Perforated by Itziar Okariz and Sergio Prego. 58 Bienal Venecia. ESPAÑOL

Koenig Books, London

Perforated by

Established in 1895, the Venice International Art Biennial is the most important and longest-running contemporary art event in existence. For Spain, it has always been important to take part in this occasion, hosted by one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. The city of Venice and its Biennial have traversed the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, welcoming a wide variety of exhibitions. The primary objective has always been to avert indifference, whether by appealing to the spectator’s emotions and sensibility through the beautiful or the sublime, or by eliciting a reflection on what we value, what we do not value, or – akin to a Baroque trompe l’oeil – what we believe we value. The Biennial has always been about more than aesthetics and art theory. It has also been about stirring consciences, a place for protest and critique, where social, political, or economic issues have been revealed through art and its continuous evolution. Above all, it is and always has been a forum for dialogue, where all of these aspects are presented and brought together from different perspectives.

Building on this idea, the Biennial’s main exhibition, now in its 58th edition and curated by Ralph Rugoff, is entitled May You Live In Interesting Times. The conceptual idea is to provide a general perspective on art-making, as well as to emphasize the social function of art. In keeping with tradition, this exhibition, shown at the Italian Pavilion and the Arsenale, will be joined by independent national participations and so-called collateral events, which in early May will fill the grounds of the Giardini and many other venues around the city with exhibitions, performances, lectures, inaugurations, and activities.

In this edition of the Biennial, the Spanish Pavilion presents Perforated by, a project

by Basque curator Peio Aguirre, featuring the work of artists Itziar Okariz and Sergio Prego. The exhibition marks a return to the two-artist format at our Pavilion, with work that includes installation, drawing, sculpture, audiovisual and performative pieces. An interesting project, described in detail in this wonderful catalogue, that promises once again to make our Pavilion an essential reference point at the Venice Biennial.

We believe that this ambitious, high-caliber project fully reflects and represents our efforts and commitment to continuously advance and promote the best of Spanish culture beyond our borders. We would like to invite all of you to visit our Pavilion, enjoy this worthy project, and experience the vitality and cultural spirit of our country through the work of these two artists. And let us not forget that the Spanish Pavilion is confidently approaching its centennial, which we will celebrate in 2022.

In closing, I would like to express my appreciation for the people whose work made the Spanish project for the Biennial possible. I would like to thank Peio Aguirre, Itziar Okariz, Sergio Prego, and everyone who worked with them for their commitment and dedication; Acción Cultural Española, for once again contributing to the production of the Pavilion; the companies that collaborated with the project; and, last but not least, the entire team at the Office of Cultural and Scientific Relations and at the Spanish Embassy in Rome, whose daily efforts contributed to making our latest participation in Venice a reality.

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Juan Pablo de Laiglesia y González de Peredo Secretary of State for International Cooperation and for Ibero-America

and the Caribbean

Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation

A body in an empty space generates tension with the place where it is inserted, because the enveloping volume of the architecture reflects the minimum materiality of the body. The art of Itziar Okariz and Sergio Prego is defined by a principle of immanence in this body-space relationship. Drawing on economical resources, they create an austere and powerful body of work that is complex in its simplicity.

Their work is characterized by the creation of spare forms and images that share in that will to transgression, to resistance, that Susan Sontag would have defined as “radical style.” In her essay “The Aesthetics of Silence” (1967), the author wrote that few traits were as emblematic of the art of her era as transparency: “To look at something which is ‘empty’ is still to be looking, still to be seeing something – if only the ghosts of one’s own expectations. In order to perceive fullness, one must retain an acute sense of the emptiness which marks it off; conversely, in order to perceive emptiness, one must apprehend other zones of the world as full.” 2 How­ ever, in our present world – saturated with information and visuality, dominated by the disembodied image, which is immaterial – transparency is nothing but an illusion. Pulling back the veils of representation therefore means a return to the material, the immediate.

The main gesture and through-line of this exhibition consists in opening and expanding the space by way of an “occupation” which in reality is the opposite, an act of vacating or emptying. In reference to John Cage, Sontag noted, “not only does silence exist in a world full of speech and other sounds, but any given silence has its identity as a stretch of time being perforated by sound.” 3 To perforate is to make a partial hole in something – an object, image or space – passing through it while offering a glimpse of what was there before, altering it in the act of perforation.

This exhibition by Sergio Prego and Itziar Okariz is conceived as a perforation, in a metaphorical as well as literal sense, through actions, sound, image, sculpture, and architecture. After all, is it not the responsibility of art to tear a hole into what is real, an opening in space and time to explore that which was not there?

Peio Aguirre — Perforated by Itziar Okariz and Sergio Prego

She pulled the Venice toward her, opened it. The fish flickered out of phase, her system launching some subroutine. Venice decompressed. 1

William Gibson, Idoru

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Perhaps the greatest change with regard to the earlier generations of performance art described above is how the performativity of these artists operates within a regime of representation where – as befits our visual era – the production of signs is inevitable. This can be clearly established in two important works. Okariz’s Red Light (1995) consists of a series of photographs and a video which document the action of dancing to a Siouxsie and the Banshees song. The photographs show the artist, dressed in a floral print shirt, jumping with the shutter release cable in her hand, freezing space and time. The frontality and the immediacy of the action unite the nonconformism of punk, the pop culture of music videos, and Riot Grrrl activism in a single image. In the time span of the leap, the body prepares to emerge from itself to become something else, a power or singularity that resists the definitions of the Self and its stereotypes. The hovering body, suspended in the air, sheds the confines of identity; a utopian instant captured by the still camera, with the artist releasing the shutter in the truest tradition of the self-portrait. In Prego’s Tetsuo, Bound to Fail (1998), and other video works made in Bilbao when it was still a derelict city, the body of the artist appears transfigured, floating in a postapocalyptic industrial landscape. Here an interest in metallurgic imagery turns into a fascination for comic book anti-heroes and subcultures, like in the film Tetsuo, Iron Man (1989) by Shinya Tsukamoto. In Prego’s work, the interest in assembly lines and metalwork of postminimalist artists (e.g. Richard Serra) seems to have turned toward the distorted universes of its hyperbolized representation. In both artworks, the earlier spontaneity of performance is transformed into an iconic, and therefore symbolic, gestural language.

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The state of the body in our technified society finds its counterpoint in artistic actions that reveal the disciplinary aspect of architecture, urban planning, and normative codes of conduct. The art of the 1960s emphasized this connection between subjectivity, sexuality, and the environments increasingly constructed by power, or biopower when it touched on flesh. The “cognitive estrangement” of science fiction literature (cyberpunk) also pointed in this direction. The expanded, minimalist and dematerialization processes of Conceptual Art, dance, and performance made this regime of representation perceptible. These art forms reiterated the language and corporeality of things in a new connection between the body and its sensorium.

There where “the mind is a muscle.” 4 Writers like Lucy R. Lippard and Lea Vergine found significant connections to these questions in the work of Judson Dance Theater. Lippard argued that minimalist language was not completely devoid of figurative content nor free of erotic implications. 5 For Vergine, “as the basis of Body Art… one can discover the unsatisfied need for a love that extends itself without limit in time – the need to be loved for what one is and for what one wants to be – the need for a kind of love that confers unlimited rights – the need for what is called primary love. […] This unobtained love is what transforms itself into the aggressivity that is typical of all these actions, events, photo-sequences, and performances.” 6 From this artistic and philosophical lineage emerges an understanding of art that has affinities to Prego and Okariz: art as a way of being, a form-of-life in which the artwork is an extension of the subject that needs to be interpreted in its entirety, transcending artistic disciplines, their limitations and determinants.

In talking about the dualism of life, the modernist philosopher Georg Simmel liked to say that “two is more complex than one.” 7 Two is also the number of the dyad, the double, and the Other. The number two alludes to oppositions like particular/ universal, identity/difference, cohesion/separation, and female/male, but not with­ out first overcoming this binarism in a dialectical way that is never entirely re­solved.

Exhibitions by or with two artists are neither solo shows nor group shows. These exhibitions usually stem from a desire to underscore the substance and the shared inner understanding that pervades them. Here the intention is to revisit this nonformat of two and its vice versas, foregrounds and backgrounds, exploring its possibilities in a building as historically significant as the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennial. The exhibition establishes a dialogue and is also an intervention and event. The transparency of the artworks – with regard to each other and to the space and its interstitial organization – provides the basis for assessing, as well as ques­tioning, the place.

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Sergio Prego works with a concise vocabulary centered on a limited gestural language. Through strategies developed during the 1960s and 1970s, he redefines the relationship between art and exhibition space, art object and aesthetic experience.

The body is essential, along with the conception of material and the autonomy of minimalist sculpture. Traditionally sculpture has been considered the most suitable medium to explore the nature of the body and how it relates to space and time.

Prego extends this sculptural quality to other media like video or drawing in an attempt to transgress the tradition of the form and its limits. Robert Morris once said that there was no illusionism in sculpture, because the sculptural realities of space, light, and material have always operated on a concrete and literal level. “[...] an object hung on the wall does not confront gravity; it timidly resists it. One of the conditions of knowing an object is supplied by the sensing of the gravitational force acting upon it in actual space. That is, space with three, not two coordinates. The ground plane, not the wall, is the necessary support for the maximum awareness of the object.” 9 Prego’s work draws on this sculptural legacy to revisit themes related to spatial investigation, such as weightlessness, balance, and matter. He explored this relationship in exhibitions like ANTI-after T.B. (2004), where the initials in the title refer to Trisha Brown. In her performance Walking on the Wall on March 30th, 1971, several dancers moved along the walls of the Whitney Museum of American Art, altering the sensation of gravity in the spectator. The same is true of Yesland: I’m Here to Stay (2001), where the artist realizes a fantasy straight out of fiction: moving about the floor, walls, and ceiling of the exhibition space, effortlessly and beyond the force of gravity.

A generational factor clearly played a role in this curatorial decision, given how the careers of both artists developed in parallel and in relation to each other since the early 1990s. Both were initially involved with Arteleku, the now defunct art and research center in San Sebastian, and the space for artistic exploration that it provided. Later they both spent a long time in New York, a period that is notable for Sergio Prego’s work as part of the group of designers and architects at Vito Acconci’s studio and Itziar Okariz’s participation in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. And last but not least, they both started out as important figures of a generation of Basque artists working in and around Bilbao whose contributions to questioning notions of identity, context, and community, with an international borderless outlook, constitute one of the most remarkable currents in Spanish art over the past three decades. They have renegotiated this dialectic between the particular and the universal time and again throughout their careers, with all its tensions, rejections, spillovers, and adherents. External categories like “Basque art” or “Spanish art” are insufficient when it comes to their identity and art, but this does not mean taking a delocalized global position either. Instead, they look to what is situated in space and time.

The work of Itziar Okariz is characterized by actions which question the norms regarding the language and production of signs that define us as subjects. She approaches the private and public space from an ideological, social feminist perspective that engages in a dialogue with its artistic legacies. Early works like her self-portraits with a map of the world shaved into her scalp or wearing a full-body prosthesis like a second skin were true expressions of a queer imaginary that in retrospect seem self-evident. Later actions like To pee in public or private spaces (2000–2004) and Climbing Buildings (2003–2007) proposed a new manner of negotiating the urban space and its rules based on ideological and gender-based distinctions. This performative aspect is intrinsically linked to the construction of identity: it applies to the “actions,” “events” or “happenings” that she creates with her voice, her presence, the spoken and written text.

In Venice, the artist will carry out a series of actions consisting of murmured conver­ sations and confrontations with statues and art objects. By directly confronting inanimate objects, the artist imbues them with soul, life, and subjectivity. The content of these conversations and the prolonged positions that the artist takes up in front of these objects spring from a strong, subjective relationship that is difficult to convey; it defies common sense and supports the intra-history and the personal and intimate way in which we relate to objects and art. These face-to-face encounters take place in the public space of museums. The words are recorded with a microphone and the images with a mobile phone or discreet audio recording equipment, which not only capture the inner conversation but also whatever situations might occur at the moment of recording. But the images and texts do not explicitly capture what oc­ curred, thus inviting a reflection on the idea of documentation and its manifestation.

The action functions as a fragmented narrative based on what is omitted, what is not seen or heard. This conversation or interior monologue is reminiscent of prayer, where the verbal and nonverbal (that which lies beyond the command of language) converge in the here and now, in a state of pure presence. Gestalt therapy teaches us to understand this present as a way of developing an awareness of the body and its holistic totality. In several interviews, Bruce Nauman has talked about the foundational origins of his art, mentioning Gestalt therapy and the philosophy of language as sources of inspiration. Okariz also makes the body as language her material, and Gestalt, yoga, breathing, body and voice exercises are an inherent part of a physical language that goes beyond words.

The form of the sculpture is as important as its materiality, alternating between organic and more geometric. The tetrahedrons in this exhibition, for example, recall the elemental structures of Toni Smith or the geometric building blocks of another utopian, Buckminster Fuller. This formal investigation takes a more complicated turn, with drawings illustrating botanical and natural specimens, bodily organs and other interstitial, biological, and sexual forms. These subtle drawings focus on the line and its demarcations, volume and void, the open and the closed, interior and exterior, drawing parallels to the inflatable membranes that also delimit the inside and the outside. Drawing and sculpture remain dialectically united. Drawing thus plays an embryonic role, suggesting mutations and potentialities within the form.

Whether technical AutoCAD drawings or pencil renderings of watercolors of plants, intestines and organs, drawing contributes to redefining the form and the principles of organicity and plasticity.

Both Itziar Okariz and Sergio Prego reiterate the alternative functions of the body.

Taken together – irrespective of the order in which their names appear, with their similarities and differences – their work seeks to delineate the contours of an art experience defined by its breadth and its irreducible, experimental and free character. We are preparing ourselves to inhabit, here and now, that “stretch of time being perforated by sound” that Sontag described; a space perforated by forms, sound, and body, which are strange yet adapted to the place. A space where the personal and the artistic converge into a radical singularity that consists of being in the world through and in art.

In all of these actions, and in others like Oceanic Breathing (2018–ongoing), images and sounds are recorded or presented independently, which means that at any given moment there is information missing from the parts without sound and the parts with­ out image, thus generating empty spaces to be filled in the act of interpretation. This dissociation between sound, image, and text, between the subject of the language and the absence thereof in the image, explores the synchronistic displacement between the subject and her physical presence. The sound installations where one hears the artist’s voice or breathing reactivate the action. The physical exhibition space and the audience become a resonating chamber. 8 The space is a meeting point where the artist reaches out to the spectator. The relationship between the audience and the artist creates a situation of mutual understanding and cooperation in which both need to confirm their identity. These object confrontations will con­ tinue throughout the Biennial, meaning that the work will change over time, giving

1 William Gibson, Idoru (New York: Berkley Books, 1996), 46.

2 Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” in Styles of Radical Will (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 10.

3 Ibid., 11.

4 The Mind is a Muscle is the title of a piece by Yvonne Rainer from 1968 that Itziar Okariz used for a conference about her work in 2004, part of a seminar on the repoliticization of the sexual space. Itziar Okariz, “La mente es un músculo,” Zehar, Arteleku magazine, no. 54 (2004): 11.

5 Lucy R. Lippard, “Eros Presumptive,” The Hudson Art Review, 1967; republished in Minimal Art. A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1995).

Peio Aguirre — Perforated by Itziar Okariz and Sergio Prego

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For the past ten years, Prego has used inflatable membranes that are based on a formal analysis of the principles of plasticity to establish new forms of material production.

In a formal sense, his work explores the limits of sculpture with constructions that are usually ephemeral or can be taken apart, using basic geometric volumes and unconventional materials. These large-scale pieces – breathing, like poems in space – explore the nature of sculpture as it relates to architecture, calling materiality into question with their lightweight, flexible materials that allow the form to only exist in a specific state or as a result of a continuous action on the constituent material. Air becomes a tool to shape the pieces. So does water, concrete, or synthetic resin. The fluid and moldable nature of the membranes provides the potential for transformation or a configuration susceptible to it. This exploration recalls a specific era and its approaches to inflatable architecture, embraced by a number of creative minds labeled as “utopian” – Ant Farm, Frei Otto, Eventstructure Research Group, José Miguel de Prada Poole, the Utopie group – to whom the artist makes hopeful allusions. The various elements of these inflatables interact with the exhibition space in a syntactic and structural fashion. They offer a critique of the globally held concept of materiality, which needs to be reconsidered within the current model of sustainability.

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Peio Aguirre — Perforated by Itziar Okariz and Sergio Prego

the spectator the impression of witnessing something alive, in progress and unfin­ ished. Much like To pee in public or private spaces, the use of the museum space is what establishes the connection to art, what is allowed and what is not, to which the artist’s response is a search for singularity and intensity (and non-consumption) in art.

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Itziar Okariz

6 Lea Vergine, Body Art and Performance: The Body as Language (Milan: Skira, 2000, orig. 1974), 7; also republished in Art in Theory, 1900–2000. An Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 906.

7 Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Fashion, trans. Mark Ritter and David Frisby; republished in Simmel on Culture. Selected Writings, eds. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1997).

8 In regard to this, and in analyzing the role of the female voice in cinema, Kaja Silverman wrote, “the voice is the site of perhaps the most radical of all subjective divisions – the divisions between meaning and materiality. It is situated in the partition of the organic and organization, in the partition between the biological body and the body of language, or, if one prefers, the social body.” Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror. The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 43.

9 Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” Artforum 4, no. 6 (February 1966); republished in Continuous Project Altered Daily. The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1993), 4.

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Peio Aguirre is a writer, art critic, and independent curator based in San Sebastian.

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Peio Aguirre — Perforated by Itziar Okariz and Sergio Prego

Red Light, 1995. Action, video stills Red Light (Jumping in Marta’s studio), 1995. Action, 12 c-print photographs Variations sur le même t’aime, 1992. Action, photographic series Irrintzi. Repetition (Guggenheim Museum Bilbao), 2007. Action, video installation Irrintzi. Repetition (The Bowery, New York), 2008. Action, photographs

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Bodybuilding, 1994. Action, 2 c-print photographs Writing with a Flashlight, 2001. Action, slides, photographs Light Drawings. Repetition, 2005. Action, photographs To pee in public or private spaces, Rhine River, Düsseldorf, 2000. Action, photographs To pee in public or private spaces, Brooklyn Bridge, 2002. Action, photographs

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Climbing Buildings. Abando Renfe, Plaza Circular, Bilbao, 2003.

Action, video installation, photographs Climbing Buildings, Euskalduna Convention Hall, Bilbao, 2003. Action, photographs How d’ye do?, 2010. Performance at ARCOMadrid One, one, two, one, 2012. Performance, 40 min, CarrerasMugica gallery, Bilbao The Statues, 2018–2019. Video still

Were one to find oneself perambulating on a cold January day in 2019 in the endless labyrinthine entrails of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, one would perhaps pass by one of its visitors, standing in deep concentration before a statue – more precisely, an early sixteenth-century, Dutch, painted wood bust, Reliquary Bust of a Female Saint. Not an unreasonable event in such a context. But, should one have slowed down just a bit and dedicated a little more attention to that mundane episode, one would most likely be drawn to pause and linger for a moment, intrigued by the unusual duration and quiet intensity of the apparently ordinary scene. One would then wonder about that particular visitor’s seriously concentrated gaze, her resolute face-to-face with the wooden bust, her intent demeanor, and ponder on why furtive smiles would suddenly cross her face, usually followed by a quick lowering of her head, as if she had just heard an intimate confidence from the supposedly inert object before her.

If one were to linger just a couple of seconds longer, one would have to finally ac­ knowl­edge that the woman facing the statue was less a beholder of a work of art than its interlocutor. One would have to come to grips with the fact that the woman, in a discreet and yet eager and sincere way, was literally addressing the wooden statue.

Talking to it. And, not only talking to the object, but acting as if she could actually hear the statue’s replies and respond to its interjections, confessions, or comments.

This kind of interaction, this kind of inter-animacy, inter-intimacy between an object and a subject, this almost invisible event, unannounced, has been a consistent practice of Itziar Okariz over the past few months. Talking to statues, listening to statues. Seriously. Without irony. For real.

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What does it mean to vocally address the inanimate and to listen to what the inan­ imate has to say? In rhetoric, such exchange between a human and an object falls under the concept of apostrophe, “a figure of speech in which a thing, a place, an abstract quality, an idea, a dead or absent person, is addressed as if present and capable of understanding.” 1 The only corrective to this encyclopedic definition is that in the case of Okariz, there is no “as if.” There is no make-believe, no metaphor, no playacting, no pretending. Okariz listens to what statues have to say to her. And she replies.

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In her book Persons and Things, literary scholar Barbara Johnson reminds us that “apostrophe turns towards anything the poet throws his voice to, and in so doing magnetizes a world around his call.” 2 Even though addressing lyrical poetry specifically, Johnson’s observations are strongly resonant with Okariz’s multiple artistic practices – which span live performance, visual poetry, sound installation, photography, video, and street actions. Across a multiplicity of media supports, durations, locations, and materials, Okariz’s work reveals the world as an “intraactive” 3 field, whose constitutive components are magnetized by endless series of calls and responses, silent dialogues between persons and things, things and things, things and persons. In this poetic-performative magnetized world, all types of matters, all types of elements, are understood as endowed with a capacity to act, to call, and to respond. Through the intra-active, “inter-animacy” 4 of apostrophe, by speaking and listening and calling to the voice of things, Okariz “brings the whole surrounding world into the speech event.” 5 II.

Liquid-words, or co-breathing

The event of speech, speech as event, does not mean supremacy of language over the nonverbal, word ruling over world. Rather, it means to extract from the verbal, as well as to will into it, a cosmic force of objective, material potentiality, one that rewrites language, rewrites writing and its many marks, just as it rearranges mouth, larynx, lungs, but also ears, cochlea, tympanic membrane, from within – not in glossolalia, not in dysgraphia, but in what we could call skoliography: a winding, bent, deviant, liquid, or pneumatic grammar of things, whose vocalization and inscription require as much precision as deviation, as much adherence to the surrounding conditions of their performance as resistance to those conditions.

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In her performances, Okariz uses her voice to bend speech and rub it against the surrounding space in such intra-resonant ways as to dissolve any ontological barriers between objects and subjects, meaning and sound, word and objects, politics of the body and poetics of the flesh. Take for instance, Oceanic Breathing (2018–ongoing), performed in its definitive version for the first time by Okariz and her daughter at Tabakalera in San Sebastian. In this approximately ten-minute-long action, the two performers stand side by side, each holding a microphone linked to an amplifying system that distributes the sound to several speakers surrounding the space. They slowly breathe into their mics in such a way that the resulting sound evokes that of ocean waves crashing and receding. With the back and forth of inhaling and exhaling, with the overlapping breathing patterns of each performer filling up the exhibition space, it’s as if breathing together becomes the action capable of turning the whole body oceanic. On the surrounding walls, Okariz’s visual poem/action Dream Diary (2015–ongoing) adds to the supra-real, metamorphic sensation of the event as the whole space becomes magnetized and animated by the rhythms of the amplified pneumatic and liquid sound. Sonically entangling the whole situation, Okariz brings the gallery space into what Paul B. Preciado has called “Okariz’s wet architecture.” 6 Okariz also imparts a liquid quality to her voice in one of her most iconic actions, Irrintzi (2006–2009). The word refers to a traditional Basque cry performed as an expression of joy at celebrations. It possibly originated as a means of communication across the vast distances of the mountainous Basque terrain. Okariz has described

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Applause, 2007. Performance, vinyl, 9:25 min, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Ghost Box, 2008. Installation with four video screens, photographs, and audio sala rekalde, Bilbao Oceanic Breathing, performance with Izar, 2018–2019. Tabakalera, San Sebastian Dream Diary, 2015–ongoing. Digital print

André Lepecki – Apostrophe, liquid-words, piss-events, minor-light: notes on Itziar Okariz’s skoliographic art

Apostrophe, or the talking object

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I.

Piss-events, or fluid politics

Since the year 2000, Itziar Okariz has been enacting a series of piss actions titled To pee in public or private spaces (2000–2004) in cities across the globe. Mostly per­ formed in open-air situations without any audience or advertising (such as the first To pee, in Düsseldorf, on the Rhine River), they are a kind of “urban microguerrilla” action, to use Paul B. Preciado’s description, 7 where Okariz suddenly stops some­ where along her pedestrian trajectory (for instance, next to a public fountain in Irun, 2001; or on the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, New York, 2002; or on the Pulaski Bridge, while holding her baby daughter in her arms, New York, 2004), spreads her legs, and pisses while standing.

In one of the To pee actions on River Street, Brooklyn, New York (2001), Okariz climbed onto the roof of a parked car in the middle of the night and pissed on it. The jet of urine, rebounding and spraying all around, created a resounding mist, carving out a space for choreopolitical and gender transgression in the city by directly attacking one of the emblems of contemporary rapacious, masculinist, auto-mobility: the car.

Not since Pipilloti Rist’s iconic video work Ever is Over All (1997), where a young woman in a flowing blue dress walks down a street in slow motion, smashing the windows of parked cars only to be met by the benign smile of a cop, had we seen such a direct attack on the principles of conformed auto-mobilization and alienated subjectivity that organize the entire petrol-imperialism of contemporary power. Of course, the crucial difference between the two works lies in Okariz’s furtive, illegal, and non-authorized transgressive action – as opposed to Rist’s filmic representation of transgression. Had there been a cop on River Street that evening, he would most certainly not have smiled at the peeing female artist standing on top of a car. As Preciado commented in writing about To pee: “We can start to think of these [Okariz’s] interventions as somato-urban assemblages, true instances of fleeting architecture in which the body and its fluids hook up with other urban conglomerates,” producing what he calls “wet architecture (body-fluid-city assemblages).” 8 These body-fluidcity assemblages, activated through somatic, physiological, poetic, sonic, and verbal actions, lead to a micro-politics of dissolution. In the case of To pee, it is the “mutually constructed dimension of gender and cities” 9 that is dissolved by such fluid politics.

The city, the polis, and consequentially its two main offspring, politics and police, along with their normative regulations and arbitrary controls, are momentarily dissolved by sprays of improperly discharged, joyously rebounding, smelly, hot piss.

On at least two occasions, To pee was performed in a gallery context: at c/o Atle Gerhardsen gallery in Berlin during the collective exhibition Attitude (2006), and as a work on permanent loan at the deSingel arts center in Antwerp (2007). From the documentation of these two actions, we can see the startling effect on the surprised public, as well as the immediate clearing effect of the action, opening up a zone of freedom within the regulated sphere of the city. In the photographic or videographic documentation of these actions, what leaves a mark is not only the trans-historical “surviving image” 10 emerging from those stained floors – visually resonant with Andy Warhol’s Piss Paints (1961–1962) and Oxidation Paint (1978). What also lingers, synesthetically, after the fact, and through the document that prolongs the act is a virtual odor coming from the image, rising from the mist of micro-particles of ammonia and uric acid hitting and bouncing off the gallery floor, drumming up an abject, beautiful, stinky, rebellious micro-storm.

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Minor-light, or perfomatography

What if the supposed tension between action and its recordings, performance and its documentation, was, from the start, less an appositional, oppositional strain than a badly formulated problem, indeed a false or non-problem? What if this false or nonproblem’s persistent articulation as a problem denied and foreclosed the possibility of considering the deep imbrication of action and its many afterlives, of event and its many zones of action? And moreover, what if the whole fissure that sets apart what we call “action” and what we call (its) “document,” the putative action/document divide, was predicated on a kind of superstitious reification of that diacritical slash, the “/”, a reification deriving from a bad habit of thought that finds itself constantly and impulsively privileging visible living presence (of the artist, of the performer) over and against invisible, persistent existence (of the work, of the thing)?

If we go down the path set forth by these questions, we may start to witness the many ways in which Itziar Okariz’s actions have taken up these problems, not to solve them, but to dissolve them, to dilute them (for instance, in uric acid), to de­ signify them (through modulating words and sentences at the edge of sense and signification), and to scatter them (in ululating joyful irrintzis). The (con)fusion Okariz

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André Lepecki – Apostrophe, liquid-words, piss-events, minor-light: notes on Itziar Okariz’s skoliographic art

But what if we look at Okariz’s more “documental” objects, such as her photographs?

Is it still true that these are also more action than archival documents? Take for instance Okariz’s Writing with a Flashlight series (2001–2005). The work is about the intricate, non-linear relations between presence, writing, protest, absence, and photological imagination, where act, performance, documentation, and support all tangle up in a kind of active dismantling of the ordinary temporal sequence of how action and its recordings should unfold. It is a performative toppling of the diacritical slash that separates action/document, creating another principle for the reality of performance which – after the erasure, toppling, or dissolution of the “/” – could now simply be called actiondocument. What happens in Writing with a Flashlight?

In its first iteration, in an apartment room with almost no light, Okariz set up a photographic camera with the shutter open to a very long exposure. Then, facing the camera, Okariz turned on a bright flashlight and proceeded to write in large block letters, but in reverse, as in a mirror, so that in the printed image, the words would be legible to the viewer, fragments from several textual sources addressing and questioning notions of identity and processes of social identification.

The end result is as paradoxical for performance art as it is for photography. A series of more or less dark images, where one can barely make out the elements of a room, even less the gestures and presence and actions of the scene’s supposed protagonist: the performer, the artist. One can certainly read the large words quite clearly, scribbled in light, the uncertain handwriting brightly occupying most of the photographic paper: “YEAH,” “COME,” “YOU CAN RIDE MY BIKE.” The words had to be spelled out very slowly in the air so that the photon particles emitted by the flashlight could impress the photographic film. However, given the different zones of luminosity, given the darkness of the room, and the very long exposure of the film, Okariz’s own image, the image of her body in action, is either not captured at all by the camera, or appears dimly or partially in some photographs. In a couple of images – the most luminous ones due to a lit TV set facing one of the walls in the otherwise dark room – we can barely discern a translucent pair of legs in the background, which seem to belong to the artist.

If the text fragments Okariz writes in this series are from sources that question issues of identity formation, then Writing with a Flashlight immediately links the construction of identity to the invention of the photographic apparatus and there­ fore to a certain techno-policing of light. The history of the social construction of identities is intrinsically linked to colonialist and police uses of photography as an apparatus of social control. In this history, the question has always been about how to freeze subjects and subjectivities into identifiable and stable anatomo-epidermic traits, which could be revealed through the subject’s capacity to be “fixed.” This fixing of the subject required a predisposition of both body and camera to enter into a certain ideal relation between the shutter’s velocity and the subject’s capacity for, or acquiescence, or forced subjection to immobility. Too much exposure on the side of the apparatus, or too much movement on the side of the subject, and the result would be a blur at best, or a total evaporation of the subject’s image from the photographic surface. Indeed, motion is what most resists capture, either by photographic or film cameras, or by ideological identity apparatuses. Okariz knows that, and in Writing with a Flashlight she engages in a kind of political archeology of light in its many performances of surveillance and control in order to reveal and subvert that history.

Not only does the long exposure of the film not capture Okariz’s actions, it does not even capture her full presence. The darkened images do reveal traces of immobile objects, walls, floors, and paradoxically, the overlapping, overlarge letters and words painstakingly and slowly written in the dark. It’s as if Okariz had recreated the conundrum of early photography’s own relation to human presence, photography’s difficult relation to human action. Indeed, as art historian Philippe-Alain Michaud narrates, in the early Daguerreotypes, “because the emulsion’s low sensitivity required long exposures, one sees […] a world bereft of movement portrayed in the first photographic attempts, a world abandoned by the living.” 11 By embracing the darkness in order to write with light (literally, to photo-graph), Okariz re-enacts the exposure conditions of early photography and extracts from this a photo-political concept similar to the one Georges Didi-Huberman has called “minor light.” According to the French philosopher and art historian, this concept would enact, for contemporary film and photography, the same political and philosophical project Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari had identified in “minor literature”: “ ‘a strong coefficient of deterritorialization’; ‘everything in it is political’; and ‘revolutionary conditions’ immanent to its very marginalization.” 12

André Lepecki – Apostrophe, liquid-words, piss-events, minor-light: notes on Itziar Okariz’s skoliographic art

III.

brings to the supposed distinction between the archival, still document and the ephem­eral, moving action is enacted in and through several of her performances that are also documents, and by several documents that are also performances: the previously mentioned graphic transcriptions of performances; the videos of To pee, or of The Art of Falling Apart (1996), or of the unannounced urban action Climbing Buildings, (2003 Bilbao, 2007 Utrecht); the many photographs; or the installation Applause (2009), where one vinyl LP record of the eponymous 2007 performance, when Okariz clapped for about ten minutes before a standing audience in a gallery at the Guggenheim Bilbao, is made available to the audience to play in the gallery.

Okariz knows all too well that any action ripples way beyond the gesture that precipitated it, exceeding and escaping the moment of the act itself. Similarly, an action’s graphic transcription immediately occasions events beyond the intended written signification – they are speech made matter made act. Thus, the frequent need for Okariz to have her gallery performances surrounded by their poetic variations as (typo)graphic transcriptions. In that sense, the graphic object works to endlessly rewrite the situation of its, and the performance’s, (re)insertion.

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this call as “a basic syntax at the limits of language”– a limit dissolved and bent by Okariz’s undulating voice propagating the sonic waves of the irrintzi. Just as wind­ ing as an irrintzi are Okariz’s typographic transcriptions of her language-based actions: Uno, uno, dos, uno [One, one, two, one] (2012), Chapter 2, V. W. (2013), or the aforementioned series Dream Diary (2015–ongoing). In these transcriptions, orthography (literally, “straight writing”) is replaced by skoliography (literally, “bent or crooked writing”). Thus, words and non- or quasi-sentences are printed as if cresting (in the transcription of Uno, uno, dos, uno), or sloping down on the white paper (see the transcription of Chapter 2, V. W.), while they assume all sorts of geometrical formations in the multiple transcriptions into print of Okariz’s voice, its echo, and the surrounding nature sounds (bees, creeks, sheep, wind) which compose the sound and video installation project Ghost Box (2008). There is a fluid poetics and a fluid politics in this triple liquefaction of architecture, the body, and writing that Okariz’s art occasions.

Sergio Prego

In the minor light created by Okariz’s intra-active, diluting movement between per­ form­­ance and photography, act and document, writing and gesture; in the dim dark­ness of her perfomatography, the resulting document is no archival file: it has nothing to do with memorializing a past event, it does not fix the act in place for posterity. Instead, Writing with a Flashlight (and its open-air counterpart, Light Writing. Repetition (2005), which includes photos taken in the very dark, and not so safe, streets on the outskirts of Bilbao, where Okariz also writes phrases of dissent) proposes a photography that does not capture. Rather, these documents ensure the improper delineation and autonomous propagation, the endless dissemination, of the actions they (do not) contain. Improperly delineated, Okariz’s actions, writings, images, sounds, and fluids overflow the documental frame, become boundless and move forth, rebounding and dissolving at the speed of darkness.13

1

J. A. Cuddon, “Apostrophe,” in The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 51.

2 Barbara Johnson, Persons and Things (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2008), 10.

3 Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801–831.

4 Amelia Jones and Christopher Braddock, “Animacies and Performativity,” in Animism in Art and Performance, ed. Christopher Braddock (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2017), 189.

5 Johnson, 8.

6 Paul B. Preciado, “Don’t You Stop. Jumping, Climbing, Peeing, Shouting… Don’t Stop Doing It,” in Itziar Okariz. Ghost Box (Bilbao: sala rekalde, 2008), 68-69.

7 Preciado, 67.

8 Ibid., 69.

9 Ibid., 68.

10 Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Image Survivante (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2002).

11 Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 43.

12 “ ‘Un fort coefficient de déterritorialisation’; ‘tout y est politique’; et des ‘conditions révolutionnaires’ immanentes à sa marginalization même.” Georges Didi-Huberman, Survivance des Lucioles (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2009), 44, translation by the author.

13 “The speed of darkness is the speed of light.” Roy Sorensen, Seeing Dark Things. The Philosophy of Shadows (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 243.

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3 André Lepecki is a writer and curator whose work focuses on performance studies, choreography, and dramaturgy. He is a professor at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University where he chairs the Department of Performance Studies.

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André Lepecki – Apostrophe, liquid-words, piss-events, minor-light: notes on Itziar Okariz’s skoliographic art

Tetsuo, Bound to Fail, 1998. Video still, 17 min PROFORMA Studio, 2010. Produced for PROFORMA, MUSAC, León PROFORMA module, 2010. Produced for PROFORMA, MUSAC, León ANTI-after T.B. 2004. Exhibition at sala rekalde, Bilbao View of the exhibition at Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid, 2012 Gemini, 2012. Pneumatic structure. Exhibition at MARCO, Vigo

Sergio Prego 2

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7 Home, 2001. Video, 5:30 min, video stills 8 Yesland, I’m Here to Stay, 2001. Video stills, exhibition at Sala Montcada, ‘La Caixa’ Foundation, Barcelona 9 Winter Star Red Orbit, 2003. Three 3.20 x 8 m walls moving uninterruptedly at random, Lombard-Freid Fine Arts, New York 10 Eventstructure Research Group, Pneutube, Frederiksplein, Amsterdam, 1969 11 Miguel Fisac, Dolar building, Madrid, 1973

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MM, 2013. Inflated tarpaulin, 15 × 200 × 220 cm SM-Totem, 2015. Installation comprising five elements, tarpaulin, and water, 330 x 750 x 400 cm CarrerasMugica gallery, Bilbao Concrete series / Houston 04, 2017. Reinforced concrete, 72 x 29 x 9 cm High-Rise, 2017. Exhibition at CA2M, Móstoles-Madrid 00 Top Half Egg Shell, 2015. Pencil on paper, 29 x 42 cm

An enormous pillow-like object has expanded to engulf all of the available space in a room. A figure steadily pacing forward partially disappears beneath the glossy, reflective skin of a plastic membrane. Women and men, their backs to the camera, run single file down the length of a pneumatic tube as if chasing an object of desire or fleeing for their lives. Vast translucent bags of air swell, ripple, and flex as they are folded into precarious, rotund geometries, leaving only a small clearing at the center of a vast hall. No description of the photographs that reproduce the pneumatic projects of Sergio Prego can fully capture the larger problems, pleasures, and doubts of these works, which are temporary in nature and often social in inspiration and function. In this, they echo a dilemma central to the historical legacy of pneumatic techniques taken up by artists and architects during the twentieth century. Even if on rare occasions pneumatic art and architecture have been preserved for their cultural value, the vast majority of pneumatics have been conceived as expendable from the outset and treated as such. They are largely fated to end up as photographic images, or as garbage. Such two-dimensional images, whether moving or still, inev­ itably reduce the phenomenological qualities of these environments, which are inherently lively and tactile, volumetric and kinetic. Nor do the images, however photogenic and complete in their documentation, capture the elusive qualities of human par­ticipation, or the institutional entanglement associated with pneumatics.

Finally, images of pneumatics encourage viewers to relate to them as objects rather than as incarnations of a larger technological, material, and cultural assemblage.

Such contradictions are not incidental but fundamental to the cultural fascination around pneumatics; the photographic afterlife of these highly perishable entities is at once a source of betrayal and of reanimation. Sergio’s recent work offers an opportunity to ask how this complex historical lineage – as image, as material assemblage, and as participatory practice – intersects with contemporary cultural production. Neither imageability nor instrumentality exhausts the role of pneumatics in Prego’s work, rather they open up a larger question concerning the aesthetic and political value of plasticity within the contemporary “art-architecture complex.” 1 Much of the visual legacy of pneumatic architecture re-entered circulation through a host of exhibitions and books that appeared in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Faced with a burgeoning production of inflatables across the fields of design, fashion, art, and architecture, curators and historians began to excavate the largely repressed legacy of pneumatic experimentation of the 1960s. 2 The general tenor of these accounts tended toward the utopian. In almost every case, the 1960s linked back to the balloons launched by Enlightenment pioneers of aviation, such as the Montgolfier brothers. 3 Tethering the pneumatics of the twentieth century to those of the Enlightenment gave these cultural techniques a mythic pedigree. Possessing an audacity reminiscent of Icarus, the pneumatic experiments of the 1960s were similarly undone by hubris, crushed by the hard realities of modern social conflict or folded into more mundane purposes. 4 Still other historians have followed the lead of Reyner Banham, who looked not to balloons but to structures devised to contain and regulate air; from the early designs of rubber tire manufacturers, such as Dunlop and Michelin, to the first known patent for an air-supported tent filed by F. W. Lanchester in 1919, and the military-funded experiments of Walter Bird at Cornell University’s Aeronautical Laboratories after WWII. 5 Yet despite the great number and historical priority of such military-infrastructural and cultural-diplomatic projects – ranging from Cold War radomes to traveling inflatable pavilions – it is the proliferation of pneumatics in design, art, architecture, and the counterculture during the 1960s that have dominated the popular and critical imaginary.

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Prego’s engagement with pneumatics was neither primarily about historical ref­ erence nor about specialization in a particular material system. The artist initially discovered the legacy of pneumatic architecture while working as part of the inter­ disciplinary team at Acconci Studio, when he found some of the original publications from the 1960s and 1970s, which compiled pneumatic research, in Acconci’s library.6 Nearly a decade would elapse between this initial encounter and Prego’s first works with pneumatics, an indication that the artist’s motivation had more to do with the demands of a particular situation than an inherent interest in this cultural legacy.

The use of pneumatics derives from the artist’s concern for plasticity, not only in the realm of sculpture but also in the realm of photography and video. Yet the question is not strictly one of medium. Prego has used pneumatics as insertions in institutional contexts, deploying these volumes of constrained air to act as media which both relate and separate the artist from the public, and the public from the architecture of the institution.

Bubble Quarantine

10 9

6 Diagram for Ikurriña Quartet, 2010 7 Ikurriña Quartet, Art Basel Unlimited, Basel, 2010 8 Ikurriña Quartet, 2010. Produced for PROFORMA, MUSAC, León 9 Frigidaire magazine, Rome, 1991 10 José Miguel de Prada Poole, Instant City, ICSID, Ibiza, 1971

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The context for Prego’s initial use of inflatables was Primer PROFORMA, a sprawling, unorthodox project conceived together with the artists Txomin Badiola and Jon Mikel Euba for the Museum of Contemporary Art (MUSAC) in León, Spain, in 2010. 7 Primer PROFORMA came about when the three artists decided to combine their separate invitations to exhibit at MUSAC into a single venture.8 The aim was not a group exhibition, but rather a collective effort to use the museum as a venue for a time-based, intensive, pedagogical, and aesthetic experiment. In part the fruit of cir­ cumstance, Primer PROFORMA was also an extension of a previous history; Prego and Euba had met through a workshop that Badiola had conducted at Arteleku in 1994, an arts initiative established in a former factory building on the outskirts of San Sebastian. Arteleku was a site where artists could have studios and meet for infor­mal

Craig Buckley – Air Pressure. Notes on the Work of Sergio Prego and the Legacy of Pneumatic Architecture

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On veut toujours que l’imagination soit la faculté de former des images. Or elle est plutôt la faculté de déformer les images fournies par la perception, elle est surtout la faculté de nous libérer des images premières, de changer les images.

Gaston Bachelard, L’air et les songes (1943)

A similar mixture of the pneumatic and the choreographic characterized another exercise, Ikurriña Corridor. Here Prego and his collaborators built a pneumatic tube which extended throughout the museum galleries, serving as a linear passageway for participants and as a temporary obstruction for visitors. A two-meter-diameter, translucent, linear tube, bent into the form found on the Basque flag, or Ikurriña, was then squeezed into the layout of MUSAC’s galleries, distorting the iconic geometry.

Participants were asked to move through this structure in single file at different speeds, keeping a constant distance between them, while passing photo and video cameras from hand to hand in order to document their own movements. One might again note similarities to the use of tubes in the 1960s, in works such as Graham Stevens’s Hovertube Project (1970), or the Eventstructure Research Group’s various Waterwalk projects (1970), where participants used tubular pneumatics to traverse bodies of water. Yet there is also something reminiscent of conceptual performances and video work of the period, particularly that of Dan Graham and works like Body Press (1970–73), where the act of passing the camera from one performer to another explored how a reciprocal relationship between video camera and mirror mediated awareness of bodily image and gender. As with Graham, the goal was to generate consciousness of the difference between internal bodily experience and external perception, yet in the case of Ikurriña Corridor, the objective was also to generate a disjunction between a familiar and charged political sign and the actions delineated within it.12 In Freeside, another exercise with pneumatics, three tubes were stacked into a pyramid, allowing participants to move along their length, but also between the tubes by virtue of circular openings connecting the adjacent tubes to each other.

As in the other exercises, participants passed the cameras between themselves, yet in this instance they were often seeing each other through the translucent vinyl. The participants’ bodies are registered as silhouettes, stark and sharp when pressed against the membrane, indistinct and partially diffused when further away, and when in motion, shifting between distinct and blurry. In emphasizing the pneumatic membrane as visual filter, Freeside echoed a Viennese strain of pneumatic exper­ iment, works such as Haus-Rucker Co.’s Yellow Heart (1968), which emphasized the

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Craig Buckley – Air Pressure. Notes on the Work of Sergio Prego and the Legacy of Pneumatic Architecture

Given these multiple resonances with the past, how to grasp this pneumatic repeti­ tion? Its re-surfacing in the present? It is significant that Badiola, Prego, and Euba described Primer PROFORMA as neither an exhibition nor “dialogue” nor “platform,” terms routinely used in socially collaborative art practice, but as a “quarantine.” 13 Rather than engagement and outreach, the metaphor invited thoughts of isolation, contagion, and heterotopia. Even the project’s period of forty days goes back to the etymological root of quarantine in quarantina, the forty days that ships and their crew were obliged to remain at anchor before entering key port cities such as Dubrovnik, Venice, and Marseilles. Unlike socially-oriented practices that explicitly address a general community beyond the museum, Primer PROFORMA sought to create an intensive and structured, yet also spontaneous and open-ended, pedagogical engagement within the museum. Prego’s pneumatic membranes established a form of relation between these different communities. In separating the participants committed to the entire program from visitors, it created a space of self-relation that also served as a device addressing the general museum public. A barrier around and through which these different constituencies perceived each other, it channeled and obstructed movement. Thus, rather than the utopian mobility of the balloon, the flexibility and efficiency of synthetic materials, or the demountability and expendability of inflatable equipment – key tropes through which the pneumatic legacy of the 1960s has been remembered – Primer PROFORMA linked pneumatics to the hazmat suit and the clean room. If a certain desire for utopian transformation persists within the exercises undertaken at Primer PROFORMA, pneumatics were also foregrounded as a biopolitical membrane, one that is not inherently liberating, but which has also served to enclose, separate, and regulate bodies. Such techniques of relation by separation emphasize an awareness of freedom as dependent on forms of constraint, in this case a voluntary subjection to the parameters of the project, together with a self-conscious elaboration and reshaping of the conditions in which participation took place.

Craig Buckley – Air Pressure. Notes on the Work of Sergio Prego and the Legacy of Pneumatic Architecture

An inflatable polyethylene enclosure called the PROFORMA Studio was the initial com­­ponent of the project; an office and working space that also hosted lectures, screenings, and meetings. Desiring to “establish a working community” by “blocking out” the architecture of the MUSAC’s interior, the PROFORMA Studio linked group formation to symbolic refuge, a physical means of isolation within the museum, yet also from the museum’s architecture and public. If such isolation was spatial, it also inverted the phenomenological qualities of the gallery space, which shifted from orthogonal to rotund, from concrete to synthetic, from cold to warm, and from a section of gallery in a complex branching plan to a self-contained 5 x 8 x 25 m volume.10 Translucent rather than transparent or opaque, the density of the polyethylene was as much an optical filter as a pneumatic barrier, designed to make the activities in the interior indiscernible, yet still allowing extant gallery lighting to glow through the surface of the bubble. A low-pressure, single-membrane enclosure braced with nylon strapping, the PROFORMA Studio was reminiscent of other pneumatic offices from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Hans Hollein’s ironic Mobile Office project (1969), Ant Farm’s 50’ x 50’ Pillow deployed in the California desert as a temporary facility for the production of a Whole Earth Catalog (1970) supplement, and Norman Foster’s more sophisticated temporary offices for Computer Technology Ltd (1970). In each of these cases, the temporary nature of pneumatic enclosure recognized, but also helped implement, a more mobile and transitory vision of intellectual work. At Primer PROFORMA, the pneumatics’ purpose was never strictly about shelter, but also about an agonistic interchange with the museum architecture. Designed to occupy the entire width of the gallery, and nearly its complete height, PROFORMA Studio was an obstruction, interrupting typical circulation patterns in the museum. The inflatable was also geared to different forms of bodily engagement with gallery spaces, designed to be tested in various ways, with participants climbing, walking on, and installing furniture on top of the residual space between the enclosure and the beams of the museum’s ceiling. Such a usage may recall the interactive role of pneumatics in many happenings and expanded cinema events during the 1960s, where spectators lay, jumped, bounced, or rolled across pneumatic surfaces. Whereas such pneumatic participation in the 1960s tended to be spontaneous and unprogrammed, the interactions at PROFORMA were self-conscious exercises. In one of the PROFORMA Studio exercises, participants traversed the length of the pneumatic enclosure by means of harnesses and rope which placed them on and around the volume of air, but also between the concrete beams of the building’s ceiling, a spatial position entirely at odds with the gallery’s typical program. Such movements highlight a link, less to happenings than to the experimental choreography of Judson Dance Theater, especially to the work of Trisha Brown, whose work with ropes, harnesses, and other mechanisms of restraint has been reprised by Prego in previous works.11

swelling rhythms and variable visual patterns of the pneumatic chamber. Prego’s pneumatics involved a greater number of participants, yet they were also looking up, down, and across at each other within multiple interconnected interiors. Structurally, they aspired to none of the technological complexity of the Austrian work, but rather took their cue from an iconic, yet simple pneumatic building, Instant City, that Fernando Bendito, Carlos Ferrater, and José Miguel de Prada Poole developed for the ICSID’s 1971 congress in Ibiza. A series of colorful pneumatic tubes that could be added and extended in different directions, the city grew as participants joined.

The entrances to Prego’s pneumatics were modeled on those of Instant City, defined by simply cutting the plastic sheeting and folding it inwards. The entrance/exit was sealed enough to retain pressure, yet never fixed or impassable; a membrane that was simultaneously closed and open.

Plasticity Themes of liberation, excess, and ephemerality have often been the filters through which the legacy of pneumatic art and architecture has been remembered, yet Prego’s work invites one to consider how constraint, limitation, and rules have also been central to this past. Despite their reputation for flexibility, pneumatics are in many respects a cultural technology of significant rigidity. Not easily combined with more conventional materials, such as glass, steel, or concrete, they also require continual and highly regulated, energy-intensive inputs in order to remain habitable.

Defined by rather strict industrial norms, even the humblest, do-it-yourself, inflated enclosure requires sheets of polymerized particles (Polyvinyl Chloride, Polyethylene, etc.) whose chemical composition and fabrication procedures are every bit as standardized as I-beams or bricks. From the relatively simple forms used by Prego to more complex air structures composed of systems of pressurized tubes, cushions, or struts, pneumatic enclosures demand the stable and predictable regulation of the difference between internal and external air pressure. Pneumatics, in short, cannot exist without a concerted effort to constrain, regulate, and domesticate the most fluid, mobile, promiscuous, and unpredictable of elements.

The tension between the fluidity of air and the means for capturing and constraining it remains key to the mediality of pneumatics. For pneumatics are media, and not only in the sense that they are often oriented to and disseminated by mass media.

Across their various forms and functions, pneumatics form a channel, an opera­ tional bond that connects the massive growth of chemical polymerization during the twentieth century with the greater strategic importance within modernity of controlling air and air flow. If, for Prego, pneumatic media have been important for collaborating with others and for challenging the parameters of institutional operation, they have also been a medium for thinking about plasticity. To say that pneumatics are a plastic medium does not mean they should be understood as sculptural material. Rather, the operational linkage between polymers and air lies in both the ability to be shaped and the ability to create form. A volume of air receives form from the membrane that encloses it, yet the inherent mobility of air – whether nearly static or turbulent– also animates the membrane, and can threaten it with deformation, deflation, or explosion. Unlike structures in concrete, wood, steel, or glass, pneumatic form has an active plasticity that results directly from the dynamic manner in which it manages air pressure.

Plasticity should not be confused with geometric or formal complexity, whether in a techno-utopian mode, in projects such as Jean-Paul Jungmann’s Dyodon project (1967), or in one of abject irony, as in Paul McCarthy’s Complex Piles (2007). Prego has consistently opted for basic shapes – mainly single-walled bags and tubes – which are fabricated on site with readily available materials rather than delegated for factory production. Instead of being sewn or joined into a particular image or structure, air and plastic take on their form by being bent, folded, or squeezed

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exchanges; a place to pursue an artistic education outside of a formal pedagogical structure. Neither quite an art school nor a space for professional exhibition, it was simultaneously a workshop, meeting place, and site for seminars and lectures. 9 The collaborative mixture of studio activity, pedagogy, and open-ended experiment that Prego, Badiola, and Euba undertook at Primer PROFORMA was an extension and reflection on experiences which had begun to germinate fifteen years earlier, an effort to create an intensive and non-academic environment where artists could learn from other artists. At Primer PROFORMA the artists, together with MUSAC’s director and curators, and a team of fifteen participants, chose to isolate themselves within the museum to conduct thirty different “exercises” (Badiola, Euba, and Prego each proposing ten) over a period of forty days for at least eight hours each day.

The pneumatic devices that Prego developed in this context mediated between the architecture of the institution and the temporary community who pursued the exercises. Initially conceived as a venue within the museum, the pneumatic materials quickly became an important substance of the exercises themselves.

Film/Membrane Such plasticity and gravity were already central to some of the artist’s earliest works, videos such as Tetsuo, Bound to Fail (1998), or Black Monday (2006), where arrays of still cameras were triggered to record a vat of paint dropped in mid-air, or an explosive detonating in an empty warehouse. Prego reprised the centuryold techniques of Eadweard Muybridge, whose battery of cameras helped define chronophotography. Whereas Muybridge famously shot horses and humans, Prego turns his camera to liquids and gases. Where Muybridge kept his battery of cameras strictly perpendicular to his subjects, rendering them sharply in profile, Prego surrounds his objects, capturing the event from the circumference of a circle. In each video, the viewer’s point of view rotates rapidly, a disorienting, stuttering circularity that whips the eye around these targets, an effect made dizzier through the use of looping. Such chronophotographic animation reverses the ontological conditions of the event; that which was moving appears still, while the fixed, monocular view­point of the camera is experienced as motion. In Prego’s videos, we encounter something reminiscent of the photographs of milk drops and projectiles by Harold Edgerton, who developed chronophotography into high-speed strobe photography in the 1930s. Prego’s apparatus, like Edgerton’s, reifies an event into a mesmerizing object.

Yet rather than a fraction of a second frozen in iconic perfection, we encounter a three-dimensional form, which we watch again and again: instant repetition.

Liquid deforms into a random and complex sheet that ripples, folds, and splatters wildly at its edges, yet it appears strangely solid. The split-second interval between detonation and dissipation hangs bulbous and still, more like a stray pink cloud at sunset than a violent explosion.

Chronophotography is often remembered as a crucial step in the archaeology of cinema, and thus of twentieth-century modernity. Yet, in arresting movement, chrono­photographic imaging never simply aimed to represent, but to intervene.

It sought not simply to record movements of all kinds, but to penetrate, analyze, control, and remake these bodily behaviors. The techniques of Muybridge and his French colleague Étienne-Jules Marey quickly became instruments in the scientific management of labor, and the high-speed photography of Edgerton was intimately linked to the military, providing millisecond analysis of the detonation of hydrogen bombs. The aim in both cases can be seen as plastic. In the first instance, the aim was to mold, sculpt, and recreate the shape of human labor, whether this be the gestures of a bricklayer or the intricate movements of a seamstress. In the second, the aim was not to remodel the body, but to comprehend and channel an unprecedented, and seemingly ungraspable, capacity to destroy and deform.

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Craig Buckley – Air Pressure. Notes on the Work of Sergio Prego and the Legacy of Pneumatic Architecture

How then to assess the stakes of plasticity as they manifest themselves in the work of an artist like Prego? It is worth remembering that the intellectual program for PROFORMA polemically prioritized the plastic over the visual. 14 Returning to an older notion of the plastic arts, in contrast to the dominant idea of the visual arts, Prego, Badiola, and Euba claimed processes of shaping and forming as practices that implicate a multi-sensory, open-ended, embodied perception in contrast to the hegemony of vision in modern art pedagogy (if not in Western culture more broadly). Such an appeal should not be confused with a new call for medium spec­ificity, an effort to elevate sculpture over two-dimensional visual media, or con­ceptual practices. Rather plasticity is asserted as a means for foregrounding questions of corporeality, form, and institutional operation that are both within and against a field increasingly dominated by optical media. In recent years, the philosopher Catherine Malabou has elucidated a theory of plasticity that may help to gauge the stakes of such a claim. The concept of plasticity was initially derived from the plastic arts, yet it has served as a schema for grasping the human condition as one of self-creation and self-formation. In philosophy since Hegel, she notes, and throughout recent neuroscience, the concept of plasticity, comprising both the aptitude for giving form and for destroying form, has been central to conceptualizing an inherent variability that is characteristic of the brain, and increasingly of human identity and social practices. 15 Nowhere, she argues, has this push toward unbridled variability and malleability been more prevalent than in the world of work, where there has been a concerted effort to make labor relations more fluid and casual, workers subject to continuous retraining, and production dependent on networks of impermanent, outsourced service providers. 16 Though she does not mention it, inherent variability has also been highlighted, notably by Mario Carpo, as one of the chief characteristics of the digitization’s impact in fields of design. 17 Is plasticity, then, an aptitude characteristic of both digital media and of the dismantled world of work, two key facets of contemporary capitalism? Plasticity, Malabou argues, should not be conflated with flexibility and adaptability. “Flexibility,” she argues, “is the ideo­­log­ical avatar of plasticity – at once its mask, its diversion, and its confiscation… Flexibility encompasses only the capacity to receive form, not to impart or create form, nor to erase or destroy.” 18 For Malabou, conceptualizing plasticity against demands for ever-greater flexibility remains crucial for developing an awareness of the brain that does not disappear into the ideologies characteristic of contemporary capitalism.

Such a distinction is worth holding onto in thinking about Prego’s practice, in its attitude to form, in its use of materials, and in its style of occupying institutions. In which processes does form-making serve a plastic purpose, and in which cases is it only flexible and elastic? Might constraint and limitation produce more of an opportunity for plastic transformation than an abundance of choice and a surplus of means? To what extent does the drive to transform museum spaces and operational praxis serve to stretch limited resources, and to what extent does it represent a true plasticity of function and mission? Such questions might serve for thinking further about the practices of Prego and his colleagues, but also as points of departure for productively rethinking the received images of pneumatics in art and architecture, affecting how such a past might inform and deform our present.

1

The term is Hal Foster’s and is proposed to describe both the ways in which artists over the last half century have increasingly addressed their work to the architectural containers in which it was displayed, and the corollary manner in which architects have made practices of visual art central to their conceptual strategies. Rather than two mediums, the intersection between them has become central to the contemporary production of images and spaces of all kinds. See The Art-Architecture Complex (New York: Verso, 2011).

2 See, for instance, Marc Dessauce, ed., The Inflatable Moment (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998); Stéphane Magnin and Marie-Ève Mestre, AirAir: Celebrating Inflatables (Monaco: Grimaldi Forum, 2000); Seam Topham, Blowup: Inflatable Art, Architecture, and Design (Munich: Prestel, 2002); Barbara Clausen and Kari Kuoni, eds., Thin Skin: The Fickle Nature of Bubbles, Spheres, and Inflatable Structures (New York: Independent Curators International, 2002); Jacobo Krauel, Inflatable: Art, Architecture & Design (Barcelona: Links, 2013).

3 The brothers launched the first hot air balloon Le Reveillon, a cotton and paper sphere that carried several farm animals across the landscape of Versailles, under the watchful eyes of Louis XV in September 1783. The reference appears in Dessauce, 1998; Topham, 2002; Magnin,

Craig Buckley – Air Pressure. Notes on the Work of Sergio Prego and the Legacy of Pneumatic Architecture

The creation of pressure through constraining, kinking, and obstructing are the plastic operations that reappear across a range of Prego’s work, even when the materials are not air. In SM-Totem (2014), water-filled tubes of plastic canvas tarpau­ lin are hung from the wall, bending where they meet the floor. In these simple tubes there are echoes of high-pressure pneumatic techniques, which have been used in aerospace, in film set design (AJS-Aerolande), and in world’s fair pavilions (Yutaka Murata’s Fuji Pavilion, Osaka, 1970), in order to allow pneumatics to behave like tectonic members rather than simple domes. Prego’s tubes are comparatively paradoxical, at once tectonic and rigid. Their exterior is nearly rock hard due to gravity acting on the hundreds of liters of water they contain, yet supple enough to bend ninety degrees. Here again, plasticity is concerned with the giving and receiving of form – the tubes shape the fluidity of water, yet their particular profile results from their relationship to the architecture. In being defined by their hang, engaging both wall and floor, they echo the importance of gravity in much postminimalist sculpture, yet their facture connotes an entirely different register. As the work’s title alludes, the shiny black surface and tightly constrained water evoke BDSM subcultures, suggesting that it is not only a question of plastic form, but of malleable and denaturalized sexual identities. A related sense of plasticity can be found in the series of wall sculptures, such as 4224 / 2442 (2015), which again turn to the kinked tubular forms found in works like Ikurriña Corridor and SM-Totem.

Here concrete, rather than air or water, has been used. Relatively inert and obdurate compared to air or water, the works remind one that even the hardest of sub­­stances do not lack plasticity. Here too architecture has provided an inspiration. The artist’s accidental encounter with the work of Spanish architect Miguel Fisac has proved an enigmatic yet recurring touchstone. Fisac used organic formwork and fabric to cast concrete columns, roof beams, and concrete paneling in a number of projects during the 1950s. As fabric molds concrete, it leaves the traces of folding and stretching on its surface, providing a visual index of concrete’s liquid beginnings, its capacity to flow in and around a tubular mold, as it is cast and configured in different ways. Created on the floor, yet displayed on the wall, the pieces provoke an uncanny impression that gravity has shaped them.

That Prego’s interest in plasticity should touch on the legacy of pneumatic experiment and on the afterlife of chronophotographic techniques points to an unexpected, but not entirely arbitrary, bridge between different arenas of cultural production. Both find themselves indebted to cultural techniques for making films of various kinds, in the literal sense of thin, pliable, synthetic substrates. Chronophotography would not have been possible without the production of more sensitive liquid emulsions that congealed into a film on the photographic plate, and the subsequent emergence of cinema cameras required nitrocellulose film that could be wound into small rolls.

The pneumatic experiments of the twentieth century depended on techniques for mass producing sheets that were light and thin, yet strong and elastic. Materials such as sheet rubber, PVC, Polyethylene, Dacron, and Mylar all depended on tech­ niques for liquefying chemical compounds and transforming them, by means of high-speed rollers or blowers, into thin sheets. Our present moment would seem to be characterized by the uneven, yet entangled afterlives of these two cultural technologies. On the one hand, the intensive, and near instantaneous, global circu­ lation of digital images has emerged precisely because images no longer depend on analogue optical film as a means of storage, transmission, and circulation. On the other hand, our lifeworld is increasingly conditioned by and dependent on the massive deployment of plastic films of all kinds. Such plastic films neither look nor behave like the utopian visions of the 1960s; their primary vocation remains banal, routine, and invisible. Yet they remain crucial media, even if overlooked as such; without them the logistical universe of late capitalism would arguably cease to function.

25

into particular architectural spaces. The plasticity of works such as Gemini (2012), Freeside, and Ikurriña Corridor stems from an ambiguous giving and receiving of form; the pneumatic is shaped by the confines of an existing architecture, just as the pneumatic defines the residual space in which bodies can move and fit.

The same principle animates more recent works such as High-Rise (2017), at the CA2M, Móstoles-Madrid, and the installation at the Blaffer Museum, Houston (2017).

Even if more complex geometries have come into play in these works, structurally they remain single-volume membranes whose shape results from being squeezed and kinked by cable-stayed aluminum bars. The pneumatic volume continues to obstruct and define residual spaces and pathways, insertions addressed to the soaring volumes of museum atria, an increasingly unavoidable feature of much recent museum design.

Perforated by

2001; and Kuoni, 2002.

4 See for instance, Topham, 2002; Dessauce, 1998, 13–15.

5 See, Reyner Banham, “Monumental Windbags,” New Society, 1968. See also, Caroline Maniaque, “Lightness,” in AirAir: Celebrating Inflatables.

6 In particular, the artist recalls Thomas Herzog’s Pneumatic Architecture: A Handbook (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), and Frei Otto, Tensile Structures: Design, Structure, and Calculation of Buildings of Cables, Nets, and Membranes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967).

7 Prego had explored an unrealized project for the Casa Encendida in Madrid, 2002, eventually deciding not to pursue it. Despite institutional support, the artist decided against the project’s costliness.

8 A history of the project, a statement of purpose, and documentation of the exercises are collected in Primer PROFORMA. Badiola, Euba, Prego. 30 exercises, 40 days, 8 hours a day (Barcelona: ACTAR, 2011).

9 Arteleku was active in San Sebastian between 1987 and 2014, and its archive can be visited at: http://artxibo.arteleku.net/ 10 Primer PROFORMA, Badiola, Euba, and Prego, 164.

11 In the exhibition Anti-after T.B. at sala rekalde, 2004, Prego specifically reprised Trisha Brown’s 1971 performance Walking on the Wall.

12 Primer PROFORMA, Badiola, Euba, and Prego, 198.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., 12.

15 See Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 9–12; and What Should We Do with Our Brain? (Bronx: Fordham University Press, 2008).

16 Her reference point is the landmark work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2005).

17 As Mario Carpo has argued, the shift from analogue to digital modes of design is not an enhanced capacity for reproducibility, but the rise of variability. Stored as binary information, digital form remains open to almost limitless alteration and iteration. See Carpo, The Alphabet and Algorithm (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011).

18 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 12.

27

Craig Buckley is a professor of Modern and Contemporary Architecture in the History of Art Department at Yale University. His most recent book is Graphic Assembly. Montage, Media, and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

Exhibition view, Spanish Pavilion, 2019

26

Craig Buckley – Air Pressure. Notes on the Work of Sergio Prego and the Legacy of Pneumatic Architecture

Perforated by 29 Sergio Prego, floor plan for unrealized project, Spanish Pavilion.

Intervention with pneumatic elements, 2019

28

Sergio Prego, What Would Vito Think?, 2019. Model for unrealized project, Spanish Pavilion.

Intervention with pneumatic elements. Honeycomb cardboard, mylar, paint, 84 x 74 x 36 cm

Perforated by 31 Perforated by Itziar Okariz and Sergio Prego. Exhibition view, 2019.

Center, Itziar Okariz, Oceanic Breathing, performance with Izar, 2019. Video, sound installation

30

Perforated by 33 Itziar Okariz, The Statues, 2019. Video, sound, sculptures by Jorge Oteiza, Armando Andrade Tudela and Sergio Prego. Installation view

32

VOICE 2 (Head of painter Otano)

Perforated by

VOICE 1 (Itziar Okariz)

(Silence, background noise )

So …

Yup.

I’m not sure what are we

I have no idea.

gonna say to the …

Actually, you know, it’s like I don’t have much to say.

it was nice

Well,

the other day I realized that it was …

when

when I have to describe something, the images that they were like actually like ... building in

in

in the sentences But at the same time, I thought that

when I transcribe the whole thing

it’s gonna be … nicer.

When I don’t have a …

like this kind of words.

When the words almost meaningless.

Yeah, I thought so.

I still have no idea.

But …

I know some of it, just

fragments.

But not the whole thing.

I’m kind of lost.

I’d like to have a … kind of like a column, something modular, maybe.

35

you know, like

Yeah,

like the bones of it.

And then the flesh

would go around, and the skin

at the end.

Yeah.

What about you?

Is it boring?

Yeah, I like suspended.

It reminds me to a song:

Itziar Okariz, The Statues, Itziar, 2019. Video still

34

“Suspended in Gaffa”.

Itziar Okariz, The Statues, conversations, 2019. Digital print, 59.4 x 84.1 cm each

Perforated by

It’s a very nice song.

It’s like kind of … mmm mm mm mm mm na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na

Yeah,

she uses a lot of this kind of like from

rhythms, popular music.

I love it.

Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know.

What I was going to say or anything …

I don’t know where it comes from.

OK.

Yeah,

it was about

the feeling of being suspended.

Without …

Without time I was going to say.

Maybe not,

Without frame

not time.

to measure,

OK?

I cannot imagine.

I guess it doesn’t matter.

Yeah.

To be fearless.

Bold.

No,

it’s not the same.

Yeah, it’s not about it, it’s about something else.

What do you want to me?

37

To what you see.

Quite boring actually. Not really boring, quite complex and …

I mean hectic.

I don’t like it.

It’s like because I have to go

all the time between like being …

Like with

lots of different

things at the same time, and emotions and

and.. thoughts to

to

simple, and calm,

and concise.

And then you get exhausted.

I do.

Itziar Okariz, The Statues, conversations, 2019. Digital print, 59.4 x 84.1 cm each

36

actually try to be more

Perforated by 39 Itziar Okariz, The Statues, 2019. Video, sound, performance. Installation view

38

Perforated by 41 Itziar Okariz, To pee in public or private spaces, 167 Greenpoint Ave. Backyard, under the rain, 2004.

Video, 1:29 min

40

Perforated by 43

Rear faรงade

vinyl tarp spilling water hose

Sergio Prego, elevation plan for intervention in the backyard of the Spanish Pavilion.

Fountain-sculptures, 2019

42

Perforated by 45 Sergio Prego, view of intervention in the backyard of the Spanish Pavilion.

Fountain-sculptures and resin sculptures, 2019

44

Perforated by 47 Sergio Prego, Calathea villosa, 2018. Pencil on paper, 46 x 30.5 cm

46

Perforated by 49

Water and electric supply for pumps

Sergio Prego, floor plan for intervention in the backyard of the Spanish Pavilion.

Fountain-sculptures and resin sculptures, 2019

48

When sculpture invades the individual space of the spectator, it cancels out the representative depth that once characterized it, shifting said rep­re­sen­ tativity to the empty space surrounding the objects, which are now entirely opaque in their material determination.

In this new state, the predisposition to interact with this materiality opens up the possibility of transforming the objects. Said openness merely signals the existence of an empty space based on the transmutability of the objects, because there is neither pattern nor indication that would give meaning to this transformation by the spectator.

Hence any potential action is nothing more than an indication of their transient quality. The objects are therefore in an incomplete and static state, which is perceived as receptive to the potential participation of the subject. This sets out a space that offers a potential place in which to encounter the Other, a space in which to share a project with someone.

The exhibition at CarrerasMugica gallery comprises several sculptures and draw­ ings, most of which are in different stages of material trans­formation. Some of the sculptural objects consist of mobile elements whose structure changes and can be manipulated. Another series of works involves water-filled membranes, which are also open to modification due to their fluid nature.

The drawings, based primarily on field sketches of botanical specimens at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, are displayed behind a protective layer composed of a trans­ lucent inflatable membrane of the same size as each stretch of gallery wall.

The plastic material of the membrane creates a convex form, akin to a swelling of the wall. Depending on where the drawings are placed, the translucence of the membrane partially blurs their edges. The lines in some of the drawings close in on themselves to define a series of figures. A line that delimits an area functions much like a membrane that distinguishes the inside from the outside, that regulates the relationship between interior and exterior. This would be the basic defining function of an organ and an organism and, by Sergio Prego, resin sculptures in the backyard of the Spanish Pavilion, 2019

50

2.

RANK AMNH

Texts by Sergio Prego

In the novels The Burning World (1964) and The Drowned World (1962), J.G. Ballard depicts two scenarios where dramatic environmental changes trans­ form the material conditions of the inhabitants of these worlds. Gradually the landscape sheds the conventional signs that once defined it, giving way to a simpler, cruder material structure that supports the characters’ existence.

These transformations create voids within the social fabric where individuals alter their behavioral patterns in an apparently arbitrary and unintelligible way. However, these patterns also give the impression of revealing deep, preexisting tendencies that govern behavior and relationships. A vast empty space opens up within this new context, where characters can give expression to their repressed tendencies; characters who appear erratic but nevertheless seem to follow a pattern of behavior, driven by some sort of objective that lies beyond our capacity to foresee an uncertain future.

extension, everything organic. The bo­ tan­ical motifs reflect a search for the organic structure of plants as it relates to the inherent plasticity of their material composition.

Stefano Tamburini came up with the idea for the character Rank Xerox (later RanXerox) in June 1978 with the help of Andrea Pazienza, a comic book artist who was incredibly popular in Italy and largely unknown in the rest of the world. At first Tamburini showed little talent for drawing. He was, however, a galvanizing force in the construction of images, creating graphic designs using collage that combined photographs and flat blocks of color with exquisite skill. In creating his work, he combed through classic noir comics, which he then photocopied and combined with transgressive scripts to recontextu­ alize them in futuristic sci-fi settings.

RanXerox is an ultraviolent nihilistic android who appears human but is built from recycled photocopier parts and is addicted to intravenous Vinavil (a popular Italian brand of white glue).

RanXerox is a robot programmed to be in love with his owner, a thirteen-yearold girl called Lubna, and serve as her sex machine and survival tool. In the third part of the comic that chronicles the adventures of the robot, the storyline was cut short by the death of its writer, Stefano Tamburini, on April 24th, 1986, as a result of his heroin addiction. In Tamburini’s final Ranx story, the robot is in bad shape, searching for the object of his desire, who has abandoned him for a “real” person. In the final strip, he rips out his heart with his bare hands, a cluster of mechanical valves pumping fluids through his body, and hurls it at Lubna while his circuits catch fire and he collapses in a jumble of flesh, plastic, and metal.

A certain spontaneity characterizes Andrea Pazienza’s artwork, who rarely did sketches before drawing his char­ acters in felt-tip pen. His lines also have a flowing and organic quality, especially in the shaded sections where he worked with oscillating lines to delimit empty white spaces, thus creating an internal flux between black and white. In Pazienza’s most popular series, Zanardi (1981–1988), his characters – a gang of three young men who serve as the author’s alter egos – use deceit, extor­ tion, and prostitution to carry out their plans, which revolve around manip­ u­ lation, personal profit, and sexual exploitation. In the story Notte di carnevale [Carnival Night] (1982), the i­ dence hall for trio breaks into a res­ female students where they wreak havoc, lob molotov cocktails, and sexually assault the young women. They accidentally start a fire, and Petrilli, the timid one in the trio, runs into the burning building, gripped by guilt. He gets trapped inside and in the end suffers an excruciating death, his body consumed by the fire. When Andrea Pazienza died of an overdose in June 1988, the magazines Frigidaire and Cannibale lost their second founder, and Italy’s punk scene, one of its most important and charismatic figures.

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1.

The northern section of the Bronx Zoo is home to a herd of American bison.

Their presence is not incongruous with the setting, in contrast to the ma­jor­ity of the other animals at the park whose reason for being there seems rooted in the exoticism of their decontextual­ ization. They live in an area that seems big enough for them to move about yet small enough for the unsettling proximity of the animals’ presence to feel con­ tained rather than exposed. By the end of the nineteenth century, massive hunting and slaughter had decimated the American bison population. Two centuries earlier, sixty million bison had freely roamed; now they were on the verge of extinction. In 1903 the Bronx Zoo took in a herd of forty bison that had been removed from their original habi­ tats. In order to prevent their ex­tinct­ion, bison from the zoo were reintroduced into nature reserves in 1907 and again in 1910. Their numbers grew to reach the current population of half a million, of which fifteen thousand live in the wild.

3.

Regarding the tubular concrete pieces

Among the symptoms of our era, the question about the nature of the Other in respect to object relations seems relevant. What fascinates us most about Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) is not the story of emancipation, or the romance, but the mysterious robot character, as though in attempting to decipher its dis­ tinctive traits, we are asking questions about our own human nature. A sense of guilt pervades the dystopian night­ mares about the subjugation of the Other, re­ duced to an object and exploited.

Contrast the film’s well-intentioned story­­ line with its seductive fetishization of the robot, which invades every image or reference pertaining to the film. In the robot’s gait, the contrapposto of the body moving to and fro within seems to belie the surface of the mechanical forms and volumes (so closely associated with the artistic avant-garde) that articulate its body and features. We are caught in a loop of subtle interwoven layers – what it is, what it seems and what it pretends to be. In the dance scene of the false Maria, the spectators are perturbed by the seductive figure and the mechanical movements interspersed throughout the dance, performed by a dancer who re­presents a robot that seems human.

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4.

exercise toward drawing, as a project experience for a personal expressive process.

For Jon Mikel and Txomin, this exercise was the most intense of those Sergio directed, while for the latter, it meant swallowing the unswallowable. The ex­ er­ cise’s ambitiousness vis-à-vis the reality of only having one day to carry it out emphasized the extremeness of these self-imposed conditions. From then on, each night we reconsidered what had been agreed on, and we were often forced to simplify the exercises, scale them down and rethink the strat­ egies for achieving them, based on the experiences we had accrued. After that, no similar cases arose. For the other two directors, this exercise was successful, because it allowed them to deal with issues that would arise in the rest of PROFORMA in general, and more specifically with regard to projects using inflatables, from the design of each intervention to the project phase – taking into consideration the specific architectural conditions – and the sub­ tle­ ties of the different methods that defined each intervention at MUSAC.

Wormholes

5.

In the evening, on leaving the museum, Sergio compared what he felt during the exercise to a Moebius storyboard called The Repairers, where two people appear in the middle of the road repairing a broken-down vehicle. The mutant me­ chanic is inside the vehicle, looking into the problem, and arrives at the heart of the machine. He is then plucked up by a bolt of lightning that drags him to the very depths of the heart. Inside this heart, a vast space unfurls before him. In it stands a single tower block. The bolt transports him toward some windows that are lit up, from which a child’s cry is heard.

He climbs through the window and finds the child with a broken toy sub­ marine. The mechanic seems to recog­ nize the child – his namesake – and he proceeds to repair the toy. Outside, the vehicle starts to work again, and the mechanic steps out. The character who was outside asks the mechanic what the problem was, to which he answers that it was something that had happened in the past, that everybody carries hidden sorrows. He tells him that when he was little, he was given a red and white submarine. It broke and he suffered enormously at the time. We activate techniques appropriate for the pain caused by the recurrent wound.

The intensity of the pain produced is kept alive by a deeply rooted fear of annihilation, and thus the technique we activate holds that same degree of emergency. In this sense, the devel­ opment of certain technologies could be simply a way of honing the technique of managing or containing that pain. It is important to note that the technology applied in each case, just as any other specific technique, is related to the characteristics of the wound; these are the characteristics that give meaning to the use of technology. In any case, art also confers upon us the tools to renegotiate the conditions of that arrangement. It is only possible to readjust them, however, after having assumed some level of failure and having been exposed to pain and to extreme fear. At that moment, Sergio resolved how to make the entire experience positive by redirecting the

Timothy

This exercise references a media snapshot of Timothy Geithner, US Treasury Secretary, at the height of his involve­ ment as a key figure in the economic recession. In the photograph, we see Mr. Geithner head-on in a large room with a group of people a certain distance behind him, his gaze fixed on a point above the camera in such a way that it appears both he and the audience behind him are focusing their attention on that point on their geometric horizon.

The point is marked by the shafts of the spotlights illuminating the hall, creating the impression that there is a higher order indicating a pattern, leading the way, and suggesting a possible outcome for the events reported in the news.

6.

PROFORMA Studio

From its very inception, the PROFORMA Studio element was intended to estab­ lish an isolated working space that would neutralize the institutional pres­ ence of the museum architecture. For this reason, it took on a scale from the very outset that was foreign to me in terms of the usual procedures for ap­ pre­hending materials that define sculp­ tural processes. As in some earlier projects, I had to approach the process from a certain distance, more like a designer or an architect. Faced with the impossibility of directly transforming the material that made up the constructive element, we applied representational mediation devices that provide for an approach through translation. However, from the outset I understood that what I was drawn to was the physical qualities of pneumatic structures, which respond to the material logic of their physical nature, and that this was best expressed in the simplest constructions. I observed an interesting difference in the way architects and artists have applied pneumatic structures when building architectural spaces. There is a long line of artists who approached these constructions, particularly in the heyday of pneumatic architecture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The difference is

Texts by Sergio Prego

that while architects would build com­ plex structures based on pattern cutting as applied to textile surfaces, artists opted for simple forms whose formal complexity was determined by the very nature of the pneumatic surface itself.

The PROFORMA Studio’s “pillow” derives from the idea of a rectangular bag inflated like a bag of potato chips. The dissonance between the strangeness of its pneumatic nature and its very familiar constructive shape aesthetically activates the whole revolutionary po­ tential of pneumatic architecture. We intended to illuminate the studio with the gallery lighting filtered through the membrane. These were automated lights that switched off in the evening.

After the first few days, when we had to work in the dark after visiting hours, we decided to install extra lighting until we were able to reprogram the gallery lights.

Texts by Sergio Prego

The concrete sculptures are inspired

by Spanish architect Miguel Fisac (1913 –2016) and his work with flexible membranes in concrete formwork, as well as by the entire development of inflatable structures in architecture during the 1960s and 1970s. The making of the sculptures followed a strict pro­ cess of pouring concrete directly into the tubular membrane, which was then given a form prior to setting. When the plastic membrane was removed, it revealed the hardened concrete in­ side, whose flow and internal formal tensions convey its liquid state, as well as the tensions in the membrane that contained it. It is part of an investigation into organic forms as an expression of membrane structures, as in organs and organisms, where membranes define and regulate the relationship between the interior and the exterior, and whose plasticity determines their form. The various artworks comprising the sculpture series contain folds that are modular in nature, organized into a sequence of gestalts that emerge as the pieces are combined.

7. Sunspark 35 Utah /

PROFORMA MODULE The inflatable pneumatic structure PRO­ FORMA Module was inspired by an image included in a project to build a pneumatic roof for a shopping center.

The roof was a large enclosed mem­ brane, designed to provide access to its interior in such a way that it could be cleaned without the building’s users witnessing the operation. This interior, with two symmetrical curved surfaces as floor and ceiling, was a by-product of the design, though the architect himself considered it the most interesting as­ pect of the entire project. Building the pneumatic structure required a pro­ duction effort on such a huge scale that it left no room for gradual developments, demanding instead a single event ca­ pable of generating the entire gesture.

In this sense, it links up with projects carried out with inflatables in the 1960s, which were interesting precisely be­ cause they were half way between a major risk and utter disarray. Further­ more, the fact that a gesture of this kind is carried out in an institutional context implies the danger of canceling out its experimental potential, a danger we shall try to avoid.

Sunspark 35 Utah is an inflatable proj­ect that I developed and which is not cur­ rently at the museum. It was originally intended as an instant inflat­able form generated from a single flat sheet of plastic. It was welded with no incisions into the surface, and once inflated it became an organic form that, in its ir­ reg­ularity, expressed the sparing means employed in its production. Over the course of our work on the piece, we encountered a number of variables that seemed to deserve further development in order to explore their effects.

Joan Jonas’s video Song Delay (1973) could provide the context for this inves­ tigation. What is compelling about the action in the video is that it appears so minute vis-à-vis the immensity of its setting, as if what she is doing could barely pierce a tiny hole for sound to permeate the solid surface of reality. In another version of this action, we see Jonas on a river barge that could well be a pleasure boat. However, the viewer sees a tear on the surface of a scene that is otherwise entirely conventional. This happens on a scale that is insignificant

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At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, I was drawn to a light box with a faded black and white photograph of a drawing that depicts an orchid. The lines describing the flower aspire to the structure that, ac­cording to Goethe, is set out by law, the complex inner structure that governs and orga­ nizes the plant-based organism. The irregular pencil strokes of the draw­ing, part of a field book from an expedition to Africa in 1936, express the anomaly of the life form, the marks left by the events in the specimen’s singular existence, and the second law, the connection between existence and the specific conditions of materiality. The spontaneous nature of the drawing’s execution replicates the singularity of the specimen, which is indistinguishable from the model it was based on.

Manuela Moscoso: In previous conversations, you had mentioned how impor­ tant your experience at Arteleku, the art center in San Sebastian, was for you.

You were there during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and there was a strong commitment to collective learning, and to production. As I understand it, this is where you developed your methodology.

Itziar Okariz: To investigation, as well. Arteleku was a place where you could exper­ iment. It was an old textile factory that had been transformed into all kinds of workshops and designed as a meeting place, with tools and professional support. It lacked uniformity, which was precisely what made it possible to experiment, to fail, but also to get things right.

The texts originally appeared in: 1. An exhibition text for Sergio Prego’s show at CarrerasMugica gallery, Bilbao, February 13th– April 20th, 2015.

2. The RANK AMNH catalogue, published as part of Sergio Prego’s exhibition at Museo de Teruel, May 8th–June 14th, 2015.

3. An unpublished text written for the presentation of Sergio Prego’s sculptures at etHALL gallery in Barcelona, 2017.

4. 5. 6. 7. The volume Primer PROFORMA. Badiola, Euba, Prego. 30 exercises, 40 days, 8 hours a day, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), León/ACTAR, Barcelona, 2013. The publication provides an overview of the PROFORMA project, developed by the artists Txomin Badiola, Jon Mikel Euba, and Sergio Prego at MUSAC in León with around fifteen participants, February 8th– March 20th, 2010.

MM: Do you think this experience influenced your decision to become in­ volved in arts education and teaching? For example, Kalostra comes to mind, the educational project, also in San Sebastian, where you and other artists have taught.

IO: A lot of artists in my circle, myself included, teach and transmit knowledge, although not necessarily in official academic settings. Kalostra came about, be­ cause we perceived the need for a space where younger artists could develop their work after completing their academic education. It was a process open to exper­ imental teaching approaches, and one of its primary objectives was to provide a long-term space which would encourage an exchange with other artists, to then think from a perspective of artistic practice, from the work itself. These kinds of places – open, informal, where processes extend over time – make it possible to work this way. In other words, spaces for experimentation where people pose visual questions together. You might have very different interests, or ways of conceiving and working out your ideas, but you coincide in a place that provides the starting point for establishing yourself as an artist. I’ve always thought that three people work differently than one person, and if you can manage it, if you can learn to work in a community, I’m certain something very special will happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. For me, the decision to turn community into a methodology, into an end in itself, was essential.

Manuela Moscoso and Itziar Okariz – A series of transcribed conversations

compared to the surrounding reality, but paradoxically that is what makes it relevant.

MM: I wonder if you can pinpoint a way of working that responds to visual questions in your own process of investigation. For example, you mentioned how having a studio at Arteleku was important in the years after you finished art school. Is the studio still relevant to your practice today?

IO: In my case, the studio is something very virtual. In New York, where I lived for many years and where I developed as an artist, the idea of the studio is something... utopian. What those circumstances taught me, is that you always have a studio, even if it isn’t physically present, more like an extension of your home and your computer. Although I do have one now, here in Bilbao, and it changes my process.

MM: What I gather is that the studio, as a place of creative work, is primarily the result of the personal and professional relationships you have built over the years, which have grown into a network of people who work with you. So then, what is your understanding of individual versus shared authorship?

IO: The responsibility is ultimately your own, but we cannot negate that we work in a community; it is a technique of using others and letting them use you in return.

Instead, I identify authorship with the idea of responsibility. Who is responsible?

How can we create human situations built around a sense of camaraderie, a passion for one’s own work and the work of others? In my practice, this question emerges as a method. I always try to find a way for this to happen, even in an educational context and in the workshops I give.

MM: I think it is important to discuss this cacophony of cohorts as method in relation to the austerity of means that is expressed in your work. Many of your pieces reveal a way of working with very little; in some cases, you are essentially your own instrument. Hearing you talk about camaraderie and community makes me think of the series Irrintzis: a language, a sign, a call, an echo, a one that is multiplied. It is your voice expanding across the space to become other voices. Do you think a tension exists between community as method and your presence as a result?

IO: You, or rather we, keep insisting on this idea of camaraderie. I think it’s a common practice, not just mine in particular. But I’m interested in what you perceive as austerity. In principle, I’m just as fond of extravagance and adornment as I am of absolute simplicity. It’s a peculiar balance. Having said that, much of my work derives from a question that I ask myself: what is the bare minimum that I need for something to exist, for this to be something? By contrast, other artists have the ability to produce ornate, embellished things, which strikes me as wonderful as long as everything has meaning; as long as it doesn’t interfere with the precision of what you are doing, or what you are looking at.

MM: How do you see austerity in relation to your body as matter? For ex­ am­ple, in the piece Oceanic Breathing (2018–ongoing), you reduce your pres­ence to vital elements like your own breathing. Another, albeit different, example would be Dream Diary (2015–2018). You mentioned how dreams are interesting to you as material, because everybody dreams. The exercise of remembering a dream is something mundane between the conscious and the unconscious, the symbolic and the real, and could be seen as an analysis of your psyche.

IO: I’m not especially interested in my subjectivity, in my representation as a specific individual. I’m interested insofar as it is susceptible to the representation of a generic individual, a shared reality.

MM: And as a woman?

IO: My experience is undoubtedly that of a woman. It is the sign I have occupied thus far. This inevitably generates a form. And there is a field of knowledge that I

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Texta by Sergio Prego

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the images of me peeing while squatting, or peeing on a table, because I not only moved the sign in one direction, but several times in several directions.

MM: What is your thought process with regard to this documented body/ sign? For example, in the piece Writing with a Flashlight (2001), where a cam­ era captures song lyrics written with a flashlight in the dark, which are then turned into slides? Or in Red Light (1995), where you’re dancing in front of the camera to a Siouxsie and the Banshees song? In both works, one perceives a presence and a fragmented body.

IO: I studied art in the late 1980s. Back then we were all involved in postmodernist discourse, which made approaching life through art, through what was real, seem impossible. Instead, the possible came about through language. So these actions you mention are more of a statement. I dance, because it is a connection to this per­ son [Siouxsie] who is offering me an idea of the body, an idea of woman, a specific idea that is feminist in origin. And I myself want to “produce” the possibility of a body. I zoom in on the shirt, which becomes a moving landscape of flowers. I then asked myself: “What am I documenting? What is the story, the narrative? What is it that you are seeing? What is what you’re looking at telling you?” Then there is the duration, time. Why will I stop dancing? The song ends, because if it didn’t, why would you stop? Chantal Akerman asked herself, “When do you stop filming? What is the reason for ending a shot?”

MM: It isn’t about how. It isn’t about asserting a performance of femininity through the appropriation of the masculine, or rather, it is, but not only that...

IO: It’s more like, shake it!

MM: I feel that in much of your work, you’re asking us about this experience of the world, and more specifically of the body, and you propose to move the sign through your own agency, which in turn produces a shift in our own bodies.

IO: Of course. It makes me think of The Mind is a Muscle by Yvonne Rainer. You under­stand the world through your body; it provides you with information which you then decode to construct meaning based on whether you move your hand, or your hair, whether you’re cold or hot. Everything gives you information, everything is language, everything signifies. And the how? I find the how fascinating. It’s curious, the other day I found these charcoal drawings of my hands that I made in art school. The drawings are finger signs. I’m giving the OK sign; I’m holding up my middle finger in a “fuck you”; I’m doing the V for victory; I’m clasping both hands in a shake. And I was surprised, because I must’ve been in my third year, and I wasn’t drawing hands in anatomy class but signs, because in some way I already found them interesting, even if only unconsciously. If you hold your hand – hold it, like this – you have the sensation of supporting yourself: that is language. That signifies...

MM: When to stop? I imagine this is a question you ask yourself often. You repeat many of the pieces and actions over several years. Perhaps a momen­ tum comes to an end that can only be reached through experience. But let’s get back to Writing with a Flashlight, where you use a flashlight to draw the lyrics of a song in a darkened room. Personal, somewhat sentimental lyrics.

However, here you introduce language, words; the relationship that one establishes with these works is different.

IO: Yes. The song lyrics I rewrote are by Hidrogenesse, a band I knew personally.

Using the words of someone close to me was easy, organic, because you share the experience of the moment and have interests in common. The lyrics are from the com­pilation album Lujo y miseria [Luxury and misery] (1998), and the first song I used for the images is “Vuelve conmigo a Italia.” I wasn’t aware of the words, and only began to develop an awareness in the act of writing them, almost because I was holding a flashlight in the dark and trying to write the lyrics of a pop song back­ wards. The act of writing was curious, especially when you consider our relationship with pop songs: you repeat parts, you only know the chorus, you get another part wrong... Pop songs are a lot of things, they are layers of meaning that aren’t only related to me but to mass culture and “everyone.” As I was writing, I began to realize that each image only contained a fragment of the song or lyric. This is why I ended up using slides. The audience constructs the image and the song lyrics in real time, in the time it takes for one image to give way to another.

MM: You have been thinking about this for a long time. I wonder what changes you have seen in the past few decades in terms of how we are redefining the body.

IO: The body that we are, your and my body?

MM: Yes. The body we are. Not as Itziar or Manuela, but as human beings.

IO: Several things. Virtuality, for example. You say that we’re together, we’re talking, and we recognize our voices, even though I know that what I’m hearing is only a mechanical reproduction of your voice, and I’m capable of recognizing it, because I’ve heard you before. One has to consider that our experience of things passes through these types of devices that are with us at all times; essential and anything but neutral. Another example would be the laws and norms that modify our behavior; or rather, one has to consider the body in relation to the moment you are in.

MM: In the conversations you have with statues or sculptures, they, for example, have a non-human temporality. Do you also ask them about their be­havior as sculptures or their experience of the world?

IO: I’ve had conversations that were very deep and others, less so. I ask them, for example, what it’s like to be inside a suit of armor in the Metropolitan Museum, surrounded by people, or inside a display case, observed day in, day out, and that can lead to a deeper conversation, or not...

MM: At the time, were you doing To pee in public or private spaces actions?

IO: I’m usually working on several processes at the same time. Some end up coming together, others don’t. I was also working on videos and photographs then; for example, Faces (2000), in which my moving body cast a shadow on a wall and recreated fragments of the Cassavetes film of the same title. What all of these works have in common is that they are signs that carry social meaning. What I mean is that peeing while sitting is a construction, peeing while standing is another construction from a specific moment in history. Likewise, a pop song is a construction of certain rhythms, lyrics, as well as a specific historical context, and what both of them signify goes beyond me. In other words, they are charged with meaning which I am appropriating. Even my work with dreams, which I turn to in a personal way, has an aspect where the subject, as such, is a sign signifying within the culture and society of which I am a part. These are things that have their own meaning and that signify, beyond whatever I do with them.

MM: In what other works is your intention similar to these conversations?

In the dream diaries, perhaps, in the way you record them, rewrite them in a particular way, and occasionally recite them?

IO: They are similar in that I don’t use the entirety of the conversation or the dream.

With regard to the objects, for example, the fact that the conversation is even happening makes it somewhat anomalous. It implies not following a rule, which in this case would be engaging in a dialogue with objects. Now, this is not a historically established norm, because if you search for other practices of this kind – prayer, for instance – the potential for having conversations with objects suddenly changes and becomes more natural. It is simply about moving the norm slightly; it tells you about what is possible, and it is minimal, basic, but sometimes there is no need for big gestures.

MM: We were talking about the importance of your interlocutors. It is inter­ esting, because in both of these actions you are extending an invitation to converse; in one, you invite yourself (the dreams), in the other, you invite objects (the statues).

IO: I’m interested in the basics of communication: a speaker, a language, a receiver.

The minimum. Not emphasizing the message is not a mistake. It is the way in which you approach an audience, sitting in their chairs, and speak to them as though they were one entity. It is an experience that results from the action of looking at this other in front of you and contemplating them as a potential entity that can give you meaning in return. A minimal gesture modifies this event.

MM: This is why you said that what is interesting is to construct body with body.

IO: I’m not sure if I completely understand what you mean by “body with body.” This search isn’t about commenting on a given thing but about real change, as Natalia Ginzburg would say. It would be more about, and I’m simplifying here, finding the possibility of producing something, something different. For example, this assigned body is the body of a woman. This is the sign that I have, that I have acquired, and this implies an experience, an understanding of the world. If I want to modify some­ thing about that, I have to modify the sign to understand its construction, and I have to understand that I can move it somewhere else. Perhaps the way I think about where I want to take the sign has to do with desire. Shaving a map of the Earth on my head is an act of meaning-making and an act of body-construction. And, if I’m peeing standing up, keep in mind that I’m not only peeing standing up, I’m peeing off a table, from up high, with this body standing on a table and crouching to pee outward; like a gargoyle. There is something abject about all of this, but you’re thinking about how this experimenting body is constructed, and how it could, possibly, move very little. And yet, we will think about where we are moving it, a place we might not even know yet.

MM: For me, this relates to your presence as a performer, because as an ob­ server, I always feel that you’re absolutely involved, and yet you told me that, despite always being present, Itziar as a subject isn’t there. I would like for us to talk about that moment when you’re doing a performance in a frame, a stage or place that you have marked out. How do you see this place? Do you see it as a stage?

IO: A stage is a frame in which to signify something, produce an event, an occurrence, be it an exhibition, a performance, or a conference. And this frame is giving you meaning, and what we do, is negotiate with this space. But, if we’re talking about a stage, I find it interesting, because it implies the idea of an audience, or rather, an almost abstract receiver. I’m not that interested in the specific spatial characteristics of each stage. Instead, I want to work with the performative situation, an emulation, precisely, of the concept of conversation. In fact, I would go even further and say that what interests me is the embodiment of the pure act of language, of this event in which I say something to someone, who in turn can tell me something, or not.

MM: Because we’ve never done it before...

IO: And, since we’ve never done it, we have to look for it.

MM: In what sense are you talking about the performance of masculinity?

IO: The performance of masculinity, or of femininity, is the performance you give to become a sign, man or woman. If I pee standing up, I’m appropriating a sign that doesn’t correspond to my gender, the one assigned to and identified with a subject.

In this case, the identification with the masculine is a simplification of the entire range of meaning contained in the piece. This is why I wanted to retrieve some of

Manuela Moscoso and Itziar Okariz – A series of transcribed conversations

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Manuela Moscoso and Itziar Okariz – A series of transcribed conversations

have built from that. Or rather, this gives me an understanding of the things that are determined by the sign that I occupy.

MM: This makes me think about your more recent work, where you experiment with language, sonority, and action; for example, Uno, uno, dos, uno (2012) and Oceanic Breathing, where you are your own instrument and develop an acoustic and social materiality through time, fragmentation, and repetition.

IO: Sound has gradually taken on a presence, not only in vocal terms, but as a material production that oscillates between abstraction and figuration.

Itziar Okariz

MM: In Si yo soy yo y tú eres tú [If I am me, and you are you] (2010) there is a phrase that you repeat together with another person. The sounds overlap and create the sensation of an echo: it is almost an exercise in expansion, not only of the limits of the self toward the other, but also of a third entity, the audience. Would you say that your practice suspends the rules with which society regulates the body as a sign? Here I mean suspend in the sense of perspective, attention, fragmentation, to produce an aesthetic resonance – often sonorous – that irrupts in the signification.

IO: This is a performance that I do with Víctor Iriarte, and it consists of repeating the title of the piece in a way where he and I fall into a dialogue rhythm that is very real. There aren’t that many words, so we can work with the rhythm to make them intelligible, or not; in other words, the rhythmic relationship of the words connects them to meaning. Similar to when you tell a joke that doesn’t make a lot of sense, and the nonsense is what makes it funny. There is no good answer; it is a trick question, with no way out, no answer. The performance therefore plays with the “I” as pronoun or as proper noun. On the one hand, it plays with fragmentation and repetition, and many possible meanings can emerge from the phrases, where the “I” and the “you” are interchangeable and have indistinct meanings. And on the other hand, you have the audience as a sign, which you identify and attribute with different signifieds: an individual, a collective, an interlocutor, or simply the “audience.” It becomes everything at once. The meaning of a sign is not ascribed unilaterally; it is a process of destabilizing and opening it up.

2018 Itziar Okariz, Centre d’art La Panera, Lleida

I Never Said Umbrella, Tabakalera, San Sebastian 2017 Una construcción…, CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Móstoles-Madrid

Itziar Okariz, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel

Dark as in the Night, CarrerasMugica gallery, Bilbao DS at Parcours, Art Basel, Basel (Performance)

Irrintzi Repetition, BOZAR, Brussels (Performance) 2016 Dream Diary, September, etHALL, Barcelona 2015 51 sueños, entre el dos de octubre y el veintiuno de noviembre, Moisés Pérez de Albeniz gallery, Madrid 2013 Un numero de acciones determinadas, MUSAC, León

Secció irregular, Mercat de les Flors, Barcelona (Performance) 2012 Uno, uno, dos, uno, CarrerasMugica gallery, Bilbao 2009 CarrerasMugica gallery, Bilbao 2008 Ghost Box, sala rekalde, Bilbao 2007 Curating the campus 2007: To pee in public or private spaces, deSingel International Kunstcentrum, Antwerpen

Talent, Vita Kuben, Umeå

Climbing Buildings, Huis & Festival a/d Werf / If I Can’t Dance, Utrecht (Performance) 2005 Made with USA standard, Moisés Pérez de Albeniz gallery, Pamplona

Climbing Buildings: Abando RENFE, Bilbaoarte Foundation, Bilbao 1999 Sweetest, D.A.E. Donostiako Arte Ekinbideak, San Sebastian 1996 The art of falling apart, Antonio de Barnola gallery, Barcelona 1995 Rekalde Area 2 (with Marie-Ange Guilleminot), Bilbao

San Sebastian, Spain, 1965 Lives and works in Bilbao Solo exhibitions

Mexico City/Bilbao, November–December 2018

Selected group exhibitions Manuela Moscoso is the curator of the 2020 Liverpool Biennial. She was senior curator at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and has also curated a number of exhibitions independently.

After 68, Museo de Bellas de Artes, Bilbao Yo, la peor de todas, Oteiza Foundation, Alzuza Idiorritmias, MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona Punk. Its Traces in Contemporary Art, MACBA, Barcelona / Museo Universitario del Chopo, México D. F. / CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Móstoles-Madrid 2015 Moving Image Contours, Tabakalera, San Sebastian 2014 Secret Codes, Luisa Strina Gallery, São Paulo

Outside of Black Box and White Cube, Keramik Werkstatt Schaedler AG, Nendeln, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein

El contrato, Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao

Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City (Performance)

Suturak, Museo San Telmo, San Sebastian 2013 re.act.feminism #2, Akademie der Künste, Berlin / Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona

Minimal Resistance, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid 2012 Feminist Genealogies in Spanish Art, 1960-2010, MUSAC, León

re.act.feminism #2, Galerija Miroslav Kraljevi, Zagreb / Instytut Sztuki Wyspa, Gdansk / Museet for Samtidskunst, Roskilde 2011 re.act.feminism #2, Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria

La internacional cuir, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

I was a Male Yvonne de Carlo, MUSAC, León 2010 Before Everything, CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Móstoles-Madrid 2007 Chacun à son goût, Museum Guggenheim Bilbao

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Fine Arts Museum of Bilbao 2006 Attitude, c/o Atle Gerhardsen Gallery, Berlin

MIX, The Dead, Absent, and Fictitious, LTTR curated video program, New York 2004 Premio Altadis de Artes Plásticas, Palais de Tokyo, Paris 2003 The Spaces in Between, FACT, Liverpool 2001 Ofelias y Ulises. En torno al Arte Español Contemporáneo, Antichi Granei de la Giudecca, Venice Biennial

Gaur, Hemen, Orain, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao 2000 Gure Artea 2000, KM Kulturunea, San Sebastian 1999 Blind Point. Spanish Art from the 90s, Kunstraum, Innsbruck 1994 Años 90. Distancia cero, Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona Further reading Miren Jaio, “Repetición: Infinitas caídas,” Zehar no. 32, Revista de Arteleku, San Sebastian, 1996 (in Spanish) Cecilia Anderson, Sin título / Untitled, Itziar Okariz. Give Me Trouble, Gure Artea, Gobierno - Vasco, Vitoria, 2001 - Itziar Okariz, “El cerebro es un músculo”, Zehar no. 54, Revista de Arteleku, San Sebastian, 2004 (in Spanish) Moritz Küng, “The Absence of Action,” Itziar Okariz. Ghost Box, sala rekalde, Bilbao, 2008 - Leire Vergara “The Voice that Returns,” Itziar Okariz. Ghost Box, sala rekalde, Bilbao, 2008 - Paul B. Preciado, “Don’t You Stop. Jumping, Climbing, Peeing, Shouting. Don’t Stop Doing it,” - Itziar Okariz. Ghost Box, sala rekalde, Bilbao, 2008

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Manuela Moscoso and Itziar Okariz – A series of transcribed conversations

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2018 2017

2016

Hondarribia, Spain, 1969 Lives and works in New York Solo exhibitions 2019 Cowboys, Casal Solleric, Palma de Mallorca 2018 Celda unidad, Jesús Gallardo gallery, León, Guanajuato 2017 Rose Colored Drift / To the Students, Baffler Museum, Houston Asbestos Hall, etHALL, Barcelona

Paralolerei, Sala Salvador Amos, Logroño

High-Rise, CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Móstoles-Madrid 2015 CarrerasMugica gallery, Bilbao RANK AMNH, Museo de Teruel, Teruel 2014 etHALL, Barcelona 2012 Soledad Lorenzo gallery, Madrid 2011 Ventana 244, Brooklyn, New York Alfonso Artiaco Gallery, Naples Mr. Pequeño & The Fury, Biziak, Valencia 2010 Primer PROFORMA (with Txomin Badiola, Jon Mikel Euba), MUSAC, León

Ikurrina Quartet, Art Unlimited, Art 41 Basel 2009 Soledad Lorenzo gallery, Madrid 2007 Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York Pan Head, Buchmann gallery, Berlin Alfonso Artiaco Gallery, Naples 2006 En una era de belleza asequible, la fealdad tenía algo de heráldico, Soledad Lorenzo gallery, Madrid 2005 Sergio Prego: Caveau, Pallazo Delle Papesse Centro d’Arte Contemporanea, Siena Boom Tube, Buchmann gallery, Köln 2004 ANTI-after T.B., sala rekalde, Bilbao

Cowboy Intertia Creeps, Art Unlimited, Art 35 Basel 2003 Winter Star, Lombard-Freid Fine Arts, New York 2002 Soledad Lorenzo gallery, Madrid 2001 Yesland, I’m Here to Stay, Sala Montcada, Fundació ‘La Caixa’, Barcelona 1999 Tetsuo, Bound to Fail, Antonio de Barnola gallery, Barcelona 1998 Tetsuo, Bound to Fail, consonni, Bilbao

Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation of Spain Minister of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation Josep Borrell Secretary of State for International Cooperation and for Latin America and the Caribbean Juan Pablo de Laiglesia Director of Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation Aina Calvo

Después del 68, Museo de Bellas de Artes de Bilbao Punto de Encuentro, Colección Soledad Lorenzo, Museo Centro Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

Art and Space, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 2014 Suturak, Museo San Telmo, San Sebastian 2013 Something Other Than Photography: Photos & Media, Edith-Russ-Haus, Oldenburg 2010 Before Everything, CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Móstoles-Madrid Pasajes. Viajes por el híper-espacio, Laboral, Gijón 2009 Reflection: The World Through Art, Dojima River Biennale, Osaka The Situation, Moscow Biennale, Moscow 2008 Other Than Yourself, Thyssen Bornemisza A-21, Vienna El medio es el museo, MARCO, Vigo / KM Kulturunea, San Sebastian Singapore Biennale, Singapore 2007 Speed 3, IVAM. Institut Valencia Art Modern, Valencia OU? Scènes du Sud, Carré d’Art, Nîmes

Chacun à son goût, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Tomorrow, Artsonje Center, Seoul 2004 Close Reading#3, Objetif exhibitions, Antwerpen Premio Altadis Artes Plásticas 2003, Elba Benítez gallery, Madrid 2003 MACBA Collection, MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona Bad Boys, Venice Biennial, Venice

The Real Royal Tryp, PS1, New York 2002 Consideraciones al respecto, Metrònom, Barcelona

Gaur, Hemen, Orain, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao 2001 Monitor: Volume 1, Gagosian Gallery, New York Further reading - Neus Miró, “Shut Between Four Walls,” Sergio Prego: Yesland, I’m Here to Stay, Fundació ‘La Caixa’, Barcelona, 2001 Chus Martínez, “Some Things that Stay,” Sergio Prego, Actes Sud/Altadis, Arles, 2004 - - Ina Blom, “Interrumped Flows and Dispersed Bodies (Sergio Prego and the newer kinestesic,” ANTI-after T.B., sala rekalde, Bilbao, 2004 Chus Martínez, “Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere. Sergio Prego: Walking on the Wall,” - Sergio Prego. ANTI-after T.B., sala rekalde, Bilbao, 2004 Peio Aguirre, “Time, Space, Material and Energy in Movement,” Soledad Lorenzo gallery, - Madrid, 2006 Pedro de Llano, “Sergio Prego. Alternative Functions of Space,” Soledad Lorenzo gallery, - Madrid, 2009 Ralph Rugoff, “Wild Spaces,” Bad Boys, 50th La Biennale di Venezia, Turner, Madrid, 2003 -

Perforated by Itziar Okariz and Sergio Prego 58th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia 2019 Spanish Pavilion An exhibition by Itziar Okariz / Sergio Prego Curator Peio Aguirre

Director of Cultural and Scientific Relations Miguel Albero

Organized by Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID)

Head of the Department for Cooperation and Cultural Promotion Pablo Platas

Co-organized by Spain’s Public Agency for Cultural Action (AC/E)

Head of Cultural Activities Elvira Cámara

Spanish Pavilion Managers Alejandro Romero Álvaro Callejo Elvira Cámara

AECID Visual Arts Coordination Álvaro Callejo Alejandro Romero

Spanish Embassy in Rome Ambassador of Spain in Rome Alfonso Dastis Cultural Counselor Ion de la Riva

Selected group exhibitions 2018 2017

Exhibition

Spain’s Public Agency for Cultural Action Board of Directors President Ibán García del Blanco Members Manuel Ángel de Miguel Monterrubio María Ángeles González Rufo Carlos Guervós Maíllo Cristina Serrano Leal Camilo Vázquez Bello Miguel Albero Suárez Francisco Javier González Ruiz Amador Luis Sánchez Rico Javier Rivera Blanco Luis Manuel García Montero José Lucio Gutiérrez Pedrosa Secretary Miguel Sampol Pucurull

Itziar Okariz’s Assistant Beatriz Cavia Sound and Images for Itziar Okariz Raúl Lomas Jesús Pueyo Digital prints Movol Color Itziar Okariz. Sculptures in the exhibition Jorge Oteiza, Portrait of the painter Otano (1947–1948), private collection, in deposit at the Fine Arts Museum of Bilbao Armando Andrade Tudela, Bilbao (Isadora), 2017, courtesy by the artist and CarrerasMugica gallery, Bilbao Performer Izar Okariz Prego Sergio Prego’s collaborators Javier Soto Tecnodimensión Nuevos Jardines Exhibition set up Kers Costruzioni Video and audio equipment Creamos Technology Press and communication

By Studio Mónica Iglesias

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Sergio Prego

Publication Management Team Executive President Ibán García del Blanco

Publishers AECID Koenig Books

Chief Financial Officer Eduardo Fernández Palomares

Editor Peio Aguirre

Director of Programmes Santiago Herrero Amigo Director of Production Pilar Gómez Gutiérrez AC/E Technical Coordination Anael García Rodríguez

General coordination Rosa Lleó Texts Peio Aguirre Craig Buckley André Lepecki Manuela Moscoso Itziar Okariz Sergio Prego Graphic design Mevis & van Deursen

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Translations and proofreading Aisha Prigann Aitor Arauz (p. 52–53) Photographer Claudio Franzini Printing Drukkerij Robstolk, Amsterdam Distribution Koenig Books, London ISBN (Koenig) 978-3-96098-589-1 (AECID) 978-84-8347-183-8 NIPO in paper 109-19-029-0 NIPO online 109-19-030-3

Aknowledgments CarrerasMugica gallery, Bilbao etHAll gallery, Barcelona Moisés Pérez de Albéniz gallery, Madrid Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Juan Ignacio Vidarte Lucía Agirre Fine Arts Museum of Bilbao Miguel Zugaza Miriam Alzuri Artium, Basque Museum – Center of Contemporary Art Beatriz Herráez Oteiza Foundation, Alzuza BilbaoArte Foundation Tabakalera, International Centre for Contemporary Culture Azkuna Zentroa Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Manuel Borja-Villel Nuria Enguita Marta Gili Iñaki Martínez Antelo Paul B. Preciado Manuel Segade Txomin Badiola Armando Andrade Tudela Roberto Varela Elvira Marco Fondation Giacometti Emilie Le Mappian Antonio Simionato Giorgio Leandro Ángel Bados Jon Mikel Euba Rosa Parma Patxi Eguiluz Carlos Copertone Pablo Martínez Begoña Santacecilia Claudia Lorenzo Lorea Alfaro Jon Otamendi Miren Jaio Susana Talayero Iñaki Gracenea Asier Mendizabal Felipe Mujica Johanna Unzueta Salvador Mujica Miel Oyarzabal Borja De Aquino Gaspar Avilés Sánchez Sira Fernández Gorka Peña Alba Peña Urko Peña

Photographic credits © the artists Claudio Franzini Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris + ADAGP, Paris) 2019 Alberto Giacometti Estate /VEGAP, 2018 Jorge Oteiza © Pilar Oteiza, A+V Agencia de Creadores Visuales, 2019 Xavier Miserachs Estate – p. 20, #10 Pieter Boersma Photography – p. 18, #10 Fisac Foundation Archive – p. 18, #11 Begoña Santacecilia – p. 9, #5 Daniel Mera – p. 19, #2 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, altered, or publicly communicated, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission from the publisher. The editor of this publication has made every effort to get in touch with the owners of the copyrights. Nevertheless, all those who could not be found, wherever they may be, are invited to contact the editor by any means possible so that in future editions the corresponding copyrights can be included, in case this legal concept is still in force at that moment. © Koenig Books, London ISBN 978-3-96098-589-1

Koenig Books Ltd At the Serpentine Gallery Kensington Gardens London W2 3XA www.koenigbooks.co.uk Distribution Germany, Austria, Switzerland / Europe Buchhandlung Walther König Ehrenstr. 4, D - 50672 Köln T +49 (0) 221 / 20 59 6 53 verlag@buchhandlung-walther-koenig.de UK and Ireland Cornerhouse Publications Ltd. - HOME 2 Tony Wilson Place UK – Manchester M15 4FN T +44 (0) 161 212 3466 publications@cornerhouse.org Outside of Europe D.A.P. / Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. 75 Broad Street, Suite 630 EE.UU - New York, NY 10004 T +1 (0) 212 627 1999 orders@dapinc.com

Organized by

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Co-organized by

With the support of