“In forms, there is a great transforming potential”.

“Traditionally there has been a mistrust in the real capacity of art to open up other possible”

Andrea Soto Calderón, philosopher and professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory, leads the seminar “Ways of doing”, a space for reflection around artist publications, in which she sees a fertile territory to explore dissenting forms that challenge the processes of standardization and allow us to imagine other possible realities.

Why the interest in the methodologies of artistic practices?

When I was invited to lead the seminar I thought that the contribution I could make had to do with a line that interests me a lot, which is the reestablishment of that quality of thought and knowledge that art has. Traditionally, art has always been seen as a form of experience, of sensibility, but it is not validated in its status of knowledge, and there is much distrust, even when we speak of critical art, of its real capacity to open up other possibilities or to make a critique, not only in the sense of denunciation but in the creative sense of imagining other spaces and other modes of representation. In this sense, it seems to me fundamental to think about the creative processes, in the ways of doing artistic practices where another imaginative gesture can be opened. Late capitalism acts by standardizing forms, intensifying mimesis, from the way we dress to the way we move. I think there is a battlefield here, a very broad field of another way of understanding how reality is configured, as Gérard Granel has developed in his analysis of what forms mean in capitalism. It is like rethinking that false left-wing debate on material culture, as if nothing were at stake in forms, as if they were an add-on or a decoration.

Forms are not innocent.

I start from the idea that forms are always material and that there is a work in the form that can certainly open another mode of experience, but above all, it can raise the capacity to imagine a reality that cannot be imagined. Fredric Jameson used to say that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, a phrase that has been read in many ways and then popularized by Žižek or Fisher, but which opens the question of what can be the place that artistic practices can have to open the territories of imagination in a time that appears to have no future. Therefore, for me, the question in artist publications is how things appear, how other relationships can be forged, the mechanisms that are there, the methodologies, the operations, the devices to operate certain maladjustments of a certain order that is presented to us as the only thing we have to live with. And there I see that the field of art, in particular, that device of how the works are presented, and how the processes are shown, has a very broad territory. Not only to work on the utopian, on that future to come but, as Rita Segato says, on what is more topical than utopian, that is, the territories it configures and makes possible.

Are artists more and more involved in this kind of practice?

Yes, but I think of Picasso’s publications in which he was already playing with forms, he saw that there was a transforming potential there. The question that recently insists in philosophy is how an event opens up, how the new appear. For many thinkers, this opening has to do with a messianic cut, like a very radical overture. On the other hand, I inscribe myself in the line of those who, like Rancière, think that the event does not happen in stupefaction but small detours. I am very interested in these small gestures, this micro-logical work often opens up possibilities and indetermination.

What characterizes artists’ books today?

I think that at the same time that art has ceased to be understood as a form of expression to become a field of exploration and research, there has been a transformation of how artists’ publications are understood. And they are not the record of what happened in an exhibition, of what it was, of what Barthes talked about, but one more piece that is operating and generating its dynamics of thought. There is a kind of work in the margins or in what I like to call “sensitive notes of the artists”. It’s interesting the turn that ArtsLibris is taking by understanding that artists’ publications are not only books but also web pages, brochures, videos, small posters. Those more bastard forms are left out of the great narratives of Art History.

One of the sessions is a dialogue between Cristina Lucas and Itziar Okariz, two artists who work with the body.

There is something in particular that interests me about both of them, and that is that, although their styles are very different, their work insists a lot on the question of inappropriate bodies. For me, the question of image and touch are always very much linked, and I am interested in the question of how bodies can object, how bodies always overflow, no matter how much they are normalized because they always find ways to contest the policies that are imposed on them. Right now bodies are once again placed under suspicion, it is precisely in the encounter of bodies that the possibilities for the unforeseen grow. And there is a second question that I think is also present in the work of both, the subterranean concern of how to move from individual actions to collective actions.  Many times the so-called minor aspects have been underestimated, in order to establish the belief that all order and domination comes from above, and the power of the one to one, the body to body, is underestimated.

Teresa Sesé
June 1st 2021