The Language of Action
Languages avail themselves of signs to substitute for objects in the exterior world in order to express and communicate messages. A tree is no longer shown; "this tree" is said. The representation of the tree by means of a sig--that sounds acoustically thus and that by social convention designates an object with determinate characterisitics that differentiate it from other objects that, in their turn, count on other signs to designate them--was a factor in the progress towards favoring the relations of production. The languages of representation by using signs, which are not the same objects, can only act immediately and directly on the presentations themselves. The influence of languages on reality was effected a posteriori, to conciliate behavior by means of suggestion, orders, requests, etc. There ends the "power of the word" as the poets are accustomed to saying; who definitively acts is the person and not representative language. Futurism, Dadaism, Cubism, Surrealism, etc., are artistic currents that avail themselves of languages of representation--to speak, to write, to paint, to recite, to sing, or whatever other known technique, in facts, acts, but acts whose determinant disposition is the emission of representations and not the emission of a message by means of action.
Each language has its own system of decoding (reading), and such mechanisms will not change. However, the channels or bases on which aesthetic information flows--be they pages, posters, canvases, post cards, walls, records, the human body, etc.--will change, to the point of the improbable. Neither are these mechanisms of reading and/or writing altered although they are modified, also to the point of the improbable, by the instruments utilized in order to write, be they pencils, brushes, wedges, airplanes, etc., or the substances employed in the technique of writing: charcoals, oils, inks, emulsions, clay, ash, etc. All combinations are possible with the languages of representation, such as in soccer, but the mechanics of such languages can not be altered without destroying them, creating other new ones. That is to say, soccer can be played many ways, with a ball of cloth or rubber, on a field or in a patio, with wooden arches or those of fiber, but if, for example, the rule is modified that prohibits touching the ball with the hands, another sport is created.
At times, in modern art, it is enough to make some small modification to create new artistic currents as, for example, to apply the scientific advances that change media--photography, the cinema, computerization, etc.--or radicalizing the supposed theories of certain codifications such as, for example, the passage from analytic Cubism to synthetic Cubism, and from this to abstractionism, etc.; or to apply the new codifications discovered in a determined language to another, such as in the case of the transposition of the significative visual unities to literature, for example, "Un coup de dés," etc., but this is another matter.
The other term of the contradiction is constituted by the language of action, about which we know little today. It is supposed that the sign of the language of action acts, contrary to the signs of the languages of representation, immediately and directly on reality. It expresses not only messages, such as do the other languages, on substituting elements of the exterior world with signs-acts of immediate conventionalization, but also the act-sign itself is manifest at the same time that the act takes place.
In order to favor analysis, let's divide the sign of action, and we shall see how its elements act: signifier and signified. On the one hand, at the level of the signifier, it works on reality, and, on the other hand, at the level of the signified, it works ideologically. A small example: in October of 1973, the Uruguayan government decided to demolish two old cement structures that previously had been put up in order to construct a funicular that, for technical reasons, was never able to be executed. The sign-act, at the level of the signifier, worked on reality with the effective and real demolition of the cement structures and, at the level of the signified, with the idea that it awoke public opinion, that the government "will demolish all the old structures that do not serve the country." This example serves also to show how it is possible--in whatever language--to disguise reality beneath a veil of signs, representations, or signs-acts.
It is possible to force one to say what one wants of whatever language, and the truth of what is shown is imposed by the authority of the speaker or other forms of informational deformation. Thus, a fixed system of communication can express something by means of one language and dissemble by means of another: these are the inadvertent slippages between theory and practice that artistic movements are accustomed to having, or those that are conscious and calculated when it has to do with propaganda or publicity.
If it is certain that in all social structures there exist three levels--economic, juridical-political, and ideological--it is evident that the artist operates in the last, but, as the imbrication of the levels is tight and mutually influencing, any change in the ideological level will act on the other levels, and vice versa. This is the same as saying that signs of any of the existing languages are as important as any other instrument in the project to change the determinant level of any system. Today, many artists are interested in art that changes unwelcome reality and not that which hardly permits them to express--be it verbally or visually, through mental behavior, or conceptually--this desire (without confusing the language of action with gestural language, whose signs are already conventionalized socially and represent attitudes: to carry flowers to the spouse, to give one's seat to the ladies, etc.).
Aesthetic information that the artist transmits enriches the repertory of the receiver making possible better levels of comprehension of reality and, as a consequence, amplifying his possibilities of acting conveniently on reality, but it is not the work that changes reality but who consumes it--the spectator, the listener, the participant, etc. In contrast, by means of the language of action, the artist not only uses the habitual mechanism of processing aesthetic information, according to traditional norms--acting exclusively on the ideological level--but also, in its turn, the work can operate directly on reality.
The foundation of avant-garde artistic activity is the unpredictability of aesthetic information, which is achieved by altering the combinatory codes or models of signs and changing them for other, new ones, that is to say, leaving to one side the characteristics already given in art, relocating signs in discourses or texts that remove the quietism and entropy themselves of known and digested art. New relations and knowledge of reality are favored that permit new models of behavior and an adequate relation with the environment, creating fresh codifications of known language as well as other languages.
Non-object 2
(A printed sheet folded into 4 parts and stapled to another that says "prohibited" in various languages.)
that an act of intervening with an object has been concluded, whose unique proposition was to unleash the thought/action synapses;
that you adequately resolved the supposed thought/action contradiction or conception-of-the-act/execution-of-the-act in spite of the prohibition to realize it;
hat the realized act will liberate the tension, fruit of the contradiction, and that this resolution is agreeable;
that, despite the alienating pressure of the system that imposes separation between thought/action, you can propose and execute other acts that move against the system in the same way that you did not obey the order of "prohibited;"
that NON-OBJECT ART rightly proposes this: to act on reality and not on a substitute for this reality such as the known art languages do; and
that on not respecting the prohibition you demonstrated you have an independent personality and that all depends on you and all is then possible. . .
To establish a relation with reality, not through a representative system as are all systems by which current art is expressed (speech, color, sound, etc.) with which are constructed these false relations deforming and abusing art's essential functions: the unique work, transportable, consumable, publishable, imperishable, rentable, etc., fruit, in all cases, of a rupture, of a disequilibrium between creators, the environment, and the medium in which they work.
Created in this aesthetic function, the object is opposed to the indissoluble unity art/life, is raised like a wall between humanity and its means and impedes a direct and adequate relationship: if they love they should love and not express it symbolically, utilizing for them one, many, or all the representative systems at his disposition. The art object eliminated, art is transported to the point from which it should never have departed, unity, the synapsis "thought/action." On leaving aside the work, non-object art gets rid of the other consequences: the utilization of the representational systems easily deformable by "status" in its favor, or, in the best of cases, for the benefit of the author himself eager to exercise the authority of his personal norms; and, it will also eliminate the consumption of the work of art with all that that signifies for the manipulation of consciousness of commercial activity, of amoral exhibitionism, of class privileges.
The unique stages that will be maintained in non-object art will be the conception or project and the mechanism of execution. All that presents itself as fruit of the execution and not of the functioning of its mechanism will not be non-object. That is to say, the non-work or the work that "says it is not" will still be object-works.
Non-object art will be rich or poor according to the degree of adjustment or maladjustment of the artist with his medium. His conduct will be adequate if he intervenes in the medium transforming it, in the same way that this same medium transforms and models him. It will be poor if the relation is passive, if its truth value is false, if it tolerates the pressures of the medium without working them. It will be "good" if it acts and modifies the relation of the forces that churn in the interior of each living thing that surrounds us, satisfying the necessities of people who move about us. It is still not life, but it is that which most resembles it: to destroy regressive, indifferent, and passive habits of conduct, to reunite the parts that separate the system (thought/action) in order to preserve itself. As much the one as the other stage authorized an individual or collective conception and realization. It will be enough with the simple realization of an immediate thought, for example, to get under a chair, to move a board, to telephone a friend, etc., but, also it will be enough to know the degree of the alteration obtained in the environment according to the act realized in order to know if an adequate and fecund relation has been established. Coherence and artistic probity itself will cause us to desire and to bring forward profound transformations in the medium, on which will depend the authenticity of our relation with the medium.
Dear friend: NON-OBJECT invites you to transmit your experience in this sense, not to constitute an object of reading or delectation, but to create a body of information that on being transmitted will only be able to enrich the acts that others will conceive and realize.
Between one and another medium there is an abysm--a difference not in quantity but in quality, the testimony of a jump, not of a step. To transport art to this intermediary zone between the two moments, the action that qualitatively modifies "status" is the intention of NON-OBJECT art.
Also the art work (after) is a different product of the initial element (before), and it does not modify the status but develops it; it has to do with the "security zone" of the system. Art needs to get out of art, must be subtracted from the systems of representation of reality to return upon this same reality, not transporting its vices (the work in and for itself, creation, consumerism, conceptual reflection on itself, symbolic representation of a movement of the spirit), but transferring its capacity for action, its norms of active conduct before the medium, its unquenchable imagination, its no longer concealed proposition of bettering the lives of men.
(This performance was realized by the Sao Paulo actor Francisco Inarra in the course of the XVI Biennial of Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1981. The following is the text of the project and some graphic notes.)
Objectives: to set out the ethical attitude of the artist before society. To utilize the greatest possible number of languages, above all, the language of action.
General characteristics: has to do with demonstrating to the people/public that we artists are at their service. How? Serving them. Three or four or more monitors should lead the public through different sections of the Biennial, whether in their arms, on their shoulders, borne in vehicles or carts, etc., and explain to them the objectives of the Biennial and, also, the themes of the different works presented, as well as the greatest possible amount of information on current artistic movements. Without doubt, the most important is to make the spectators comprehend in one way or another the ends of the Biennial. The monitors that participate in this work will have to carry an inscription on their shoulders that says, in Portuguese, "THE ARTIST IS AT THE SERVICE OF THE COMMUNITY." This is basic. Also pancartas can be used, etc. The important thing is that the spectator feels himself looked after by the monitors. The language of action is direct: its significance is materialized at the same time that it is realized.
Particular characteristics: the determining language of "discourse" corresponds to the language of action. Concomitantly it will be necessary to use other languages, such as, for example, the verbal: by means of pancartas or announcements located all over the Biennial that say, for example, Justice, Love, Friendship, Solidarity, Art, etc. to which the spectators will be lead with the end of meditating on their meaning; by means of texts that will be transmitted by speakers moving through the Biennial area (the texts go separately); by means of a large poster located on the door of the Biennial building that says: "THE ARTIST IS AT THE SERVICE OF THE COMMUNITY" (at least 4 or 5 meters).
Visual language: all the Biennial functionaries will wear the same inscription on their backs, if possible. Behavioral language: during the programmed round tables the problems themselves of artistic creation and especially the objectives of art works will have to be proposed as themes, if these are necessary.
WHAT OBJECTIVE CAN ART HAVE IF NOT TO BE AT THE SERVICE OF MEN?
The project can be complemented with flyers when the most people are present, notices to the local press, radio or television commentaries on the project, and all that the monitors want to include to better their communication with the spectators.
". . . Non-Object Poetry (or Action Art) was developed by the Uruguayan artist Clemente Padin, at the beginning of the 1970s. . . Padin departs from the idea that art offers the spectator a substitute for reality in order that he can escape from it, when it should be that which humanity makes "in direct relation with that which surrounds it and not in relation to a representational system of this reality" (Padin, 1975). For this reason, "non-object poetry" proposes "to act on reality and not on a representative substitute of reality such as the known artistic languages" (Padin, 1975). Its language will be, then, that of facts, the "language of action," whose sign is the act that, as signifier, operates on reality, and, as signified, operates on ideology, depending for its degree of information on the intensity of the action.
This proposal, which was developed in various countries, was modified by the author, who--according to his own declarations-- perceived the fallacy of an art that was only pure action and incorporated other languages into its earlier creations in this line, as was proved by the project "The artist is at the service of the community" (Sao Paulo, 1975), that can be considered a synthesis of its aesthetic, and the performance "For art and for life" (Berlin, 1984), in which is appreciated the confluence of diverse languages in the treatment of an aspect of the current Latin American problematic.
When I understood the nature of the sign of the language of action, I stopped my investigations because of the evident and impossible contradiction of being looked at askance: information needs an object to be transmitted, whether a page or a disk, whether an environment or a painting. The pretended distinction "object in and of itself"/"object for," which the contradiction seemed to transcend, is not adequate; the connotations depend on the interpreter: a shoe serves as much for footwear as to drive a nail in the wall, according to the function which one wants to give it, and, if in general it is used as footwear, this is due to the fact that its determinant trait, imposed by use and convention, is that of being an object to protect the foot. Nevertheless, NON-OBJECT experience did not cease to be advantageous, although less for the fact of permitting the emergence of more coherent and adequate positions on reality.
It is thus that we have returned to the point of departure: we have the awareness of existence of a language of action (the "res non verba" of the Latin people) and we have detected the nature of its sign (aesthetic information that the artist transmits enriches the repertory of the receiver making possible better levels of comprehension of reality and, as a consequence, they augment his possibilities of working on reality, but it is not the work which alters reality but who consumes it; on the contrary, with the language of action, the artist not only uses the habitual mechanism of processing aesthetic information, the same as working according to traditional norms--at the ideological level--but also his work can operate directly on reality!). Desconocemos the rest--how to be able to articulate a "frame" through the language of action? What are its meaningful or non-meaningful unities? Is there a dictionary or glossary of acts? Will it be possible to go beyond the level of referential expression and to accede to levels of aesthetic expression utilizing the language of action? Won't history be a long "discourse" on the transformative action of humanity on the world? In what measure will each of us join ourselves to this "discourse?" That is to say, how will we incorporate history and in what measure will we transform the world with our acts?
Copyright © 1997 by Clemente Padin.
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