course for curators of contemporary art: course participants / study excursions / program collaborators / exhibition

SEMINAR IN WRITING

Tomaž Brejc
The Interpretation of Art Work

In Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume, a horrible fact is revealed that the abandoned newborn child is most probably Hell's bastard: it has no smell. On the old photographs, Duchamp's Urinoir (Urinal) gives the impression of a reeking freak. In its new version (the replica in Tate Modern) it is immaculately clean and sterile while its Post-modern version shines as an elegant piece of room design. Gober's urinals and lavatory sinks are unused yet their content is soiled with allusions to the anal and to the scatology. The invisible substance of those metamorphoses is the smell, which is neither an art-historical nor a critical category; still it is a signifying quality that goes beyond the genre qualifications from the initiatory iconography. There, in turn, where the fruits rot on bronze trees and the decay of biological substances fills the entire gallery space, or where the splendid installation of a Japanese artist appears as an ideal garden of a Geisha in the 21st-century technology, the description is already a recording of the installation story. The smell along with the taste - and not only in scatological meanings - are the describer's task.

Tucker's Okeanos is a seemingly strange phallic mass. It is an informal mixture of the internal and the external; neither a sculpting surface-form nor a compact object substance. The aesthetic experience has sunk into a haptic mass. This process, not discursively describable in its entirety, preserves the fundamental existential traits of touch. Deprived of them, the content of the sculpture is nought. The describer's task includes the touch and the experience of weight.

The installation Neither Theme Nor Darkness (Kemperle/Lenardič) has no presentation libretto. Its contents are only seemingly discursive (this is a premise). The fundamental reasons are not defined in an utterable form; argumentum ex silentio (in the shape of) is the sole witness of its efficiency. The spectator grasps it in a kind of multi-layered representative construction where there are no appropriate and, if possible, single-meaning ontological divisions. The task of the describer is to determine the unknown relations, to separate the (fictional) story of the installation from the official description (and how far it can reach without turning into a narrative).

Such tasks are perhaps more fatal (and banal) than the Modernist theory, which puts the Post-modernist "piece" (L. Vodopivec) in the relation: body-"figure"-sculpture-plastic-concept. If we survey this representative sequence through the optics of Riegl's theory of haptic experience, the seemingly light semiotic rhythm of analysis is halted, while the theoretical description of the Minimalist product (Judd, Andre) all but repulses such demand. Does the art of description begin below the threshold (only liminal may be minimal) of aesthetical ontology? In contemporary sculpture, the access to eccentric objects and installations is not to be found in a basically plural context but rather in the analysis of artistic intentions that lead us from the context towards the artistic "work". The context may be merely a rough archetype (the tendencies of an actual style and its production output), while the artwork (as index and icon) is a subtle, individualised typus. Now, in the 21st century, when there are so many trials of introducing the haptic into the virtual (Ch. Cunningham: Flex), where olfactory and synesthetic effects are in the fundament of conceiving biological genres of live art, genetic art and the aesthetics of artificial intelligence, I am interested in nothing but its individual status, significance and sense. This is a brief and entirely empirical premise of my lecture, a practical experiment built out of questions rather than answers, out of notions and haptic experiences, out of lived through ephemeras that are not yet descriptions.