Teks*
texture, Text, context,, (archi)tectural) TEKHNE
TEKS* : (etimological Indo-European root.) to weave, to make.
[sankrist .taksati: “he makes” ,taksan “builder” , avestico .tasan-,persian tas :
” to build” ; old Irish. tal. “axe” ,old high german. desha , lithuanian tasau: “to carve” , latvia .tesu, old slavonic. eel. tesq, Czech. tes : “carpenter” , het. taks-: “to join”]
Greek : TEKTON : carpenter, builder.
TECTONICS : belonging to building construction; belonging to earth´s crust.
Architect: (gr. arkho : to order ) ” the one who manages a construction”
Greek : THEKHNE : art, skill.
TEXTURE : the manner the threads or the fibres of a fabric are combined.
The mannner of being combined or joined together the parts, the particles or elements of one thing.
TEXT: set of statements that composes a written document.
Etymological loan ( Sixteenth century) from latin textum “textile” , from where “text” by analogy with the construction of the discourse…
CONTEXT: neccesary set of circunstances that surrounds a situation in order to be able to understand it correctly. From latin contextus “connection”, “linking” specially applied to the discourse, from texere to weave
The presentation of my proyect begins with these ethymological shades, since my work in the series TEKS* includes all these concepts in its development and praxis.
introduction
the contemporary landscape thrust us into a desolation without voices
where human is only articulated like a quiet rumor. Nature is mererly
a silent witness where are thrown down the ruinous wreckage of what was thought
to be once.
David Pérez ( Naturalezas )
Experimentation is the hard core of my investigation proyect. This experimentation is articulated
in different levels. Thecnical experimentation with the materials, the photographic circle, the computer graphics
and also the conceptual experimentation about the limits of the representation, or the semioligical aspects like
legibility or illegibility of artistic texts.
The experimental investigation of photagraphy ” like a prosthesis to increase the power of our eyes, in a process
of acceleration that suppresses our knowledge of distancies and and dimensions.” (1)
(1)Paul Virilio. La máquina de la visión. Cátedra. Madrid 1998.
With my proyect, I cast doubt on the indicial nature of photography because it is not strictly a trace of reality but a false trace,
an apparent reality. Sure enough, my photographs are “preformed”. They are not pictures of something of the world that I have not
participated on more than selecting it as motive of aesthetics attention, but I have actively participated on the creation of all the details that appear in the taken model.
Although being photos of pictorial matter, which treatment is close to certain kinds of informalist abstraction, the view I put forward is spatial, not planimetric. Such planimetry is a characteristic feature of the abstraction offered by the historical vanguards. The size gradient is altered by the change of scale due to the descontextualization provoked by the camera through its shutter.
In relation to the optical illusion, Baudillard called ” the tactile vertigo” that provokes what´s more real than reality.
“Icon, founded in a communicative contract presupposing the adherence beteween represented things
and the things of the world”, paradoxically, ” at the same time the “Iconism” of painting – objectivity effect-
depends on coincident techniques with maximum abstraction” (2)
The central core or theme of my proyect is the ruin, gradual status of disintigration of a system. That is called entropy: entropy in physical and geological terms but also cultural.
Taking into account that for the occidental culture the relation between nature and culture has been the matter of conflict, where it is easy to distinguish that the civilization process is set in a progressive oversight of nature, my pictures instead of showing a devastated nature because of culture, they show culture devastated by nature. In these wastelands, where archytecture remains like naked bones and one can see the erosion and calcification process, time seems to have stopped and the intervals are long, hundred of years.
As opposed to the iconography of nature proposed by the mass-media, ideal nature, pleasant, lots of travels and sales, I critized these models displaying a hostile an desolated nature.
Nature is assumed like a correction of a civilized reality. In my work, this reality becomes desert because of an entropy of nature or culture, assuming the fragility of human condition..
My hope is to change the documentary task into creative exercise, like the trace of the inevitable decline of the discourse that gives shelter to human being. Decline that is hidden by the media with its icon flow.
It is worthy to contextualize these aspects in the post-modern context so that the vanguards “have coincided in their aesthtics and programaticals categories with the epistemologial a moral premises of an industrial proyect that stated the utopia of a better world and nowadays throws new centuries of uneasiness and desturction everywhere” (3) and I implicitly set a doubt on that industrial development, that maquinica utopia, representing its degradation both physical and model.
(2) Omar Calabrese. Como se lee una obra de arte. Cátedra. Madrid. 2001
(3) Eduardo Subirats. Linterna Mágica. Siruela. Madrid. 1997
Development
texture
the random but controlled combination of the painting matter gives rise to a special texture of my investigation process. If I try to reach a sense of organization in the image, obviously, I will use and modify natural materials so they give the best result in terms of iconicity.
The materials that compose the models are: wood, zinc oxide, white cement and oxide mineral of iron (oligisto).
The main strategy is to imitate on scale the geological processes of nature: erosion ( erosion process of oligisto), sedimentation (sedimentation of the white zinc in the small holes of oligisto rocks). This sedimentation is produced by the water flood from the scale so that the pigments fill the remaining holes of the oligisto rocks.
The result is magmatical pictorial surface, full of shades and contrast. A surface that sometimes could be compared with the informalist-matericals like these of Barceló, tapies, Genovés…
Text
In its semiological sense, text includes the writting form as much as the graphical, pictorial, photographical or cinematographical
representations.
Without doubt, the result of my artistic project is iconical. However, this iconicism, close both to the materical abstraction and the informalism, is the result of the treatment of the surface. So, the consequential text allows diffrent possible interpretations that conforma hybrid structure. The iconicism of the painting, I mean its effect of obejctivity, depends on the coincident techniques with a great range of abstraction, gathering in the same pictorial text the depth of the painting ( mimetic space) and the surface of the painting ( space of pictorial-materical). This assembly of both lines of the painting is fused by means of photographical technique: hybridization of painting, sculpture and photography.
At this point, it´s possible to say that my proyect and the development of the artistic discourse of photography are really bound to the critic program of representation set by the vanguards. In my proyect, the text reffers to a difused reality, a bordering territory between reality and fiction. An eccentric territory inside and outside pictorial matter, photographic and infographic, a proposal of an area of the phantasmatic representation, close to cinema.
The art, I try to carry on, not only imitates nature but also try to reproduce a certain effect, particulary, of rupture with dayly life, destabilization, estrangement, that takes out the usual space notion and objects. There´s no continuity between the space of photogrphy and the space of the spectator.
The intertextual refferences that can be seen in my project point to authors like Casebere, VaJlhonrat, Simonds, OLiver Boberg…
tectonic
It is worth to point out that the word tectonic reffers both to biulding construction and earth´s crust.
The earth´s crust and the building construction are the core elements of my plastic investigation project.
The constructions of my project and the desolated atmosphere that surrounds them are in a kind of temporal and narration hanging up. It seems the time would have stopped and human activity would have disappeared. Dehumanized spaces where it is not known
by certain what has happened before reaching this state of disintegration, or, reintegration in the desert lansdscape.
Like Smithson, I travel and make a parenthesis in history stopping at the ruins. The poetics of the ruins, of large tradition, are the expression of time suspension, a wounded architecture.
Instead of beauty categories or the sublime that affects the subjective perspective of the landscape, Smithson proposes the joining, the rehabiltation of the idea of the pictorial matter. Attraction for the rough, rude and irregular shape of the earth, as well as for the accidents that transform it.
With my approach to nature, I look for what seems artistic just because it escapes from the regularity of the natural laws.
It´s known that whatever break the law, the formal unity and keep closer to nature (aesthetics of the picturesque) is well received in art.
My landscapes also takes part in some sort of aesthetic of the sublime since the shadow of the immense is present: large desert spaces where we can observe the time suspension but always seen from the secure distance of representation, of aesthetics.
As an artist for whom nature is the main source of his work, I am acting like witness of a devastating entropy provoked by the imbalances among ecosystems due to human industrialization. Moreover, I make an absolute criticism about nowadays capitalism production system.
Context (discontextualization)
The discontextualizationIf is some way the key point in the setting of the scale and the final result of the picture. Discontextualization of the pigments by means of the photographic framework. Using this process, a smal piece of sensible pigmentary matter appears infront of our eyes a kilometric space. It is impossible to meassure the size of the scale once photographed. Moreover, this is provoked by the presentation of the picture, 1m x 50cm, so the space sense is more evident and stonger.
“Walter Benjamin described the capacity of the camera, the technical eye, “unconscious optic”, in order to learn in his unconsciousness what is conscious for the eye, educated on the control of representation, results incomprehensible: the same register of the difference, the event. This is what the unconscious optic reveals: on one hand, the presence of the difference during the absorption of the detail, in the unlimited explosion of th fragment, in the capture of the multiplicity.
On the other hand, the instantaniety of the event, the incomprehensible brevity of the time-now, the same insuperable temporality of being -not in vain the same Benjamin reffers to that infinitesimal jump produced in the descomposition of the movement..(7)
If the quality of the unconscious optic is to capture the multiplicity, the infinite detail, the lack of time or elements out of our usual visual perception, it can be used and changed its hyper-perceptive cuality like I do: using it more as a bridge between reference and image than for its nature of mark and document. In the mediation process between reference and image, the trick or fiction appears.
That mediation is disturbed. For this reason, the indicial quality of the picture changes. It offers a game of tricks that we accept bearing in mind we usually rely on the photographic media as it was a true evidence of the sorroundings.
The same Derida has also persisted in the importance of high technologies in the field of the diconstruction of visual arts.
“ It is not a matter of representing the given reality, but putting on declarative segments that set doubt on the established order of the representation ” (8)
The discontextualization offered by the unconscious optic is absolutely intrinsic to the quality of the picture, unalterable compound segment. As much in space -The picture in its local aspect, of fragment that can´t be found- as in time.
I like seeing my work, my artistic project, like a “cinematation” of photographic image. So, It becomes readable. By means of this process, the picture acquires a narrative dimension closer to the cinema than to the classic painting model.
(7) Jose Luis Brea. “un ruido secreto”. Mestizo 1996. Murcia
(8) Jose Luis Brea. “un ruido secreto”. Mestizo 1996. Murcia.
tekhne
the stimulus that breathes in photography is a melancholic. That stimulus or impulse expresses the insuperable certainty of the whole. For that reason every picture is ” melancholic object” and also its generic territory, if there´s any, cannot be but “vanitas”, So every picture is allied to conscience of the human being brevety. Apart from any language ( photography is not only language but also at the same time and against it, writing, trace), photography reveals the changable and elusive substance of what it is. (11)
It is surprising that neither nature nor dead ( vita fermata in un istante immovile) was present in the former definitions of dead nature .
Obviously, it is not pointing to motionless objects but to ” things that has stopped for a while”: Selecting a moment as if it were an ever, temporality is held up. It becomes 0.
In terms conquering the movement ,dead nature seemed to follow an opposite way compared to the evolution of painting. Dead nature heads towards the identification of a lasting moment ( suspended narration).
Some of these ideas set by the dead nature coincide with aspects of my pictures: for instance, suspended narration, cancellation of temporality, the transitoriness of the material and the inexorable passage of time. Indeed, my pictures are representations of things that have stopped for while ( vita fermata in un instante immovile). A moment which does not last tenths of a second but a dilated instant that could include hundreds of years.
There is another factor I would like to make refference, the size of the vanitas and the dead nature which have a relation 1-1 to reality.
In my pictures, on the contrary, there is some kind of breaking between the space of the picture and the space of the spectator. The landscapes of the pictures are so large that we cannot know the real size of the scale. The spectator’s perception suffers an interior fight trying to distinguish the size as
well as the origin of the captured scale. There’s a perceptual break, a doubt, a sense of oddness about what is being observed. The camera, in general, enlarges the space, lengthens the movement, expands the time, becomes small the bigger and the big smaller of microscopic size, truns odd the familiar and unrecognizable the usual things.
The spectator is sure that he deals with something real in terms of space and materials. The main doubt is the procedence of the space.
The alegory about this human fragility and cultural entropy is overwhelming, assumed from the first moment. These unreal places, where every hope and narration is cut off, keep their allegorycal intention.Furthermore, everytime I show my work, it is impossible to avoid the refferences to lanscapes, the Afganistan or Irak devastated buildings… Unconciously, the spectators make a relation between the images they watch on TV and my pictures.
Subirats talks about the perfomatization of reality, filtered reality, due to the mass-media. Consequently, there is nothing we can do but realting my pictures with those taken from the fighter planes and bombers by the pilots through their laser sights. Pictures of what they will destroy.
(11) Jose Luis Brea. “un ruido secreto” . Mestizo 1996. Murcia
My pictures are seen from the secure distance of representation and aesthetics. Without feeling in danger because of destruction, this perspective allows us to enjoy the greatness of the inhospitable. All my pictures are aerial sights of those landscapes and buildings : double secure distance, one given by the representation an another by the aerial sight that offers the opprotunity to walk along this desolated space without touching the ground.
aisthesis………………….anaisthesis (12)
This secure space of representation, cinematic space, can be used to forget or anaesthetize us as the mass-media does. On the contrary, it also can be used as Walter Benjamin invites, a cognitive potential space and political consequece of the cutural experience technologilcally meassured. (13)
Bearing in mind this idea, Susan Buck-Morss claims the aesthetic use of new technologies, as Walter Benjamin does, in order to give back the power of critic and political reply to the society : briefly, aesthetics versus anaisthesis, taking aesthtetics in its former sense ( the one Walter Benjamin reffers to); [ Aisthetikos] ” all that is suitable of perception by means of sensation”, Aisthesis is the sensorial experience of perception.
Walter Benjamin says that our civilization suffers a status of continous shock produced by the alienating job in factories and the city life. ( Freud talks about war shock) Walter Benjamin talked about modern experience in neurological terms: the enviroment technologically altered exposes the human sense to continuous physical shocks that provoke mental shocks.
If we call sinesthesic system the one formed by our senses, neurones and the surrounding world composing the whole, Susan Buck-Morss says ” consequently, the system turns its function. Its goal is to numb the organism, kill the senses, suppress the memory: so, the cognitive system of sinaesthesic has turned anaesthesic. The eyes, bombed with fragmentary impressions, see too mucho and so the do not register anything. In this way, the simultaniety between “over-stimulation” and numbness is a characteristic of the new sinaesthesical organization understood like anaesthesic [anaesthetics]. (14)
Linking the ideas of Susan Buck-Morss and Subirats, we will see that the perfomatization of war by the mass-media and the continous bombed of fragmentary stimulus of TV about it, provokes a numbness, an anaesthesis of the senses as well as the critic conscious.
The purpose of the alegories about destruction that I represent in my work, would like to have the contrary effect of this anaesthesis of consciouness, suppression of the memory and numbness provoked by the mass-media with its bombing of images and destrucion stimulus. My purpose would be aesthetic, I mean, the opening of the senses, the memory, the conscience, that allows the spectator reconstruct his or her critical consciousness about the cultural, productive or energenetic systems. These systems, apart from others, make the destructive entropy present in my work familiar, like recent wars of colonization. Wars with no other goal than the maintenance of power and developing awful structures.
(12), (13), (14) Susan Buck-Mors. Estética y anestetica, una revisión del ensayo de Walter Benjamin
sobre la obra de arte. la balsa de la medusa Madrid. 1993
( the english term used by the author is “ anaesthetics” which reffers to the spanish sustantive “anestesica”. She plays with the ethimolgy of the word, from the greek anaisthesia, lack of perception of the senses.
David Elgea 2004