Proyecto para un texto / Project for a Text
Cosmopoética 2015, Córdoba, Spain
Sala Galatea, casa Góngora, 2/10 – 15/11 2015
with:
John Baldessari
Marcel Broodthaers
Chris Burden
Jan Dibbets
Dénes Farkas
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Rogelio López Cuenca
Michalis Pichler
Rafael Quintero
curated by: Óscar Fernández López
"In the 1969 artwork La pluie (projet pour un texte), we can see the
artist Marcel Broodthaers trying to write a text under the rain. This
attempt is, no doubt, condemned to failure. He seems aware of it
but, nonetheless, the expression of his face and the writing
ceremony remain unalterable. Maybe, the subject matter here is the
failure itself; maybe, the very idea of a text, or the act of writing, is a
chimera.
Although spent his entire life buried in letters -maybe because of
that- Broodthaers, together with Roland Barthes, seemed always
distrustful about writing. He found it insufficient, frustrating, and also
unable to make him earn some money. All this reasons forced his
shift to the visual arts realm, where he would find the appreciation
he never found between poets. His pockets remained almost empty.
Nonetheless, the Belgian artist never rejected writing. On the
contrary, he introduced text and writing in his artistic practice in such
an astonishing way that still today, 50 years later, is one of the most
influential modern artists. But there was a battle he declared lost:
there is no way to blend both worlds, the literary and the artistic. He
reached a clear conclusion: artists and poets do not understand
each other, so they do not blend either. Any fusion attempt between
them is just a void gesture or the appropriation/domination of one
over another.
The discourse of this exhibition is based on Broodthaers´ certainty:
visual arts and literature, with exceptions of course, have an infertile
and asymmetrical relationship. They´re constantly thieving each
other but, despite the existence of few alchemic miracles,
permeability between them is not that happy and productive
endeavor we are used to listen and celebrate. So, trying not to follow
this “ecumenical” common place, not to fall in the postmodern
concept of cool intertextuality, we propose a group of non-literary
artworks that, paradoxically, use words and texts as medium,
support or inspiration. Because, according to Barthes o Blanchot,
the act of writing is a very different issue than the construction of the
literary field, we collected a series of artworks in which the text
flows, but the literary do not take control."
Óscar Fernández López