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detoumement: the Andalusian mountains become a weekend beach; romantic
smugglers become crazy terrorists; the discarded flower of which Don Jose sings
is only a plastic rose, and Micaela massacres Beethoven instead of singing Bizet
arias. But the detournement no longer has the function of a political critique of
high art. On the contrary, it effaces the picturesque imagery to which the critique
appeals in order to let the Bizet characters be reborn as the pure abstraction of
a Beethoven quartet. It makes gypsies and toreadors disappear in the melting
music of images that unites, in the same breath, the sOllnd of strings, of waves
and of bodies. In opposition to the dialectical practice that accentuates the
heterogeneity of elements to provoke a shock, bearing witness to a reality
marked by antagonisms, mystery emphasises the kinship of the heterogeneous.
It constructs a game of analogies in which they witness a common world, where
the most distant realities appear as if cut from the same sensible fabric and can
always be linked by what Godard calls the 'fraternity of metaphors'.
'Mystery' was the central concept of symbolism. And certainly, symbolism is
once again on the agenda. By that I'm not referring to certain spectacular and
slightly nauseous forms, like the resurrection of symbolist mythology and
Wagnerian fantasies of the total work of art in Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle
(1997-99). I'm thinking of the more modest, sometimes imperceptible way in
which assemblages of objects, images and signs presented by contemporary
installations have, over the last few years, slid the logic of provocative dissensus
into that of a mystery that bears witness to a co-presence. Elsewhere I have
mentioned the photographs, videos and installations of the exhibition 'Moving
Pictures', presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2002.' It
affirmed contemporaty art's continuity with an artistic radicality born in the
1970s as a critique of both artistic autonomy and dominant representations, But
- in the image of Vanessa Beecroft's videos presenting nude and inexpressive
female bodies in the museum space, in the photographs of Sam Taylor-Wood,
Rineke Dijkstra or Gregory Crewdson showing bodies of ambiguous identity in
undefined spaces, or in Christian Boltanski's dark room with lightbulbs
illuminating walls covered in anonymous photographs - the interrogation of
perceptual stereotypes, which was always invoked, slid towards a completely
different interest in the vague borders between the familiar and the strange, the
real and the symbolic, that fascinated painters at the time of symbolism,
metaphysical painting and magic realism. However, on the upper level of the
museum, a video installation by Bill Viola was projected onto four walls of a dark
room: flames and deluges, slow processions, urban wanderings, a wake, or
casting off a ship, simultaneously symbolizing the four elements and the whole
cycle of birth, life, death and resurrection. The experimental art of video thus
came to manifest the latent tendency of many mechanisms of today that mimic,
Ranciere//Problems and Transformations in Critical Art//91