BUSCADOR RECOLECTA

This paper reflects on art’s social effects and on the possibility to make up a theoretical discourse about them. Through a dialog with current artworks, we take into account the cognitive and ideological special status of the aesthetic object. Then we put to test the competence and the limits of a post-structuralist theory of art. Our thesis asserts that this theory must be complemented with a phenomenological theory of the aesthetic experience. One of the goals of the paper is to show how the categories of form –or mean– and content –narrative or represented– intertwine into the experience of the artwork, so that the first becomes the responsible of the semantic and ideological charge and the second, of the expressive means. These reflections, since they improve distinctions on the relations between experience, theory and cultural context, can bring something new to the epistemologist (from a heterodox perspective), as much as to the theorist and critic of art., En este artículo reflexionamos sobre el efecto social del arte y sobre la posibilidad de estructurar teóricamente un discurso relativo a tal efecto Mediante un diálogo con obras de arte actuales, presentamos el carácter cognitiva e ideológicamente específico del objeto estético y ponemos a prueba la fuerza y los límites de una teoría socio-estructuralista del arte. La tesis consiste en que esta teoría debe complementarse con elementos de una teoría fenomenológica de la experiencia estética. El artículo también muestra cómo los conceptos de forma –o medio- y contenido –narrativo o representado- se entrelazan hasta llegar a intercambiar las funciones que tradicionalmente se les otorgan. Mientras que la forma es responsable de una carga semántica e ideológica, el contenido lo es del medio expresivo. Estas reflexiones, que desarrollan nuevos matices sobre la imbricación entre experiencia, teoría y contexto cultural, pueden aportar algo nuevo tanto al epistemólogo, desde una perspectiva alejada a la suya habitual, como al crítico y al teórico del arte.

“Technique” is the human power to become human, the power of instauration, installation, maintenance and extension of humanity. Is there something outside of that power? The non-power is neither outside nor inside, it doesn’t occupy a beyond nor an against. It’s also not a vacuum, since this is always about to fill. Let’s think about death for a moment. Does it occupy space? Does it posses or exhibit any consistency? What power or impotence nest in it? The only thing worth saying about death is that it doesn’t occupy space at all, death is not the corpse, Death doesn’t occupy any place or has consistence. However, death “is”, death happens, death is (the) truth., “Lo técnico” es el poder humano de hacerse humano, el poder de instauración, instalación, mantenimiento y extensión de lo humano. ¿Qué hay fuera de ese poder? El sin-poder no está “fuera” ni está “dentro”, no ocupa un “más allá” ni un “contra”. Tampoco es otro nombre del vacío, pues éste se halla siempre a punto de llenarse. Pensemos un instante en la muerte. ¿Ocupa algún lugar? ¿Posee o exhibe alguna consistencia? ¿Qué poder o qué impotencia anidan en ella? De la muerte sólo cabrá decir que no ocupa lugar alguno –la muerte no es el cadáver–, que no posee ni exhibe ni consiste… Y sin embargo, la muerte, cómo dudarlo, “es”, la muerte “ocurre”, la muerte es (la) verdad.

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Simulation is a specificity of human being just like writing is a specific feature human beings. These two specificities can be interwoven when one wants to hide writing message. The concealment of this message can be done in two ways, one called steganography, that is through techniques that hide the message itself to those who are not meant to receive it, the other is cryptography, that is acting on the signifier. Our alphabetical forms of writing, including the syllabic ones, are fit to be counterfeited and transformed into cryptographies because the level of expression signifier can be altered by mixing the letters constituting its structure. There are several ways to make cryptography of a text. They follow precise mathematical rules based on the discreteness of alphabetical characters that, for their own nature, can be treated as numbers. In addition, alphabetical-linguistic systems share with numbers many characteristics. In this essay we deal with different systems of written codes: the monoalphabetical and polialphabetical ones developed by Leon Battista Alberti, the Table of Vigenère, as well as some more recent methods for producing ciphers along with their resolution. But if we can operate in such analytic way on the signifier, for its nature of discrete element, what happens in case of non-alphabetical or non-syllabic forms of writings? In the Ptolemaic period (but even before) there were many cryptographies in hieroglyphic writing composed with Egyptian ideograms – i.e. in a figurative form of writing – that did not have the discreteness and referred both to content and phonetic, mixing them together. This essay examines one of these cryptographies and other engraved on the flat surface of the scarabs preserved in some museum collections and analyzed by the Egyptologist E. Drioton. Starting from some observations we have drawn two final considerations on Egyptian cryptography: 1) that it uses exclusively phonology by dealing with ideograms as they were phonemes in a similar way of alphabetical cip- hers, and 2) that alteration – i.e. the change in position to create unusual geometries – allowed the Egyptians to change, in a general way, the syntactic order of signs so to assimilate hieroglyphs to alphabetical writing. In my opinion, this subject should be further analyzed for it could lead us to new interesting linguistic and semiotic developments.

Through the figure of hypotiposis, the work attempts to identify the specific qualities that enable a text to give the impression of becoming an image. For this purpose, instruments developed in the field of visual studies are applied: Wölfflin’s dualities, Gombrich and Arnheim’s writings, gestalt, the Theory of perception, etc. As a first exercise, a text by illustrator and novelist Mervyn Peake was selected and analysed in terms of its visual and narrative effectiveness as if it were a painting, the aim being to demonstrate that within certain texts with a high degree of visual richness, images configure a supertext of non-explicit connotations that are superimposed on the verbal.

The story of St George staged by The Golden Legend of Jac. de Voragine designs an architecture built on four pillars called by the author of the article “law of the father”, “law of de son”, “law of the spirit” and “law of the dragon”. Each law articulates and built the whole in a different way, but their borders are easy to cross. The first appear as three images of the justice detected and understood from different perspectives which are very human, linear and reproductive. The fourth seems to work an take place on the fringe of the human, but it contaminates any point of view with its strange circular tenacity. The dragon, which inaugurates the story and dies so soon, draw it, however, in the interstice that unites and separates the outside, like a kind of untiring architect with no proper name: it dies in a story and returns to life in another, to die again. The dragon, hidden protagonist, spins in its plot as many stories as attempts of reconstruction of the justice, which sooner or later is destroyed or out of joint without remedy. Neither human, nor inhuman, nor divine, the dragoneo shows itself to de living image of the writing, a virtually poetic justice in fieri.

The painter Gregorio Prieto approaches writing from two essential points of view: the incorporation of words in his paintings, most notably the words written in Greek characters, and the writing of his own name. The fact that Gregorio includes Greek words in his paintings or that he signs in Greek, even though he did not know this language, allows us to analyze the use of writing and specifically the Greek alphabet from two different perspectives: the inner concept of words: “the signifien” Greece and Gregorio, and the value of writing “having meaning”. This last sense leads us to believe that Gregorio recuperated the primary use of writing and that he returned to it its aesthetic aspect. The Greek alphabet, although phonetic, was the essence of Greek-ness for the artist, (here we can introduce the term grapholatry) and through it, he would transform his signature into an emblem and ex-scribe and to in-scribe himself as a /in Greek.