Transcript Document

Fisae XXXI
congress
Nyon Switzerland
26 august 2006
Eros & Thanatos:
ex-libris images
as cultural
wallpaper
by Mauricio Cruz
How can we know
whether the man
in Spitzweg’s
painting is
reading a text or
looking at an
image ?
…
In other words:
who, or what, is
the “worm” ?
Ex-libris
wallpaper
by Lewis &
Wood
[a]
Carl Spitzweg -around 1850
“The bookworm” / “Der Büchenwürm”
The wallpaper :
If each book lining the library held an ex-libris within it, and if we imagine that
the library were to suddenly disappear with all its books, leaving only the exlibris, the wall would transform itself into a “wallpaper,” a visual motif with
floating vignettes, the same hovering figures that make up the aforesaid
images.
The worm :
In languages such as English and German, enthusiastic readers are
characterized as “bookworms” rather than “library rats” (in French) or “library
mouses” (in Spanish). The difference is meaningful: while in the first case, the
implicit associations recall the apple or the skull, both objects with fatal
consequences, the second instance is more directly related to a furtive food, in
the manner of a hidden cheese or abandoned goods.
The “familiarity” between
the apple (1) and the skull
is confirmed here by
the snake (the worm)
MAD Magazine, issue 215, June 1980
(1) In 1989 I wrote a first article on the subject of ex-libris: “Del libro como manzana”
(The Book as Apple), published in Gradiva, a literary magazine
Wallpaper, as the emotional
cultural textile that it is, can
essentially be reduced to the
alternating motifs of roses and
skulls.
The point is that this
necessarily marginal image of
Eros and Thanatos has the
power to synthesize a general,
though often overlooked,
situation.
…
In consequence, these two essential motifs turned into a recurrent theme,
which resurfaces in the following two ex-libris I made …
Bref :
The skull, as a
photograph of
the final credits
of a movie seen
on TV.
EX_LIBRIS? Benoit Junod
Photo-engraving, 1988
And the rose, as
taken from an oldtime Parisian
sugarcube
wrapping
decorated with
floral motifs.
EX-LIBRIS ANALFABÉTICO
VOX POPULI
Xilography, 1988
[b]
“Common Places…” an article
published in
emciblog.blogspot.com
about the relationship between my
three ex-libris
“When we speak today of ‘common
places,’ we mean, for the most part,
stereotypical expressions, by now devoid
of any meaning, banalities, lifeless
metaphors (‘morning is golden-mouthed’),
trite linguistic conventions. Certainly this
was not the original meaning of the
expression ‘common places.’ For Aristotle
(Rhetoric, I, 2, 1358a) the topoi koinoi are
the most generally valid logical and
linguistic forms of all of our discourse (let
us even say, the skeletal structure of it);
they allow for the existence of every
individual expression we use and they give
structure to these expressions as well.
Such ‘places’ are common because no
one can do without them (from the refined
orator to the drunkard who mumbles words
hard to understand, from the business
person to the politician). Aristotle points
out three of these ‘places’: the connection
between more and less, the opposition of
opposites, and the category of reciprocity
(‘If I am her brother, she is my sister’).”
... And this led to the
“third” ex-libris:
a “political” feminization
of a colombian peso
Before…
(when such a thing existed back in
1953)
Thinking then about the type
of images that could be
placed in books, not as
illustrations or themes, but
as ex-libris, as an artistic
genre in itself, I remembered
that domestic habit of using
books for safekeeping bank
notes: that habit of using the
library as a home bank, like
a paper piggybank, or
momentary hiding place for
that circulating image.
Billete de 1 peso. Bogotá, Colombia, 1953
(Bolivar and Santander framing the historical landscape
of the Boyaca Bridge)
After!
(…) In this sense, the bank
note, as an institutional
figure, could be exposed to
some form of cultural,
idiosyncratic surgery.
Ex-Libris Paisa (un peso mujer)
Photoshop, Laser print, 2005
But let us return to the
paradoxes of
VOX POPULI, the
?
analphabetical
ex-libris
(does there exist a book in which
such an ex-libris can be inserted?)
…
“Éros tient le milieu entre le
savoir et l’ignorance.”
Platon, Le Banquet
POPULAR
natural. vibrant. nice. explicit. pure.
seducing. amazing. lovely. pretty.
stimulating. beautiful. immaculate.
provocative. sensual. dazzling.
pleasant. healthy. teasing. exciting.
gorgeous. naughty. erotic. cute.
charming. lascivious. self-confident.
sweet. happy. sexy. inspiring.
voluptuous…
... the shift from
printed words to
highly visual
media, shifting
thinking from
abstract and
alphabetical to
concrete and
analphabetical.
(between the apple
and a peep-hole)
La rose, pas
la pomme
“The great Jeanne de
l’Echiquier d’Alençon called it
her oval (…) And it is without
doubt this image which is at
the origin of the mystical
almond that, in the Middle
Ages, symbolized Mary’s
virginity in all its Glory -oval in
its almond-like shape, used to
decorate sculptures of the
Virgin. Meanwhile, one
generally reserves the name
‘mandorla’ for that which
surrounds Christ in his Majesty
in representations of the Last
Judgment, while saints only
have a right to the rounded
halo.”
Dictionnaire littéraire et érotique des fruits et
légumes, JL HENNIG, Albin Michel
Fray Hortensio Félix de Paravicino, by el Greco
QUOD IN IMAGINIBUS, EST IN LINGUA
(insofar as it is in images, it is in language)
“Car ce vaste
ensemble de
systèmes de
signification
qu’est le social
fonctionne - de
même que
l’exercise de la
langue de façon
inconsciente.”
“The unconscious (...) as a
systemic social formation (...) also
accounts for (...) the specific
condensation of signifiers (...) IT
SPEAKS” Lacan
“ ‘It is no longer conceivable (…) that the word
has an accidental relation to its object’ Instead,
he (Benjamin) told that every human language is
really a failed and garbled translation of a divine
language that speaks in things. ‘It is the
translation of the language of things into that of
man.’ “
Lévi-Strauss
(...) “the ‘objective chance’ in
which any artist or person will
learn to read the half erased
letters of a text written by
desire.”
[c]
The “analphabetic book”…
Interpretation:
the art of the
people
Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango,
Bogotá. 1997
A curatorial idea for an
itinerant exhibition
by Mauricio Cruz
Do you know how to read?
Can you differentiate a duck from
a goose, a trunk from a suitcase?
The idea behind this museographic strategy consists of presenting a series of art works
as a puzzle of artistic interpretation that is set before the spectator. In this way, the
exhibition de-centers the authority of specialized knowledge (as removed as it is
intimidating to the general, profane public), and displaces it towards an area of
imaginative possibilities of association specific to creative thinking. Thus, each work is
translated into a language of environments, objects, images, sounds, texts, and so forth,
which function as poetic revealers that behave according to conditions of
indetermination, the very basis of this entire proposal.
The installations, the proposed “scenographisms,” are thus examples of an artistic
interpretation of each one of the works. This is not so much in the rational, analytic sense
-which is typical of traditional critical judgment, one that usually contradicts the operative
modes that are specific to artistic thought- but as an open form of participation, more
spontaneous and connected with the processes of association by analogy.
Using this technique, I seek to propose a communication option or model -always in
artistic terms- that will mediate in the well-known separation between ART and its
PUBLIC.
The Line, by P. Guston
two
pages
Gossips, by N. Rockwell
8-9
Abcd…tongues of the eye
12-13
“If dream is thought. If dreaming is thinking of
something.” -L. Wittgenstein
-When I use a word -said Humpty Dumpty
in the same condescending tone-, that
word means exactly what I want it to
mean, nothing less.
And two more pages
…”because the mission
and power of images is
to render visible all that
remains inaccessible to
the concept.” -M. Eliade
20-21
Do you know how to read?
-The question is knowing -said Alice- if
one is able to make words mean different
things.
-The question is knowing -said Humpty
Dumpty- who will dictate the rule…and
that’s it.” -L. Carroll
Gift, by Man Ray
24-25
Things as “optical instruments”
(not simply to see them, but to see through them)
Just an example:
A large rectangular background painted with a hospital-like green (optical, spotless, scholastic). The painting is placed on this wall as if it
were effectively a blackboard. Next to it, a popular poster with a provocatively nude woman. Placed approximately one meter in front of it,
lies an old wardrobe, completely closed -it is meant to be filled with clothes, for parts of these slip out through the tight cracks of doors and
drawers. The wardrobe gives off the muffled sound of songs that come from 3 or 4 radios hidden inside, all receiving different local radio
stations. On the green wall -surrounding the blackboard- one can see linear drawings made with tailors’ templates, which appear stuck
onto different parts of its surface
The “scenic” interpretation
14-15
The art work
A painting by
Santiago Cárdenas
School Days, by Jasper Johns
“What the reader can also do,
leave it to him.” -L. Wittgenstein
The book
(again)
22
27
Last page [really]
…
A text written to painter Victor Laignelet
in relation to “the Book”
The ex-libris analfabético is thus in its proper, own place!