Article by Jorge Carrión in CCCB LAB

Explosion! The Legacy of Jackson Pollock was the title of a recent exhibition at the Joan Miró Foundation. What was it that exploded? Painting. Right through the roof. The exhibition allowed us to see one of the ‘evolutions’ of pictorial art in the twentieth century, in terms of Ovidian metamorphoses: changes in gestures and concepts. Pollock slid his brushes or allowed the paint to drip to the rhythm of jazz and bebop. Shozo Shimamoto fired it from canons and hurled bottles of it against his canvases. For Niki de Saint Phalle, shooting the canvas was like shooting all men… Through these and many other artists, painting became increasingly spatial as its boundaries were pushed back, so that hands, hair, and the skin of the entire body became a paintbrush; and any wall or any floor, surfaces of any kind, suddenly became a canvas. Yves Klein painted with fire. Akira Kanayama, in 1957, allowed a toy car to paint for him. And then there was Body Art, Land Art, the rereading of Artaud and Duchamp – visual art transformed into actions, happenings, performances, concepts.

And into books. Because many artists have maintained an ongoing relationship with the book-as-object, such as Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, who, from El libro transparente (1970) to 2000 d. de J.C. (1995-2000), La celosía (1972) – which was a literal transcription in the form of film of the homonymous novel by Robbe-Grillet – and El diccionario de la gente (1976), has linked his practice to this age-old object. And because numerous contemporary artworks from the turn of this century use the novelistic form as a vehicle. The novel as a platform of convergence of genres and languages. These artworks can be one-off books, or books that do not move through the same channels as literary books (as in the case of the artist Dora García, for example), or virtual, hypertextual books, or sculpted books, or purely oral serial novels that are recited or spoken (as in Un roman parlé (titre de travail), by Benjamin Seror). But the line that probably interests me most is the one in which the novel becomes a multiple platform for interpretation, writing, reading. In Materializar el pasado. El artista como historiador (benjaminiano) Miguel Ángel Hernández discusses an emblematic example: “In El instante de la memoria. Una novela documental (2010), Virginia Villaplana uses a textual device consisting of documents, photographs, testimonies, essays and fictions that form a ‘narrative puzzle’ that reflects on the plan to build 1,110 niches in a common grave in the cemetery in Valencia, which contains the bodies of Republicans who were killed by Francoist forces in reprisals between 1939 and 1945.” This is an example of one of the possible embodiments of the post-novel-as-explosion.

After Cubism, abstraction and Surrealism the best-known paths in the visual arts are those taken by Pollock and Duchamp. But at the same time, Picasso, Dalí, Tàpies, Hopper, Freud and Barceló were still painting or constructing paintings that mimicked or questioned the actual materiality of paintings to varying degrees. I think that this dual dimension offers us a useful parallelism with which to understand the novel of our times, given that novels have gone through a process of dematerialisation equivalent to that of contemporary art. In art, the earliest gestures were against painting, and then the attack and demolition operation expanded to include everything and everybody, without ever losing sight of Tradition. In the narrative field, the first attacks were against the elements that constitute the interior of the novel (time, space, the plot or characters, torn apart by Pirandello, by Musil, by Beckett and many others) and gradually attacked its fictionality, its textual condition, its materiality, its literary patent. The novel could be said to have superseded painting as an artistic platform – because a novel can be virtually anything. Even what we call works of ‘visual art’, to give them a name.

The prefix ‘post’ deservedly raises suspicions, but we can provisionally brush these aside by extending the concept in time: by thinking of each generation or each era as a period that sees itself as subsequent to the previous one – that believes it is refuting, surpassing or simply replacing it, even while the two are still coexisting in time. Even if we think in this way after the fact. From this point of view, at least since the sixteenth century, we would always be dealing with one novel typology, and one post-novel typology, like the front and back of a single plot: Tirant lo Blanc and El Quijote, Robinson Crusoe and Tristam Shandy. Post-novels proliferated in the twentieth century under the influence of the historical avant-gardes and Modernism, which incorporate images as an expressive resource through collage (Nadja, Berlín Alexanderplatz) or even by means of the deletion of text (the graphic novels of Frans Masereel or Lynd Ward). After World War II, the total novel (The Alexandria Quartet, One Hundred Years of Solitude) would have belonged to the first group, while the anti-novel (Rayuela) and ‘non-fiction novel’ (In Cold Blood) would join the ranks of the second, which became increasingly difficult to define theoretically because it gradually came to include concepts that moved further away from prose fiction and the book format. The print novels of the eighties and nineties gradually included more and more essay and reportage, and at the same time, graphic novels took hold and television series became the new Great American Novel. Ultimately, the novel came to prevail as the grand narrative paradigm that transcended what we had classified as the ‘novel’ for the previous few centuries.

As a result of all this, at the start of this century we had two types of ‘post-novels’: on one hand, the type that inherited the tradition of the classic post-novel, of Cervantes and Sterne, of avant-garde and post-avant-garde expressions in which there is a blurring of the debate around fiction and non-fiction, and in which images and typographic games are inserted seamlessly. Works such as The Infinite Joke, The Rings of Saturn, House of Leaves, La muerte me da and HHhH. Or like Reif Laren’s The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, which describes the adventures and travels of the protagonist in the form of a biography, illustrated with maps and comic strips, like a complex narrative artefact. On the other hand, there is the post-novel that does not necessarily take the form of a printed book, what we could call The Total Triumph of The Novel, its transformation into a platform that makes it possible to create and read an endless number of cultural and media products. Videogames, comics, TV series, film sagas, visual artworks, political and advertising campaigns, reality shows.

As a reader, I’m equally interested in all of these: the novel that could be seen as heir to Diderot, Balzac, Tolstoy or Vargas Llosa; the post-novel that works in the complementary tradition; and other narrative or conceptual works that are expressed in other artistic or commercial languages. In Teleshakespeare I focused on the energy of the TV series genre, but I used the concept of ‘quantum fiction’ to try to understand, above all, the complex relationships that develop among all those languages – through transmedia when the intention is more commercial than artistic, through quantum fiction when artistic intent prevails over commercial intent, if these differences still have any meaning, as Frédéric Martel explored in Cultura Mainstream. In this sense, the work of the visual artist and photography theorist Joan Fontcuberta, as seen in the retrospective exhibition De facto. Joan Fontcuberta, 1982-2008 (La Virreina, Barcelona, 2008) and the accompanying catalogue El libro de las maravillas, could be read in these terms of conceptual expansion. We can retrospectively read the book of Marco Polo’s travels as a novel, and we can also use the concept as the ideal framework for understanding a series of projects in which photography, photographic manipulation, objectual fakes, information technologies and texts converge in order to tell stories and to dismantle them. Stories that seem to take place in parallel universes, and that, in an exhibition or a catalogue – which are read as novels – are ultimately positioned within a single framework of conversation.

Given that, in principle, art resists taxonomy, the territory that unites and separates these two types of post-novel (the one that respects the boundaries of the literary book and the one that exceeds them) is probably the site in which some of the most significant projects of our time are being carried out. A name that springs to mind from the North American scene is Miranda July, who, in 2007, published a book of short stories that fit firmly within the classic narrative conventions of her country, No One Belongs Here More than You. At the same time, she established herself as a filmmaker and performer, before returning to the world of books four years later, but this time with It Chooses You, a volume of photographs (by Brigitte Sire) and interviews, in which literature is placed at the service of the documentary drive and subordinated to the production of a film, The Future. This means that the book was positioned in-between several channels of circulation of cultural products and of commercial and critical legitimisation, causing a series of disruptions in the usual discursive flows. The generally positive reviews in the United States describe It Chooses You as a ‘book’. On blogscritics.org it is described as “a compelling hybrid of photobook, memoir and social observation.” On the flap of the Spanish edition we read that it was “one of the best books of the year according to Amazon, and Oprah Magazine featured it as a can’t-miss read of the month.” Its meaning expands if, after reading it, you watch the film. Miranda July’s website acts as a narrative thread that links these experiences: the performances, the film, and the ‘making-of-the-book’ interlock in a narrative continuum, in which the videos, the texts and the performances follow one another in a coherent way. It’s hardly surprising that the book launch formed part of this continuity: Partners & Spade gallery organised a sale of objects found and packaged according to the logic of It Chooses You, which were sold alongside copies of the book. In this way, the space brought together a plethora of assumptions and prejudices about what popular art is, what literature is, how artworks are legitimised, how art and money interpenetrate each other and who or what has the authority to judge their value (an online store? a television presenter? a gallery owner? an editor? an art critic? a literary critic?) Once again, it all exploded through the roof. And then it was pieced together again. But each time, the pieces fit together differently and the result is always more fascinating than what existed previously. But also more monstrous.

http://blogs.cccb.org/lab/en/generes-mutants/post-novel·les-i-altres-monstres/#more-2774

Article by Jorge Carrión in A*Desk

Are levity, speed, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency the principal traits of the literature in our time? Italo Calvino imparted his famous cycle of Harvard talks in 1985 (“Six memos for the next millennium”, Harvard University Press, 1998). More than twenty-five years have passed since then. In this lapse of time, it’s not just that the Berlin Wall has fallen and the Twin Towers been knocked down, but also that screens have multiplied, reality became pixelated and the postmodern era came to an end. His six concepts, of which he only developed five, are still valid for thinking about the literary precisely because the byte has occupied part of the symbolic place of the atom or the cell: lightness, speed, the visible or the multiple are concepts that help us to understand digital writing as much as the literature published on paper, where the technological imprint at the end of the turn of the century is evidenced. Exactitude and consistency, if we bear in mind that Calvino didn’t exclude the value of weight from his defence of levity and the importance of dilation from his defence of speed, point to coordinates that in reality are in tune with most avenues of contemporary creation, without totally excluding the rest. As if, ultimately the prophecy was so plural that it also couldn´t be erroneous. And that it would situate itself between two poles: electricity and the body, the virtual gesture and gestural physicality.

This coexistence of practices and tendencies, stemming from different moments within the history of art, is, indeed, one of the principal characteristics of our 21st century. Even within the career of one author we find books that echo conflicting narrative models: think of “See Under:LOVE” (Picador, 2002), by David Grossman, an Israeli investigation into the memory of European Jews constructed with mechanisms typical of the postmodern novel (the last part is written in the form of an encyclopaedic dictionary and all of it dialogues inter-textually with the life and work of the canonical author Bruno Schulz, as well as an immensely popular writer, Sholem Aleijem). And “To the end of the Land” (Vintage, 2011), by the same author, a work that despite being set in the present recuperates the psychological ambition and technical register of the great novels of the 19th century that have a woman as the protagonist. The first was published in 1986 and the second in 2008. The first is contemporary with Calvino’s millennium memos and the second is of this millennium.

Both, what is more, are monumental. I say this because it seems that the anti-monumental is the principal tendency of the literature of our time, an idea concomitant with that of lightness and speed, that have their correlation in the contemporary art that has worked with the project, with dematerialisation or the concept, instead of making the Work of Art or the Monument. And it is highly likely. In the Hispanic ambit, some of the authors, who are more celebrated by critics and academics, cultivate exclusively the novella, or the more or less short novel, as if it was the most convincing answer to the total novels of the 60s and 70s. I’m thinking, amongst others, of César Aira, Mercedes Cebrián, Mario Bellatin, Julián Rodríguez, Yuri Herrera, Alejandro Zambra, Valeria Luiselli, Sergio Chejfec or Ricardo Menéndez Salmón. Authors who have maybe encountered, consciously or not, in the reconnection with the brevity of J.L. Borges, Juan Rulfo or Augusto Monterroso, a way of escaping the shadow of the deicide narratives that were written by Gabriel García Márquez, José Donoso or Mario Vargas Llosa. Self-sufficient narratives, preoccupied above all with History and Literature, far from the dérive of Contemporary Art that could have been their spur and context.

If one had to look for a split in the authors of this generation, a work that did dialogue with the visual arts and the music of its time and whose most well known title, is simultaneously a monument and its rebuttal, one would have to cite “Rayuela (Hopscotch)”, by Julio Cortázar, who in 1963 proposed the possibility of the counter-novel. Rereading its expendable chapters involves noticing that Cortazar’s project was by nature anti-monumental. And one has to remember that the majority of current authors have read this novel in their youth (although they refute it with intellectual arguments, it’s still there, latent in their sentimental memory). And in these same final chapters Cortázar insists on the project of “a story that wanted to be as unliterary as possible”, he talks of “unwriting” –a verb that connects with the “unword” of Beckett– that, as in his case, implies stripping away: “behind that deliberate poverty, behind that “began to go down” that substituted “commenced his descent”, I get a glimpse of something that encourages me. I write very badly, but something happens through it all”.

A large part of current writing is also riddled with what is known as “bad writing”, a concept like the deliberate poverty that we find in all art of the 20th century (from arte povera to the art of recycling, from Antoni Tàpies to Nam June Paik, from Roberto Arlt to Osvaldo Lamborghini, from jazz to noise music). Nowadays, the trash sculptures of Mark Jenkins or the tales of cumbia by Washington Cucurto imply the extension of this tradition that acquires a new meaning with each economic crisis. And the one at the beginning of this century is, obviously, no exception. In “Estética de laboratorio (Laboratory Aesthetics)” (Adriana Hidalgo, 2010), Reinaldo Laddaga carries out a comparative analysis of the artistic practices of our time that specifically share the staging of a creative process that implies stripping away. In the introduction to the book, the Argentine essayist mentions, amongst others, W.G. Sebald, Pierre Pichon and Joan Didion, in dialogue with visual artists such as Sophie Calle, Bruce Nauman and Matthew Barney. We read:

“A considerable part of the most ambitious and inventive art (of music, literature and visual arts) currently takes place in the place where they converge and articulate these strategies: the presentation of the artist in person at the scene of the work, realizing himself some form of work at the moment of its self-exposure; the use of minor materials such as light-bulbs for controlling light; the most casual greetings in the use of language and, with sound, the banging of knuckles on wood; the frequenting of past productions that are approached as accumulations of strata, like quarries or reserves, where elements that have been deposited need to be picked up and preserved; the construction of diffuse architectures, hardly differentiated in the space in which they have come to exist and into which they would soon like to reintegrate themselves; the interest in anomalous collaborations, that condition productions of a particular type, but also the sites of investigation into the possibilities of inter-human relations; the imaginary exploration of the relations between creatures that have fallen into spaces where the horizon is not visible and must persist in the relation however they can.”

In one way or another, the majority of artistic practices in our time, that we understand as contemporary and, consequently, as inheritors of the modern art of the end of the 19th century, the avant-garde from the beginning of the 20th century and postmodernity, in the least exclusive sense of the term, can be understood by way of the concepts enumerated by Laddaga. The music interpreted with toy instruments by Pascal Comelade, the novels of Pablo Kadchadjian or Michel Houellebecq, the flamenco by Israel Galván, the performances by Ron Athey or Angélica Liddell, the theatre of Rodrigo García or Rafael Spregelburg, the visual works by William Kentridge or Kikki Smith, the films by Isaki Lacuesta or Albert Serra, the installations by Kuribayashi Takashi or the comics by Miguel Gallardo or Peter Kuper. Laddaga selects two writers for a detailed examination: J.M. Coetzee and Mario Levrero. With the South African, as much as with the Uruguayan, we find principal works that recur to informal forms, such as the diary, the journalistic interview or the annotation, as if it was possible in these narrative procedures to strip away rhetoric, in-exactitude, the sketch, offering a certain immediacy that communicates truth. Because if La novela luminosa (The Bright Novel)(Alfaguara, 2004), Levrero’s masterpiece, tells us something, it is that through it we are accessing the reality of a writer, his anguish, his routine, his sincere thought. While in “Diary of a bad year” (Vintage, 2008) as much as in Summertime (Vintage, 2008), Coetzee doesn´t conform to reproducing these types of texts, but with them constructs a complex artefact. Because the novel is no longer found in the words so much as in the structure, not so much in the text as in the texture. “A great writer? How John would laugh if he heard you! He would say that the times of great writers have ended for ever!” exclaims one of the people interviewed in “Summertime”. As opposed to the perfection, closure and excessive ambition of a certain type of novel of the 20th century that persists to this day, Coetzee and many other writers today propose an apparently imperfect literature, open, in a minor key, in just correspondence with the symbolic place that the literary occupies today.

We also find the format of the lecture, recurrent in the more recent work of Coetzee, in that of Enrique Vila-Matas. In which the supposedly anti-rhetorical immediacy is crossed with another trait that is fundamental in the literature of today: its performativity. One only has to observe the first chapters of his latest novel, “Aire de Dylan (Dylan’s Air)” (Seix Barral, 2012), which like the previous one “París no se acaba nunca (Never any end to Paris)” (Anagrama, 2003) begins with a performance and participates in the theatrical representation that all lectures have: instead of imitators of Ernest Hemingway, in this case we find ourselves faced with discussions about artistic failure. After a clearly self-fictional beginning, the narrator is invited to a Swiss congress that will deal with failure, to which writers such as Sergio Chejfec or Werner Herzog will also attend. There he will meet Vilnius Lancastre, who intervenes in the gathering with a performance titled “Reality theatre”, where he aims to “confirm live his suspicions that the public have absolutely no interest in his drama (…), his performance ends up being the painful and sultry failure of the history of narrators of all times” and was “a complete and exemplary public exhibition of how to fail fully and truly”.

The title of the talk could be an indirect allusion to another book by Laddaga, “Espectáculos de realidad. Ensayo sobre la narrativa latinoamericana de las últimas dos décadas (Spectacles of reality. An essay on the Latin-american narrative in the last two decades)” (Beatriz Viterbo, 2007). In it he talks of a narrative less prone to “realize works than to design experiences” and summarizes the traits of a large part of the most relevant literature from the last few years: their apparent improvisation and instantaneity, their desire to introduce a trance, their aspiration to mutate and their relation with local cooperative practices (in a previous essay, “Estética de la emergencia (Aesthetics of Emergency)”, the author had carefully examined the very strategies of collaborative production at the turn of our century). His examples are works by César Aira, Mario Bellatin, João Gilberto Noll, Fernanda Laguna and Cucurto. But these traits of a few works, that simulate a stream of consciousness writing, reveal their scam, as being as much experiences of reading as experiences of the read, and as such are evidently performative, we can also detect them in titles by Victoria de Stefano, Agustín Fernández Mallo, Antonio José Ponte, Gabriela Wiener, Cristina Rivera Garza and Manuel Vilas.

All these considerations about the vectors that in our times govern the relations between literature and contemporary art make it possible to observe the greater mutation: from paper to pixel. A mutation that, as suggested by the multiplication of jam writing, has made a spectacle of the writer, who now no longer just produces deferred work (first written and corrected, then edited and published), but also produces work live (at the beginning of the last decade, Arcadi Espada carried out various exercises in his blog of chronicling in real time: today it is common practice in all digital newspapers, for example with the football matches, and in social networks and other platforms). The most important phenomenon with regard to the digitalization of literature was perhaps the explosion of blogs at the end of the nineties and at the beginning of this century, one of the many facets of the proliferation of writing that took place and is taking place on the web. Though the professional production of written discourse, often literary, was shifting from traditional supports to digital ones, it is probably the multiplication of amateur texts that is more relevant. The bad writing is thus divided into the intentional and the naïf.

Some of the most important mutations of the last few years come from this very tendency. I’m thinking of Hernán Casciari, who before 2005 had already published a novel and had won the Juan Rulfo Prize for literature, but from then on became well known thanks to “Más respeto, que soy tu madre (More respect, I’m your mother)” (Plaza y Janés), a compilation of the texts from his famous narrative blog. The blog, the novel and the theatrical adaptation: three incarnations of the same work, all three equally popular. Finally, after the success of a new blog, that of the television series in El País Digital, and his break with mass communication and corporations, Casciari began, at the beginning of last year, a project that seeks new routes for the circulation of culture. Orsai was born because several thousand readers promised to support it. It functions by way of a system of prior subscription: the magazine isn´t published until they have a sufficient number of readers. As well as a magazine, it is also a publishing company and even a sort of cooperative enterprise that has already opened a pizza parlour in Buenos Aires, with the clear vocation of being a cultural centre. From the virtual, to the performative. From virtual cooperation to physical cooperation. Devoid of national barriers in either the pole of production or that of distribution.

We find this same duality in the actions of the mutant Spanish group Hotel Postmoderno that publishes books on paper (“Hotel Postmoderno”, Inéditor, 2008; “De La Habana un barco (A boat from Habana)”, Lengua de Trapo, 2010), as well as realizing sophisticated on-line works, such as suicídame and los7vampiros. None of the same artists participate in any of their projects: the writers, musicians, designers, actors and actresses vary according to the characteristics of the proposal. It is clear that work online is one of the signs of our time, in real time and on a transnational level, to an extent that could never be so great. But so are the alternation between digital relations and corporal relations, between electronic textuality and texts printed on paper, between unpaid and non-lucrative projects and projects subject to copyright laws. One might think that this is consistent with a time of transition, but while writing is produced by typing (the physical pressure of fingers on the keyboard) and the family is the fundamental nucleus of human society one can only suppose that the coexistence of virtuality and the objectual, or corporal, will continue to be a characteristic of the work of writing. One only has to take a look at the quantity of English magazines that, after a successful existence on the web, have taken the form of printed objects. Or at how poetry recitals continue to be the best way of disseminating the book or the books that generally justify and sustain them.

After his “Escuela Dinámica de Escritores (Dynamic Writers School)” or his “Congress de Dobles (Congress of Doubles)”, two performative and collaborative operations, Bellatin is carrying out a work that intervenes critically in this very context that I am trying to outline. In “Los 100.000 libros de Mario Bellatin (The 100,000 books of Mario Bellatin)”, the Peruvian-Mexican writer has renovated his home, in order to house, in the sitting room, a publishing house and a storage space, where, on one hundred shelves, thanks to the cooperation of an industrial designer and a graphic designer, the thousands of examples that he is going to publish of each one of his recuperated works are accumulated. The installation has become a thermometer of his life: he still hasn´t written one hundred books, so the future, of both his life and writing, is measured by the shelves occupied and by those that are empty, like a countdown. What does recuperated mean? It’s to do with the books that Bellatin published with a variety of publishers in different countries, some of them with a contract for copyright that is still valid, however, no law impedes him from self-publishing as long as he doesn´t distribute them commercially. The writer re-appropriates his books and takes them with him, in a suitcase that is heir to that of Duchamp, and he exchanges them (for money, objects or favours) at the literary fairs he attends. Sometimes he announces on Facebook that at a certain hour he will be in such and such a park, walking his dogs, and he’ll take his suitcase with him. Someone will approach, with a book, by him or someone else, with a bottle of wine or with 100 dollars to facilitate the swap.

These are a few examples that illustrate the desire to react against the ways the media and publishing industries have become codified, that stand out for having intentionally held back, in the last few years, the shift in the paradigm of consumption, from the traditional book to the digital. Sigueleyendo.es, the Barcelona initiative lead by Cristina Fallarás, proposes precisely to simplify the processes of relation between writers and readers, through innovative methods such as the purchasing of texts without electronic protection, without anti-pirating mechanisms, appealing to the common sense of the purchaser/reader through the following message: “Our books are not protected. They are the fruit of the labour of a writer, an editor, a corrector, a digitalisation technician, a web designer, a web master and a producer. If you pirate it, you know who you are stealing from”. Ultimately, like Hotel Posmoderno or Orsai, what Sigueleyendo.es proposes is the creation of a community.

With the distances between writers and readers increasingly blurred, in the supposed horizontality of the social networks, every writer is a self-manager who simultaneously belongs to several communities of producers of discourse or “I like”. All the users of Facebook, be they readers or writers, are micro-critics who manage a huge amount of cultural information moving from one side to another the flux of consumption and reading. The project Heartbeaters, by the Spanish artist Dora García, consisted in precisely this: in the creation of a community. A community, that arose from the existence of an online hyper-textual story, in the fertile frontier between contemporary art and literature (and vice versa and without the copulative and: literature is contemporary art). The relational art of the nineties prefigured the habitual modus operandi of written culture in our century. Forms of operation and intervention that are in the laboratory phase that are still hesitantly being progressively defined, without anybody knowing if they are going in the right direction. One only has to look at the boom of community managers and the dearth of companies in the management of social networks. Like them, each writer of the 21st century is looking for a way through, while also having conflicting relations with publishers, disbelieving in the cultural supplements while knowing that they are still the ones who decide part of the prestige, discovering in certain blogs and profiles – international ones – criteria that are of interest, conversing with interlocutors who up to four days ago were inaccessible (in a immeasurable quantity and quality, often secret, this virtual epistolary that in only a few cases will partially, one day, be revealed) and receives more audio-visual stimuli than any writer in the past and expands his artistic production thanks to tools that no longer need formal training (Photoshop, video editors, web pages, word and image processors, etc.). And perhaps, in the most extreme cases, even working in the ambit of digital literature, alongside a programmer or actually programming, far removed, from the market, the laws of supply and demand, from the preservations of works in libraries, from everything that we are accustomed to and which is increasingly rare, even exceptional.

Way too much instruction manual. Nowadays the code of a user programme seems to be the perfect functional language to apply to any occasion. In the instruction book we have perfect literature and a happy tool that saves us from anxiety, ravings or even social exclusion. Even something as rootless as utopia can occur in the form of a self-help breviary that indicates the ways to use the revolution or organise its liturgy. Worrying, without a doubt. We have routinized utopia as an ideological pamphlet at the service of any common destination, without questioning its true capacity for transformation, as the inexcusable bearer of radical and positive change always pirouetting between the real and the desired. Utopia throughout our most recent past, in becoming legitimate has lost the pleasure of discovery and has become converted into an almost mechanical ideology that applies prescriptions that only function a priori. However, utopia is like the sirens’ song in Ulysses travels, more worrying due to the silence of navigation than for its loaded melody.

Renouncing utopia as a user manual, but not utopianism as ethical thought, the work of Xavier Arenós revolves around the archaeological spaces of modernity discovering the inert remains of the utopias of the 20th century; plans for action and the social processes for an ideal State. Excavating in the subsoil of our memory or confined to the warrens of self-exile, the productions of this artist are like the stratigraphic workings of a mole. The works are artefacts and documentary records that propose a more efficient and less instrumentalized reading of utopian thought, that function as discursive structures that settle one on top of each other. I believe that his works allow us to know something more about what has been learnt and used because they possess the aesthetic option of being extraordinary material to read about the workers movements, the history of social architecture, the episodes silenced by the dictatorship, the wars or the anarchistic imaginary. An opportunity that is entirely relevant, narrating the proto-history of the failure of our current economic and social system.

The artist investigates without an instruction manual, indicating in the process of the pieces a pathway with which to return and read about the thought and utopias of the West, to analyse the desire for a material and moral bettering of society. In the end, utopias are models of hope for a more just future, one that we have not achieved. The work of Arenós is solid and coherent and has in the figure of the poet Hölderlin and his experience of a whole life in voluntary exile the silence of the emblematic force of dystopia.

In the gallery Valle Ortí in Valencia he has just presented a group of projects that link to form an open narrative about the symbolic constructions of modernity and its decline. The title of the project, Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis (“where you are worth nothing, you will wish for nothing “, 2012), is an aphorism that alludes to the philosopher of Flemish origin Arnold Geulincx, a determinist and Calvinist who affirmed that the human being is a mere spectator of his acts, subject to the will of God. The artist reminds us that this instruction was also used on various occasions by Beckett to accentuate rootlessness, the sterility of language and the impotence of action as a radical behaviour of its imaginary, always in the ambivalence of the void. In the gallery window, a cloth banner expands the slogan of this headline as a warning against the struggle and also the defeat.

Amongst the works exhibited, some of which are earlier productions, such as that of the Canòdrom in Barcelona (Arquitectura desplazada, (Displaced architecture, 2010), I want to highlight the pieces dedicated to one of the most emblematic Russian Suprematists, El Lissitzky and his project Proun. The Soviet artist applied the term Proun (1919-1925) to a series of drawings, paintings and constructions designating in this way an imaginary and radical space, beyond any aesthetic or even functionalist category. Once more Xavier Arenós excavates in the words to observe in them the desire to communicate a transforming potential for art and politics. The piece Madriguera #9. Proun (2012) eis a reinterpretation of the composition Proun nº10, transforming the original piece to convert it into a hollow construction that assembles tunnels which function as sound boxes for the hypothetical communication between a transmitter and a receiver. This artefact is a heterochronic space where the echo of the past coexists with the voices of the present, with the argument of the whole series dedicated to the Prouns reaching its maximum visibility in the photographs of an excavation and simulacrum of the discovery of an archaeological object that resembles a strange city. The constructions, like the remains, continue to reflect upon utopian models of the past. Between the enigmatic Prouns, four books furthering social rights published by Ruedo Ibérico (in the El viejo Topo collection) are ordered into a geometric form on the wall, in the form of a new insignia of libertarian thought. The design of the covers, minimalist in style, is transformed within the space into a large mural painting. The whole exhibition brings together a potent stockpile of the reality of utopian thought, an inherent experience of human beings and their struggle against resignation.

The works by Xavier Arenós don’t describe history nor do they justify it, they are records that by their very nature traverse and confuse the values that guide the thought of modernity, as the only possible way to understand the world and to carry on anticipating utopia.

http://www.a-desk.org/highlights/spip.php?article1542