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| Ulises Carrión performing To be or not to be 1976 |
During the years that Ulises Carrión spent in Amsterdam from
1972 to 1989, he produced a wide variety of works that employed almost all the
late 1960s and early 1970s forms of distribution: books, films, radio shows,
print editions, mail art, conferences, talks, and festivals, calling into
question the status of the artwork as a unique object and defusing single
authorship by offering collaborative projects. A selection of Carrión’s work
was recently on view at the Showroom offering a rare occasion to have a peek
into his personal worlds and cultural strategies. Arranged in a modular display
system inspired by the cardboard vitrines designed by Martha Hellion for the
Fluxushoe exhibition that toured the UK in the early 1970s, there was a
selection of Carrión books and videos, from Looking for poetry to some of his
most celebrated video works, such as The Death of the Art Dealer and Card Song.
Following the same spirit of collaboration and spontaneous gathering that
characterised most of his work, the exhibition culminated with a re-enactment
of The Lilia Prado Festival, a reassessment of one country’s cultural values and
stereotypes, and the possibility of translating them to another cultural
context.
A former poet, Carrión was interested in the structural,
spatial and visual potential of language. His early works such as La muerte
de Miss O 1966 or De Alemania 1970 connect with a tradition of artistic and poetic
practices that extends from the Cubo-Futurist and Dadaist legacies, to the
Concrete and Fluxus poets of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In this tradition,
language rids of its semantic burden increasing its material perception and
acquiring a formal autonomy that intensifies its plasticity and objecthood. The
destruction of meaning in language had a great impact in the structure of the
book, which remained being a container of texts but now these could or could
not be literary; they were open to the articulation of new systems of signs.
Carrión’s work soon distanced itself from the literary
practice to formulate the definition of ‘what a book is’ which is best
developed in his notion of bookworks,
‘books in which the book form, a coherent sequence of pages, determines
conditions for reading that are intrinsic to the work.’ His essays, The
New Art of Making Books 1975 and Bookworks
Revisited 1979, are eloquent articulations
of new systems by which to present language under different forms. In his
writings, he appeals to the ability that everyone has to understand and create
signs and systems, setting up notions of what a book is by opposing radically to
the traditional genres of novel, theatre or poetry. For Carrión, every book
allowed for a different type of communication, and it was the conviction that
each book produced and conveyed a different effect or message that led him to
experiment with other media, applying the same logic throughout his work.
In 1975, he opened Other Books and So a bookshop specialised in the production and
distribution of artist’s books, that was also an archive and an exhibition
space, where artists gathered and exchanged ideas, and where performances,
lectures and other events would take form spontaneously. Carrion’s interest in
the production of artist’s books wasn’t so much in tune with recent claims
about the democratisation of the artwork, or about making it accessible to a
wider public (as it has been the goal of earlier artist’s books), rather he was
experimenting with ways of devising a work of art that could incorporate its
own distribution as a formal quality. Central to his work was the relationship
between communication and distribution, and when he opened Other
Books and So it was clear that he was
trying to have some control over the production and distribution of his own
work. ‘Where does the border lie between an artist’s work and the actual
organisation and distribution of the work?’ he would ask himself, reaching the conclusion that
distribution should be an intrinsic part of the work, not because this would
make it more democratic or accessible, but because only when the art work
includes its own distribution it becomes something else, its form serves its
own purpose. Accordingly, he organised a series of Mail Art exhibitions, such
as Definitions of Art 1977 and Erratic
Art Mail International System 1977, which
offered an alternative to the official mail system, and where he drove the
attention from the aesthetic value of the object to the fact that Mail Art was
a unique way of controlling the production and distribution of art.
Distribution becomes a formal element of the final work, determining its physical
appearance, while at the same time emphasising the relationship between form
and function.
Mail Art was also a strategy to integrate and incorporate
other artists’ works to his own, bringing together different views and
opinions, and renouncing to just one way of representing things. Similarly, he
started to experiment with different media, such as video and film,
performances and festivals, devising what he referred to as
cultural
strategies in which the artist’s ‘personal
world’ would gain a social reality by being exhibited and thus becoming a
cultural event. Carrión was using culture as a broader concept than art,
including non-aesthetic elements, as he explained, culture was ‘the
coordination of a complex system of activities occurring in a social reality
and including as well non-artistic factors: people, places, objects, time,
etc.’
He became more interested in mass media and in how
communication operates at different levels and through different channels. The
video Aristotle’s Mistake 1985, a documentary
in which reality and illusion are blurred, was conceived to be broadcasted in
television, ‘a frame that makes everything equally real. If it’s on TV it’s not
art, it’s real’. Once again, the distribution of the work would have an impact
in the nature and formal qualities of the very same work. In an earlier video, Gossip,
Scandal and Good Manners 1981 Carrión
experimented with marginal communication, in this case, gossip. The work
consisted in launching a piece of gossip with the help of a group of friends.
The project lasted more than three months, and it also consisted of a lecture
on gossip in the University of Amsterdam, and a video-work as a conclusion.
This work contrasts with the informality with which gossip is originated and
transmitted and it gives an insight into Carrion’s ideas about language and
communication, his fascination with identity, his interest in everyday life,
and the importance of his friends in his works.
In 1984, Carrión produced The Lilia Prado Festival one of his most successful works, which makes us
reassess more contemporary art practices that engage in originating social
events and gatherings, and that facilitate a dialogue among diverse communities
outside the confines of the institution or gallery. The Festival was a tribute
to the Mexican actress Lilia Prado, an idol in the Mexico of Carrión’s youth,
and it included the screening of Prado’s films together with parties, cocktails
and music. The Festival generated extensive press coverage and attracted great
number of people. By organising this Festival, Carrión intended to raise
questions on identity and cultural values, and more specifically on how one can
translate a cultural stereotype; how does a star from a given culture translate
to another culture with different values. With this work, Carrión activated a
social situation that connected with the historical avant-garde ideal of
blurring art and life, while at the same time it brought about many questions
on the dematerialisation of the artwork and its anti-market nature, and more
importantly, about single authorship and collaboration. He considered the
Festival to be a ready-made, a work from which he could withdraw, a work that
offered him the possibility of disappear: ‘My ideal as an artist’ he said, ‘is
to become invisible.’
á
Ulises Carrión, ‘Personal Worlds or Cultural
Strategies’, Second Thoughts,
Amsterdam 1980, p.51.
