Draw a house with dotted lines.
Let people imagine the parts that are missing (a).
Let people forget the parts that are missing (b).
Spring, 1965.
Yoko Ono. From the series Instructions
– I bring you a message.
Ester took a cooking pot out of the basket which she had left in a
corner of the kitchen. Àlex and I limited ourselves to following her
with our eyes whilst she put her hands into the container to pull out
something solid.
I watched with the eyes of a novice. I was only aware of the
existence of this game of messages between her and Àlex Nogué because
Ester had told me about it. They exchanged presents, each of them
interpreting the gift received and elaborating on this with another in
response. They had provoked a correspondence of pieces, images, of
works, created in different disciplines, based on a private game which,
who knows when, takes impetus and acquires the qualities of an artistic
experiment which affords them great delight and whose plastic qualities
become more than the simple anecdote, obliging them to give an
interpretation to the whole. All this, they think, has a meaning. The
reading of the messages-responses generates a trajectory with a
character of its own, open to interpretation by a spectator from
outside. The game can be public; it can be exhibited as an
installation-conversation, an installation tennis match.
I knew these things. Ester had explained them to me one evening as we
walked around the village of Bàscara, a bucolic place, uninhabited and
silent, only disturbed by some adolescents on motorbikes. She had
explained how the game started, with a present which she had given to
Àlex, in the shape of a book of photographs, one of which, the face of a
woman from the Amazon, tattooed with a labyrinth, had become the first
message which she sent to him and in response to which Àlex put forward
the idea of replying.
– This is a message – she must have said, as she showed him the photograph.
– Then that message requires a reply – suggested Àlex.
How would I have replied to that message? I asked myself this as I
strolled through the streets of Bàscara with Ester. I decided, but
didn’t tell her. I knew that Àlex had replied, too (this was, as I said,
the start of the message games, which had reached, if my memory serves
me right, 18 in number) and Ester didn’t explain to me how, with what,
nor in what fashion he had replied to his interlocutor. I asked myself
if my own response, which was the first thing which entered my head
without having actually seen the image (and trusting that I had fully
understood the rules of the game), was in any way related to that which
Àlex Nogué had proposed. I also thought, quite sincerely, that I’d love
to take part in it.
ÀNGEL’S MENTAL RESPONSE TO ESTER’S FIRST MESSAGE. “WOMAN TATTOOED WITH A LABYRINTH”.
“The hand which begs shows, without shame, the lines of an unpromising destiny”.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna. “Greguerías”.
I didn’t know, at that moment, what the line of thought that had
linked the greguería (a kind of surrealist metaphor in epigram form
combining humour and poetic insight) with Ester’s image had been (I
suppose it was due to the fact that it depicted someone excluded from
the world of the rich, and showed some patterns on the skin as well),
but the fact is that it was the first thing that occurred to me, and
that gave it a special value. This is how the message game must work.
Ester pulled two pieces of ice from the pot. They were two cylinders,
one taller than the other, with small holes in them and made of ice. She
left them on the ground, on their sides. At Àlex’s house in Hostalets
d’en Bas the kitchen floor is made of enormous black slabs; an old floor
which Ester’s ice message matched perfectly. I could see a natural
relationship between that floor and the blocks of ice, a basic and
highly suggestive primitivism. “The truth is that I thought of the floor
of your house when creating the work”, she said to him.
The ice on the kitchen floor was the first real message-piece which I
saw of the game in which the artists were engaged. That was a message!
That was a certainty, a piece of evidence, a real reply! I wondered what
the previous message from Àlex must have been to have provoked that icy
reply from Ester.
“We’ll have coffee in the studio, that way you’ll see all the messages together”.
They had invited me to lunch at Hostalets. I didn’t know the Valley
d’en Bas, and that countryside, seen from the car, one weekday, far from
Barcelona, allowed me to disconnect completely. During lunch, we spoke
of other things, and little by little we centred on the reason for the
meeting, the message game, the last of which I had just seen before
sitting at the table. I asked questions; they explained the planning,
the day-to-day development of the experiment. They spoke of what was
very clear to them and of other things they were unable to define; they
speculated as to the importance of the significance which each conferred
on their message-response, and whether it was necessary or not for the
spectator of the whole to know anything about the entire process of
concretion. They had “theorised” about the reasons for the replies,
about the methodology of the creation. They had done this since the
beginning, from a personal point of view: they tried to capture in words
how they had arrived at the codification of the message which they
directed at the other and what they wanted to say by means of that
message. Months later, when the experiment was converted into material
for an exhibition, they shared the phases of the process, reading to one
another all that they had written about the pieces. They also decided
to include the intermediate levels of concretion, prior to the final
message (images from which they had started, rough drafts, photographs,
etc.). They were thinking of exhibiting that, too, together with the
final pieces. They had even contemplated the possibility of exhibiting
only two or three messages adding evidence of the phases of the process
(related documentation: photographs, texts, images, writings, etc.)
I have always been fascinated by that concept of art based on their
interaction with life. I think that the creator holds the power of
decision, and decides what he creates, what he understands to be
creative act. Art, by definition, is an act of decision. “That is not
art”, is often the opinion of the incredulous, the methodical, those who
compartmentalise and put things into pigeonholes. Art is the world
vision of he who creates; art are those parts of life which he decides
represent his perception of things. To create is not only to do, but
also to decide. It is based upon a direct implication with your
surroundings, with the scenery, with human relationships. The twentieth
century propitiated the mixing of art and life; the artist freed himself
from representing reality and valued instead a parallel one, his own,
that of his quotidian life, that of his thoughts. Duchamp signalled,
with the finger of the creator, an object which was ready made;
Schwitters worked upon his own habitat in order to construct an
alternative one for himself. The material was deconstructed; colour was
subjectivised. The creative being achieved the freedom to express
himself and represent his unconscious, his fears and his joys.
Ester and Àlex’s experiment, the game of exchanging messages, is
full of personal and vital references. Everything starts with a present
(a present which is given to someone, but also Pleasure given to the
senses), an expression of friendship, love and gratitude between the two
artists, and from that object with images, the first message is born,
the first sentence of a conversation which they have continued over
recent years. Conversations on themes which interest them, shared
attitudes towards life. Ester’s message is silent, because it contains
no words, only the face of a tattooed native, and the contemplation of
the photograph, but the act of sharing it almost certainly will have
fomented a lively verbal discussion. Perhaps the silent beauty of the
woman and the labyrinth on her face, the serenity of the plastic image,
conditioned the silence of the replies which followed. There are two
screen images, a video with a clip from a Buster Keaton film (Àlex,
message 10) and a CD for computer: the first is a silent film, the other
only allows one to hear the beating of a heart. I ask myself if that
first message, Ester’s finger indicating the photograph in the book (the
finger of Duchamp indicating a ready-made) was exactly a question, or
no more than the confirmation of that of which she was already aware,
their shared admiration of beauty; an “Àlex, I know that this will
please you” and, effectively, he proposed initiating a conversation.
The life of the two artists appears and conceals itself in the
consecutive messages. They have shared a long and friendly relationship
since their days at the faculty of Fine Arts of Barcelona; there is a
journey to India; there is a broken romance; there is an experience of
work, a period of doubts, a search for oneself and an ending up in the
same place, having gone around in two hundred circles. In the messages,
the social reality of the time and place in which they live, the
Catalonia-Spain-Europe which still does not know how to deal with
immigration, which it approaches tentatively, and to which it is both
open and closed at the same time, can be found. So too, can the reality
of the rural world that has still not totally disappeared, following the
massive exodus to the cities and industries, but has gained new adepts
amongst those people who have tired of the advantages of the big cities.
But “modern life”, the imaginary one of the technological revolution,
necessarily invades the rural modus vivendi and also transforms it,
obliging it to readapt. How is it possible to organise, in only one
unstructured exercise book, the variety of telephone numbers and
different addresses? “Adela address”, “Adela landline”, “Adela mobile”,
“Adela fax”, “Adela e-mail”, etc. (Ester, message number 17)
The quotidian life of the interlocutors, their experiences, their
desires, inevitably enter the conversation. It is about, this much is
evident, all that which they want to say and that is why they speak.
Objects from their surroundings, from the furniture (the force of five
wool mattresses, from double beds, covered only with striped ticking,
embracing, both in form and content, the ethereal and volatile
dimension, of an intricate telephone book. Ester, message 17); clothes;
people with whom they spend their time and many life experiences,
partner, pupils, friends. Ester and Àlex take out of context and isolate
tools and pieces of junk to elaborate the messages. From time to time,
they confer movement on the objects, they charge them with life (the
vibrating ladder. Àlex, message 18); personalise and humanise that which
is inanimate (the wrapping paper designed with an egocentric “I want”
and “today I start”. Ester, message 11); they stop and freeze that which
is mobile through inertia (the heart which stops beating, the toy
lorries loaded with flowers and stopped on a steep ramp). Ester gives a
gardenia to Àlex in reply to the image of the heart which stops beating
in an ecography. Ester’s plant (message number 5) carries instructions
similar to those poetic instructions by Yoko Ono: Àlex, recipient of the
message, has to observe how the gardenia grows, he has to control the
rhythm of its growth in the same way as he does his own respiration as
he walks.
I can distinguish three types of relationship between the
message/question and the message/reply. During the first phase of the
project, the replies from one to the other have a certain formal link,
by which I mean that the form of the received image (the formal content)
conditions the reply. The facial labyrinth of Ester’s aboriginal woman
(message 1) receives as a reply a tangle of wire netting imprisoning a
hazelnut (Àlex, message 2). Ester responds with the photographs of a
paper-chain which adopts various different forms (message 3), one of
which resembles a heart, perhaps the heart of the ecography which Àlex
sent her (message 4). Later, an engraving by Ester (message 15) which
shows an encircled leaf, received by way of reply a very subtle
construction by Àlex: a glass column made with small glass pots full of
blue pigment and crowned with a spent light bulb. All the glass content
of the piece (message 16) has a form which is similar to that which
encircles the leaf of Ester’s message.
A second type of relationship between messages is that which I shall
term MESSAGE-REPLY, which, both formally and conceptually, bears a
direct relationship to the previous message. This is the case in Àlex’s
reply to Ester’s gardenia: a series of pencil drawings of the plant,
dated to the minute and done over a few days (message 6), like when he
made a tape which is a recording of his own breathing as he walks. The
third kind of reply, the most common, is that which has undergone a
process of reflection which escapes the understanding of the novice
observer and offers no clues to be able to relate it, formally and
rapidly, to consecutive messages.
ASKING ONESELF QUESTIONS
It was a beautiful evening in the Valley d’en Bas the day that the
artists invited me to the workshop in Hostalets to see the messages.
They recreated the chronological order of the messages to offer me a
vision of the whole according to the order in which they had been
produced. From time to time, I asked them for guidance as to the reason
for a particular reply, and then they let me read, if such a thing
existed, the verbal message, written down, which they had thought of for
that piece.
I was unfamiliar with Àlex Nogué’s work, but knew that of Ester
Baulida, whom I have always admired sincerely. I am convinced that the
previous work of both, their creative experience, frequently emerges in
the conversation which they maintain by means of this message game. And
the fact is that the aesthetics do succeed in blending, they match
perfectly and manage to confuse me. Messages from Ester which I would
have said were from Àlex; replies from Àlex which, as soon as I set eyes
on them, upon entering the studio, I had thought to be the works of
Ester Baulida. The act of concentrating upon a theme (the conversation
informal, but sincere) has bought them closer formally, in the sense
that, in my view, the figure of the person has prevailed over that of
the artist. In the experimental pieces they have allowed the creative
“I” to identify completely with the personal “I”, and Àlex and Ester
have much in common. That which makes them get on so well together as
friends, makes for a formal coherence in the messages. They opt for
simplicity, clarity, for the subjective experience and for sincerity.
They opt for immediacy, for the primitive and basic force, for heart
before head, for senses over thought. The project’s pieces transmit
cleanliness, light; they keep their feet firmly on the ground, turning
to fundamental things, to the view, to nature, to the hand.
As I walked amongst the works and wrote a few observations in my
notebook, I thought about the creative techniques employed by Pina
Bausch, the German choreographer, with her troop of dancers at
Wuppertal. Pina’s method, of which Ester and I are great fans, is based
upon a series of basic questions which she asks the dancers, and the
configuration of the new show is based on their replies. She demands
sincerity of them, investigating the intimate experience and a certain
choreographic sense of movements and actions. As in the case of the
plastic artist, the choreographer decides. She decides which movements
are dance, and finds them in the most quotidian actions, in the most
habitual gestures, in people’s way of relating to one another and in the
instinctive part of the self.
Pina Bausch’s messages in her work “Walzer”, launched in 1982, were,
amongst others: “Make a trap for someone. Think of a very simple phrase
and express it without words. Who knows how to do a handstand? Hold a
cigarette. Do you know how Red Indians crawl along the floor? Tell a
story without making any noise. Submission. Defend yourself. How do you
kill an animal? What can you do with one hand? Rituals carried out by
someone else and which really annoy you...” For “Für die Kinder von
gestern, heute und morgen”, 2002, the questions were of the type “What
would happen if we imagined that we were birds, free of any ties? What
would happen if we found ourselves newly at the dawn of life, with all
our options still open”? Pina Bausch’s shows are so forceful that you
feel an uncontrollable impulse to climb onto the stage and act with the
company, scenify their games and answer their questions. Enter their
story. Intervene in their conversation.
This is the sensation which I myself felt upon admiring the dialogue
between the two artists: I wanted to join in, give my point of view,
suggest a different reply. It annoyed me not to be able to join the
conversation, to be a simple spectator/listener limited to standing
there, marvelling at the beauty of the words/images to be heard and
seen.
– You can participate in some way, if you wish – Ester had said to me
during our first encounter at Bàscara, and they would repeat this at the
studio in Hostalets, the two artists in front of the displayed works.
I was not able to resist.
THE GAME OF ÀNGEL’S MESSAGES.
I decided to take one of the messages in the chain and describe it in
words to a group of acquaintances from the world of literature. How
would a novelist or a poet respond to the messages? What reading would
they give them? Would I allow fiction to be introduced or would I let
the first person and personal experience speak? I chose a message by
Àlex, that of the ecography of the beating heart, given that the piece
was ideal for my purpose: it was not limited to graphic language; it
referred to quotidian experience; it left no-one indifferent and in
addition, it opens the doors to the most pure fiction, in that it speaks
of the act of dying.
To acquaint the writers with the antecedents, I wrote the letter, the
transcription of which follows, and sent it to the e-mail addresses of
seventeen people who are fairly well-known within the world of Catalan
literature. As can be appreciated from the note, I insist on freedom of
action and absence of coercion when taking part in the game: so that
each one was free to answer the heart’s message according to their own
disposition, interest or desire to experiment.
Dear Friends! My name is Àngel, and I’m about to ask you in good faith
for a few words, a brief message, in order to continue in some way a
message/game which has been suggested to me. Let me explain:
Àlex Nogué and Ester Baulida are two plastic artists. He is a
professor at the University of Barcelona and she, in addition to having
been a friend for many years, is one of the Gerona artists whom I most
admire. Ester and Àlex are preparing an exhibition which has been
commissioned by l’Espai Zer01 of the Museum of Olot, a gallery
specialising in contemporary art, which will open next September. Their
proposal started from a shared idea, an idea which arose from their
daily lives, unsought, and is based on the exchanging of messages. One
day, Ester made a present of a book of photographic images to Àlex, and
she chose one of the photos (a native Peruvian woman with a face
tattooed with a labyrinth) and announced to him that it was a message
which she was sending to him and which required a reply, also in the
form of an image, from him. They have maintained this relationship for a
year by means of the messages-images-gifts, which they have exchanged
regularly. Each one received a message and codified it according to
their own viewpoint, ignorant of the sender’s explanation, and sent
another one back, which had to be interpreted as a reply.
Questions/answers which have accumulated and ended in the formation of a
group of exquisite pieces, the exhibition of which, like the phases of
the process, will fill the gallery at Olot.
A book-catalogue is to be published which will explain in detail the
creation and exchange of the visual messages. I have seen the complete
pieces and their authors have explained the whole process to me. My task
will be more literary than documental, and seduced, as I have been, by
the message game, I thought of suggesting to my friends that they write a
parallel mini-game and compose, in this way, a written counterpoint
based on the visual game.
It is far from my intention to inconvenience you, nor should I like
to think that, lacking the time or wish to do so, you reply to me out of
obligation. As I have told you, this is nothing more than a test, an
experiment.
For this reason, and here is what I propose, I am sending you the
description of one of the messages which Ester and Àlex have exchanged.
This was sent by him, in the form of a visual CD, and was given to him
by doctor friend. Ester replied to the message (which was the fourth in
the series) with another, which I don’t need to explain. They have
reached the figure of 23 related messages.
Well, the case is that I would be very pleased if you could reply to
this message from Àlex with a simple image, with a phrase, with a verse,
with a proposal, with anything which occurs to you after receiving it.
I don’t know, the first thing which enters your head, a name, a place, a
saying, a poem by someone. Or send an image to me in JPG format. I
should like to start a brief correspondence of messages with you, and
finally, include this series in the artists’ book.
I insist: you must not feel obliged to reply. But I am deeply interested in trying this experiment.
The message is as follows:
THE GENUINE ECOGRAPHY (IT LASTS 36 SECONDS) OF A HUMAN HEART WHICH IS
CEASING TO BEAT. IT BEARS THE NAME OF THE PATIENT, THE EXACT DATE OF THE
RECORDING, AND THE CURVES OF THE RHYTHM OF THE ELECTROCARDIOGRAM AT THE
BOTTOM. THE HEART BEATS, IT ACCELERATES, AND SUDDENLY IT RELAXES.
FINALLY IT STOPS, BECAUSE THE PATIENT EXPIRES.
The image is in black and white, blurred. It could be anything
organic which moves and then moves no more. The image is abstract, and
moving if you know exactly what it represents.
What does it suggest to you? What would you reply to me if you received this message?
Allow me to greet you and thank you for your attention. It is much appreciated.
Àngel Burgas.
Of seventeen possible interlocutors, only five replied to the
message. Others made excuses for various reasons and the majority said
nothing. Of the five, three included in the message-reply a comment on
the interest which the experiment had awoken in them. In the letter,
the possibility of continuing the game with a reply to the message which
they had sent, from me, was not made clear. But I tried it. After their
messages, I sent them a second message, this time personal and in the
form of a reply to the message which they had thought of, in this way
recreating Ester’s and Àlex’s dialogue. Only one of the writers replied
to this second message of mine.
Eduard Márquez replied to the heart message with a poem. Presumably it is a poem by him, I imagine unpublished. It says:
Mort.
Les onades s’enduen mar enllà
El reflex del passat.
A la vora de l’aigua,
Només queda la sal muda.
Dead.
The waves carry out to the sea
The reflection of the past.
At the water’s edge
Only the silent salt remains.
An image of desolation, without a doubt, and of silence. My reply was
motivated by the fact that it was a poem, which described a scene, an