José Manuel Bártolo
Destruction:
A work in progress
There is a kind of vital
experience – time and space experience, of us and of the others, of life
possibilities and dangers – that is shared by women and men all over the world,
today. To this group of experiences we can call contemporaneity. Maybe we, the contemporary,
aren’t living something substantially different from the ones that came before
the ones that came before us – the moderns – lived.
The environmental experience of
the contemporaneity – in what it has
of return to the modern and of awareness of the impossibility of such return –
is marked by the crisis and resistance to the models, categories and values
that – from the political to the economical, from the religious to the artistic
– drive ourselves into a confrontation with forms of production, circulations
and archive that, echoing Marx suggest us, that
everything that is solid melts in the air.
For the ones that have come
before us and after the moderns, the dissolution was not an anguishing shadow,
but a whole program. The reduction to the
concept, carried out by a young generation of artists and architects by the
end of the 50’s, expressed such programmatic concern of returning, by radical
means, to the modern project original concern of constructing the synthesis
between life and art, being this twentieth century second half neo-avant-garde
ideologically closer to the XIX century utopists
than of the historical avant-gardes from the beginning of the last century.
The object destruction was the
recurring strategy in this reduction to the concept process that Luccy Lippard
describes very well, in full process, in the beginning of the 70’s [1]. The objectives pursued by the conceptual program were diverse but,
as recalls Suzi Gablik, “depriving the works of art from their aura or
singularity and, therefore, preventing that they transform themselves in
objects of consumption, was one of the main objectives of the conceptual art” [2]. As
Robert Barry expressed, in 1968, “the world is full of objects and I don’t
intend to add any other”. This trail, we know it now, would reveal us some
perversions. The dematerialization, but mostly the destruction of the artistic
object, through an anti-artistic intervention over an object (everyday object
or work of art) instead of removing it from the commercial chain, exempting it
from the condition of good, generated a new value dimension (ironically, a
certain aura) that, rapidly, would find its own production system, circulation,
trade and archive. To the production of objects, the conceptual art, intended
to oppose two alternative creative processes: the production of ideas and the destruction
of pre-existing objects. In 1969, Robert Barry presented his Telepathic Piece that consisted in the
effort of “communicate, by telepathy, a work of art.” Three years later before
the presentation of the Telepatic Piece, Gustav
Metzger organized in London the DIAS – Destruction in Art Symposium – particularly
animated by actions as Painting with
Explosion in which Pro-Diaz proceeded
to some creative detonations or by the Viennese
Actionists performances that aimed, as well, a kind of explosion through the “abrupt
liberation of big amounts of energy”.
The recourse to explosion was
one of the most symbolical means and radically actual of the contemporary art,
working with a referential triangle that dominates the second half of the
twentieth century culture – energy/production/consumption. The approach to the literality
and to the explosion imaginary and through it the construction of creative
processes based in the controlled and intentional act destruction built one of
the most contusing representations of the contemporary culture, that Peter
Sloterdijk, already in this century, called the fast burn culture.
The destruction of the object
by the contemporary art appears, in this way, as a representation, between the
melancholic and the unusual, of a process of fast combustion, explosion and
destruction of enormous amounts of energy that characterizes the industrial and
liberal culture of the XX century. The forms of destruction were, as we know,
the most diverse, as very well enunciates Metzger in the Manifesto Auto-Destructive Art of 1960: “Materials and techniques
used in creating auto-destructive art include: Acid, Adhesives, Ballistics,
Canvas, Clay, Combustion, Compression, Concrete, Corrosion, Cybernetics, Drop,
Elasticity, Electricity, Electrolysis, Feed-Back, Glass, Heat, Human Energy,
Ice, Jet, Light, Load, Mass-production, Metal, Motion Picture, Natural Forces,
Nuclear Energy, Paint, Paper, Photography, Plaster, Plastics, Pressure,
Radiation, Sand, Solar Energy, Sound, Steam, Stress, Terra-cotta, Vibration,
Water, Welding, Wire, Wood.”
This “drop drop dropping of HH
bombs” was, in this way, developed in several ways: by dissolution (as in the
Metzger or Mark Boyle and Joan Hill paintings with acid); by incineration (as
in the Pyromania Projects of Ben
Vautier, in the Burnt Instruments of
Armand or in the Peintures de Feu de
Yves Klein); by split (as in the project Passage
of Saburo Murakami); by smashing (as in the works of César Baldaccini or
John Chamberlain); by dismantle (as in the Piano
Destruction of Rafael Ortiz); by cut (as in the compositions of Arman); by
penetration (as in the anti-buch of
Herbert Zangs); by strangulation (as in the Implosions
of Ewert Hilgemann) and finally by explosion, recourse that from the Hommage à New York (1960) of Jean
Tinguely to the recent works of Kendekk Geers is still recurrent.
To Metzger the auto-destructive
process was a path to the total conception, being the idea, by chance
paradoxically, of a total conceptual work of art, slowly defined since mid
50’s: “Auto-destructive art is primarily a form of public art for industrial
societies. Self-destructive painting, sculpture and construction is a total
unity of idea, site, form, color, method, and timing of the disintegrative
process.
Auto-destructive art can be
created with natural forces, traditional art techniques and technological
techniques. The amplified sound of the auto-destructive process can be an
element of the total conception. The artist may collaborate with scientists,
engineers.
Self-destructive art can be
machine produced and factory assembled.
Auto-destructive paintings,
sculptures and constructions have a life time varying from a few moments to
twenty years. When the disintegrative process is complete the work is to be
removed from the site and scrapped.” [3].
In 1973, after a decade of
massive destruction, the energetic crises confront us radically with the crisis
of over-abundance It will not be simple coincidence, the fact that the
Post-modernity affirms itself, through Charles Jencks, in the same year that
the oil crisis reaches its peak. An organization paradigm of the
energy/production/consumption referential triangle, that reached a declared
exhaustion. Almost forty years after this point of exhaustion, there was no
real paradigm modification. The creative processes of intentional and controlled
destruction were gone in the last three decades extinguishing it and becoming
merely residuals. We remain inside a fast
burn culture, but evolved in the vertigo of this combustion, maybe we lost
the ability of representing it and potentially create a critical alternative.
After this experience of
critical destruction, to us, it seems only to be left the experience of keep
the ashes or to free them in the air.
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1- Lucy Lippard, Six
Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, London,
1973.
2 - Suzy Gablik, Ha muerto el Arte Moderno?, Herman Blume, Madrid, 1987, pp. 39.
Image:
Poster of The Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS), London, 1966, organized by
Gustav Metzger.
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José Manuel Bártolo (1972)
Develops
work of investigation, teaching and curatorship in the areas of contemporary
art, architecture and design. It’s author of the blog Reactor (www.reactor-reactor.blogspot.com) of the books Corpo e
Sentido and Design and editor of
PLI Magazine.
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