AUTOBIOGRAFÍA AUTOBIOGRAPHY
If the author has died —Sergio Rubira
The Author is dead In 1967, rather than in 1968 as some insist so that it may coincide with the student protests in Paris, Roland Barthes published in an American magazine one of the most well-known articles in the contemporary age, or at least one of the most oft-quoted ones, for its title refers to a paradoxical catchphrase of another divine and somewhat older death, “The Death of the Author”. It was in the issue of Aspen—that was the name of the magazine—devoted to one of the poets with whom the contemporary era began: Stéphane Mallarmé, the poet of pure language. It was a double issue, no. 5 and no. 6, which was soon dubbed the minimalist issue. This name has stuck to this day, most likely because the previous issue was called the pop issue, following that so customary progressive reasoning, but also because of its insistence on language— although this may be more appropriate for a special issue on conceptualism—and because of the names of some of the contributing artists, such as Sol Lewitt, who never liked the minimal label, Robert Morris, who would eventually abandon the large geometric structures in neutral grey to work with felt, producing forms that turned out to be too organic for a fundamentalist of that trend, and Dan Graham, who does not always fit into what the history of art has come to call minimalism in order to fabricate, once again to fabricate, a movement that may unify different tendencies of the sculpture of the sixties. In those minimalist issues of Aspen one could read—in some cases it would be better to say write, see, listen to, or
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even construct—essays and works by Samuel Beckett, Mel Bochner, William Burroughs, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Merce Cunningham, Marcel Duchamp, George Kubler, Max Neuhaus, Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Richter, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Tony Smith and Susan Sontag. Many proper names, too many for the table of contents of an issue announcing the death of the author. This table of contents is now a sort of canon. Everyone in it has been canonized; perhaps because one had to sacrifice oneself, to be a martyr, let oneself be killed, like the author of Barthes’ article, in order to be a part of it. It seems this became a necessary evil during that decade: to die as author in order to be reborn as authority. Previously, it had not been entirely essential to murder oneself in order to achieve this —although one might believe that the wave of romantic suicides, the turn-of-the-century infectious diseases, the avant-garde disappearances and the post-war traffic accidents, would contradict this. Maybe this is the ultimate difference between Baudelaire and Mallarmé, the fracture that marks the passage from one place to another, from modernity to the contemporary age: from the reading of the individual in the text to his elimination in the writing. However, Barthes’ text, which was originally a conference, had another very different intention, and it was not so much to talk about that author who was dead and who had been transformed into a ghost because many people continued to invoke him, but to
Mark Morrisroe. Self-portrait (to Brent), 1982. Courtesy Collection of Brent Sikkema and the Estate of Mark Morrisroe.
Olivia Bee. Untitled, Everyday series, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.
Elinor Carucci. Cherries I Ate By Myself, Crisis series, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Fifty One Fine Art Photography, Antwerpen.
IX MOTHER'S Miyako Ishiuchi www.michaelhoppengallery.com www.thethirdgalleryaya.com
Son los grandes actos los que normalmente se consideran trascendentes, pero en el recuerdo que mantiene el amor que se ha perdido, son los pequeños detalles los que perduran para siempre. A veces son las cosas más insignificantes las que provocan mayor nostalgia. Las que evocan recuerdos profundamente anclados en el fondo de la memoria con mayor nitidez. Las trazas de un olor en un pañuelo, el tono irisado de un carmín sobre el dorso de la mano, una cuenta de cristal, una media desparejada, el tacto de las páginas amarillentas de un libro o la atmósfera viciada de un cajón cerrado durante demasiado tiempo. Restos, retazos, residuos, huellas. Recorrer una vida a base de algunos de sus fragmentos más vulgares. Acotar, con las posesiones del pasado que una vez definieron, que definen en nuestros recuerdos, a quienes ya no están. Pruebas materiales, objetos que testimonian con el desgaste provocado por su uso, la existencia que no volverá. En el año 2000 la madre de Miyako Ishiuchi fallece repentinamente. Desde hacía tiempo la fotógrafa retrataba detalles de su cuerpo y, tras su muerte, empezó a fotografiar también sus objetos personales. Una dentadura postiza, una fotografía antigua, los restos de cabello en el cepillo o el calor de su cuerpo aprisionado en el encaje de su lencería. El alma de su ser más querido capturada en plástico, tela y metal, fijada para siempre en una fotografía. Catalogando con imágenes lo ajeno para lidiar con el dolor propio, relatando la infinitud de una vida extinta, aprehendiendo los últimos retazos de su existencia.
The great acts are the ones that are normally considered transcendental, but in the memories we hold of our lost loved ones, it is the small details that last forever. Sometimes it is the most insignificant things that provoke the most nostalgia, vividly evoking remembrances rooted in the depths of memory. The traces of a smell in a handkerchief, the iridescent tone of lipstick on the back of one’s hand, a glass bead, an unpaired sock, the feel of the yellowing pages of a book or the stuffiness of a drawer that has been closed for too long. Remains, remnants, residues, and traces. A life can be surveyed through some of its most vulgar fragments. Those who are no longer with us can be contained in the possessions from the past that once defined them, and continue to define them in our memories. These fragments are material proof, objects whose wear and tear bears witness to an existence that will never return. In the year 2000 Miyako Ishiuchi’s mother died suddenly. For some time the photographer had been portraying details of her body. After her death she began to photograph her personal objects: her dentures, an old photograph, the hair left in her brush, and the heat of her body caught in the lace of her lingerie. She captured her loved-one’s soul in plastic, cloth and metal, freezing it forever in a photograph. Cataloguing outer items with images in order to cope with her inner pain, relating the infinity of an extinct life, seizing the last remnants of its existence.
— Marta Mantecón Moreno Translated by Dena Ellen Cowan
E X IT Im ag en y Cul t u r a / I m a ge & Cul tu re Tr i m e s t r al / Q ua r t e r l y M a ga z i ne • Añ o 13 - # 49 F e brero / M a r z o / Ab r i l 2 0 1 3 • P V P E s pa ña : 2 5 Eu ro s