(eNvolutions: this is how I call the numerous non-lineal evolutions, those that are involving, cumulative, oriented towards a multidimensional and indeterminate future in constant reconfiguration. They are also structurally complex, essentially retroprogressive, and pointing in all directions, either when it comes to the modes of production of vital phenomena or to their scope of action and comprehension, for instance, in the intersections of art, thought or science.)
To eNvolve, then, amidst lives and journeys, amidst nonsense and the eternal uncertainty of who we are and who we can become. To eNvolve, still, amidst the learning process that is to live, even coexist, with those who already know everything, with those who always intend to mark the way that only leads to themselves: their interests, preferences, and their own power. So, to eNvolve amidst incomprehension if needed. To move in the midst of things and explore their extremes, running away from binarism, but only to get plunged into it; into its ayes and noes, its impossibilities. I mean, definitely, to keep binarism in mind to challenge the extremes; to use it for surpassing the instrumentalization of their dichotomies, their beatings. And also, to prevent ourselves from the oppression that comes with noise and dogma —to get away from delusion and total isolation as well as from the petrification of essentialism. To move in the midst, to eNvolve —mainly to let ourselves become affected, ruffled, by multiplicity or diversity. Not to establish a fix midway nor to serve as a mediation agent, but to pursue the opportunity of maximising the sway, the need for contingency, for experiencing the fugue as well as the tension of commitment —sometimes firm, sometimes unstable, usually contradictory and almost always hard to handle. To move in the midst of identities that never achieve to identify us —that we don’t need. In the midst: between what is extremely intimate and extremely public; and swinging or straining forces in there, moving from one place to the other. Because one always feels in the midst of something, driving around —or being driven; putting together a temporary material upon which other lives, images, or sensations circulate… And one takes notice of missteps, accelerations, frictions or deadlocks, not only in relation to our inexplicable intimacy, but also to the public contexts that can be welcoming, rejective or indifferent. Contradicting McLuhan: the medium is not the message, nor the medium is the massage. We are the medium, but the message is for us unknown.
Exact and inexact at the same time, widely unextended, these eNvolutions —this amidst—presented at the Isabel Hurley gallery exhibition are clear and different artworks, created over decades. They are showed in combination with some recent works, some unreleased and some non-materialised projects. All of them are set to serve what I call operative fields (contingent and dynamic compositions, coming from much wider origins and much blurrier profiles than the works installed in them). The combination of works, the way they overlap, the projects, the graphic transits, etc.; along with a rather theatrical, multifocal, sometimes diagrammatic exhibition setting (as if it were an illuminated notepad, a field notebook or even a rare tableau vivant; composed of audiovisual materials, photographs, documents, graphs…) distort the clarity and the ability to distinguish those early works to the point of producing sets of outlines, less precise, and wider in meaning. These sets can be considered somehow evolutive; eNvolutive —with a teleonomic flair (as proposed in Life Sciences by Monod or Lorenz, for example), they can be seen as action and construction on the go, originating from initial conditions but moving and evolving with no final destination ahead. It is a jam session setting: we always play with what we have closer (“adjacent possible” as Stuart Kauffman would say). After all that precision within our reach in each of the clear and different artworks —even relevant— we play with them, improvising more or less discontinuous processes, which are leaky and not too elegant; but committed to a general sense that goes beyond any possibility of partial meaning… Paraphrasing Wittgenstein, playing with his famous sentence and referring to his subsequent puns —because it is not about passing over in silence what we cannot speak about: What we cannot speak about we must play.
eNvolutions in the midst…, with flows running inwards and outwards —like a sponge (Ivars, El rizoma y la esponja, Ed. Melusina, 2018) capturing and releasing, knowing there is no actual distinction between one element and another. As water, which circulates everywhere, between the peaceful folds of the sponge and the stormy outside of the ocean vastness: it is impossible to hold, to catch; ditchwater rots. Against constant capturing: release, or at least the chance to generate some capture-release dynamics. Some of us have had enough with the litany of capturing. It is too “exclusive”, to the point of becoming consumed by its demands; arborescent, made of networks, rhizomes —ways of capturing with different formats. We are exhausted of explaining why we cannot meet expectations that are not ours.
Because to move amidst…, to eNvolve, is the intent of running away from fixed positions and frames configured by all sorts of no-brainers and slogans (e.g. “less is more”, “the artwork works”, or “art and life”), as well as determinations enclosing premises in a generational, political or social spectrum; or a theme or formal structure. Children of our time: even if some of us have lost motivation in the art system (we never had much), some of us do feel stimulated by everything not fitting within its parameters or trends, nor the clarity and difference which favours the excesses of intellection and the market. Let’s uncase. In a way, we feel poorly adjusted, misfits due to those incapable to adapt. But not in an act of radicalism or provocation —we are far from interested in provocation as well as in specialisations or disciplines (opinion, contemplation, originality, or intended conceptualisations barely sustained by poor ideas). These are mainly decorative responses, “narcissistic”, so unchallenging as the deployment of alien ideas covered by an aura of “intelligence”. On the contrary, we need to reconcile with the wide direction, to look at N, projecting an art of liberty that seeks other ways which don’t correspond to the system needs —a system that, by the way, is increasingly polluted by the various germs nesting in institutions, including those more or less avowable pathologies we need to face. They don’t correspond either with the emancipation fantasies subjugated to program directions. There is no being for or against the system. Simply, we are here, we lurk, but don’t have to contradict ourselves in order to get on a stage: we can dance without a dancefloor. We don’t need programs, nor codes that generate a future known in advance. We don’t want a foreseeable future, but an unconscious one (as every actual future is, as every gambled future is). It does not seem either that algorithms will end up being very helpful in the important matters of life: they narrow the future using a simplified past, along with pretentious and rather shallow certainties. Committed escapes may follow diverse directions, and choosing the most suitable one along the way, while rolling the dices, is a life-sustaining task. Even to escape from the partial escapes towards an ultimate one. Are we mutating our species so radically as it happened when changing nomadism to sedentism? Where are we heading if we don’t want to be driven by others? An intriguing task, artistic without any doubt —beyond calculation. But it has no turning back, and the price to pay is nothing to complain about: nobody asked us to get involved.
Anyway, the character who lends himself to eNvolutions, who wanders amidst…, has been portrayed several times due to the lack of models eager to trespass the maze. I would think of him as a sojourner —only this role allows to see the multiple sides of the world. An animal of interstices, emerging like mould from the mud. An exudate, more than a distillate, a sidelong futile creature who bets recklessly on his flaws and on an ineffective intromission. It is metastable, though, by means of an evolution not consisting of winning bets, but to play them —to gamble on something that could be called eNvolution. An involving evolution, which follows the paths of evolution, in its minor or major diversions, its forks or interruptions, its transformations, etc. To let ourselves go by life itself while we lead it. Maybe to recognise oneself as eNvolutive, co-eNvolutive, is a life choice, it doesn’t matter whether it is artistic or not. And then, be willing to reactivate all that never left us, including our oldest self, even if we think of it as obsolete or peripheral; because we simply —and not always reasonably— consider it outgrown, on a planned obsolescence rather than an unexpected one. We go against obsolescence: the brain has not removed any old functions. They are there; they are available. Life drags all forms of life to a broad set of options, and they are at the future’s disposition. In that sphere of multi-directionality and multi-temporality is where we find ourselves, becoming unearthly, extemporary —in moves and whirls, dancing as tops children spin to see what happens. What if…? That question, which is common to art, thought, science, and life itself…, is the driving force behind the action which stops us from getting accommodated in more or less utilitarian simplifications or simplism. Apparently, they provide us comfort, but at the same time they subjugate us to an appalling indifference: a living death. And that is why, despite wobbling and a likely failure, we move forward, in the depths of vastness, eNvolving, amidst…, still, and maybe forever…
—Translated by Teresa Soto Tafalla
