Page 186 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

5 Jordi Colomer in conversation with the author; see “La sabiduría del tramoyista,” in Lápiz 258, December 2009, p. 52.
6 Íd., p. 56.
7 “The show Alta
Comedia at Tarragona’s Tinglado art venue was a watershed moment in my approach to things. By means of a scale model of that 1000 square meter space, I devised the exhibition as an ensemble,
an itinerary, a street. The four pieces that made it up were of architectural proportions, meaning a 1:1 scale which allowed you to climb onto them and traverse them. Those pieces were built
from blueprints, but I reserved
for myself that after-completion moment when I could improvise placing small objects here and there; packets of rice, patches from carpets, shoes mixed with light bulbs, as if to leave traces of the passing of an individual dwelling in those spaces. The excitement
in this kind of work came from
the coexistence of two scales
and two construction moments. There was for instance a squalid little chipboard staircase made
by three of us, as we were having potato chips. Once it was finished, that fact that in the middle of
a such a huge space you could notice the marks left by greasy fingers, seemed to me to be truly important. The game relied mostly on the viewer’s traversing through and confronting these two scales.
I remember always being deeply intrigued by Carl Andre’s metal plates, the contrast between the coldness in the construction and the public walking and ‘acting’ on top of them”. Íd., p. 52.
8 Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Arts Yearbook 8, 1965, pp. 74-82.
the least relevant question is “until when” is the action going to be repeated – the question of duration, which is also somehow the question of ends. Each action lasts as long as is required for its typology to be established: the city’s action A, behavior B, practice P. What matters, though, seems to be how each of these exercises sets in motion a system of objects connected with the urban model underpinning the work.
At one point Colomer clarified his views on sculpture as practice and material field, arguing that “the point is not to vindicate a particular discipline; on the contrary, sculpture is rather the place from which everything can be encompassed”.5 In connection with this field, cinematic practice appears as “sculpture extended through time”.6 Sculpture serves as stage scenery both inside and outside a film: both in the space where cinematic action unfolds, and in the exhibition space where the cinematic work is screened. Sculpture’s aesthetic space (or construction’s sculptural value) is particularly salient in Colomer’s early works, both in the stage sets displayed at his 1993 exhibition titled Alta Comedia (High Comedy) and in the minimal volumes in the 1996 installation El lloc i les coses (Place and Things).7 Thus sculpture “expands” upon being filmed, and that expansion is another name for the processes carried out on and with the stage scenery. What distinguishes such processes, what renders them specific in the same sense as objects in Donald Judd’s famous text,8 is that, besides being halfway between sculpture, scenography, and architecture, they are neither constructions nor destructions. The term that might perhaps best define them is the above mentioned metaphorai from present-day Athens. They are constructs yielding no results, with no further teleology beyond their own execution. A kind of labor is displayed in them which is more likely to be found in the preparation of festivals and rites, or demonstrations and parades. This constructive force is not accumulated, nor does it alter the intrinsic mobility of such forms of activity. Work does not materialize into any kind of product beyond the experience, the memory, the description, the document that will subsequently expand the action across time.
For the above-described material displacements, translocations and transformations, scattered historical precedents may be found, mostly in the gray areas of art history. Architect Gianni Pettena recounts how, as work was being carried out on his Clay
186
¡ÚNETE! JOIN US! JORDI COLOMER