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Community is the name under which the group of works
done by F.X. Archive for The Empty City are presented. In a
staging, which is drama and gesture at the same time, visual
constructions of all kinds – images, pastimes, organisations,
actions, participations, noises, language – are brought into play
and administer a different way of uttering discourse in which
the gestural values of the theatre subtract exhibition value
from the works.
In that sense, the theatre is a tool with which to present the
works as a ‘place composition’, acting as the choreography of
a mental theatre. The point was to stage an archive and its
functions with regard to the construction of the city. A commonplace
imaginary refers us to those stage settings, from the emblematic
old lady to the closing scene of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, for
example, the archive ‘becomes’ a city. A theatre and its double,
giving the conjunction ‘and’ the same values of demolition, of
gutting, consigned to it by Antonin Artaud: ‘…an instrument that
does not separate but obliges the theatre to double reality.’ For
F.X. Archive that presentation space of the works seems like the
place of places in that same way as doubling reality, but also of
bowing to it, since giving each piece the value of a tool is also
the outcome of that attempt to subtract exhibition value from each
of the works.
And so, the statement ‘this is not an exhibition’ may be
inscribed as a frontispiece at the entrance to the room; not
that it is a laboratory, nor a work in progress, nor a work in
construction; it is the very nature of this work that makes it
necessary to put the traditional exhibition space it uses in inverted
commas. Although the space is constructed with the materials
on show, they do not point to the finished work, their purpose is
not that monument; rather it is to sketch intermediation operations,
making each thing a medium. The theatrical resource thus works
as a containing wall, preventing the colonisation of spaces of
reality which aesthetic violence ends up turning into capital.
Etymologically, of course, the spectators of this exhibition
make a Community in the sense that they receive the same
communication. Stressing its polyphonic character in the montage
is also part of the work of F.X. Archive. The visitors as inhabitants
of the community are for a moment more actors than spectators.
Although the public exhibition of all these works only intends to
invite the visitors, the spectators, those actors to add their
expectations, their attitudes, their gestures to the great work
machine of F.X. Archive. Like real helpers, the visitors, actors and
spectators of the exhibition have to find their ‘MacGuffin’ with
which to travel, leave traces, draw the floor and the air of the
installation.
The whole exhibition is portable, it can fit into a book, and
that arrangement also works towards subtracting exhibition value
from the things. The construction, the scaffolding of the whole
city, works in the opposite way to a theatre of memory, and so
what it puts into play is rather an ‘art of forgetting’ in the face
of a totalising ars mnemonica, with the same critical sense Michel
Foucault wanted to give the technology of the archive.
In his book Politics of Aesthetics, published by Continuum in 2004,
Jacques Rancière says that the space of art must be the space
of diversity: diversity of competence and function that erases the
boundaries and mixes the forms of experience and expression.
That the space of art must define a politics of the anonymous in
a twofold sense: to avoid as far as possible the separation between
activities (contemplation, circulation of information and debate),
so that everyone can be integrated, while surprising the visitors’
expectations, maintaining the expressive potential of each of those
activities, which invite a global reconfiguration of the experience.
To end this conversation, although I could also have brought
it up at the beginning, I would like you to tell me about how your
work, all your work, creates spaces of resistance, opens up the
political space, where it has been emptied, and tries to show it in
all its complexity, resisting banalisation and spectacularisation,
which inevitably distances you from many of the landscapes currently
defined by the art institution.
In fact, that taking a stance in the political debate, that
intervening in the business of community life, that linking oneself
with the decisions of organisation of the city should not be based
on a more or less social awareness of the artist, nor on the
experiences of marginalisation or repression he may have suffered,
nor on his concern for hunger in the world; on none of that, except
the knowledge that the language of art, in a deep, structural sense
has an eminently political, social and communitarian character.
Enrique Vila-Matas, who was also invited to this and other
projects, tells me the following: ‘Talking about Canetti, I remember
a text of his, The Writer’s Profession, in which he recounts his
stupor on reading a note by an anonymous writer. The note was
dated 23 August 1939, i.e. a week before the outbreak of the
Second World War, and the text said: “There is nothing to be done.
But if I really were a writer, I should be able to prevent the war.”
How absurd, Canetti said to himself when he read it. What
pretensions! What could a single individual prevent? And why
particularly a writer? Could there possibly be a claim further
removed from reality? Canetti said all that to himself, but for
days he could not stop thinking about that note by the anonymous
writer. Until suddenly he realised that the author of that loose
note had a deep awareness of his words, and then Canetti
went from indignation to admiration. He realised that while
there are people who take on board that responsibility for words
and feel it most intensely when recognising a total failure, we
shall have the right to conserve a word – the word writer –
which has always designated the authors of the essential works
of humanity, those works without which we would have no
awareness of what really makes that humanity.’
Only someone who recognises the end can recognise what
the ends still are. Only someone who knows the different finishes
of art will recognise the many purposes it is taking right now.
Only by knowing the end of the protagonism of man as the main
agent in the world will he now recognise his many tasks.
Let us think now that this machinery that works under the
epigraph of F.X. Archive – a name that sounds abstract, formal
– is an autonomous machine for which we are simply writing
an instruction manual. That where Vila-Matas writes ‘word’,
we put our ‘images’. Let us think, alas!, that the note of the
anonymous writer Canetti found has a distant kinship with the
different mechanisms the machine will put into circulation. In short,
the work of F.X. Archive tries to deploy a meaning machine
with which to review the world through its most radical aesthetic
gestures. The archive as work of art, understanding that device
as a moment in space-time to which people turn their gaze, their
understanding, their intellect, their love, their knowledge. The
work of art as the minimum object of relation people need to
understand the world. As Nietzsche wanted: ‘The work of art,
where it appears without an artist, for example as a body, as a
machine, as an organism. To remove the artists insofar as he,
the artist, is no more than a great preliminary. The world as a
work of art that engenders itself.’ Or as they say in these soleares:
‘I thought loving well
was child’s play,
and now I see one suffers
the torments of hell.
I’d believe in loving well
if it were child’s play,
now I see it passes,
like a machine over death.’
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