Fisae XXXIcongressNyon Switzerland26 august 2006

Eros & Thanatos:ex-libris images as cultural wallpaper

by Mauricio Cruz

How can we know whether the man in Spitzweg’s painting is reading a text or looking at an image ?

…

In other words: who, or what, is

the “worm” ?

Ex-libris wallpaper by Lewis & Wood

Carl Spitzweg -around 1850“The bookworm” / “Der Büchenwürm”

[a]

The wallpaper :

If each book lining the library held an ex-libris within it, and if we imagine that the library were to suddenly disappear with all its books, leaving only the ex-libris, the wall would transform itself into a “wallpaper,” a visual motif with floating vignettes, the same hovering figures that make up the aforesaid images.

The worm :

In languages such as English and German, enthusiastic readers are characterized as “bookworms” rather than “library rats” (in French) or “library mouses” (in Spanish). The difference is meaningful: while in the first case, the implicit associations recall the apple or the skull, both objects with fatal consequences, the second instance is more directly related to a furtive food, in the manner of a hidden cheese or abandoned goods.

The “familiarity” betweenthe apple (1) and the skullis confirmed here by the snake (the worm)

(1) In 1989 I wrote a first article on the subject of ex-libris: “Del libro como manzana” (The Book as Apple), published in Gradiva, a literary magazine

MAD Magazine, issue 215, June 1980

Wallpaper, as the emotional cultural textile that it is, can essentially be reduced to the alternating motifs of roses and skulls.

The point is that this necessarily marginal image of Eros and Thanatos has the power to synthesize a general, though often overlooked, situation.

…In consequence, these two essential motifs turned into a recurrent theme, which resurfaces in the following two ex-libris

I made …

EX_LIBRIS? Benoit Junod Photo-engraving, 1988

EX-LIBRIS ANALFABÉTICO VOX POPULI Xilography, 1988

Bref : The skull, as a photograph of the final credits of a movie seen on TV.

And the rose, as taken from an old-time Parisian sugarcube wrapping decorated with floral motifs.

“Common Places…” an

article published in emciblog.blogspot.com

about the relationship between my three ex-libris

“When we speak today of ‘common places,’ we mean, for the most part,

stereotypical expressions, by now devoid of any meaning, banalities,

lifeless metaphors (‘morning is golden-mouthed’), trite linguistic

conventions. Certainly this was not the original meaning of the

expression ‘common places.’ For Aristotle (Rhetoric, I, 2, 1358a) the topoi koinoi are the most generally

valid logical and linguistic forms of all of our discourse (let us even say, the skeletal structure of it); they allow for the existence of every individual

expression we use and they give structure to these expressions as

well. Such ‘places’ are common because no one can do without them

(from the refined orator to the drunkard who mumbles words hard

to understand, from the business person to the politician). Aristotle

points out three of these ‘places’: the connection between more and less, the opposition of opposites, and the category of reciprocity (‘If I am her

brother, she is my sister’).”

[b]

... And this led to the “third” ex-libris:

a “political” feminization of a colombian peso (when such a thing existed back in 1953)

Thinking then about the type of images that could be placed in books, not as illustrations or themes, but as ex-libris, as an artistic genre in itself, I remembered that domestic habit of using books for safekeeping bank notes: that habit of using the library as a home bank, like a paper piggybank, or momentary hiding place for that circulating image.

(…) In this sense, the bank note, as an institutional figure, could be exposed to some form of cultural, idiosyncratic surgery.

After!

Before…

Billete de 1 peso. Bogotá, Colombia, 1953(Bolivar and Santander framing the historical landscape of the Boyaca Bridge)

Ex-Libris Paisa (un peso mujer)Photoshop, Laser print, 2005

But let us return to theparadoxes of

VOX POPULI, the

analphabetical ex-libris(does there exist a book in which such an ex-libris can be inserted?)…

“Éros tient le milieu entre le savoir et l’ignorance.” Platon, Le Banquet

?

... the shift from printed words to highly visual media, shifting thinking from abstract and alphabetical to concrete and analphabetical.

POPULAR natural. vibrant. nice. explicit.

pure. seducing. amazing. lovely. pretty. stimulating. beautiful.

immaculate. provocative. sensual. dazzling. pleasant. healthy. teasing. exciting. gorgeous.

naughty. erotic. cute. charming. lascivious. self-confident. sweet.

happy. sexy. inspiring. voluptuous…

(between the apple and a peep-hole)

La rose, pas la pomme

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“The great Jeanne de l’Echiquier d’Alençon called it her oval (…) And it is without doubt this image which is at the origin of the mystical almond that, in the Middle Ages, symbolized Mary’s virginity in all its Glory -oval in its almond-like shape, used to decorate sculptures of the Virgin. Meanwhile, one generally reserves the name ‘mandorla’ for that which surrounds Christ in his Majesty in representations of the Last Judgment, while saints only have a right to the rounded halo.”

Dictionnaire littéraire et érotique des fruits et légumes, JL HENNIG, Albin Michel

Fray Hortensio Félix de Paravicino, by el Greco

“ ‘It is no longer conceivable (…) that the word has an accidental relation to its object’ Instead, he (Benjamin) told that every human language is really a failed and garbled translation of a divine language that speaks in things. ‘It is the translation of the language of things

into that of man.’ “

(...) “the ‘objective chance’ in which any artist or person will learn to read the half erased letters of a text written by desire.”

QUOD IN IMAGINIBUS, EST IN LINGUA (insofar as it is in images, it is in language)

“The unconscious (...) as a systemic social formation (...) also accounts for (...) the specific condensation of

signifiers (...) IT SPEAKS” Lacan

“Car ce vaste ensemble de systèmes de signification qu’est le social fonctionne - de même que l’exercise de la langue - de façon inconsciente.” Lévi-Strauss

Interpretation: the art of the people

Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, Bogotá. 1997

A curatorial idea for anitinerant exhibitionby Mauricio Cruz

Do you know how to read?Can you differentiate a duck from a goose, a trunk from a suitcase?

The “analphabetic book”…

[c]

The idea behind this museographic strategy consists of presenting a

series of art works as a puzzle of artistic interpretation that is set before the spectator. In this way, the exhibition de-centers the authority of specialized knowledge (as removed as it is intimidating to the general, profane public), and displaces it towards an area of imaginative possibilities of association specific to creative thinking. Thus, each work is translated into a language of environments, objects, images, sounds, texts, and so forth, which function as poetic revealers that behave according to conditions of indetermination, the very basis of this entire proposal.

The installations, the proposed “scenographisms,” are thus examples of an artistic interpretation of each one of the works. This is not so much in the rational, analytic sense -which is typical of traditional critical judgment, one that usually contradicts the operative modes that are specific to artistic thought- but as an open form of participation, more spontaneous and connected with the processes of association by analogy.

Using this technique, I seek to propose a communication option or model -always in artistic terms- that will mediate in the well-known separation between ART and its PUBLIC.

Abcd…tongues of the eye “If dream is thought. If dreaming is thinking of something.” -L. Wittgenstein

two pages

8-9 12-13

Gossips, by N. Rockwell

The Line, by P. Guston

…”because the mission and power of images is to render visible all that remains inaccessible to the concept.” -M. Eliade

And two more pages

Do you know how to read? Things as “optical instruments”(not simply to see them, but to see through them)

-When I use a word -said Humpty Dumpty in the same condescending tone-, that word means exactly what I want it to mean, nothing less.

-The question is knowing -said Alice- if one is able to make words mean different things.

-The question is knowing -said Humpty Dumpty- who will dictate the rule…and that’s it.” -L. Carroll

20-21 24-25Gift, by Man Ray

Just an example:

A large rectangular background painted with a hospital-like green (optical, spotless, scholastic). The painting is placed on this wall as if it were effectively a blackboard. Next to it, a popular poster with a provocatively nude woman. Placed approximately one meter in front of it, lies an old wardrobe, completely closed -it is meant to be filled with clothes, for parts of these slip out through the tight cracks of doors and drawers. The wardrobe gives off the muffled sound of songs that come from 3 or 4 radios hidden inside, all receiving different local radio stations. On the green wall -surrounding the blackboard- one can see linear drawings made with tailors’ templates, which appear stuck onto different parts of its surface

The art workA painting by Santiago Cárdenas

The “scenic” interpretation14-15

School Days, by Jasper Johns

22 Last page [really]

“What the reader can also do, leave it to him.” -L. WittgensteinThe book

(again)

…The ex-libris analfabético is thus in its proper, own place!

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A text written to painter Victor Laignelet in relation to “the Book”