La Cambra Daurada (extract)

Manel Clot

Amongst the fundamental ideas first coined and put into circulation by post-minimalist attitudes from the mid-sixties on ideas which have carried through to the present with a currency that is today not only undiminished but re-established and considerably strengthened we should perhaps give particular weight to the whole series of issues relating to the pro­found linkage between the experience of the subject as subject and the processes of creation: a linkage that makes it possible for us to posit the notion that the work of art ultimately possesses a high degree of identification not only with the artist’s own specifically personal characteristics but, on the basis of these, and by virtue of their paradoxical universality, with the very idea of the human being, as projective metaphor or as generic parabola, as much with regard to the upsets of the mind as to the simple relationship between the structures and dispositions of thought.

Adopting these same elements, but radically changing their direction, the convulsive spirit of the modern twists around the orientation of the terms introduced by the historic avant–gardes, and at the same time twists around the very definition of the avant-garde, and even the legitimacy of going on to employ that concept in some approximation to its foundational sense: it is no longer art which seeks to draw closer to life, or to incorporate itself as one further constituent part of life, but life which takes on a sufficient consistency, responsibility, consciousness and power as a succession of crucial events to assume the capability of forming part of the imaginary and the conceptual repertoire present in the contemporary artistic process, beyond its merely humdrum or mundane recourses. From this viewpoint, that which we conceive in generic terms as being the experience of the subject that limitless territory abounding in parabiographical references and fictive devices linked to individuality and a particular understanding of the private constitutes itself as one of the most important elements when it comes to calibrating those current mechanisms of artistic production which most interest us, immersed in a referential dynamic that brings that which constitutes the essence of creation within reach of the expressive volition of the artist, constructing a discourse founded on the production of the consciousness of being, on the one hand, and on the relationship between this subjective entity, producer of discourse, with its environment, on the other.

Within this wide conceptual framework, basically since the mid-eighties, we have seen how the sculptural and three-dimensional have been the areas of engagement which have most contributed to founding a complex, multiform artistic practice that has forged links connecting the world of metaphorical reference and allegory with processes of artistic production. The mise en scene of the artist’s ideas in three dimensions has signified a revulsive not only with regard to materials, techniques, objects and expressive systems, but to the entire accumulated stock of images, associations and representational intentions brought into circulation on a virtually massive scale. The tremendous metaphorical possibilities of materials, the allegorical implications for objects, and the whole repertoire of effectively linguistic or paralinguistic combinations of structure that this has involved has arrived at the point where, at the present time, the deployment of three-dimensional mechanisms has a considerable effect on the plane of the representation of the subject’s ideas and intentions, the sphere of the individual and the realm for privacy, with the result that the artist becomes in this regard, an effective constructor of images, a forger of presences which relate her/his own existence to the outside world, and the outcome of these almost symbiotic involvements with her/his own processes of artistic creation: thus the enormous allusive potential of materials and objectival constructions is linked more and more with the actual constructions inherently implied by the discourse of the subject as such.

Moreover, the convulsive art scene of the eighties saw the inclusion -we are still here in the realm of the three-dimensional, albeit in the widest sense of that term – within the mechanisms and processes of interest of artistic creation of a vast referential world powerfully linked to the idea of the massive and decomplexed appearance of a dense mesh of newly problematised questions -social, sexual, ethnic, religious, political, of identity, of minority, of illness, of accusation – on the contemporary scene; new problems and new interests evidently put into circulation by the creative artists themselves, in the conviction that fictive three-dimensional constructs constitute the ideal ground on which to put these problems and interests into practice, or where they can be staged in a productive and relational fashion: the works and the expressive systems presented by Permindar Kaur and Carme Saumell are at once witness to and supreme exemplification of this.

There are moments when it can seem as if the history of an individual might at the same time also be that of her/his people and of the specific conditions which have constituted it, and vice versa. Permindar Kaur reveals in her work a number of distinctive characteristics which pertain to her cultural origins, to the geographical zone from which her history derives, to a series of elements connected with religion and, finally, to her condition as a woman and to the activities associated with being a woman, so that all of these factors ultimately come to constitute one of the possible networks which give her three-dimensional work its density and depth, charged with far from indirect references to parabiographical circumstances, and immersed in the processes of memory.

But more than any merely referential and directly symbolic function her work displays profound allegorical capacities which, moreover, lie at the roots of her generic discourse; allegorical capacities which are as accessible to the spectator as to the artist herself. Indeed, the spectator is invited to see in each of Kaur’s pieces some fragment of an image deriving from a very specific contextual and social stratum -religious, domestic, human…- while all together they weave relationships as if constructing some kind of map covered with landmarks and reference points: a temple, a house, a cradle, a bed, a sacrifice, a tattoo, a scar, a child’s shadow, and the vestiges and imprints of all of these at once; all, however, without arriving at full definition, revealing itself openly, as if awaiting the conclusive operation of the spectator, the operation which will complete the system of production. These are not simply images but places; not only allegories of the human condition but particular locations, emplacements in which history and life unfold, in which that which comes to constitute the substance of a whole existence takes place, from the present moment forward into the future, and with the image of the past perennially installed in the memory, like some kind of guide, as if it were a time that had never quite passed.

Manel Clot, 1994 (extract translated from Catalan)

From the exhibition catalogue La Cambra Daurada (The Golden Chamber).
A two person show with Carme Saumell, La Capella De L’Antic Hospital De La Santa Creu, Barcelona, Spain

3 March to 10 April 1994