Contanimation (1)

While we were waiting for Shinji Kohmoto's arrival, the leading curator of The National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, we adopted a ceremonial and expecting attitude inspired by the awe our Japanese fellow visitors expressed. At that time Kohmoto-san and Thomas Schütte were putting the finishing touches to a show of Schütte's work. The tension had reached its peak, when a shabby little man in a shirt, a way too large pair of jeans and oversized sneakers entered the scene. Thát was Kohmoto-san. An interesting conversation about European and Japanese culture followed, for Kohmoto-san, who appeared to know very much about Dutch visual art, had frequently visited Holland and its cultural institutes. Just recently, the museum in Kyoto organised an exhibition of Dutch art with Chris Dercon, the director of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Kohmoto-san dismissed our question whether Japanese visitors would understand the nature of Dutch art, considering the many deeply rooted differences between these two kinds of visual culture not to mention differences between their reciprocal appreciation of them. He did not think it was a problem at all, for - with a friendly smile - 'misunderstanding can be a very creative moment'.

For several weeks in the summer of 2002 Libia Pérez de Siles de Castro and Ólafur Árni Ólafsson worked on the project 'Un elemento más' in Sala de Arte Moreno Villa, Málaga. The Sala de Arte is a pristine space in the renovated Cervantes Theatre, situated on a nature stone plateau and adjacent to a so called run-down area. The artists aimed at 'osmosis' of the clean atmosphere of the typically museum-like space and its multifarious, dynamic surroundings. To achieve this they used several means; in addition to having chance meetings with playing kids and people living in the area, they also made physical interventions both in- and outside of the exhibition-space. In the new passageway in front of the theatre they built a wall of stones they had found in the neighbourhood. Instantly, this was accepted as a resting-place and a 'hang-out' by the public (childeren and grown-ups) for reading, eating and drinking, kissing, relaxing. The different public groups had various 'readings' of this wall. Some of them made use of it without any particular notion, others might have seen it as a work of art, and there were people who thought it concerned archeological remains. Discussions about of which period of history the wall would be and its origin were not unusual. The artists had created a situation that accomodated various understandings. Although the wall was a Fremdkörper, it was picked up as a natural occurance (2). So an intervention like this triggers people's action and incites 'creative' interpretation.

Contributions of authors to catalogues of artists can serve divergent, if not questionable purposes. In case of this publication the writings of Pérez de Siles and Ólafsson themselves could do quite well. Not in particular what they write about their work, but more their small 'informal' messages (3). The structure of these texts provides a useful guidline to view the artwork of these artists - which as a matter of fact often includes words - in a meaningful, proper perspective.

The use of language of Pérez de Siles' and Ólafsson's texts are best characterised by the concept of 'abundance', which is not based on a baroque urge to over-elaborate, but excited by a strong desire to narrate, or more properly said: to share. Not by accident the artists present themselves as troubadours, as wandering performers (4). The lavish design of their texts has to do with the use of all available linguistic means, resulting in a piling-up of words, languages, idioms. The things they want to say are always explained in several lines and from different angles so as not to exclude or overlook anything and to be certain of a profusion of meanings: 'synthetical expressionism'. Obviously, their peculiar use of language is pragmatically underpinned. The two artists do not share a mother tongue, not even a second language. An Icelander and a Spanish girl have met in Holland, speaking a little English, somewhat more German, communicating in a mishmash of words and syntactic structures, meandering around to a delta of meanings carried along like sediment. With their writings Pérez de Siles and Ólafsson are not after a strict and formal correctness. It suffices when a text is adequate for a specific occasion on a specific moment, including that one word can be written in several ways. Their way of punctuation seems susceptible to the pace of their thoughts, weaving together separate linguistic constructions. From the perspective of one of these languages - for example, their correspondence with the author of this text is embedded in the Dutch language - you could speak of a continuing contamination (5) by other languages. In other words, the artists consider purity of language inferior to their need to communicate.

This unintentional process of 'corruption' of language, which could be marked as a sublimation of deficiencies, enables the artists to breathe new life into words and (sometimes dull) expressions, to animate language, and to generate new meanings and referencies. It stimulates the readers to look for the intended message (of a word or a line) actively, and persuades them to abandon their own fixed frame of reference or concept for some time. In this way they can open their minds to, and even take part in the creation of new ideas and meanings. While impure, yet rich and evolving this language appeals to involvement, and could be used as a means of communication, not only useful for the persons concerned, but also for an attentive audience. Refusal to agree upon a fundamentalistic puritanicalness that would only result in a suffocating monoculture, determines the political dimension in the work of Pérez de Siles and Ólafsson.

The same considerations could be applied to the visual language of these artists. Their installations provide the public several possibilities to turn inwards - a bed, silence, a documentation of 'vulnerable lives', and scents - as well as to express themselves. So, it is possible to observe the scene calmly and reflect on matters of life, but to use the space for own purposes as well. With a flamboyant visual richness, in which a handful of visual languages - e.g. formal painting, social engagement, personal notes, topographical memos - have corrupted each other, Pérez de Siles and Ólafsson are tempting their public into communication on various levels at the same time. Perception and an ongoing investigation into perception seem priorities in all this. Perhaps this is the reason why mirrors play such a major part. Not only do they reflect the viewers and their surroundings, they also bring worlds together, which is a sort of spatial contamination. The glass of the mirror may be metaphorical for the delicate nature of open communication and the fragility of the individual in a palace of reflections. The space they created in Malaga was appropriately described as 'fragile tot histerisch fisical state of mind'. (6)

Arno van Roosmalen

(1) Purposely, I mixed the two words contamination and animation, for the core of my text explicitly deals with the intertwining of two terms and its linguistic consequenses. Although the term contamination is negatively connoted, in a morphological and semantical sense it sets a creative process in motion that can 'reanimate' common materials and objects through new words.

(2) According to the artists: "het is een volkomen anonim en autonome 'wesen' wat doch heele mal geintegriert en intim verscheint."

(3) I safe all the emails they send because of their wonderful use of language.

(4) "This is becoming more clear: as travelers and emigrants, we are telling as troubadours, more than journalists, something that we perceive, but at the same time we are trying to understand how we perceive, and experimenting with the context and new possibilities of transforming it." (quoted from the author's correpondence with the artists)

(5) According to Webster's Dictionary, contamination is an alteration in a linguistic form due to the influence of a related form, as the replacement in English of earlier femelle with female through the influence of male.

(6) quoted from the author's correspondence with the artists.