Crítica ornamental / Ornamental critique

Con lo dicho hasta aquí, hemos tratado de exponer con cierto detalle uno de los muchos malentendidos que siguen circulando en el medio artístico acerca de la validez "crítica" de ciertas prácticas, un malentendido que forma parte, sin duda, de una estrategia de legitimación del entretenimiento y el simulacro como funciones principales de la cultura. Se reparará rápidamente en la paradoja que afecta por igual a este texto en cuanto que objeto "crítico", por muy literal que sea: su capacidad de dar lugar a un comportamiento consecuente en el lector está limitada no solo por las condiciones de difusión del soporte en que aparece, sino más todavía por la dificultad de toda reacción del espectador frente a un régimen normativo institucional extremadamente rígido, cuya labor principal estriba en disimular permanentemente sus crisis. Permítaseme, pues, concluir citando a Boris Buden, quien, tomando como base el nefasto legado de la sociedad estalinista, afirmaba recientemente en su artículo "Crítica sin crisis, crisis sin crítica" (ver: http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0106/buden/es): "La crítica -bajo la forma de la autocrítica comunista- fue utilizada (o abusada, si lo preferís) no para revelar la crisis y sus antagonismos e intervenir en ella (lo que hubiera constituido un acercamiento marxista clásico), sino, por el contrario, para ocultarla y, de esta manera, convertirla en permanente, esto es, para transformar o traducir las crisis en una suerte de normalidad. Esto es típico de la situación actual: ni somos capaces de experimentar nuestro tiempo como crisis ni intentamos devenir en sujetos mediante el acto de la crítica. En tiempos de la modernidad clásica, la crisis siempre se experimentaba como una posibilidad concreta de ruptura y la crítica, como la ruptura en sí misma. Hoy, obviamente, ya no somos capaces de realizar esta experiencia. Ya no hay ningún tipo de experiencia de interacción entre crisis y crítica. (...) El resultado es una crítica permanentemente ciega ante la crisis y una crisis permanentemente sorda frente a la crítica; en suma: ¡una armonía perfecta!" (traducción de Marcelo Expósito).

  

 

The battle to purify forms, one of modernity's most common gestures, was fought mainly by denying the concept of the ornament. This denial unfolded both in the field of the supposedly autonomous arts (painting, sculpture, music) and in the realm of the functional arts (architecture, design). In that sense, Adolf Loos' famous essay, Ornament and Crime, from 1909, had a foundational character. In one of the main passages, Loos defied the pulsional tendency of the "primitive" man or child to tarnish his body or surroundings with inscriptions that in one way or another referred to his passions and elemental affections. According to the Austrian architect, the modern man was characterised by rejecting said forms of behaviour as signs of "degeneration." As the climax of his reasoning, Loos proclaimed: "I have found this truth that I give to the world: the evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects." Loos' discourse clearly advocates a trend that verges towards the radical rationalisation that characterised the formalist period of the historical avant-gardes, and certified the death, especially in architecture, of Art Nouveau ("Jugendstil" or "Modern Style"). Likewise, other formulations of that same aesthetic discourse legitimised the predominance of geometric abstraction over other manifestations of "advanced" art, giving way to movements such as, first and foremost, Malevich's Suprematism or Mondrian's Neo-Plasticism.

However, the representatives of these movements -albeit demonstrating their capacity to achieve an extreme degree of pictorial purity (Malevich's absolute white, pure essential painting bereft of ornament)- were not able to rid themselves of the subjective-narcissist residue of art taken as an expression of genius, which made them prone to a certain type of mysticism. After a few decades, some schools, in Europe and America, undertook the deconstruction of pictorial activity in general through automated and extremely rigid behaviours that referred to the mechanical and mass production of images and objects and to the decorative servitude of painting in general. In France, the group composed by Daniel Buren, Niele Toroni, Olivier Mosset and Michel Parmentier used repetitive and reductive pictorial practices to develop a critical artistic process. It is interesting to analyse the historical evolution of said process, at least partially, precisely given the manner in which said criticism has been assimilated by the artistic context. The evolution of the first of these artists, Daniel Buren, after the group split in 1967, is especially relevant if we observe the extent to which there has been a reversion of the "critical" impulse that seemed to encourage their artistic quest from the upstart. Said impulse was more or less explicit in Buren's first street interventions, the famous affichages sauvages of posters bearing his now famous 8,7 cm-wide stripes. By choosing a single visual message as a recurring element in his interventions, Buren revealed a slightly problematic character, based primarily on the aforementioned denial of pictorial content and on the reference to nothing but a mere painted surface (which was, in addition, produced industrially). Each time Buren's "trademark" appeared somewhere in the city, it did not only cover (with certain symbolical violence) a specific pre-existing message (an advert or propaganda), but also revealed, in the specific location, the strategic character of the use of signs in public spaces. However, nobody can escape the fact that, by using those walls, Buren was falling back on a completely ordinary promotional tool; it was a type of advert, an "unruly" pursuit of notoriety that demonstrated quasi-immediate effectiveness and attracted a great amount of attention from the art world towards this creator. It was back in the year 1968 -an inaugural year for the history of post-modern advertising- and the growing requests for interventions in galleries and museums started to turn the "revolutionary" Buren into what he is today: an interior decorator with an irremediable penchant for Mannerism. That did not stop the artist from asserting, that same year: "Everything superficial should be transformed constantly; since the infrastructure remains intact, evidently nothing is modified fundamentally... Art is actually the most beautiful ornament in society and not a warning sign for society, as it should have been and never was."

As of the Seventies, Buren started to decline his motif in all types of museum and urban spaces, occupying both functional or interstitial areas (corridors, stairwells, chairs) and marginal surfaces and signaletics (banners and flags, nautical sails, windows, etc.). The specific capacity for designation or indexation created in these locations by implementing an identifiable sign within allowed Buren to specialise in a form of so-called "immanent criticism" through his onsite work, a critique that Buren, with masterly rhetoric skill, has almost always managed to combine with a maximum degree of neutrality... This explains his commercial success and the trust that all types of, eminently not neutral, institutions have placed in Buren for over three decades.