11. Bienal Internacional de Cuenca

CURATORIAL PROPOSAL FOR THE 11TH BIENNIAL OF CUENCA

Our intention is to devise a threshold text, a hinge text, to introduce the three curatorships that will make up the 11th edition of the Cuenca biennial. In order to place these three views in context, we venture some general reflections about current art as seen from the idea of in-between, a term that we consider highly productive.

We believe that in art as in life, what is most important occurs between what is black and white, between what is revealed and what is hidden, betweenwhat is open and what is shut. And doesn’t the best of the body pass between the arms, between the legs, there, where love and desire occur?

Instructed by the Spanish writer Jesus Ferrero, we begin to develop our theory from the idea of desire – which is at the origin of everything, or at least at the beginning of our action.

…the fact that frequently in our lives desire slips out more for what is banned than for what is expressed, as Lacan believed; he confirms that desire, in addition to fully possessing the language and objects that it denotes, possesses it links, its frontiers, and ample areas that unfold between what one can and can’t say.1

What we wish to point out is that while the word “ban” means the prohibition to do or say something, in its desirous urge and its veiled references (in its concealment and caution characteristic of aesthetic production) art has the capacity to break through the borders between what can and cannot be expressed, the capacity to ban prohibitions.

For his part, in his research on “The Dialectic of What is Inside and What is Outside,” Gaston Bachelard– to whom we owe the title of this invitation -- writes: “On the surface, in that region where a being wants to both manifest itself and hide itself, movements of closing and opening are so numerous, so frequently inverted, so overloaded, with ambiguity as well, that we can end with this formula: man is the in-between entity.”2

From this notion we divide the word as well; we open it to make it say something more, in that fissure that art causes on the skin of reality, in that terrain which is open to the production of forms and senses which the work unfolds. IN-BETWEEN: Invitation, announcement, annunciation. It invites us in to speculate, to open slightly (like a peeping Tom, like a voyeur who is every spectator of art). It announces (no longer as a mystery but as a significant practice) the incarnation of the idea in that perceptive reality that is the foundation of works of art.

Another key argument that supports our thesis of in-between, we find in Octavio Paz, who at the end of his exemplary essay, Xavier Villaurrutia: In Person and in His Work, concludes that the Mexican poet “does not propose the transmutation of this into that – flame into ice, emptiness into fullness, – but perceives and expresses the moment of transition between opposites.” That paradoxical instant, that poetic attempt, Paz defines with the preposition between, whose reasoning we cite in full, given its importance.

Between is not a space, but what is between one space and another: nor is it time, rather the moment that blinks between before and after. Between is neither here nor now. Between is neither body nor substance. Its kingdom is the ghost town of conflicts of authority and paradoxes. Between lasts the length of a lightning flash. Between is the universal fold – the fold, which upon unfolding reveals not unity but duality, not the essence but the contradiction. The fold hides within its closed leaves the two faces of being; the fold which upon revealing what it hides, hides what it reveals; upon opening its two wings the fold closes them; the fold says No each time it says Yes; the fold is its duplicity: its double, its assassin, its complement.

The fold is what joins opposites equidistant from unity and plurality with-out ever melding them, […] the fold and between are two of the forms that take on the question that has no answer.”3

From this analysis we can explore a possible definition about the profound sense of poetic and art, as well as the rhetorical maneuvers that the poetic and artistic code employ and share. To begin with, both are based on the domains of conflicts of authority and paradoxes: not in mere and facile provocation, but in the invention of paradoxical discourse where art subverts common places and orthodoxies. [It is] in the same way that the flashing character of between so concerns the intempestivevocation of art, its disruptive, eruptive character, like the moment in which it occurs. “The theme of the painting is truly the instant, the lightning flash that blinds the eye, an epiphany,” writes Lyotard, with respect to the paintings of Barnet Newman.4 And before that, Walter Benjamín had said, “The text is a flash of lightning whose thunder is heard a long time after,” becauseit is in the future where it reveals its fullest sense and its potential for transforming consciences and realities.”

What’s more, in it’s crease, in its double movement of concealment and revelation, the fold expresses to perfection the insinuations and subtleties that belong to figurative discourse, to the allegorical impulse that is at the center of contemporary art.

It is no less important that in the process of the development of “forms that take on the question that has no answer,” between and fold underscore the questioning, interrogative character of art, since works of art are at the same time a sign of notation and interrogation that appears out of place, where we don’t expect it, and which does not allow for a single answer.

We are also interested in emphasizing the importance or erotic resonances of in-between, for which the thoughts of Roland Barthes are very useful.“Isn’t the most erotic part of a body perhaps where the clothing opens?” the French essayist and semiologist asks.

It is in this intermittency where the body makes contact with its object, like the fleeting glancedoes with a work of art. But while erotic communication permits a momentaneous disconnection from reality, artistic communication reconnects us with itand has an effect on our relationship-connection with the world.

Outlined in this way, we believe we find a metaphor that is alive and rich in significant possibilities and realizations, a figure that dialogues with a number of related and current concepts coming from philosophy, cultural studies or post-colonial thought: “The Space In-Between” (Silviano Santiago); “third space” (Alberto Moreiras); “in-between” (Mignolo and Gruzinski); “contact zone” (Mary Louise Pratt), and particularly the concept of interstices, developed by the Hindu thinker, Homi Baba, for whom…

It is in the emergence of the interstices, whereinter-subjective and collective experiences of nationality, community interest or cultural value are negotiated.6

This agreement of terms, as it was seen by the Brazilian theoretician Marcos Aurelio dos Santos Souza,“…is set forth in a group of concepts that are indicators of areas of maladjustment, that give testimony and dislocate the sole references to European culture in a moment of weakening of the crystallized schemes of unity, purity and authenticity.”7 Without forgetting its existential genesis and phenomenology, and its ontological matrixes, partially open is recognized in those concepts, which are understood as instruments to think about our cultural differences and our mechanisms for translating models and patterns of western culture.

Material and semiotic flows, floods of graphias and graphemes, are propelled by the economy of desire, rebellious with respect to any pre-established course, to all orthodoxy. We understand contemporary art as the place where distinctive languages and disciplines come together to erect a barricade against the media steamroller and official speeches, and as such, it gives rise to difference, divergence, dissidence. In summary: a protest speech. But in addition, it is a place of a dérive, like a detour from the norm, from a route, and also – in the sense developed by the situationists – like a procedure “indissolubly tied to the recognition of effects of a psychogeographic nature and an affirmation of the novel game-orientedconstructive nature that opposes the classical notions of travel and trips in all aspects.”7 (Guy Debord). Let us remember that “psychogeography” studies the effects of the environment on the affective behavior of its inhabitants. Finally, one tries to create new relations and perceptions with one’s birthplace or living place, to facilitate an experimental use of urban space – set out by symbolic products that give it a new significance – to produce an epiphany, an encounter with the other.

Thus we foresee an event in which each spectator will be forced to realize his particular dérive or detour, such that each itinerary entails a reading of the works disseminated in the city and, at the same time, a rereading of the traveled surroundings.

Faced with media standards of transparency and media strategies of instantaneous communication, contemporary art has the virtue of preserving and accentuating a certain discursive mystery – precisely as a way of confronting literal, soluble and frequently rude discourse of the media – such that the rhetorical devices of contemporary art, instead of opening meaning, open it partially, questioning meaning as a way to protect secret, hidden or disguised data, which is to say, the neurological core of the work and the erotic-aesthetic enjoyment.

XI Bienal Internacional de Cuenca

Künstler: Antonio Vega Macotela ...