Crítica ornamental / Ornamental critique

Gillick recurrently uses the aforementioned type of textual devices in his art. In these artworks, the discourse is systematically used from an acritical distance that measures the ineffectiveness of the work and its fragmentation into a social sphere of non-debate. That is, for instance, the case of installations such as Exterior days. Here the inscriptions "ok, I'm sitting now on a ridge" y "ok, I'm standing now on a ridge" attempt to function, as Gillick himself states in his "visual archive," as "a critique of the tendency of dominant cultures to nominate a space of occupation, and then go and occupy it without thinking through all the consequences of this action"... The level of elaboration of his explanation of the work demonstrates its "critical" scope. It is also the case of Negociated/Double, a long sentence extracted from an unfinished text by Pierre Bourdieu which he uses as an element of conversation in a corridor: "Umneoliberlismkindofyouknowpromotessortofcommetialisation-uhitstrengthensumtheyouknowcommercialkindofpole..." Another of his "critical" strategies is, as aforementioned, the construction of polychrome metal sculptures, like fences or cages, with (once again, vague) references to workers conflicts in the Post-Ford era. As Gillick himself stated about Buffalo Structure, a similar private commission undertaken in the homonymous us city: "The work is designed to reveal itself slowly within the landscape and constructed specifically for the location. (...) The work reveals a critical interest in the legacy of painted metal sculpture and the way such work shifts meaning and potential when produced while reconsidering notions of production in a post-industrial environment such as Buffalo" (sic). It is intriguing to consider how a sculpture can "reveal itself slowly within the landscape" and how a norm for the "evident" artistic interpretation of the work can be generated spontaneously, based on an element as ambivalent as a metal fence (the mere description of a mode of production does not necessarily involve taking a stance in the balance of conflicting powers that encourage said mode of production). If we attempt to undertake a phenomenological interpretation of the so-called spontaneous revelation of the object, we see that it encounters the obstacle of its own codification -a coding whose operation Gillick does anything but ignore. Instead, what it actually reveals is the predominance of the form (integrated in an aestheticising exchange economy) over the content. The connection between the way in which the work is coded and its specific referent are based on submission -the form (i.e., the sensitive appearance), far from being formed by the reference, squashes it, drowns it. The fact that these works only become legible by means of a museum-based cultural mediation device in point of fact reduces the communicative potential of the object to a form of transmission that is perfectly institutionalised and, obviously, screenable.

These considerations on Buren and Gillick bring us towards the neuralgic centre of this line of argument. As aforementioned, it would be naïve to say, as Benjamin Buchloh suggested in 1980, that works brought about by a supposed "critical project" simply failed because of the symbolical economy and the social system of circulation they fall within. Since both do not only accommodate the work but, also, generate them, the artists responsible for their production cannot simulate the position of manipulated victims. This is not the failure of a critical or negative project; instead, this is the "success" of a project that is as positive as it is perverse, which is linked to the incorporation of the critical practice into the ornamental repertoire of a symbolical system within which political action can only become visible as simulation. As Juan Luis Moraza has brilliantly demonstrated, there needs to be a shift from an empirical or material conception of the ornament to a structural conception, since elements are not ornamental in themselves; they have an ornamental function or even an artistic action -an ornamental function that is potentially active wherever relationships between subjects and the environment are influenced institutionally by a spectacular model. "Only social complicity can allow for the, albeit partial, realisation of a project based on the fusion of art and life. The non-existence of that social complicity will lead to the disciplinary confinement of art, or to its strictly formal translation. Thus, the avant-garde rhetoric becomes more mystical or more radical with the disappearance of social complicity, or through its involvement in events. Revolutionary and content festivities appear as a medium for reconciliation (...). The extension of the ornamental corresponds to draining the life from the ornamental, and is illustrated in the subtlety of Tatafiore tissue paper, or in Jeff Koons' supposed perfectionist lewdness, or in Wodiczko's crude project about homeless vagrants dying of cold on the streets. Their legitimacy is the scenario of a preliminary, ornamental, legal space. Post-Modernity involves the assimilation of everything as ornament, and the acceptance of the illegitimacy of the law..." (J. L. Moraza, Ornamento y ley [Ornament and Law], Cendeac, 2007).

These ideas have attempted to expound on one of the many misunderstandings that currently circulate the art realm on the issue of the "critical" validity of certain practices, a misunderstanding that is, obviously, part of a strategy that strives to achieve the legitimisation of entertainment and simulation as the main functions of culture. Readers will soon notice the paradox that equally affects this text as a "critical" object, however literal: its capacity to trigger a consequent behaviour in the reader is limited not only by the conditions of the dissemination contributed by the support on which it appears, but also, and more importantly, by the difficulty of the reaction of each viewer when faced with an extremely rigid normative institutional regime, whose main task lies in permanently concealing its crises. Thus, I would like to conclude by quoting Boris Buden, who, basing his writings on the disastrous legacy of the Stalinist society, recently stated in his article "Criticism without crisis, crisis without criticism" (see: http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0106/buden/en): "Criticism -in the guise of communist self-criticism- was used (or if you like misused) not to disclose the real crisis and its antagonisms, and to intervene in it (which would have been a classical Marxist approach), but on the contrary to hide it and in this way to make it permanent, that is, to transform or translate crisis in some sort of normality. This is typical for today's situation: neither are we able to experience our time as crisis nor do we try to become subjects through an act of criticism. In the time of classical modernism, crisis was always experienced as an actual possibility of a break and criticism as this break itself. Today we are obviously not able to make such an experience any more. There is no experience whatsoever of an interaction between crisis and critique. (...)The result is a permanent criticism, which is blind for the crisis, and a permanent crisis, which is deaf for the criticism, in short -a perfect harmony!"