Description and a brief reference of Jorge Gutiérrez’ work

I have coordinated the Research and Theatre Production Group “La Baulera” for nine years. The group has recently initiated an investigation on the concept of contingency in art, the axis of which is the fissure caused by immediacy in theatrical production, putting the concepts of presentation and representation under the magnifying glass, or better still, performance and theatre.

This investigation has drawn us to search for new languages and to reflect on the role played by documentation and the recording of action art, which were responsible for a number of productions akin to photography and video performances, related to the idea of an immediate theatre, connected to the need to recompose or reaffirm the search for new systems of distribution and consumption of the artistic product.

I discern three different axes: the gesture as a fundamental element to the performer and actor, the ephemeral installation as a monument, and the third and main axis, the everyday object as bearer of high symbolic content.

Millones de Argentinitos (Millions of Argentine Children) is a performance staged by La Baulera group that though it had been planned ahead coincided with the December 2001 events in Argentina. In it, the black school pencil is used as the symbol of state education.

When I chose the Faber black pencil –the most ordinary pencil used in primary schools in Argentina- I thought of the state schools, in what they lack and in their problems, in the reforms and budgets, in the right to education, in exclusion, in children’s death rate, in la Noche de los Lápices (the Night of the Pencils)(1), and in the visual and auditory memory, and in the tribute devoid of dramatism allowing for the high symbolic value of the bare gesture. It is the manner in which I look to return with the gesture and the object to the daily encounter with memory.
I am trying to deepen that subjective, personal and intimate memory to create a tension, a fissure in the social collective memory. To do this I start from a simple, everyday element of possible symbolic value (a black pencil, a kite, small football tee shirts, rain drops), accompanied by a simple gesture, of highly Utopian potential value (stand the pencil on its base, try flying a kite, putting out the small tee shirts to dry on a clothes line, to catch the first rain drops of the season), in which the non-achievement creates the tragic sense of the action.

In consequence, the resulting installation lacks aesthetic manipulation and depends on accident. An installation by accident? An ephemeral monument by accident. I do not refer to a monument as a specific place for historic or collective memory but I look to generate, starting from the action, an individual exercise, the exercise of intimate memory.

With regards to the gesture, I am interested in two situations that it generates: on one hand an optimist hope to achieve the action outlined (this it the objective that motivates the action of the performer), and, on the other hand, an expectation of frustration when it is not achieved.

I have been working on my own with the subject of memory in a work in process called Agosto, mes de los vientos (August, moth of the winds). The performance was suggested by the sight of a child trying to fly a kite without wind. What interested me specially about this image was the will set on a fruitless action.

For the performance we flew between 20 and 25 kites made among ourselves, that were accidentally caught in different parts of the city, creating a real installation that was not only visual but a sound installation as well. These added up to the thousands of kites that had been left “installed” in trees and cables in the neighbourhoods of Tucumán; somehow through the action I took them all symbolically and metaphorically. At the end of the experience I started the recording stage of these kites in several instances, paying special attention to the process of the disappearing of colour or of paper caused by the action of the sun and the rain, till the structure made of cane became one with the branches and cables.

(1)The operation known as the “Noche de los lápices” (the Night of the Pencils), that took place between August and October 1976, during the first year of the last Argentine military dictatorship involved the kidnapping and disappearance of secondary school students in the city of La Plata, that had fought in defence of a students’ bus ticket.
In the dawn of September 16, 1976, between 12:30 pm and 5 am Claudia Falcone, María Clara Ciocchini, Claudio de Acha, Daniel Racero, Horacio Ungaro and Francisco López Muntaner, secondary school students, militant members of UES, teenagers every one of them, were abducted from their homes where they were sleeping. To this day their whereabouts are not known.

Collaboration with Germaine.

THE INDEPENDENCIA SQUARE IS NOT WHAT IT SEEMS

“...the gentleman whistles for a long time, but I think he does not define the song…he lacks an arm, but the sleeve that belongs to that arm is in his pocket. What is he waiting for? He raises and lowers the volume of his whistling, he has not stopped for the last four minutes. He looked at me and suspected me. He went from facing me to turning his back to me…, now he leaves. He crosses the street and thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, eighty metres away I hear the stresses of his whistling…he is gone…” (2)

Before being able to write the results of Context in Tucumán, we should agree on the fact that the results of artistic experiences may be in permanent and continuous development, during which the values of the production and of context are in crisis.

This is inevitable if this experience has a clear political outline and an adequate methodology. This is what happened with the Dutch artist Germaine Kruip and her work, Point of View, with which La Baulera group was invited to collaborate.

Though the group, dedicated to theatrical production, has for some time now taken on themselves to deepen the concepts mentioned before of presentation and representation, the arrival of Germaine ended by confirming the ongoing crisis of the values at play during the execution of the action, in the frame of a new problem: the one of context.

We then became involved in the search for the tension produced between reality and fiction, a relationship that has been questioned so many times, specially in the last works of artistic action that the group had taken on.

The depth of the proposal and the intense working days with the artist, plus the contributions of the philosopher Jorge Lovisolo, lead us to intense discussions on the democratisation of the way of looking, among other problems. We started to ask ourselves what does the public look at and what do we want them to see. This brought up concepts such as drifting and psicogeography (in the sense applied to them by the Situationist movement), and the figure of Benjamin’s flâneur, among others.

In looking for the adequate scenario to develop Point of View we visited different spots of the city: parks, squares and other public spaces. The discussions on which would be the right one were also meant to focus on the concept of the work proposed by Germaine, which kept on changing in as the main city square was held as the most appropriate space to develop the action.

This decision implied rethinking the work, since the Independencia Square, rather than being a public promenade, as might be considered by the visitors to this province, is a space where different social manifestations meet reflecting the social, economic and cultural situation of the province. These social manifestations (celebrations or demands) are the image of popular feeling, linked to the sites of the most emblematic buildings in the life of the province: Government House, the Cathedral, the ex Plaza Cinema, today the Evangelic Church, the Economic Federation, the Province Popular Savings Bank, the ex Province Bank, the Jockey Club, the Tourism Office, and other institutions set in historic buildings.

The country’s crisis situation is evident in these spaces reaching a high degree of theatricality due to that many of these manifestations use creative forms to denounce their problems publicly. An example of this is that all the while our work lasted we shared the square with a demonstration by Municipal civil servants who walked chained to one another round the square. The statue Liberty, by Lola Mora, principal emblem of the square, was fenced in and covered with scaffolds set up for restoration work. In any other city of the world this may have passed unnoticed but in this historical context it acquired high symbolic value.

Once the space was chosen everything acquired new meaning. The context defied theatricality relentlessly. How was one to compete with the high degree of performance of the social demonstration? Point of View wanted to generate a fissure, a tension beyond public space as scenario, in the search and in the design of action. The performance then came through and took over; the context was the big performance, and the performers, a slight indication of fiction, data to see things from another point of view. The public could not avoid this game, a permanent change of roles. We all looked to be looked at.

(2) Text by Agustín Toscano, Punto de Vista performer. This text is the outcome of one of the stages of the work, which consisted in the construction of a map drawn by every member of the group, once chosen the scenario for the performance. The actors had to chose the manner in which they represented their first observation route, possible routes, and a manner of establishing a first confrontation between the concept of the work and what we ourselves looked at. Bobby wrote this in the corner of one of the sketches. We thought it was interesting to include it as it was, and we respected its form.

Proposal for the work on Context

My proposal is to hold a performance choosing an everyday object, which we find, has a symbolic density, that suits the purpose of the action and of the installation as ephemeral monument.

The project means to deal with the subject of memory but from an intimate, everyday sense: individual memory, avoiding to mistify or trivialize the memories. This is why I suggest the gesture as the central axis of the work to be done. The simple or bare gesture that does not quote specific events or circumstances, but that allows a personal revival and with that the remembering of something that appeared forgotten. The gesture should not necessarily intend to produce anything specific: its only aim is to enjoy a clear acknowledgement.

To stretch one’s hand to see if it is raining, to create an empty space in a line to pay for public utilities as one moves away, to stand a pencil on its basis, to fly a kite, etc. These actions do not refer to specific collective historical moments. They refer rather to sensorial perceptive “climates” conditioned by our culture that does not have a clearly defined anchorage. They were simply there all along, imperceptibly together with our own subjective history.

With these actions I design I want the everyday things to be acknowledged by the gesture often forgotten, and to achieve the memories I mentioned before. I want to create “useless lightning”, as installing a block of salt by the seaside so that the water erodes it away to find out if the water is saltier in another sea. To establish by its very paradox the perfect uselessness of the gesture, that nevertheless, because of its immense evocative power in the moment of remembering, one can acknowledge as absolutely necessary. To cause in this manner ephemeral monuments agreeing with Ricoeur that “memory is no place that may be visited”.

Of course I understand that the possibility of such remembering (that is the deconstruction of a part of ourselves, in the past) is conditioned by the context in which that part of ourselves happened. In any other culture, far away or close to us, it will be necessary to investigate those subtle and underlying aspects that conditioned the perception of its actors. I do not try to relate to the great social and historical cultural events that determine the life of a country, but, as I explained above, to the intimate, everyday, individual memory…

That will be my starting point to design the action, which I hope will be the result of team work, not only of the assistants and interpreters who might help in my search and decoding of cultural signs of the type of memory I am working with- and that I claim as the most convincing, real and true- but of a group of performers who will join the proposal.

If the choice of a possible gesture would imply the manipulation of a type of object, it will belong to everyday life and after the action it will be part of the “rest”, like the kites caught in the electric cables, (installation, lacking every aesthetic manipulation, that depends on an accident).

There are then two possibilities:

1) that information ought to be given out on the situation, and then it is necessary to produce a cut in the normal development of the space chosen. In that case, the number of actors must meet the scale of the place.

2) action ought to be almost imperceptible but it must leave “traces”. In this case the number of actors or performers is not meaningful.

The idea is for the performers to take part in the experiences of observation and in the discussions to choose the gestures and the space of the intervention to achieve a gesture devoid of overacting, and to work during the rehearsals to stress this treatment of the action.
To achieve this, meeting places and specific work on the execution of the action and the treatment we want to give the gesture must be provided.

Operative needs
Therefore I will need:

• To work with a group of performers or actors to generate one or several situations. The number of persons will depend on the place chosen to set the situation, and this decision will be taken after the gestures are decided on.

• An English-Spanish, Spanish-English Translator

• An “interpreter" who guides me in the selection of “signs”, starting from which I will design the action/s.