Miguel Copón
Stupefied
ridiculous actions in the search or in the belief that behind everything some sort of meaning is hiding. Contagion can be as utterly virulent as we imagine: Nietzsche is nothing more than the virulent detonator of that illusory falsification of all meaning, very appropriately in the line of Protagoras and Diogenes, very appropriately against the Socratic-Platonic tradition, which did not understand laughter, nor fluidity, nor the existence of urine in the world. Our assumption was that the spectator halts before a work and expects to discover its meaning. The distance that Nietzsche provides us with is that of the idiotic radicaliness of questioning in excess, once again, like a child. It is very simple, one only has to generalise the question radically. Like a virus, so that reason becomes ill. Why spectator? What does the spectator expect? Why halt? Is it not possible to contemplate something in movement, or the movement itself? Could it be that the work is stationary so that the spectator can capture, embrace, understand it? And what if the work moves more than the spectator? And what if the spectator moves more than the work? If everything becomes dislocated, if everything has an argument of madness, the weave of a dream, is more indefinite than certain, more sensitive than perceptible? In order for all this to happen it is necessary to provoke a step further. Stupidity is the path, with all the danger it entails, although an enormous number of artistic genres and styles derive their names from a pejorative label that the public used to defend itself from the excess of art, a label that is later assimilated by artists as their own. Stupidity is a complex form because it cannot depend on any expectable medium, it has to be a provocation that leaves meaning open and with it the spectator. Stupidity is demanding with its formalities; if not, then it can degenerate into the easy joke, the predictable theatrical action, the standardisation of the risible. Those who are bewildered are stupid, and the theatrical mode of access to this bewilderment is the foundation of the work on the score of Los Torreznos. However, stupidity is the formula for submersing expectations in astonishment. A familiar word in Spanish announces this to us: estupefaciente1 is the means for creating the absurd space of meaninglessness. The stupendous silliness, where the contagion has already gained ground on meaning and where any sign that is emitted plays on another field; and where any wink, no matter how minimal, triggers laughter as a contagion, laughter as the defence of spectators before something they do not understand due to its extreme simplicity, or do not understand because they cannot understand it, because of its extreme raison d’être. The infection, literally, is the shared contact of something, not merely of laughter, but of the thematic formula that normally serves as the excuse for the works
of Jaime and Rafael, that is, power. All of their works circle or touch upon this subject, even if they cannot approach it in a direct manner, or when it appears in a nominal manner, it is degraded as a cliché that has to be dissolved, so that another contagion, one even more virulent and sickly, can appear: the general lack of meaning, or how ridiculously pathetic the most common and trite power structure is, the one that links a meaning to a sound, the one that links an action or a presence to a signifier. A reprimand that can be stated simply, but which contains an enormous dose of danger: There is no other power but that of creating meaning; if meaning is left vacant, the potency of any discourse is rendered inane, is dissolved. If this is so, then we can laugh at anything; if this is so, then we laugh at anything. In fact, we laugh when the facts are not connected to one another and they present themselves in all of their radical pathos. The contagion of laughter affects reason, which is left stupefied, bewildered, and stupid, in a ritual process in which the theatrical techniques lead us little by little to the sewer of the reasonable, until we are left exposed in them. We laugh to defend ourselves from the most uncomfortable of situations. We laugh in order not to cry, or we laugh until we cry, because injustice and meaninglessness are called nonsense, silliness, with all of its grand pejorative tone, solvent, comic, surreal or superreal or hyperreal, inasmuch as reality has been distorted to the extent that meaning has become homeless, infected by laughter.
1 [Translator’s note: «estupefaciente» means «narcotic» and shares the same root as «estupidez» (stupid).] –– 102 ––
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