Page 184 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

2 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” in Artforum Vol. 5, No 10. 1967, pp 12- 23
3 The disputed identification between the artist and the subject of political revolution, still propounded by some, lies in a proximal field, though it shall not be addressed here.
My analysis in what follows focuses on certain actions within X-Ville – dramatic exercises of a non-figurative kind, we might say – where the problematic connection between work and its representation is brought into sharp relief. To put it differently: Up to what point is it possible to interpret an actor’s labor as work, and the worker as a character in the world-as-drama? On the basis of the ambiguity in these relationships, an even more unfathomable question arises as to what an actor may produce when (s)he is cast as a mason or a gardener: a house, an artwork, or the fragment of a potential artwork. Jordi Colomer’s mot d’ordre (or mot de désordre) through the last decades – “to inhabit the stage scenery” – forms the background to this questioning. This might even allow us to indirectly address or at least visualize how an artist’s labor (say, a sculptor’s) may be thinkable as acting work, in what would amount to a curious reversal of the weaponized notion of theatricality, a term infamously coined by Michael Fried in 1967.2 This line of inquiry would be analogous to the questions raised, at least in the last hundred years, on how much, in terms of their work, an architect may be likened to a stage designer, or a ruler to a stage-manager, etc.3 Different transpositions and re-scalings are involved in all these relationships, which question not only the overgeneralization of the theatrical, but also the delocalization (read miniaturizing) of politics within the realm of art.
An intermediate existence: “metaphorai”
X-Ville begins with the recitative declamation of an introductory passage from Friedman’s Utopies réalisables, followed by scenes representing the functioning of a city depicted in black ink on pieces of cardboard. In voice-over mode, the recitative accompanies some of these scenes: X-Ville’s inhabitants walk, eat, trade, till the land, furnish the common areas, or gather in assemblies. Most of these activities are summarily imitated, without great detail: at one point, for instance, a man and a woman use brooms to push aside a mound of rubbish, yet it can’t be said they are sweeping the floor; then there’s the moment when the city dwellers are given their pay in the form of small change, chocolate, or biscuits. While human motility is accurately portrayed, in the course of the film actions shed their figural nature. Around minute 9, a game played with car tires appears to mimic road traffic, but it could also be the enactment of a race, or a form of collective entertainment.
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