dwindling family of artists who have devoted themselves to loving every object, talking to every animal, attending to the world’s every desire: noble ones and those projected at ground level, contemptible ones, unworthy ones alike. If the romantic was exploited by desire, Aráoz’s post-romantic subjectivity is that of a prophet hyperexploited by the new desire that has, assisted by microelectronics, increased its mass and speed. His work could be read in criminal terms as an attempt, a crime under way but not yet consummated: desecrating art and forcing it to spread those antigenic attributes of capital, making sure that art can reach capital in its capacity for swift deterritorialisation, that it can serve to reorganise the matter with an emancipating expressive power, that it can be a consortium of powers composed of all realms and all substances.