Lanudo: A "Strange" Drawing by Dominique Serrano

I

A few days ago I looked at some of the drawings that the Chilean artist Dominique Serrano included in a group exhibition currently on show at Animal Gallery, Santiago, Chile. Discussing the work with her on the basis of what I saw on the website, I became aware of a “distance” between what I thought I was looking at on my computer screen and what was actually on show.
Another thing that amused me was her mention of the piece “Lanudo” as being “somewhat strange.” It amused me because it seems to me that, to use Freudian terminology “the unhomely” or the “strangeness of the familiar” is no longer the exception but the rule and a quality eagerly sought after by art practitioners today. Another question that came to my mind was why did she feel it was strange?

Strangeness (that is, systematic and coherent strangeness) is just another way of saying “uniqueness,” it distances you from your surroundings and allows for the creation of an independent identity, a profile, if you like. The artist today needs this profile, not to feel personally special and interesting but as a tool to circulate through the media and the web creating and exploiting a personal myth. Today, artists need to be readable and above all communicable in order to exist in a media-dominated reality.

Strangeness is also a momentary, in-between condition that will inevitably be absorbed into established categories and concepts. Therefore, for me, the strangeness of Lanudo comes not from its current or possible form, or from what Dominique might do to it to change it, but from my incomplete understanding of it as an event, an incompleteness that in this particular case derives of distance and mediation.

In the past you would look at a painting and rather than wonder about its thematic coherence (unless you were a scholar) you would tend to carefully observe the brushstrokes, the lines, the stains, the volumes and forms, trying to engage with the artist’s physical process and infer from it his or her intentions. Today, you are more liable to observe with the same degree of attention the theoretical underpinnings and other conceptual aspects of the work in an attempt to link them to a broader theoretical context, because these days we know that the work is not all there before you, it includes that other information and besides, most of the times, as occurred in this case, you are not face to face with the actual object.

I saw Dominique’s early work for the first time a few years ago, shortly after her return to Chile from Spain and I was pleasantly surprised to make the connection with these recent pieces. In her early drawings large sheets of paper provided a dominant, white space inhabited by pencil lines and colour marks that seemed to delicately drift together to form depictions of the female body of a vaguely pubescent sexual nature. The relationship between foreground and background was clearly in favour of the background, which seemed to invade the foreground through the open treatment of the female form. In her current installation for “Animal” Gallery, the pencil lines have become physical constructions and objects floating on the white walls of the gallery, like a 3D version of her earlier drawings. There has been a “thickening of the line” both in terms of density of content and of physical form: lines have become objects (then again perhaps lines have always been objects, and it is just that we have become accustomed to reading them as signs, based on their content value rather than their usually spare physical presence).

Examining her work on the gallery website, I was unable to identify certain materials as being form (foreground) or background and as a result, my reading of them was tentative and open-ended, based primarily on a quality of black that I identified in the works. As a result, I established provisional connections that made sense only if my assessment of the materials had been correct according to what I could see in the photo. As it turned out, it was not.

Evidently a photo or other image of the work will never replace the experience of actually being in front of an art work, and with the new digital imaging possibilities, it is no longer a reliable record either. But the truth is that, nowadays at least, it does replace this experience. In what could almost be described as an application of Gresham’s law, the “bad money” or media image has completely replaced the “good money” of the real experience of the work of art in viewers’ awareness and also in the specialist media, simply because it is not possible to see most if not all of the works that we read about. It is physically impossible and we simply do not have the time to do it. As a result, we find ourselves in a situation best illustrated by the example of a poem by the French member of OULIPO (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) Raymond Queneau: “Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes” (One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems). This is an experimental work proposing a combinatory of possibilities such that if we took one minute to read each resulting sonnet, and we did this for eight hours every day, two hundred days per year, it would take a million centuries to finish the poem. The reality today, is that we cannot deal with the amount of information available.

Queneau’s poem, like Dominique’s piece titled “Lanudo,” lies in a potential state linked to a minimal materiality (a few words and an algorithm). In the case of the poem life is too short for you to ever fully experience the real thing. It is a performance that conceivably could happen, but never will. In the case of Lanudo its potentiality, and the source of its strangeness is not in the artist’s availability of choice, or her desire to “cut off some parts” but in the fact of her hesitation, which immediately locates the piece in a place in time rather than physical space, even cultural space. The event of her work, as reflected by the physical object, is suspended in between potential choices that have not been made (yet) and this existential condition also reflects a struggle that is currently taking place in the world of technology, the effects of which could be described as “being in the eye of the storm.”

II

Recent technological and commercial developments suggest that our awareness of personal finitude, our physical and material limitations will not change, only intensify. The production of information today is such that we will never catch up. In such a space, terminology, in the form of “key terms” together with Boolean search techniques are called to define (temporary) “form” that will identify and “name” selected data or areas of information from the remaining universe of the web. Given this, we should really ask ourselves about the nature of the real, of reality in our time and perhaps, also, acknowledge that, in the arts at least, physicality and permanence increasingly seem to act as validating referents in a role much like that of gold in gold-based economies.

As I mentioned above, most of the art work we see these days is mediated in some form of publication, website, photo, blog, etc. On the face of it, as I have explained in connection with the work of Dominique Serrano, this would seem to involve a distancing from the real, from the “original.” But, even allowing for this referential role, does it really? Hasn’t the computer screen become the face-to-face of our time? Is Google not real? Is Yahoo not real? The proliferation of web-based dating services, spaces for personal interaction as YouTube and Face Book and now, also, virtual spaces like Second Life certainly seems to suggest so.

Perhaps then, what has happened is that the narrative dimension of things, the myth, the story about the object has finally replaced the real thing in our experience, with beauty now not a quality inherent to the object but something to be found in the poetic resonance created by the choice of words used to describe it, the story of it, as defined by the nature of the relationship between the viewer and the object: a moment.

Or perhaps our experiences are increasingly less physical and more intellectual. If that is the case, what I saw on the web, with all my mistakes and omissions was actually the “real” work of Dominique Serrano, real for me that is, thousands of miles away in London, unable to fully experience the physical object, and real, also, for potentially millions of others. The question is, are we as artists producing work for the web, for the story, for the complex narrative system through which 99% of viewers interact with the work and where the work actually occurs rather than for the increasingly rare experience of its original? Or are we artists trying to convey our experience of the work as we see it when we make it and touch it, through a prototype and, in fact, the “real” work is the interface-determined “semi-experience” replicated and circulated millions of times in the vast avenues of the Internet “cloud,” where only Ariadne’s thread (or the tracks left behind by our own footsteps) can lead us in and out?

III

If you follow the ongoing media coverage about the battle of the giants, Google and Microsoft, and the latter’s efforts to acquire the company Yahoo, you will have probably read the term “cloud computing.” Cloud Computing or Internet-based computing implies, among other things that, in the future, software, for example, might not be resident in your computer. Instead, you will access it through the Internet via consolidated providers that take advantage of dropping connectivity costs. This represents an evolution from software to “software services.” One can only imagine the structural consequences of this in the corporate world.

Will the local office and representative disappear entirely, or will their function be redefined as a localized website, “hub” or Data Centre-type location catering exclusively to local users? How will the “local” be defined and controlled? Who will be in charge of oversight? How will market territories be defined? Will the entire concept of software “ownership” disappear and be replaced by a broader form of long distance licensing?

In the story so far, the Founder and CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates has voluntarily stepped down from his executive position and resigned from the day-to-day management of his company. In doing so, he has removed the symbolic obstacle of an aging view of the role of the company from the equation. For his part, the new Chief Executive of the company has declared that the currently defunct negotiations with Yahoo could be resumed only if the entire board of Yahoo resigns, particularly Jerry Yang, its CEO, who is seen by many market analysts as a major stumbling block in the failed negotiations, blaming his personal views on Microsoft and its founder.

One might be forgiven for believing that this kind of issue has little or no relevance in the art world, but the truth is that what is happening with Microsoft today is highly relevant to the art world and artists. It is very likely to revolutionize the basic tectonics of the art world, challenging established assumptions about what is art and even the value of art and the art object, with potentially massive structural and economic consequences. The world is at a technological crossroads that is in a way reflected by the question underlying Dominique’s drawing-wall piece: do I “remain material” or do I “go meaning”, still analog...or waiting to go digital? (The actual object depicted is, I firmly believe, a dog).

The astronomical figures paid for “safe” forms of art investment, such as paintings by certain artists (a painting by Lucian Freud was recently sold to a Russian billionaire in London for 37 million pounds sterling, the highest price ever paid for the work of a living artist) reveals that, as far as the art market is concerned at least, the value of “new” web-based art and other non-physical , temporary and experimental forms of art has not yet consolidated and also, that the growing unavailability of a certain kind of “blue chip” work is forcing changes of attitude and perception with respect to other less physical and even temporary or time-based kinds of works, a process begun many years ago with the French Impressionists, the post-impressionists and a very short list of living artists.

Just like the emergence of the personal computer and Sony’s Portapak portable video camera did in the 70’s, the technology that allows for “cloud computing” will change the context in which we communicate art and also how we make it, to such an extent that unforeseeable new forms of art will emerge, a totally different aesthetics, complete with its own grammar, medium-specific terminology and audience. This will undoubtedly be followed by some new form of art market or a mutation of the existing art system. Perhaps present-day web-based art and artist collectives as well as virtual environments can give us clues as to their possible form and function, but the best is always yet to come. So far, however, the art market seems not to have a clear, dominant vision of its future development and therefore the smart money is assigning a high premium to safer forms of art rather than embracing whole heartedly the new forms.
The fact that none of the new forms of galleries and exhibition spaces and organizations has become predominant reflects, like Lanudo the fact that here too, the matter is yet to be resolved and that the issues at stake in the Microsoft-Yahoo saga concern us all.


IV

Surveying the artistic practices and phenomena of her time in the book “Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972...” Lucy Lippard documents a period of flux in the arts scene in NY in particular. She also heralds a process of dematerialization of the work of art at a time when the authority of the museum (and the art world) was being questioned by galleries and institutional exhibition spaces, progressing to the mobility and dynamism of the so-called “independent spaces” and “artist run spaces” of the 90s and including the emerging figure of the independent curator. This was followed by the emergence of the artist curator, artist collectives all the way up to the loose, globally dispersed associations of today. This has involved a technologically determined breakdown and atomization of structures, an ongoing process of liquefaction of the production of content in the art world.

By putting out all the information and limiting her conclusions Lippard allows us to observe more or less freely what was happening at that time, allowing us as readers to identify the roots of work done years later, trends, failed trends, etc. It is through this birds-eye observation that we can make the connections between the reality of the 70s and the emerging technologies of today, with its own emerging technologies.

Microsoft’s strategy clearly reflects the fact that today’s technology and market conditions do not allow for the ready emergence of a new Google or a new Yahoo and that these companies will most likely consolidate and “rule the cloud” defining and imposing the way we will interact in these spaces in the foreseeable future. Microsoft is a producer of objects (software) and Yahoo (like Google) is a venue through which such objects will be distributed. In cloud computing what is at stake is not the sale of technology and goods on the Internet , however, but a vast market of online users of computing resources, perhaps the biggest market ever created, for many years to come. What is at stake is no more and no less a completely new global reality.

To describe this phenomenon in pictorial terms, what is happening is that the foreground (form, structure, Microsoft) has entered into conflict with the background (The Internet, Yahoo, Google) for pre-eminence in response to the changing conditions of a fluid picture plane. Action is no longer dictated and described by form while background space, in turn, is no longer the passive, formless host of form it used to be. It has become active and now seeks its own form, something that it will never achieve, for in the Internet, form is defined by the query, by our movements in that space and therefore spatial perception on the Internet is a one-to-one, personal experience (hence the emergence of MySpace, for example).

In seeking to assert its own form, the background or space enters into conflict with the foreground in terms of the basic Aristotelian principle of identity: two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time; also, two things cannot be the same thing at the same time. So far, however, neither can do without the other. Will form and structure (Microsoft) prevail? Will space (Yahoo, Google) prevail? In a painting, such a conflict, the stage it is currently at, is best represented by flat space, a side by side division of the pictorial plane that does not help the viewer in identifying what he/she sees, creating ambiguity and hesitation and with it, uncertainty.

At this point, we are all waiting for something to happen, for the dust to settle so to speak. This existential hesitation is reflected in the piece titled Lanudo by the Chilean artist Dominique Serrano. Because of her hesitation, the aesthetic element in her work no longer resides exclusively in the specific information, physical object or context of installation but on the event of the staging of that information in a fluid meaningful space, a moment, as I explained. Therefore, rather than art objects we are now looking at art-events whose independent elements (physical or otherwise) “come together” in space and time when the maker or artist publishes them, when we see them.

The root of the “strangeness” of the piece titled “Lanudo” by Dominique Serrano and also the work exhibited at Animal Gallery (as I saw it on the web) is that it has not yet found its valid counterpart, its true referents and peers. It is simply in a nameless state prior to “being.” Put simply, such works, just like the corporate battle I have referred to here, reflect a process of gradual social fluidization that affects everything, but because the battle is not over, as I said, we are all waiting for something to happen. When the penny finally drops (and it must) we will decide, name, classify, conceptualize and move on.