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an
iconology of the gap
repetition and montage in the work of Julião Sarmento I.
There lies a mystery within the thinking that art is centred on that which
takes place between two images.
This means that, unlike what happens in the field
of music, in which one sound may occur in a continuous relationship with
another, establishing a continuity that is physical, in the field of images
this is not possible. That is, in images that represent movement, it is
not possible to find that same continuum. In other words, images that
demonstrate movement are themselves fixed images. Movement, however, is
the aim of the appropriation of the image, no matter what the context.
Aby Warburg, the German art historian, called this possibility of connecting
– indeed, his method – an "iconology of the gap".
This iconology of the gap derives from a necessity to understand art as
a zone of non-fixation, between impulse and action, outside of any normal
fixation, as a stigma of a movement. However, our perception of movement
does not allow us to see the impossibility of its representation.If we
take the example of the presentation of movement in the cinema, it is
obvious that we are not aware of this impossibility, because we see movement.The
basic principle of cinema, the showing of the 18, 24 or 25 images per
second of the Super 8mm films of our childhood memories, of the 16mm films
of the movie theatres or videos, both analogical or digital, gives the
construction of movement to a movement of the spectator, to a perceptive
action, in the sense that there is no known way of visually expressing
movement, that is, movement as itself.It is starting from this axis of
thought that Julião Sarmento’s work is condensed, in the sense
that it provokes two sensations that come together in an indiscernible
form. In the first place, a sensation that we may call cinematographic,
the result of a process of construction that is very close to cinematographic
processes of editing(1)
. In the second place, the perception that what we are seeing is not passing
before our eyes, but instead is a fleeting memory of something we have
already seen – out of the corner of our eyes, as movement.Curiously,
these contradictory sensations (given that the cinema comes from our voracity
for the image and obliqueness is an escape) are summed up in a tension.
The most striking character of his work – and the most impressive
– is its capacity for the unresolved permanence of this tension.
Looking back upon his artistic path, it has always been like this. Sarmento
began his activity in 1972, with painting. Those first works already included
a fragmentary character present in the installations he would produce
later on, connected, above all, to a thought on the practice of painting
and its relationship with the space. This first procedure in painting
establishes a field of relationship with the cinema, far from pictorial
practice and already anticipating the flight that his later works
would use as a process(2)
. From 1975 on his work diversifies its supports, using Super 8mm film,
installations that include text (and the word is fundamental in the construction
of his universe), sometimes sound, and frequently photography. Curiously,
the works from this period, if they are tributaries of the analytical
concerns of a widening of the artistic field, already manifest a use of
the image as a strategy of seduction, whether through mechanisms of eroticizing
or through the construction of suspended micro-fictions. This is the case
of works like the Super 8 film Faces, from 1976, in which two women
endlessly kiss each other until they completely dissolve their lipstick,
or in the set of photographic images of a naked woman wearing both real
and synthetic furs, a work which seems to evoke Sacher Masoch’s Venus
in Furs – and we shall deal with this axis of connections further
on.
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It
is principally since the photographic works from 1975 (although in
the paintings under the generic terms Shadows, from previous
years, there are already silhouettes of women standing out over backgrounds)
that Sarmento’s work will encounter, in the processes of desire
and, progressively, in the depiction of woman, the form of producing
the specific mechanisms of its own process – suspension – and
its most recurring theme – the space between bodies. This negative
dimension of that which is between, in the middle, is particularly
important in Julião Sarmento’s path, and it is clear that
for him this aspect simultaneously originates in a Bataillean interest
for the negative space of the erotic, but is also an aware reflection
on the negative ontology of the space, constructed since Duchamp and
the female figure leaf, and stretching through Bruce Naumann’s
moulds – who also finds continuity in Rachel Whiterhead’s
sculpture, although the latter artist is very removed from Julião
Sarmento’s work. In any case, the (cinematographic) mechanism
he uses is the process of finding a thickness in interstitial space,
and is perhaps his most lasting and constant characteristic.Space is
therefore presented as a mechanism of the efficiency of desire, but
also as a serial metaphor of the distance between each repetition,
in which to see more is, above all, to see less. This
theme of the fascination for the sight of that which is not there (anymore),
or the perversity of establishing the desire for the sight of the face
as the only possibility of eroticizing the exhibiting of the sex (as
in the film Legs, from 1975), configures the establishing of
the libertine as a fundamental category in Sarmento’s work in
a permanent manner until today. Indeed, one could compare this area
of his path to the installation Siege, from 1993, made up of
two large-size photographs. The first of these images depicts an indistinct
male character looking to the right, in a clearing in a forest. The
other image shows a woman being sodomized by a man. The woman’s
face can be seen, whilst the man is protected by his anonymity.In this
field of work there is the enrolling of a figure, a modulation of a
character. On the one hand this character is clearly someone who feeds
on absence, on the absent object (3).
On the other hand, this absent something – a certain idea of evil – is
hinted at but never made explicit. In the piece Quatre Mouvements
de La Peur, from 1978, the figure of the absent/present is signalled
in a set of large-size photographs of a woman who runs at night in
a forest, with her body revealed by a robe flapping open, until the
image of her fallen body with only one arm showing. This flight contains
an impersonality (which is an allusion to Sade) and, above all, a concern
for demonstration – the fallen body is a demonstration of the
flight, and of its reason, as was made clear in the painting The
Hands of Night Come Down for Her, from 1987, which uses two of
the photographic images taken during the preparation of Quatre Mouvements
de La Peur, separated by a black monochrome panel and showing three
drawings of a hand holding chopsticks at the bottom. This simple and
ironic figuration of the surgical precision of manipulation reinforces
the violence of the impersonality and, once again, demonstrates without
making explicit. On the other hand, that precision of the manipulation
opens up a fictional field, a field between seeing and manipulating
that would be pursued later in the form of the close ups of maimed
hands belonging to faceless women.
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From
1980 on, and for the following nine years, Sarmento returns to the systematic
use of painting in order to develop an extremely vast lexicon of figurations
always connected to the understanding of the processes of manifesting
desire, whether through a pornology that, in his case, is very close
to (or replaces) the possibility of a total abstraction, or through the
creation of a set of devices that materialize the possible space between
bodies, in the form of vortexes, as seen in the installations using painting
carried out earlier in 1978/79, to recourse to the appearance of cutting
objects, or to the use of the word, or even the representation of spaces
themselves – houses, fences and labyrinths.From 1989 on, his work
moves towards a progressive drying up. On the one hand, the lexicon is
reduced and drawing becomes predominant in the construction of the work.
On the other hand, emptiness fills the canvas, which begins to include
fragments that are dispersed and form simulacra of narratives. This is
the case of the works The Space Between Things (M5), from 1990,
or Inevitable Polarities, from 1989, both indispensable for an
understanding of the cycle of work that would start with the exhibition Days
of Darkness and Light, from 1990. This series of works begins the
cycle of the so-called ‘white paintings’, which are being continued
today, namely up to the Fundamental Accuracy series, presented
at the Hirshorn Museum, Washington DC, in February 1999, and which has
been prolonged in his later work. The exhibition –me, that
the Funchal Contemporary Art Museum is presenting, continues this field
of the depiction of the woman. It carries on a path that begins with
the physicality of the sculptures, pursuing the female figure through
the winding streets of Lisbon, on its track in the repeated gestures
of the woman whom one touches, putting one’s nails into her skin,
and is toned down in the strangeness of the apparently abstract images
of "the house with the upstairs in it", presented for the first
time in London in 1996. |
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II.
The series Days of Darkness and Light, the beginning of the so-called
‘white paintings’, presents depictions of bodies and of spaces,
particularly of female bodies, initiating the presence of a woman who is
frequently linked to the presence of sharp objects, knives, intuitions of
incisions on the body that would be repeated later on. This synthetic and
dry work presents a woman without a face – a category that will be
manifested in several different forms in subsequent works, particularly
in more recent series, such as Poison and Carpe, associated to a limiting
of space, to a fence, in the negative. The use of the negative image, which
had already been seen in Sarmento’s earlier work, will take on particular
importance in the installation The Importance of Surprise in Attack,
a set of eight large-size paintings that depict a woman on a hypothetical
pedestal, a faceless figure in metamorphosis. Placed face to face, the figures
face us without looking at us, radical in the duality of the black and white,
pairs of opposites. This obscuring of the face in painting – it is
not the case of the photographic works – would only be broken in the
series Attack, from 1994, and in the installation The Basedow
Paradigm Applied to Decorative Painting, from 1995 and in the series
Fever, from the same year. In both cases, the appearance of the face
is connected to the presenting of androgyny (4)
and thus emerges as a symptom of the same impersonality, being shown as
a face of non-identity. The centre is then located on the body as a test
of resistance and of several different forms. Either as an object for the
rehearsing of its fragmentation, as in the apparent eschatology of Sleeping
on a Bed of Nails, from 1991, in which the body is always confronted
with a receptacle, in a sibylline suggestion of libations or dejections
(in Numb (II), from 1991/2, the demonstrative phase is carried out)
or in The Cone concealed a Blade, in which the woman’s body
appears as a suggestion. The frontal nature of the female image that is
begun in these works starting in 1991 concentrates its disturbance on its
offering. Indeed, it is a body that is offered to the gaze, but in terms
effective to desire, not by its being exhibited, but through the perversity
of its being absent. |
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III.
In the set of white paintings from the nineties there is an element that
is systematically repeated: the presence of woman. Not that it is the only
or exclusive element. There are series that introduce other elements from
his universe, like the references to architecture, particularly in the works
from 1995/96, which show modernist Bauhaus architectural spaces, to the
series The House with the Upstairs in it, of which four works are
presented here. This was presented at the London Projects in 1996, and is
connected to the correspondence between James Joyce and his wife Nora, exchanged
during the brief moments throughout their married life in which they were
separated. This is the case of Violer d’Amores (Paris-London 1926),
from 1995, Standing Still to Hear Better (Dublin-Trieste 1909), with
the latter dealing with the theme of the mutilation of a woman’s hands,
which was also present in Completion Rather than an Interruption (Zurich-Paris
1918), from 1996, made particularly disturbing through the association
between the female body and a gesture of aggression (or of self-aggression).
In this work it is clear, due to the ambiguity about the origin of the gesture
of holding the knife, that it is a question of a gesture for someone else,
that is, it is a question of performing a gesture. This performing aspect
of the gesture that gives rise to a tension has been progressively taken
on in his work, yet it appears that the series around Joyce/Nora represents
an indispensable moment in this path. This is also the meaning of the work
They Pass in an Air of Perfumes (Dublin-Dublin 1904), from the same
year, in which the gesture of stretching out a hand crystallizes a waiting,
not only because it is the same mutilated hand that performs it, but because
the proximity of the shadow of someone else is near and, therefore, its
absence is almost tangible – which is, indeed, uncommonly close to
the title, sent and received in Dublin. We thus have shown how the presence
of the female form is manifested in his work. Sarmento creates a device
in which the woman performs a gesture for an absent someone. This absent
presence is replaced by the spectator, who (literally) lives out the space
of this absence as a stand in, as an intruder. It is thus a question of
rehearsing the body’s performing capacity, even if the body has to
be mutilated to do so, and its violating has to be staged. The series Casanova,
presented at the 1997 Venice Biennial, deals with the possibility of this
staging, almost as if it were the demonstration that a body is always a
body destined for someone else, as is the case in Casanova’s memoirs,
not only for his enjoyment, but for sight (as in the famous staging that
Casanova carries out for Cardinal Bernis, a hidden observer but consented
to by the lovers, with the religious woman identified as M.M., to whom he
would give a portrait commissioned from Boucher) (5).
In the set of works for the Venice Biennial, mutilation, which until here
had always appeared as a testimony to the offering of the body, is granted
with a more subtle form, as an incision in the clothes, in the woman’s
black dress or, in a more provocative manner, as a direct penetration of
fingers into flesh, as if the skin were not enough to contain the limit
of the sensation. In Between Abnegation and Voluptuousness, a woman
makes a cut in her (deeper?) dress. This is Julião Sarmento’s
most explicit libertine reference: the gestures that his painting, photographic
or video works stage are always gestures whose nature does not lie in the
fact that they are carried out, but in the fact that they are representations,
that is, they have their nature in their destination. Of course, their destination
is us; we the spectators who also play the role of intrepid figures, pursuers
of figures through alleys, as if the only reason for our existence resided
in that interminable pursuit.
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IV.
Repetition is an essential element for the successive carrying out of this
process of demonstration. In Julião Sarmento’s painting the
gestures are repeated, as if they were a permanent rehearsal – and
this gives rise to the use of drawing as a device, which is often down-played
and erased, as if the scars on the skin should remain visible – but
the women are also repeated, in their black dresses, in the same situations
(they lift up their dresses a little, they touch each other, they reveal
a shoulder). This repetition has a defined function. Its obliqueness resides
here, in the same way that, in Sade, it is in repetition and in description
that (as Deleuze points out)(6)
the libertine finds his highest degree, in a process that is indeed close
to asceticism – the apathy of the libertine as a pornologist in confrontation
with the pornographer’s enthusiasm. It is in this repetitive character
that a system of permanent tension is constructed, trying to find in what
way a "pain B provoked in a second nature, may have infinite repercussions
on the first nature (7)".
However, this device can only be activated in a fragmentary and substituted
manner, as the pleasure of demonstration, but never that of making explicit.
This ethics of the libertine may be exercised in such a manner so that Sacher
Masoch, for example, was often judged to be an ethnographical writer, in
the sense that the games he describes are so dubious that they may be taken
for innocent regional customs. Sarmento’s connection to Masoch, however,
is above all to do with the character of suspension and with the monumental
representation of the woman. One therefore understands Sarmento’s interest
for Casanova more than for Don Juan. It is not a question of adding up (the
Venetian libertine does not have a Leporello to keep a score of his conquests),
but of repeating, once again, the staging of absence. On the other hand,
repetition appears as a practice that generates, due to its very existence,
a field of meaning that is serenely multiplied. It is through the repeating
of the same gestures (touching oneself, getting up, washing, showing oneself,
hiding oneself) that the reflexive sense of his work is shown. He carries
out a game with us: we pretend that each time we see the meaning is serially
revealed. This is not true. The meaning is not revealed, but allows itself
to be compulsively made fiction; there must be a greater meaning in its
multiplied presence. |
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V.
In the universe of the construction of this libertine figuration there is
a particular case referring to a sculptural and monumental dimension. This
is the installation The Importance of Surprise in Attack, from 1994,
a set of eight large-size canvases, each one containing a female figure.
They are presented facing each other, on opposite walls, and form the simulacrum
of a mirrored structure. The figure stands out in black on the white canvas,
and the reverse is the case on the black canvases. In the former paintings
the figure is always face on, and in the latter it is always with its back
to us, but in both sets the woman is standing on a base, which we may call
a pedestal. This is, therefore, a monument, as the spectator’s
point of view is low in relation to the figuration, but also in relation
to the installation of the paintings, which are raised a little higher than
is usual. This monumental character has a particular meaning in this work,
but it also has a special place in the imagetics of the woman in his work.
It is particularly interesting to compare his recent glass-fibre sculptures
of female figures (of which, in the exhibition –me there is
one of the most striking examples) with the pictorial installation The
Importance of Surprise in Attack, given that, if the latter uses the
strategy of the monument as a process, the presence of the sculptures, on
a strictly human scale (and systematically maimed, which reduces their volume),
is elusive in relation to the very idea of the monument. These sculptures,
eloquent in their presence, live off their amputated character and thrive
on it, which means on our relationship with mutilation as the destruction
of the body. And this is exactly the opposite of process of the installation,
which appears to the spectator as an evocation (due to its monumental character)
of a body that is metamorphosed. It is therefore a contradictory monument,
in the sense that it celebrates (substitutes for), not crystallization,
but a transformation of the body, of a body that acquires extensions from
which mysteries emerge. We are, so it seems, facing a further reference
to the twofold character of nature that Sade speaks of and that Klossowsky
identified so well. As Deleuze writes, "second nature is a nature subject
to its own rules and to its own laws: there the negative is to be found
everywhere, but not all is negation. Destructions are also the reverse of
creations or of metamorphoses; disorder is another order, the putrefaction
of death is also the composition of life. The negative is everywhere to
be found, but only as a partial process of death and destruction."
(8) What is interesting
is that the agent of this negativity in Julião Sarmento’s work
is the woman, and not the libertine. The agent of negativity is the performing
aspect of that body that is transformed into the negative, despite the fact
that in the positive version everything indicates that the statue of the
woman depicted is of a pregnant woman. We are in the presence of an evil
that is inherent to life, but it is neither that of the punishment inflicted
by the sadist nor that of Masoch’s subjugation, but that of the identification
of the woman as the fact itself of the simulacrum for the other of evil.
It is into this web that we fall, as spectators, and it is with this alterity
that we identify (9).
This is therefore a very subtle game played with the condition of seeing
(with our condition as spectators) and with the resistance of the body that,
in metamorphosis, in mutilation and in distance, calls up, and exists for,
that gaze. |
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V. Let us
return to the first question as to the perplexity from which we began
(10): how does one articulate
the paradoxical character in Sarmento’s work between its cinematographic
connection and its concomitant compulsion for the image and the fleeting
character of his figurations? In order to deal with this issue it is necessary
to invoke the series What makes a writer great, which is now being
presented at the Porta 33 Gallery. This is a set of collages in two different
formats: 152,5 X 122 cm and 68,5 X 48 cm. The collages include images
from two origins – the smaller ones include photographs that have
been gathered, sought out or simply found, signs of an already familiar
universe in his work. The larger pieces include photographs taken by the
artist himself. This distinction is generally irrelevant for the spectator,
although it is probably not so for their author. Indeed, in both cases,
it is a question of using the same montage and editing device. In common,
the two types of presentation include texts, words or sentences taken
from books. The source is unimportant, in the sense that decontextualisation
is absolute due to the extremely short nature of the quotation (in English
or French), introducing a meaning that, outside of the intimate dimension
of its author, is completely different from that of its hypothetical origin.
Finally, it is necessary to point out that the text is written in longhand,
in pencil, leaving the mark of the graphite around the words, testifying
to the presence of the hand. Thus, the result is that of a set that carries
out a permanent to and fro-ing between the application of the cutting
and editing process, of continuity between memories, circumstances lived
out (and recorded in photographs) and organizational tension. As in the
case of Godard, these series of works filter a whole universe of references
made opaque to their spectator, mixing up the visual world like an atlas
of images and texts, a process of permanent remission of the known to
the unknown, of recognition to strangeness, as if the combinational art
presented continued to keep the secret of its reason. In other words,
the series What makes a writer great is an essay on tension, its
processes and its successes, with the reply to the challenge contained
in the title being hinted at: it is we, the compulsive players of the
game of meaning that, in our anxiousness to produce a fiction, find a
space between the images and the words, and within it re-create the processes
of an absent entity. Now we may attempt to answer the initial question.
The intimately cinematographic character of Julião Sarmento’s
work resides in the tension generated between our condition as being complicit
with the atrocity of the mutilation of the body (and of the image and
of the word) and the paradoxical character of the identification between
the victim and the perpetrator of the crime, like in the opening scene
of Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou – rejected, indeed,
by Bataille for publication in his Documents, due to his considering
it to be morally unable to be shown (11)--
a scene that makes us look, but looking away slightly. This is perhaps
the meaning of those women who populate his works – morally, perhaps
of that single woman, whose names change, Emma, Nora, Laura, Alice
– which exist as our alterity, as our double. The process of this
identification is that of the repetition that, through its permanence,
calls up an absent being, a third entity that is the fictional figure
of the libertine. However, this repetition does not exist alone. As Giorgio
Agamben states in a remarkable text on the cinema of Guy Debord (12),
contemporary image is a moving cut (13).
The process of cinema is that of repetition and stoppage. If repetition
is the returning of the identical (to continue with Agamben) – and
we have seen how this aspect is essential in Sarmento’s work –
it is above all the possibility of the identical becoming perceived of
as something present, even if this presence is felt as a fleeting reminiscence.
Stoppage is the power of interrupting. In the articulation between repetition
and stoppage there appears the image that allows itself to be seen and
does not disappear into that which makes it visible (14).
In this process, the image shows its negation, its invisibility. Julião
Sarmento’s work feeds upon this limit of visibility, like something
that is simultaneously repeated as the presence of a woman, but which
can only be seen out of the corner of one’s eye, in passing, in a
glimpse. Delfim Sardo
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1-
Conf. Tarantino, Michael, "Julião Sarmento, a montage of attractions"
in Julião Sarmento, pub. Fundação de Serralves, Oporto,
1992 (catalogue)
2- Conf. Gaßner, Hubertus, "Wo der Schmertz Regiert" in
Julião Sarmento Werke 1981-1996, pub. Haus der Kunst Munchen/Cantz
1997 (catalogue) 3- Conf. Deleuze, Gilles, Présentation de Sacher Masoch, pub. Editions
du Minuit, 1967 4- Sardo, D. "A Paixão de Swann", Julião Sarmento,
National Palace of Sintra, 1995 (catalogue) 5- As described by Thomas, Chantal, Les Voyages de Casanova, pub. Denoel
Folio. 1985 6- Deleuze, op. Cit. 7- Idem, ibidem. 8- Idem, ibidem, p.26 9- Fundamental in respect to this is the text on Sade included in L’Erotisme,
de Georges Bataille, Éditions du Minuit, 1957 10- In the above-mentioned text, which Sarmento greatly appreciates (and
used in works from the seventies) Bataille states "voluptuousness
itself demands that anguish should be right. Indeed, where is the pleasure
if the anguish connected to it does not totally clarify its paradoxical
aspect? If it were not unbearable to the very eyes of the one who knows
it?" A wise question. 11- Krauss, Rosalind, L’informe, mode d’emploi and introductory
text by Yves Alain Bois, pub. Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996 12- For all references to the concepts of Repetition and Stoppage we have
used Giorgio Agamben’s text "Repetition and Stoppage, Guy Debord’s
Technique of Montage", Documenta documents 2, pub. Cantz, 1996 13- An image-movement in Deleuze’s terminology. 14- Agamben, op.cit.
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