Being under the rule of devices, this same device that allows us to see that we are inside an art gallery and everything else that comes with it, is a condition of the game of at least a part of the contemporary art exhibitions. But can becoming aware of this mobilize something lively within us?
When you climbed up the stairs, you encountered a red light that warmed the antechamber; maybe it resembled a film development laboratory. When you enter the exhibition space, the set of images of people looking at artworks is also looking at you. There are people looking at artworks; and you, looking at them, who also glance at each other. This is a manifestation of the artist’s skill, whose research points to what may be the construction of a way of seeing art throughout art history, or yet, makes us a fundamental part of this looking experience. Or would it be our inability of seeing? She gives us a clue: in this game, it is no longer possible to completely interact. To know the mechanisms isn’t to be a better player.
In order to come in contact with Isis Gasparini’s work in Mise-en-scène-museum, it seems more logical to talk about something close to what Virginia Woolf relates in her diary from May 14, 1925: “The truth is, one can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes”. Here, the same paradoxical relation occurs. In trying to conform to the device’s discourse, something of the experience of “being with art” (as the British duo Gilbert & George suggest) escapes us. Hence, how can we be together with art? How can we experience it within an environment that has already produced so many different discourses about it and built so many structures to mediate and shape the relation art establishes with us?
One of the solutions, but with no guarantees, is still to allow oneself to be captured by what the exhibition offers, when, including for us who are writing this essay, it becomes feasible to become an audience again, like you are here. And this without being influenced by the memory of the day when we discussed how we should hang the photographs by aligning the eyes of the portrayed with the eyes of an average-height person.
On the floor, the photograph has become an object; it has weight, volume and texture. The environment is still dark, but there is some light and other colors on the image that reveals a painting; part of a painting, the artist’s detailed construction interrupted by a lilac quadrant. Still searching for a fleeting light, we find a window from a museum. The curtains swing in a space-between. In the video, one can glimpse what Isis chose not to let us see. Or would it have been the museum? The addicted red that stands out in a room with chairs and carpet seems to exalt the clots in the museum system. A flash blocks a woman’s face, a countenance we could have added to so many others, given the classic portrait repertoire that inhabits our imagination. On the blue wall, the caption is more important than the work, framed in a gold shade that reflects the past. The cards bought in souvenir shops, exposed to the sun, evoke the light and color investigation also carried out by Claude Monet, on the Rouen Cathedral (1890).
The desire for a light choreography and the use of emblematic art history images give volume to a cyclical quest that points to the possibility of relating to the devices just like a tourist who isn’t surprised by the traditions of a foreign city, and accepts the challenges with which artists deal when implicated in their work: the unequivocal connection with the world’s things, with others and with themselves.
Coletivo Ágata