Newspaper 45, January 2005

Never seen or done before

BRUSSELS, 17 JAN. - In 1969 Robert Barry realised a work entitled A work submitted to Projects Class, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Barry instructed the students to conceive a work which would exist ‘as long as the idea remains in the confines of the group. If just one student unknown to anyone else and at any time, informs someone outside the group the piece will cease to exist’. This work recalls a recent series of works by Mario Garcia Torres, like the Never to be seen by the artist-piece etc. It seems that both artists are dealing with exactly the same issues. What is interesting is the fact that Mario Garcia Torres didn't know about the existence of Barry's work. This fact and the publication of a text by Maxine Kopsa (see elsewhere in this Newspaper) on re-enactment led to a show, organised in collaboration with Garcia Torres, about repetition, originality, uniqueness and re-enactment, including works by 10 artists. The title of the show comes from a work by Jonathan Monk. What follows is a conversation between Garcia Torres and the Lithuanian curator Raimundas Malasauskas.

MARIO GARCIA TORRES: It’s interesting that Jan relates the re-enactment issue to the previously-done phenomenon as that also raises the question about how a work of art is perceived once it accesses the artistic circuit and how originality still plays an important role in the art system. You are right, I wasn’t aware of Barry’s piece when I started the never-seen projects and actually, when Jan first proposed to think about re-enactment for a show, I initially thought about it in the most literal way, the restaging of a particular fact in history.
Although I wasn’t thinking about repeating Barry´s strategies, I think the never-to-be-seen works are very related to and very much indebted to his work. Not only to the one submitted to Askevold’s Project Class but to most of his practice, to the idea that the artist does not need to see or experience the actual work, but needs only to know of its existence.
The most interesting part of this kind of coincidental actions -if we are to perceive them as coincidences- lies in the fact that the same action could trigger very different meanings when inserted in different contexts –both place and time. Barry set-up a way of understanding the work of art and, in that sense, ‘A Work Submitted…’ became fundamental for my artistic practice. The never-to-be-seen works are more interested in the implications that those very strategies might unveil within a new artistic scenario, as for example how the art world as a whole would assume the responsibility of keeping the piece alive. In Barry’s work, the students were/are in charge of maintaining its existence, whereas my works make a larger circuit - the museums, galleries and even the public - responsible for it.

RAIMUNDAS MALASAUSKAS: I was wondering what happens if we shift our focus to the operations of a detective trying to unravel a crime. A detective, according to a great book by John T. Irvin on Poe and Borges (who doubled series of fairy tales by Poe not only in terms of structure and the subject, but also temporally, i.e. exactly one hundred years later), always tries to double the working of someone's mind and then to make a step ahead in order to prevent a crime. So in the case of deliberate re-enactment or repetition I am tempted to think about this "one or two steps ahead", which means that there's a retrospective attempt to speculate about various possibilities and scenarios that could have happened if there were different political or cultural circumstances as well as seeing how the same act could affect the current circumstances (recently Jeanine Oleson, NYC artist, did a re-enactment of Joseph Beuys' I love America and America loves me communicating with rats instead of the coyote). I don't know if that's true, but there's always a certain game of truth involved too, no?

In the case of almost-coincidence of yours and Robert Barry's piece I think it's impossible to think of an original piece anyway. Does the fact that it happened after means that it happened After? And on the contrary, I think it also happens that repetitions tend to coincide with something other than the event they try to represent, no? We call those things coincidences, but it's just our way to articulate something we don't fully understand. So to address this notion of contingency is a self-reflective task, I think. Pierre Bismuth was playing with it in Waiting for Coincidence, a video-projection showing a juxtaposition of two different TV channels at the same time.

MARIO: Yes, I would agree, coincidences are ways of articulating something we don’t fully understand, but this leads us back to Jan’s first inquiry; why do things repeat in time. As you say, maybe we should not be thinking about time, about what came first, but about repetition.

In this matter, the first person that comes to my mind is Daniel Buren. One might say that he has done the same work again and again throughout his career. His activity does not merely rely on painting colour stripes but in initiating its meaning in very different forms. (“My main activity is tied to the ambition of making visible the ‘not-yet-seen’” D. Buren, 1981). He has made us understand how things work by repeating the same strategy again and again.

Maybe Buren’s strategy is closely related to the detective’s procedures; repeating an action to make things visible. There are a few works in the show that we should talk about like Joachim Koester’s photographs, Darwin Place. He re-shot the same picture that Robert Adams had done in Colorado Springs in 1969. By repeating the same action thirty years later, Koester’s work may reveal the changes that have occurred in that location but which remain unnoticed in the everyday.

It’s funny you mentioned the detective thing; actually the first time I saw the word re-enactment was in crime documentaries –it was blinking on the TV.

RAIMUNDAS: I think I started to think about re-enactment in a more repetitive way after an encounter with the work of Eran Schaerf, whose work was incoroporating the culture of the so-called hobbyists (a term I came across in the text of Maxine Kopsa on re- culture.) It seemed a good way to reveal the mechanisms of the production of history - so indeed to make things visible. But what happens when you make visible something that has never existed and say it's a re-creation of a past? We have fun, no? Imagine having photographs of a party that Truman Capote held in 1966 at Plaza in NYC and printing them in Wallpaper magazine in 2004 saying that it’s a re-enactment (actually Wallpaper magazine organised the re-enactment in London last year for real)?
Wasn't it in a certain way one of the issues that Argentinean Media Art Manifesto addressed in the 70s? They said that you don't need to make an actual performance, a photograph with a caption is enough to make it into a performance. Mario, what happens if someone re-issues a series of your works from 1999 that you have never seen or heard of (and when you say that they say that it's something that you have thought about.) I love this zone of repetition where the whole set of issues connected with copyright and intellectual property gets involved.

Thinking in this direction (and it's a direction of a labyrinth of course since a repetition always build's up a labyrinth instead of line of succession, no?) I suddenly found myself in the realm of economy nowadays where competition and collaboration goes hand in hand, so in a way I can see re-enactment as a way of merging social capitals. But perhaps the most important moment to me is the fact that repetition basically functions as a producer of change and thus difference as what is re-created never coincides with what it intends to represent. And when it coincides with something else than intended it makes one think of Slavoj Zizek's proposition that identity of something is always outside of itself. So at the end the re-enactment or repetition is simply a sort of creative way of co-producing reality, no?

MARIO: It seems to me that there is a reason to think that we try to fool ourselves about understanding re-enactment as a precise repetition, although at the end we all know that the impossibility of a pure repetition still constitutes some kind of production of knowledge. Gus van Sant’s Psycho was widely criticized; the argument was that there was no point in doing a take-by-take copy of the original Hitchcock version. But to me the most fascinating part of it all is to see precisely the rhetoric of failure put into action by van Sant. On the surface we are copying, remaking, re-enacting but actually the works, others and ours, are only being redistributed –recycled- for very different purposes.

I guess I would love to see the chain reaction you mention about a work of mine that I have never seen-or heard of. It would become some sort of repl(a)y. What could be difficult then is to recognize one’s own thought. Would you then consider similar works of art made simultaneously in different latitudes a re-enactment?

In that Borgesian thinking we could try to figure out what Barry knew on June 15th, 1969 at 1:36 pm when he made the piece All the things I know but of which I am not at the moment thinking.

RAIMUNDAS: This piece of Barry’s to me stands as one of the most monumental concepts in art. When are you able to recognize that you know something? What constitutes this knowing? How many things do you never think about even if they are stored in your mind? So all these cognitive questions arise when I think about this piece, however the truth could be much more simple. I remember when I asked Barry what was in a telepathic message that he sent in 1969 that was ‘neither word nor image’, he said ‘nothing complicated, a sense of difficulty to express something’. It is interesting to think about this difficulty in relation to the rhetoric of failure you mention, no?

Going back to the piece of yours ‘that you've never seen or thought about’ I would say that you have to double the working of the mind of a person trying to replicate the working of your mind and thus create a piece of yours that retains the logic of your thinking, but is not yours. But why is it not yours? I think as soon as you think about something it becomes yours. And maybe this is what Barry was thinking about: when does something become yours? When another person becomes (a part of) yours and vice versa? What are the limits of an ongoing transpersonal experiment? Or maybe he was thinking about piracy as a way to liberalise copyright laws? Do you know?

MARIO: It’s interesting that you mention this. I got this letter on the mail yesterday. It was from Konrad Wendt –one of the seven students that took Askevoldt’s Project Class in 1968. He is got very interesting thoughts about Barry’s piece. He said for him it has become less about group loyalty and more about (collective) memory. He comes up with a couple of questions that might be answered differently by the rest of the group: Are you absolutely sure about the date of the piece? Are you sure about who was actually involved? The fact has become something else, regardless of their actual idea.

That could also be related to what you are saying about the Never-Seen. Normally when I mention it, the immediate response is to try to figure out what the work could be, somehow informed, I guess, by what people know about my work and something of their own. I don’t know, maybe the students then also tried to match their own common idea with what they knew about Barry’s work at the time… Wendt would of course only be assured that he hasn't told anyone about it.