Are We changing the World
“Are We changing the World” is an exhibition and a magazine that were constructed around Narcisse Tordoir’s probing investigation of artistic collaboration. Following the recent re-entry of art into the arena of social transformation, both the exhibition and the magazine will revolve around a series of collaborate projects that have been realized by Narcisse Tordoir from 2001 thru the present within the context of his own studio, and in the field of extended cultural exchange. They lead from the Amsterdam Rijksacademy to the cultural premises of Mali’s Bamako and back to Antwerp. Extending upon these collaborations the exhibition will articulate an investigation of painting as a vehicle for experiments with cultural borderlines and dialogue accross these borderlines.
The artistic activity of Narcisse Tordoir can probably be understood most clearly if we start by conceiving painting as a specific and versatile modus operandi. Painting according to Tordoir is not dead, it is rather allover. Ever since the appearance of new media, painting as a tool for producing coded images has been adopted, reproduced, stretched and extended over different media. If we further elaborate on Tordoirs’ extended notion of painting, we would be tempted to consider painting a sort of motherboard for our contemporary digital image economy. Painting as such becomes a potential hotbed for articulating cultural dispositions and their transformations in a 1:1 ratio. Tordoir investigates the problems and opportunities surrounding painting and continuously formulates painting beyond the picture plain, beyond the frontal image, and eventually beyond the constraints of the individual author in a series of unambiguous collaborate endeavors. Tordoirs artistic carreer kicks off in 1976, today it is about to be veered into yet another orbit. The exhibition is set out to demonstrate the close ties between Tordoirs direct social actions of the 1970’s, his continued interest for painting and the most recent works that relocate Tordoir at the heart of reality.
Already in 1999, Tordoir had joined efforts with fellow painter Luc Tuymans for the exhibition project Trouble Spot Painting (NICC/MuHKA), where both took on the role of curators. The exhibition formulated a pertinent questioning of painting in its extended mode. Is painting a conceptual act of projecting an image onto a flat surface and how does this act resurface in such diverging actitivies as making photographs, designing spatial installations, directing video art or even in conducting workshops with several individuals. Is there a thing such as a painterly disposition that regulates the production of complex/intelligent imagery beyond the constraints of particular media? These questions steered the research for Trouble Spot Painting and lead Tordoir and Tuymans to juxtaposing their own bodies of work. Surely we were not only dealing with two highly diverging, to the point of conflicting legacies of Belgian painting (“if this is painting, then that’s not”) but we were equally dealing with a form of artistic collaboration without necessarily having to lead to one shared body of works. At its most extreme Trouble Spot Painting was testing the limits of painting and the limits of exhibition practice both at the same time. Pushing practice and theory (hypothesis) close to each other.
Before we even start digging in to what extent we are able to detect a similar or comparable, curatorial juxtaposing principle (several artistic bodies meeting) in Tordoirs actual collaborate works, it is recommended we first observe on how a series of about 10 recent artistic collaborations has developed out of specific spatial but also painterly conditions.
By the year 2000 Tordoir started inviting artists to his studio on a quite regular basis. Gradually the studio developed into a collaborative workstation that was frequentled by David Neirings, Koen de Decker, Carla Arocha, Bruna Hautman, and James Beckett, among others and extended this practice in 2002, together with Alioune Bâ and Bréhima Koné, by setting up a series of workshops that led to a semi-permanent culture exchange workstation in Bamako, Mali, centered around the traditional Bogolan technique of textile painting. Tordoir conducted three Mali workshops in total (Echap, Click and Bogodia). The outcome of these workshops and collaborations, together with Tordoirs oeuvre, has been set out as the basic material for the exhibition “Are We changing the World.” The exhibition and magazine offer a preliminary survey of all collaborate works that have been realized so far. As an exhibition it does not conclude nor does it provide a synthesis and will rather take the form of a deserted sweatshop, addressing several questions at the same time.
How can we bridge the gap between Tordoirs highly conceptual Untitled 1976, which provides us with an exposé of painterly materials, problems and solutions over Untitled, 1982 which is the first experiment in perpendicular panelling, to a piece as multi-layered as “Africeur” (2003-2004).
Tordoirs healthy scepticism towards about every form of picturing reality has led him to developing quite pragmatic spatial solutions and reductive graphic schemes for writing down imagery in painterly shorthand. If we add all the strategies that have permeated the work of Tordoir we discover an ultimate freedom that has allowed him to touch all sides of the skateboard ramp, from colourfield painting to mounting objects on pedestals photography and performance. It is in this extended territory that we already encounter a denial of authorship.
Artistic collaboration performs a rather direct and far more encompassing questioning of authorship. It does not so much target the author as a solid and unified ideological concept although Tordoirs situationist background “society is a system ...” could put us on track of such a reading. Let us take note of different readings whenever there’s different authors involved: Collaborating is a way at defining new parameters for exchange between artists and audiences. It is equally a way at fostering a new definition of art as a meeting place where alternate ideas and cultural conditionings are negotiated along diverging artistic opinions, identities, conditionings, contexts and ideas. How can the exhibition enhance this meeting of ideas instead of opposing ideas in binary couplings: self/other, painting/discourse, art/information. For Are We changing the World we would like to make these concepts work for art instead of making art work for these concepts.
The image of the studio is playing an important role throughout the work of Narcisse Tordoir. Where at the end of the 1970’s the street can be a working terrain for Tordoir as a performative painter, Tordoirs attentions move towards more conceptual activities around 1985, hence his sketchbooks become the primordial site of artistic experimentation, conceptualization and planning. Throughout the 1990’s tordoir counters these conceptual overtones, by designing his studio as an office with several working stations/tables/modules. The maze structure of the studio is hiding a series of maquettes or scale models that are being developed simultaneously. These maquettes are the opposite of the collaborate works, they deny the individual artist in his singular relationship to the masterpiece. Tordoir moves from one work to the next and back. End of the 1990’s Tordoir moves to a new studio that is more spatial and comparable to an exhibition space. It allows a more monumental way of working. Some of the maquette works are being blown up into real size, or more than real size. It’s interesting to trace how a magazine and an exhibition can follow these developments, can represent, recreate or re-stage them. How can we incorporate opposing ways of thinking/working. The final display of works will be structured along various subdivisions that coincide with different operational strategies in the work of Tordoir and along the various boundaries that regulate the encounter with the work of art: the white cube, the workshop zone, the studio, the black box, the panorama, the performance area, the documentary platform. These spatial dispositions - the way we present art – will eventually relate to certain painterly dispositions and vice versa.
The exhibition among others will feature a reconstruction of Narcisse Tordoirs studio as it could be found early 1990’s. Its setup displays a dispersed regime of productions: several scale models are in the process of being worked upon simultaneously. Even the studio itself is scaled down to various maquettes that conceive the studio or the exhibition space as a portable object, caught up in a continuous process of relocation and translation. The dislocation of the studio is inherent in collaborative and workshop practice: different working conditions suppose different productive or even anti productive strategies. The 1:1 reconstruction of the studio is treated as a tongue in cheeck ready-made that can be transported from one locale to another. It becomes both the site for a revaluation of the basic conditions of production and a non-space that can be relocated incessantly as a figure for the artist travelling and the accompanying processes of conflict and identification.
Mobile paintings vs mobile artists
Artistic collaboration in the specific case of Narcisse Tordoir can be seen as diverse individuals engaged in a process of negotiation, compromise, mimetics, camouflage and exchange. How do we coin this collaborate zone then. Is it a neutral ground where all inhabitants temporarily coagulate? If we briefly return to our description of space and the conditions that seem to determine the work of Tordoir, this process of collaborating could be directing us at a new environment. Tordoir leaves one form of architecture – the studio – and becomes a mobile artist travelling in space and time. Tordoir becomes a mobile unit that can be connected to an unlimited number of interfaces or like an interface connects to an unlimited number of networks, individuals or groups. Just maybe Tordoir at this point is revealing the conditions for making art in the 21st century.
The horizontal process of exchange, share and negotiating that is embodied by the workstation is allowing Tordoir to set new challenges for art in the domain of social, political and cultural transformation. “Fight for 1000 Negatives” for example is a video documentary that has been realized in conjunction with Tordoir’s African exchange in “Africeur”. Africeur is a quite complex installation that combines an interest for the traditional Bogolan technique with the production of utilitarian textile in three domains: table cloths, clothing and painting. Fight for 1000 negatives as a documentary addresses the attempts made by the Seidou Keita Foundation to bring the estate of the late Malinese photographer into a precarious balance with a Western photo economy. The president of the Keita-estate is being interviewed and allowed to testify of the difficulties in caring of the thousands of negatives, when the estate can hardly survive as long as profits are being made on its back in a Western black market. Africeur is staged as an African trading place meets video lounge. A series of tables and benches invite the visitor to examine or even use the bogolan textiles that are displayed on the table. At the same time the visitor can witness “Fight for 1000 negatives.” The video interview is a criticizing manifesto that is not only meant to offer a platform to the Keita estate. It is equally offering Tordoir an alibi for exporting several bogolan cloths out of Mali into a western art world under the veil of collaboration. Again the title of the exhibition is veered into new orbits. As far as we were tempted to believe that art by itself would be capable of changing the world, we find it hard to disconnect art from different economies and distribution centers. In order to be active on all these levels the artist needs to travel incessantly from one level to another. The estate of Seidou Keita is trying to bring its archival function into a balance with a western photo economy, much as Tordoir endeavors to gear his background in painting to the socio-ritual but equally utilitarian production of the Bogolan, as one among many compasses that steer Tordoir in his collaborate endeavor.
If we pay carefull attention to the history of Tordoir’s individual artistic preoccupations we can only but witness their painterly concerns, but equally a performative gesture revealing an engagement with society at large. Tordoir used to be an active member of the Direct Action group. The collective performed numerous performances in public space over the 1970’s. It’s approach was not very different from Tordoirs seemingly more monumental and aesthetically more permanent efforts of today and of the preceding decades.
But then, are we changing the world?
“La rivoluzione siamo noi” (we are the revolution) is a multiple by German artist Joseph Beuys. It was issued in 1972 and shows the artist walking forward in a self-conscious way. Beuys invites us to follow him on the straight path to a brighter future. By 1981 Tordoir realizes a series of three images: “Are we changing the world,” immediately followed by “Are we losing our ideals,” and “All is quiet here.” “Are We changing the World” originally features as text at the tip of a mountain. Each of two sides of the mountain is climbed by a dog/wolf. The animals are about to collide. Surely “Are We changing the World” has different intentions than Joseph Beuys’s incentive into mimetic behaviour. Apparently their instinct is forcing the two animals to engage in battle, which is the most urgent form of action/reaction we can imagine. It is the flip side of collaboration. “Are we losing our ideals” is a larger than man size drawing. In the few photographs that were made of the drawing, it is being held by the artist. We can still see the hands of the artist holding the top edges of the drawing. At the bottom of the drawing we see the bottom of a chair the artist is standing on. Tordoirs early drawings could be pamphlets, political manifesto’s that should be carried in demonstrations. Recently a series of bypassers at a square in Antwerp was asked to manipulate and hold a series of cloths that Tordoir had realized in Bamako. Are we changing the world, are we losing our ideals, everything is quiet here: The three titles also seem to provide us with a step by step account of what artistic collaboration could encompass: The meeting of idealist individuals, The opening up of the fortress of protection around artistic activity, The disappearance of the threat of the other.
The artistic endeavour at the heart of the exhibition “Are we changing the world” cannot hide a tongue in cheeck mentality. At the midst of the first decade of the 21st century there is hardly any indication that an individual or a group of individuals would be able to change the proceedings of an entire planet? It is a question that seems to fall apart in several ruins after a time lapse of about a decade since “La rivoluzione simao noi”: What is an individual, what is a group, what is change. It provocatively replaces Beuys’s dictum with the questions should art represent or should art perform revolution? The question is highly political and at the same time a deconstruction of all its constituents. Our only hope is rooted in the following: Tordoirs work is doing both.
In the poster image for the exhibition we see a fragment of the work “Africeur” being installed in the multicultural environment of the De Coninckplein in Antwerp. Installing “Africeur” in such a context (the work resembles an African market) is a harsh statement about both art as an instrument for social and cultural change (How do we upgrade the neighborhood?) but equally about social and cultural change as subject matter for art.
How come then that critics have hardly been able to recongnize these subjects/attempts in the works of Tordoir. Do painters need to go corporate in order to be legitimate in a global economy. At this point the exhibition takes a final turn. What is the position of painting in a globalized image economy? The act of collaboration not only brings us beyond the constraints of individual media, dicsiplines, formats, but equally beyond the constraints of the individual as a creative actor.
Postscript:
“Heaven on Earth” shows us the perfect calm in the artificial setting of a domesticated landscape, a parc in Paris on a Sunday afternoon. “Heaven on Earth” was shot on 8 mm. The image chills and we are caught up in tranquil moments of pure bliss. Beyond the mood we can trace or recognize patterns of individual and group behaviour, as spectators we become anthropologists. “Heaven on Earth” seems to portray everything that can compensate a nine to five clockwork. The urban concept of the parc, its undisciplined yet regulated divertimento value is comparable to that of art or painting. Tordoir and his direct action group seems to be warning us for the moments when everything is quiet here.
|
