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I Am a Book I Neither Wrote nor Read, Chapter II at The Goma

December 23, 2015

Artists: Juan Sebastián Bruno, Vier5, Miguel Mitlag, Valentina Liernur

Exhibition title: I Am a Book I Neither Wrote nor Read, Chapter II

Curated by: Mariano Mayer

Venue: The Goma, Madrid, Spain

Date: November 5 – December 20, 2015

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and The Goma, Madrid

“I don’t read much about myself, anyway, I just look at the pictures in the articles, it doesn’t matter what they say about me; I just read the textures of the words.”

-Andy Warhol

Similarly to a novel printed in weekly instalments in a newspaper, the upcoming chapter in this exhibition project is still in the making. This open-ended structure, whose title is borrowed from a line by Delmore Schwartz, started in 2014 at Galería Mite in Buenos Aires, with the idea of proposing structures of temporal expansion and elements of continuity, together with a cast of pieces and artists whose relationship with text is highly personal. By steering clear of conclusions and underscoring textual potential, each chapter can be understood as a version of the unfinished. Each one of the pieces in this exhibition expresses a desire to construct a language through its own means. Based on constructive principles more than inventions, this newfound language is able to convey not just a reflection, a discourse or a narrative but the probability of communication. Then again, in this condition of pure meaning, the textual line has been transformed into a writing to be seen, writing that is now an “object”. Nevertheless, these objects do not represent an external reality, as a language does, but their own materiality. However much we partake in the same linguistic environs, we inhabit a world made up of signs that we cannot decipher, contingent on all kinds of variables. Wittgenstein used the idea of optical illusion to demonstrate the lack of fixity with which we observe the world. And he did so by drawing the head of a duck and a rabbit in the same circumference. Depending on the way we look at it, we can see the head of one or the other animal. The image oscillates and the only way of stopping that movement is to name what one sees. For the philosopher, what we call language is nothing more that various changing, open-ended and rule-making games. The axioms of Juan Sebastián Bruno, Valentina Liernur, Miguel Mitlag and Vier5 foster a utopian, transitory situation where objects and gestures afford access to a text without entering in its content.

-Mariano Mayer