MARTÍNEZ, Chus — “Flowers Made Us Possible”, in Relevos/Reliefs, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien & Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Berlin / Lisboa, 2014, pp. 25-28.
Portuguese
other texts
Flowers Made Us Possible
I
I like to read about flowers. Flowers remind me of a sentence by a literary critic I particularly admire, Elaine Scarry, “Beauty always takes place in the particular, and, if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down”. 1 Flowers are this kind of particulars. We assume we know how they look like, and we even may find them kitsch as an idea, however every time we encounter a flower field we are surprised. They are both delicate and powerful. Their apparition marked an end to the reptile era and flowers were the ones that made us possible, by making fruit and proteins and sugar also possible. Looking at them that way, there is no contradiction in thinking about fat and flowers. There is something very powerful in them, the pure embodiment of biochemistry, of all possible relations between sun, water, ground, sugar, smell, protein, form, color, transformation, repetition… But they are also the marker of a big uncertainty, how do facts transform into emotions? Why do they move us and not only affect us via the senses, but produce feelings, ideas, intoxicating us with the incoherence of life?
II
Flowers are strange in-between creatures. They can be understood as a marker, a tool to register the plausible operations that art makes from the inside of knowledge: matter, language, images, form… all tilting from the inside. And this is perhaps the reason why they have such a history in the history of art making. Flowers, in other words, represent a different way of naming the challenge that art poses to the problem of coherence, to the possibility of responsiveness, to demonstration. Their oscillating movement embodies an ongoing performative speculation about ways of affecting and being affected, about ways of naming. When facing flowers, the viewer is obliged to find a language, to imagine a place, to conceive a time, and to surpass the identification with all of them—and at the same time create a faraway from all of it. Flowers’ vacillation has the virtue of perceiving the unknown without it being transmitted into communication by the superficial sociality of discourse. To refract the unknown without syntaxes, without the movement of displacing the known and replacing it with a new known or the other known: this momentary forgetting of the syntaxes implies a momentary forgetting about learning—that is, it can carry the unknown into a form, a formulation, that will allow the inconceivable to be conceived. And so flowers come to name the possibility of discovering unsuspected positions between the animate and the inanimate, as well as among the many forms of life; an imagination capable of conceiving an act of knowledge among those who live beyond language.
III
In Notes to Literature (1958), Theodor Adorno states that the essay is the form of writing that best suits thinking, since its attribute is to be groundless, not limited by historical transmission or etymology. “Groundless” is here the opposite of “motionless.” Isabel Carvalho’s practice has been always motivated by exploring what movement can be, when movement cannot even be perceived. She has a strange and particular idea of the subtile: in doing books, or sculptures, her main concern seems to be discovering a dimension of life in her materials that nobody else saw or perceived before. Her works are part of an invisible movement, of a research. It is difficult to describe or subscribe her practice to a particular “mode” of the contemporary today. Her practice is rather unmannerly, or post-disciplinary, to use the words of academia. Recalling Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words, we could say that in her way of dealing with matter and form, texture and text, senses and sense etc… she intends to aim to primary wisdom, primary wisdom being intuition, “while all later teachings are tuitions”. Her works need and deserve time. They have the quality of appearing in front of us like prolegomena. That is, they recall the possibility of a time that is always preliminary, of a language that maintains itself partially unknown, outside the realm of mediation. It is there that we need to look for politics. Not in the ideological sense of classical gender concerns, or Modern and after Modern forms, or in engaging the viewer in any sort of action. But politics in a premeditated modification of the tone she uses for her subject matters, an intentional reversal of a “good” understanding of time. The preliminaryness she inscribes in all her works is pure resistance. So her works could act like in classical virtues did: a manifestation of the act of disowning—knowledge, property etc… To disown is completely different from refusing. The act of disowning is radically different from the populist praise of ignorance. To disown means to place at the center the possibility of doing something, as an artist, with a material and a form, with a language, with a sentiment even, while, at the same time, the still possible is always there. And it is by enacting the possible that art and artworks are imagined, not as a product but as an event or, even better in the context of Isabel Carvalho, as an advent, a manifested form of ideas that do not find a stable meaning but have significance.
1. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton University Press, 1999.
I
I like to read about flowers. Flowers remind me of a sentence by a literary critic I particularly admire, Elaine Scarry, “Beauty always takes place in the particular, and, if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down”. 1 Flowers are this kind of particulars. We assume we know how they look like, and we even may find them kitsch as an idea, however every time we encounter a flower field we are surprised. They are both delicate and powerful. Their apparition marked an end to the reptile era and flowers were the ones that made us possible, by making fruit and proteins and sugar also possible. Looking at them that way, there is no contradiction in thinking about fat and flowers. There is something very powerful in them, the pure embodiment of biochemistry, of all possible relations between sun, water, ground, sugar, smell, protein, form, color, transformation, repetition… But they are also the marker of a big uncertainty, how do facts transform into emotions? Why do they move us and not only affect us via the senses, but produce feelings, ideas, intoxicating us with the incoherence of life?
II
Flowers are strange in-between creatures. They can be understood as a marker, a tool to register the plausible operations that art makes from the inside of knowledge: matter, language, images, form… all tilting from the inside. And this is perhaps the reason why they have such a history in the history of art making. Flowers, in other words, represent a different way of naming the challenge that art poses to the problem of coherence, to the possibility of responsiveness, to demonstration. Their oscillating movement embodies an ongoing performative speculation about ways of affecting and being affected, about ways of naming. When facing flowers, the viewer is obliged to find a language, to imagine a place, to conceive a time, and to surpass the identification with all of them—and at the same time create a faraway from all of it. Flowers’ vacillation has the virtue of perceiving the unknown without it being transmitted into communication by the superficial sociality of discourse. To refract the unknown without syntaxes, without the movement of displacing the known and replacing it with a new known or the other known: this momentary forgetting of the syntaxes implies a momentary forgetting about learning—that is, it can carry the unknown into a form, a formulation, that will allow the inconceivable to be conceived. And so flowers come to name the possibility of discovering unsuspected positions between the animate and the inanimate, as well as among the many forms of life; an imagination capable of conceiving an act of knowledge among those who live beyond language.
III
In Notes to Literature (1958), Theodor Adorno states that the essay is the form of writing that best suits thinking, since its attribute is to be groundless, not limited by historical transmission or etymology. “Groundless” is here the opposite of “motionless.” Isabel Carvalho’s practice has been always motivated by exploring what movement can be, when movement cannot even be perceived. She has a strange and particular idea of the subtile: in doing books, or sculptures, her main concern seems to be discovering a dimension of life in her materials that nobody else saw or perceived before. Her works are part of an invisible movement, of a research. It is difficult to describe or subscribe her practice to a particular “mode” of the contemporary today. Her practice is rather unmannerly, or post-disciplinary, to use the words of academia. Recalling Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words, we could say that in her way of dealing with matter and form, texture and text, senses and sense etc… she intends to aim to primary wisdom, primary wisdom being intuition, “while all later teachings are tuitions”. Her works need and deserve time. They have the quality of appearing in front of us like prolegomena. That is, they recall the possibility of a time that is always preliminary, of a language that maintains itself partially unknown, outside the realm of mediation. It is there that we need to look for politics. Not in the ideological sense of classical gender concerns, or Modern and after Modern forms, or in engaging the viewer in any sort of action. But politics in a premeditated modification of the tone she uses for her subject matters, an intentional reversal of a “good” understanding of time. The preliminaryness she inscribes in all her works is pure resistance. So her works could act like in classical virtues did: a manifestation of the act of disowning—knowledge, property etc… To disown is completely different from refusing. The act of disowning is radically different from the populist praise of ignorance. To disown means to place at the center the possibility of doing something, as an artist, with a material and a form, with a language, with a sentiment even, while, at the same time, the still possible is always there. And it is by enacting the possible that art and artworks are imagined, not as a product but as an event or, even better in the context of Isabel Carvalho, as an advent, a manifested form of ideas that do not find a stable meaning but have significance.
1. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton University Press, 1999.