Gustavo Torres

In what way does the institutionality of art relate to the aesthetic experience of the audience; and what could be the role of conceptual art in this situation?

If we assume that the audience is supposed to create meaning for emptied artworks (but not only those), we do so knowing that the apprehension of those artworks depends on the artistic context – the institutional web, the Art World – that guarantees visibility and legitimizes certain objects at the detriment of others, therefore regulating not only aesthetic experience but the conditions for having an aesthetic experience.

The question then is not anymore which are the works of art, but what our perception is of something that is seen as art. The notions of silence, emptiness and reduction delineate new prescriptions for the acts of looking, listening, etc., which confront the artwork in a more conscious and conceptual way. The main function of form is not any more to provoke a sensation, but to offer the necessary conditions for the production of thought about.

The impossibility of the existence of emptiness (of silence, of nothing…) is what brings these artistic propositions to the audience’s experience. Because they are emptied of content, these artworks present their own support; the material substrate inherent to every artistic object. In another way, real emptiness as a concept can’t be experienced. Tending towards zero, emptying content or duration, are all attempts to eliminate the possibility of experience (phenomenon) to make space for the concept. This cannot be apprehended. Unless in an abstract, non-experiential way.

The more orthodox conceptual art, in an attempt to eliminate or diminish experience, feeds itself on a tautological movement in which every artwork is a definition of art – the art theory must account for the art. In this way, conceptual art guarantees its existence thanks to the institutionality of art and not because of its relationship with the audience.

Nevertheless, it’s not possible for an art, in the attempt to diminish or repress experience, to exclusively reside in concepts. It is the same conceptual art, emptied, that shows us a way out of the institutionalization of experience. Perhaps the sensorial emptying of the artwork can create an experience that offers the conditions for thinking about the experience, to think the conditions for and the effects of that experience. An experience that confronts the idea of experience, provokes thought about the state of sensation, about what is listening, seeing, and feeling; challenging the already instituted ways of perceiving things.

2 – In defense of quasi-nothing

The image of nothing is not equivalent to the representation of nothing, neither is it nothing in itself. The image of nothing is what allows a glimpse of nothingness.

The quasi-nothing as an artistic proposition doesn’t aim for the achievement of anything. It accepts the incapacity to reach it as much as the impossibility of the accomplishment of the pure concept – nothing as a concept.

The quasi-nothing is the experience of the unrealized concept, or the non-experience of the possibility of the existence of nothing. Quasi-nothing is an incommensurable, uncertifiable condition. If nothing is an abstraction that is impossible to realize, how can its proximity be proven or its degree be measured?

In a reductionist process where the aim is to get closer and closer to nothing, movement towards an always receding horizon of nothing, there is a logical, though imprecise, limit. Since it is not possible to reach nothing, when we get closer to nothing, what will be the next step?

“— Predict the end, see the day come, outlive it and set a new date.”

If there is a moat between concept and sensation (experience), the quasi-nothing doesn’t attempt to fill it up, nor to build a bridge that annuls the separation. To float above the moat with no intention of landing is its only commitment. To orbit the emptiness without touching it.

3 – The things

When things exist, they exist. A concept exists free from the need for a physical object to sustain it or be its material correlate. A physical object exists independently of an adjustment to a concept, a priori or a posteriori. A metronome (overturned), 30 latex gloves (one inside the other), a black poster (fallen), an electrical extension cord (connecting two sockets), a space (in the dark), a page (where something is missing). A simple material reconfiguration of certain objects can endow them with new concepts, modify pre-existing ones, make them more complex. When things exist, they exist, but they can always exist in another way. Perceiving something is different from perceiving something as something, perceiving something as something requires the knowledge of a concept that shakes, even if only temporarily, the object.