The Other is that which renders possible –Gilles Deleuze.
Naming the Unnamable
by Ra�l Zamudio
To begin an essay with the title "Naming the Unnamable," is to embark on a conundrum freighted with uncertainty analogous to other paradoxes of an artistic, philosophical, and linguistic nature: "in a flat painting look for space" (Lieou Tao-Chouen); "at the foundation of well founded belief is belief that is not founded" (Ludwig Wittgenstein); "quote me as saying he was misquoted" (Groucho Marx). What unifies each of these contextually diverse statements is that they appear to end in contradiction. While these circular, syntactic puzzles are rooted in Ancient Greek rhetoric and syllogism where a statement is proposed and only through its negation can its truth claims be contested, they also exhibit what the philosopher Jacques Derrida termed the "absent presence" of language (1). In other words, language as the vehicle for knowledge transmission is by nature flawed at its inception, creating "meaning effects" through an endless chain of signifiers amounting to an "absent presence"; thus meaning is never fully achieved and is always beside itself. For Derrida has shown that words, concepts etc., are enriched and more complete in their signification when they defer to what they are not; consequently there is a contingency on the other that simultaneously creates an absence through presence. The question that arises and is the subject of this essay, however, is how do the aforementioned quotes that individually tie themselves up like semantic Borromean knots amounting to linguistic auto-asphyxiation, serve as analogies for the recent work and artistic strategies of Javier T�llez?
The myriad conceptual currents that run through the art of Javier T�llez in general are structured around dichotomies rooted in philosophy and are infused with a political subtext; these dichotomies are exposed as necessary antinomies and for the most part are never devoid of poetics, irony and humor. The basis for these oppositions is the self/other binary that emerges in T�llez’s work overall and that he interrogates to the point of its implosion. Yet the route taken to this philosophical dissolution is manifold. The political reverberations of the self/other dichotomy that T�llez addresses has a distinct lineage with the historian/philosopher Michel Foucault and his seminal study Madness and Civilization (2). In his book, Foucault argues that this dichotomy is foundational for Western concepts of self-knowledge; and even more telling of its ideological imperative, that the self/other is transposed into other binaries crucial for Western cultural identity: culture/nature, civilized/barbarian, Western/non-Western and so forth. This self/other configuration is epistemological in nature in that it is constitutive of a particular form of knowledge acquisition and conceptualization of the world, and is linked in a roundabout way to Derrida’s concept of deferred meaning: in the same way that words defer in order to be more comprehensible, the self needs the other in order to know what it is not. Questions surrounding the self/other are nonetheless freighted with unequal relations of power that are innately political, and it’s this power differential that T�llez also fleshes out it in his work into a web of conceptual and formal configurations.
In You Are Here, for example, a video installation of a "performative" nature realized with the patients of Nirgua Psychiatric Hospital in Venezuela, there is a complex weaving of narratives emanating from the self/other that are then transposed into other categories with the intention of undermining them. Thus the patients are the subordinate element of the self/other dynamic, and through deferral other dichotomies are figured to elucidate a more complete "diagnosis" of the patients and their maladies. Health is thus the opposite of sickness, rationality of the irrational, sanity/insanity, etc. According to Western psychiatry these imbalances are understood to be psychological and somatic in nature, but are construed by Foucault as symptomatic of social alienation engendered by circuits of power; and a historical necessity for the establishment and prolongation of state control. But if T�llez were only addressing such things in his work, however compelling, it would amount to nothing more than a florid didacticism underscored by rigorous institutional critique.
This is not the case; for what is evident in the overall work of Javier T�llez is not only its criticality and visual poetics, but an understanding of these dichotomies that has a basis in philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, sociology, and anthropology, to name a few disciplines; these, in turn, are formally and conceptually integrated in his work with themes, ideas, tropes and strategies culled from an array of sources including literature, art history, architecture and popular culture. The misinterpretation of T�llez’s work is not without its merits when exploring its nuance and subtleties: the "politically correct" have construed You Are Here as well as other works realized in collaboration with psychiatric patients as being exploitative; or that it espouses a meta-position of moral authority in its analyses of psychiatry’s history, its formation and general discursively, and its role as an extension of the state. Yet T�llez’s work operates in the locality of the other in undermining psychiatry’s impetus for universal well-being that marginalizes any forms of social agency that does not fit the normative of what the state deems socially and politically acceptable. Empathetic with what ostensibly maybe seen as the transgressive, You Are Here resonates with the philosopher and Talmudic scholar Eliphas Levinas’ humanist and ethical notion of the other, where the self’s’ identification with its opposite becomes tantamount to moral necessity (3). There are also references to Hans-George Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics as well: "Hermeneutics acquires a central place in viewing human experience. This feeling for the individuality of persons, the realization that they cannot be classified and deduced according to general rules or laws, is a significant new approach to the concreteness of the other [italics mine](4).
Levinas’ concept of the other and Gadamer’s hermeneutics are evinced in You Are Here in numerous ways. The freedom of the patients to do what they wish in the video exemplified in their spontaneous pushing of a giant ball around the hospital grounds, however contained within the context of confinement, asserts a social independence, however brief, via the undermining of the administrative apparatus and authorial voice of the artist that calls attention to the patients’ status of alterity. Although we know that You Are Here is a work of art, the ceding of artistic authority by T�llez allows a certain liberty in the patients by diminishing the subject/object dichotomy that underlies the traditional relationship of artist and artwork. In fact, the work operates as a situationist intervention into social space with its own random direction and unfolding in real time that transgressively engages the architectonics of institutional confinement. It is in this "play of difference" that the patients can articulate an unbridled desire innate with its own self-driven therapeutic potential. In the collective performance of the patients there is also a multiplicity of action, though sporadic, unconscious and at times indeterminate, that dismantles the self/other and diffuses it under the rubric of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the rhizome (5).
The collective effort of pushing the giant ball as performance is an endeavor that is re-framed from singular artwork as installation in the exhibition, to where it morphs into a mobilization of forces, an amorphous field of energy, an organic constellation of willed power. Even the title of You Are Here is heterotopic and multi-spatial, since one is never "here" in the sense that the giant ball is always in a state of movement, of dynamism, of rhizomatic exuberance.
Operating between the global and the local, T�llez has worked within the mode of site-specificity, albeit as post-studio practice, in international locales such as England, Brazil. Japan, Peru, Venezuela and other countries as well, and an undercurrent through these projects is a contingency on contextual locality, reciprocity, and mutual engagement that is innately dialogical. In a way that gives his work an idiosyncratic resolution that is left open-ended, T�llez has more often than not returned to the site of his projects with his completed works to present to his collaborators, further extending the notion of context-dependent work in an altogether different modality of what has historically been called social sculpture. In other words, there is a conscious insertion of his work into the local that then fans out into the global and vice-versa. Unlike social sculpture, however, T�llez’s projects are prone to a level of social engagement reminiscent of what the art historian Rosalind Krauss has called the "expanded field"(6). Both social sculpture and the notion of the expanded field operate outside the parameters of the institution. T�llez, however, broadens the notion of the expanded field by creating work that refers to what the critic Nicolas Bourriaud has termed "relational aesthetics" (7). Bourriaud has formulated the notion of "relational aesthetics" as artistic operations theoretically anchored in human interactions and their social contexts: "The artist produces connections with the world broadcast through works of social gesture, sign and form." Javier T�llez has similarly voiced this concern in an interview about his art: "the aesthetic mode is a condition that manifests less in things than in their relationships; it is in these that my work finds its battleground."
Notes
Title quote: Gilles Deleuze, "A Theory of the Other" The Deleuze Reader, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
1. Jacques Derrida, "Difference" The Margins of Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
2. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, New York: Pantheon, 1965.
3. Eliphas Levi, Entre Nous: On Thinking of the Other, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
4. Hans-George Gadamer, " The Hermeneutics of Suspicion" Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984, p. 57.
5. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
6. Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985
7. Nicloas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Paris: Les presses du reel, 1998.
