If you don’t write against yourself you write nothing. The devil only has the importance we attribute to him.
And my master is a swallow.
-Christian Bobin
I haven’t written to you, dear friend, for almost a year. Everywhere it seems that nothing works. Inequalities are increasing, neoliberal capitalism swallows democratic modes of government and protest movements never last long. We will continue not to understand age-old problems like war, exploitation, fascism, violence and other forms of barbarism. This year I was in Paris twice. I saw some exhibitions, which I’ll tell you about. Right now, and above all, I have the image invading my memory of a homeless person removing and eating bark from the trunk of an oak tree, on one of the long Parisian avenues. This could have occurred anywhere in the world. This must be globalization. Our ontological failures are also global as we’re ncreasingly certain that we’re accomplishing nothing but failure.
But I can tell you I still have a job. However, I read in the media that a Call Center company closed and employees were fired by video call. The redemptive digital platforms (which only obey political practices and the dominant economic elite) accentuate the lack of courage and ethics. The company’s CEO said this collective dismissal was carried out in accordance with the law. The national agitation around this misery was practically nil. Everything ends up normalized. At the end of each workday its value is always less than at the beginning. To contest has ceased to be a fundamental gesture. I’ve noticed that when this occurs, in this country that isn’t yours, it’s the variables of narcissism that personify themselves in false claims, street demonstrations, creation of new newspapers that only conceal personal interests. Global markets and capitalist distribution circulate through our bodies, shape our individual and collective drives. We are as subordinate to them as two-thirds of the world’s population can no longer survive without the flow of capital that perpetuates itself in infinite unfolding.
In the art field, dear friend, it’s only the market that benefits from the already standardized notion of Carte Blanche. For the world of sales and auctions the blank check has always existed, even before being named. Art criticism like any other form of thinking about art seems increasingly to have no significance and the text functions as a decorative element. It’s still, and for this very reason, that a strong critical practice is increasingly important. At the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris, within the framework of celebrating ten years of Contemporânea magazine and a public conversation with Sílvia Guerra, we had the opportunity to defend that criticism not only hasn’t died but is increasingly necessary. I discovered, on this trip, MAY magazine. Here too there are no shortcuts, only serious, rigorous and committed work. The director, present in the room, intervened at the end to reflect with us on editorial questions and the immense associated difficulties. There, as here, freedom has an economic value and the fear of taking a position, the difficulty in producing reflective texts, has expanded more rapidly than the salvific promise of the missionaries of art’s internationalization.
Dear friend, I also had the opportunity to visit Atelier 11 at Cité Falguière, a space that Modigliani, Soutine, Gauguin and Brancusi, among others, occupied when they arrived in Paris. I crossed the places the Situationists walked in their dérives and the houses where Daumier, Baudelaire, Nerval, Bernard, Camille Claudel or Blum lived for some time in their lives. As you know, I don’t enjoy traveling but I believe it’s easy to understand that in these dérives (so accompanied) a kind of Einfühlung is produced and an intense openness to the world. A silent encounter, without any need for cunning or concession. No place for sensationalism. Only the shadow of the steps of those we admire. For some time in our lives we believe that art might still prevent the collapse of our small beliefs. After all we’re never alone, even when the erosion of Jim Morrison’s voice invades us when he sings:
People are strange When you’re a stranger Faces look ugly When you’re alone
At the Centre Pompidou the ostentatious exhibition by Wolfgang Tillmans, Rien ne nous y préparait, Tout nous y préparait (Nothing prepared us for it, Everything prepared us for it). It is, literally, dear friend, an exhibitionism of apparent widespread democratization what we witness at the Bibliothèque publique d’information. As always, beautified technique and images coated in fashion activism serving official models. A Tillmans of lyrical moral ambitions concerned with the important questions of yesterday and today: from ecology to multiples, from the body to architecture, from the everyday to fashion, from NGOs to works by artists he supported, from editorials to spirituality, from the printed page to information, from war to memorials, from still image to moving image, from astronomy to digital reality, from consumption to the state of things. Yes, we were prepared for this because perhaps we expected nothing more than this, a library transformed into a multisensory menu through which circulate the hyper-visible themes of the art industry under the appearance of a radical critique of aestheticized fabrication. An exhibition that aspires to the condition of total artwork. However, the manifest will to axiomatically summon everything to a kind of public good converts the exhibition space into a mere formal signifier that only conveys the instrumentalized machine of false evidences. Too much advertising communication and too little art.
It’s not a retrospective because it aspires to be more than that, it proposes itself as a staging of eternity. Thus the artist converts himself into a legitimate representative of symbolic imperialism. In his words, “History doesn’t announce itself, history is now.” But what this exhibition seems to announce precisely in the mode of “now” is the narrative and historical consecration of its author’s trajectory up to our days. Between Chronos and Kairos, Tillmans knows how to seize the opportune moment and the strategy of success, with the high sponsorships of luxury brand CELINE and the international financial group, based in Geneva, MIRABAUD. Everything sustainable, of course.
The Centre Pompidou will close for five years for renovation works with the presentation of four decades of Tillmans’ practice which, dialoguing with the material history of the library, operates for himself, by identification, the symbolic transfer of encyclopedism.
Dear friend, at the Bourse de Commerce/Pinault Collection, I’m confronted with a work I hadn’t yet seen, the surprising film-installation, AGHDRA, by Arthur Jafa. The rhythm of African-American voices and music that accompany the agitated mass of black waves of a contaminated ocean (and on whose horizon line we’re still allowed to discover in a tenuous way the presence of the Sun) project us into a dystopian universe in which little seems to remain for all species. The film, which shows us through various angles and sonorities a dying maritime landscape, enunciates the polysemic sense of “Blackness.” Existence and Ecology, “more an organism than a film,” in the artist’s own words. The filmic, grandiose and emotive envelopment that the work convokes produces a critical approximation that doesn’t transform the artist into a representative consciousness or superior instance of emancipation. There’s no place for the abandonment of art’s autonomy, the work doesn’t dissolve into illustration of social denunciation or reproduction of critiques the system has already built. Individual disorder doesn’t limit itself to imitating social disorder. An artist is an artist, is an artist, wrote Joseph Kosuth.
When I arrived in the city of Porto, in this country that isn’t yours, I still managed to see the film Sirāt, by Oliver Laxe, a filmmaker who likes the Quran and techno. When the film ended I kept thinking that life is perhaps our great rave in the desert, traversed by Beckettian figures and Nietzschean wanderers. It’s never too late to embark on the mystical communitarianism of group transcendence and PLUR or, greater adventure, to have the courage to advance into the unknown with the same will as someone heading toward the unpredictable. It’s here that something grandiose and difficult is achieved by a mortal. An exercise in wisdom that holds us to the screen. What can happen to someone who expects nothing more from the world or from themselves? Only to explode in a short span of time. In the desert. In the air. In the sky. Suddenly and unexpectedly. To dance death, to dance with death or to continue living, even if World War III makes itself heard in the distance in the complicity of a film. We suffer with life that stops, with the combat that still whispers in our ears, with all the days that are many days, too many days, sometimes. Like the yak Werner Herzog tells us about in his autobiography, the will that assaults us is to stop being a beast of burden, to abandon the load and run toward freedom.
Between Tillmans’ supposed civic concerns and the Social Canteen where I had lunch in Paris, frequented mostly by artists, I choose the latter. And you pay considerably less. As you know, dear friend, for glamorous brands and bankers there only exists what serves their spectacular profits and market forces. There, as here, the relations between territorial structures of power and capitalist logic are well cultivated. So many activists emerging daily against all forms of oppression and extractivist actions but with lifestyles that simulate those of high finance. It’s not only a certain working class that aspires to bourgeois condition. Some artists validate curators and exhibition spaces having as their only criterion questions of surplus value. Perhaps this choice is the most adjusted to concealing the artistic emptiness of the work produced. Operation of capital exchange or, if we prefer, circulation of money, business. No strangeness, no violence seizes those users. Only training. As Marx said, freedom begins where necessity ends. Dear friend, it’s the taste of others.
Eduarda Neves is a professor, essayist and independent curator. Her research and curatorial activity articulates the domains of art, philosophy and politics.
The author writes according to the former orthographic agreement.
Translated by Mohammad Salemy. This text was oroginally published in the 25 edition of Contemporânea Magazine.