06-2004
THE STAGED MATRIX
Marta Kuzma
Abstracts from the author's Manifesta 5 catalogue text

An interpretation of place as a contradiction between the demand for order and the will to formlessness, bracketing the rational and irrational, offers an architectonic point of departure for envisioning a possible trajectory for Manifesta as a concept. With open-endedness and fragment as part of its matrix, Manifesta's very flexibility benefits from its genre as a project, but one equivalent to a city as part of a broader territory. Manifesta's critical validity is invested in its abstract temporal structure that totalizes history from the standpoint of the ever-vanishing and ever-present, and embraces a conflicting plurality of projects, relational points and possible futures. Through an endeavor to claim the city and its possible other, Manifesta extends beyond theoretical applications to invent a series of scenarios that enable the very dimensions of the city to become personified. By effectively extending the parameters of the city in this way, Manifesta transforms the place into an evental site that anticipates a future.
Manifesta arrives in San Sebastian in the Basque autonomous region vociferously; perhaps one of the most critical sites since its inception. Located in the very seat of a movement focused on cultural autonomy, Manifesta develops in an emphatically singular place where supermodernity, accelerated space and any characterization of the artwork as a site of non-place must proceed cautiously. As an international art event, it is contrasted against an environment of intermittent insurgency where power may appear intangible or even ghostly. As an implicit site of tension, the region is detached from global or synthetic notions of either history or the present. This forces Manifesta to operate as a critical cultural manifestation with the fortunate challenge of working with contingencies that inevitably direct actions and strategies, which are first and foremost interpreted by the realpolitik of the region. Subsequently, the project inevitably questions intelligibility and resolution as abstract and unstable concepts inscribed in a dialectical site marked by a consciousness of temporality that represents both a structural present and a gesture towards a future.
Abstracting from the social experience of San Sebastian, Manifesta implies a departure from the logic of its difference that influences the syntax and semantics of the cultural. By referring to the architectonics of place, an attempt is made to reveal the essence of something that simultaneously articulates the economic, political, historical and aesthetic, which prompts one to seek beneath the surface of the project's rationalist appearance. What is it in the nature of its particular that seeks a constellation for a broader meaning? How is it possible to quote the elements of place to instill a sense of monumentality in the everyday? And, in this way, how is it possible to formulate a project as one interwoven into the fabric of the city so that it evolves into something more?

Locating a Form for the Political
Within a zone of contingency such as the Basque region, the malleability of time and space discloses the omnipresence and unpredictability of change as endemic to its structure. The understanding of the area is plagued by what is connoted by the clandestine nature of ETA, an organization responsible for changing the course of modern Spanish history twice - first directly in the death of Carrero Blanco and secondly, indirectly, in the rumour of the organisation's purported involvement in the Atocha bombings. The very polemics around ETA served as central to the the former Popular Party government in their stylization of a 'new strategic culture' against terrorism, which equated the more complex issues relating to the territorial structure of Spain with black and white incentives toward violence.
The realpolitik of the territory, however, transcends this covert aspect and is, in actuality, framed by aspirations for the autonomy claimed in the controversial Ibarretxe Plan for Basque sovereignty. This proposal in the form of a claim, even if dismissed as political rumour or regional rancour by its opponents, is nevertheless publicly articulated and challenged in the regional parliament. Only faintly echoed in the international media, the plan challenges a traditional notion of the nation-state in a way that is, quite simply, incompatible with today's Europe. Amidst the resulting irregularities this plan introduces to the traditional flow of city, region, province, and state, it is possible to consider a juxtaposition of the rational and irrational as relevant in relation to art. Certainly, it is not the intent of Manifesta to legitimize any political initiatives. Its incentive remains to abstract from the social experience of the Basque region in order to locate a parallel discourse that considers the autonomous work of art, one characterized by dissonance and tension in its construction. In this context, art's challenge is not to privilege the regime of the spectacle or any fantasies about the overcoming of the state and the end of politics (perhaps exemplified by the nihilistic attitudes of the Situationists). But it also cannot deny existing realities by merely reducing them to private matters. Manifesta is an attempt to broaden what is regarded as contemporary history by projecting art's social agency as a form of resistance that negates attempts at clarity and immediacy and reaffirms the power of reflection through its very performativity.

Irreconcilable Differences as a Critical Site for Art
How are sites of resistance to be understood spatially, temporally, theoretically, and practically? Ever since Adolf Loos referred to architecture as a "cry into emptiness," art has drawn from the debates around critical architecture to seek out within it the political logic of resistance. Architectural ideology has contributed to the formulation of a performative aesthetic that endows art with the potential to recollect what no longer exists and anticipate what has yet to exist in a vision of an alternative world. Although the cooperation between architecture and art has evolved into a dominant form, it is important to point out what distinguishes each discipline as thought and practice to understand the evolution of their entanglement. The central consideration of this history returns to the basic question of functionalism. Architectural theorist Andrew Benjamin has noted that art, in order to be art, must negate the present, otherwise it would be in its service. Architecture, Benjamin continues, while having function, cannot negate individuals as they are.

The historical dynamic of function - from its utopian considerations arriving out of an effacement of ornament to the contestation of its treatment as such by the mid 20th century, lodged the 1960s as a time frame whereby postwar critical thought returned to the cultural field with the roots of its revival in the Frankfurt School while a crisis of urbanism prevailed throughout Europe. What emerged was a divergence of views over the notion of the subject in relation to the built environment. The original utopian values of the Russian Revolution were overtaken by the USSR's technocratic bureaucracy. France under de Gaulle was not far removed from the restrictive policies of Franco's regime. The Algerian War promoted further intellectual dissent in France which resulted in movements suchas 'Manifeste des 121' against the government. How did the zeitgeist of the 1960s contribute to an understanding that architecture had surpassed its premise as ideology? How did art attempt to proceed apart from the cycles of production and consumption in late capitalism to stand apart from the increasingly compromised position of architecture? How did art evolve as the only remaining mediator from which architecture might borrow to fathom its other possibilities? Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza, who left the art world after his presentation of Operation H in the Bienal de São Paulo in 1957, sought out alternative possibilities for cultural production available in the factory and documented them on film. In a letter written to a colleague in 1965, he expressed his views about a "new functionalist approach to the art gallery" that marked a departure from the concrete rationalism and geometric reasoning of place prevalent in previous decades toward the emergence of irrational, spontaneous, subjective and informal conditions of expression. Art began to extend rather than recite the language of architecture by distilling its logic and leaving its functional aspirations and adherence to a monocular perspective behind.
The early 1960s saw an international revision of the social significance of architecture that oscillated between handicraft and imagination and its subordination to rationality. The city became the central site where questions of the architectonic collided with the social in areas that related to the existence or non-existence of the social subject. Theodor Adorno referenced these oscillating arguments between rationality and expression relevant within the debates of architecture in a little-noted but seminal essay entitled 'Functionalism Today' presented to the German Werkbund in 1965.The essay was pivotal in releasing Adorno's arguments from the traditional categories of function and ornament framed in the first half of the 20th century to revise these concepts in confrontation with the current socio-historical situation and the emerging global economy. In doing so, Adorno structured a logic that invested critical architecture as the foundation for understanding the autonomous work of art by unraveling the irreconcilability of function and expression as the optimal condition to explain why architecture inhabits culture before culture inhabits architecture, and how architecture tends to construct the visual before it is placed in the visual.

The Cry into Emptiness
Architecture as a discipline lodged in the future fathoms the possibilities of what has yet to be. In its projection toward the future, architecture relies on a kind of staging process that resists the literal to try to convey that despite a building's privileged status as complete, it is, at the same time, incomplete. This contradiction in terms is made evident by architecture's binding relationship to space, which is gauged against notions of staged time versus built time in the generation of form. Within the matrix of staged time, it is possible to unlock a singular concept of time and release its complexity in the interplay of form and function inherent to the logic of architectural thought through alterity, or the understanding of otherness, which allows the aesthetic to surpass the materiality of art by means of an imagination that Adorno refers to as 'innervated.' This imagination enables the development of the immateriality of excess that assumes an enigmatic form reaffirming the irreconcilability of differences and dissonance within the construction of a work of art.
The logic of architecture and its articulation of spaces is inscribed by a gap - that between the structural present and a gesturing toward a future - marking a site of tension and potential. It is in this gap, this striving for what has yet to be defined, implicit in both art and architecture, that a future may be projected to overcome the present. In this projection, function extends beyond a question of what is practical and useful to encompass "that which may be," which refers to alterity as the pivotal mechanism distinguishing an autonomous work of art from a real project and allows it to retain its critical status as lodged between the probable and the possible. The autonomous work of art is inscribed by a tendency that may find its metaphor in the performative. An artwork is determined by the integral organization of all its elements so that nothing remains of the ornamental. It strives toward becoming a more opaque and unintelligible object so its effective de-arting is essential to its constitution. Assuming an enigmatic form, art adopts the metaphor of a puzzle that constantly thwarts any solution. In this way, it operates within the paradox of its own incomprehensibility to lead to an understanding of art as more of a tendency and a gesture than a result. This allows for the production of emotional effects, even if invisible, to produce 'the more,' or what Adorno refers to as the 'crackling noise' of art.

Fathoming Another Place
The particularities of place lead to the possibility of conceptualizing various futures without departing from the real factors and forces moulding the future forms of this place. San Sebastian is a leisure-oriented space, a potlatch of surplus objects, symbols and energies, with an accent on sports, reinvigoration and the carnivalesque, rather than on rest, relaxation and asceticism. The illusion of naturalness exhibited by the city makes space for another illusion: that of a centralized, organized, symbolized and programmed space facilitating the production of a representational space. In its spontaneously induced eroticism, it holds material for the development of ample discursive sites for interrogation and investigation. As a predominantly figurative city by virtue of a neoclassical reconstruction designed by Pedro Manuel de Ugartemendia after a devastating fire in 1813, San Sebastian reeks of narrative to the point that would inevitably lead Adolf Loos to scream: 'ornament and crime.' Extended to its very edges by the abstract volumes of Rafael Moneo's Kursaal, the city as discursive and shifting meets the sea, which is, in contrast, a kind of solid defined in history, identities and functions. Moneo's orthogonal tectonic spaces silhouetting the headlands of Mont Urgull and Ulia employ a compositional device of rotation that draws from the Bahia de La Concha to other critical sites for intervention. As a Derridean marker of the limit and the delimited, the interior and the anterior, it announces the sublime as the ontological condition of this particular place. Situated within the as if, San Sebastian envisions itself as 'other' through a critical exploration of contemporary culture and aesthetics in the form of a project.

The consideration of the limit is not in the sense of a marker but as a means of discriminating between a certain order and a certain disorder - that which falls within the limit is subject to the law and that beyond it is devoid of law and form. In this sense, nature points to a hybrid domain that refers back to the cult of ruin that holds within it a force of resistance that expresses a history and yet is compelling. As an example, the surroundings of San Sebastian falsely invite an innate faith in natural beauty that in reality has been subject to the incursions of technology in the production of a man-made landscape along the coast. What Humboldt referred to as the craggy Basque landscape, is in large part an illusion and an imitation that constitutes it as artifactal - a 'cultural landscape' from which it is possible to abstract to find the relational in the aesthetics of nature to the philosophy of art. At its very core, nature is a reality that points to something other - to the difference between what we interpret as the reality of nature and a certain fiction that the idea of nature imposes. It is not merely a division of what is visible and invisible but an alluding to a 'something more' that leads to suspension and the unthinkable, to an undeterminable detour that is marked by a perpetual movement of withdrawal and to reinscription. Nature points to an otherness that presents to thought the concept of alterity. The aesthetic attitude toward nature - that of contemplation, that of correspondence and the experience of nature as a prototype implies different modes of experiencing temporality. As the experience of contemplation relates to the present as a passing moment, the experience of correspondence relates to the past, and the experience of an imagination to the future. These attitudes imply aesthetic experiences of landscape wherein the experience of nature in correspondence plays a predominant role in architecture bound by a time and space relationship that extends beyond the language of existing buildings and structures and questions of practicality and function.
The experience of the sublime relocates within the present-day space of the abject - within container-ridden port areas and industrial lots common within the outlying industrial belts of San Sebastian in Letxo or the nearby industrial ghost-town of Eibar - an architectural wonder of small scale modernist factories on the verge of demolition. The present-day experience of the sublime, then, locates human subjectivity in an otherness outside of what is experienced as the myth of natural beauty, to remind us that not everything is to be reduced to exchange value, and that not everything must submit to the control of an instrumental reason subject to a location within the grid of definitions and categories. The prior systems of classification and belief are subject to a historical dynamic that calls for revision and reinterpretation. And art therefore requires the sublime in order to extend out of its frame of mere appearances to become, as Adorno claims, an active independent agency and not merely a reservoir of historical frustrations of failed dreams and projects of human emancipation.
Why is art 'art,' anyway, if anyone would even care to ask? Adorno answers enigmatically that art most resembles the phrase 'Here I am' or 'This is what I am,' or even 'I am a Rhinoceros - for there is no place/without eyes to see you.' Cryptic as this may sound, the analogy promotes an understanding of art that defers from identification and tends towards a reliance on the interdependence of entities that locks in a binding object-subject relationship. Art is by its nature animated, continually speaking back to us. It acts like a subject by engaging the subject and, ironically, it is the gaze of the artwork that engages the subject and constitutes expression. What essentially makes art 'art' is the residue of the subject in the artwork. This is the way that subjectivity defines itself in the object and understands itself through the object.

Violence of the Imagination and Negation
Vandalism. The territory is intermittently vandalized by graffiti and by virtue of the immediate recourse taken by the authorities to remove the traces, the inscriptions read as invasive acts. This roving interventionism continually threatens the space to stand accused without an alibi through the mechanism of a spontaneous event, a project, a deed. The city's identity consequently evolves as a possible fiction, if one is to consider Mikhail Bakhtin's formulation that identity could be fiction, and at the same time universally present in assumptions made about one's status as an individual, in human social experience, language and even in scientific speculation. Other clues persist in proximity to San Sebastian. A recently built museum dedicated to the exhibition of cement as a cultural and historical artifact is offered as a tourist site strokes Valéry's notion of the museum as mausoleum, with critical work being found everywhere else but there. The Museo del Cemento Rezola is located within a composite environment that includes a sports ground, kiosk, bar and neighboring factory. With declamatory banners hung prominently throughout, a cultural space evolves similar to El Lissitsky's PROUN, as a type of abstraction of a propaganda hoarding, cryptic and unintelligible while at the same time communicating urgency. The signs without instructional function appear as head-on collisions announcing a fracture that prompts investigation. Posted banners in apparent protest read as painted writing functioning like Corday's letter in the hand of David's Marat - a discursive form that is not necessarily decipherable. At this point, it is possible to cite Mayakovsky's poetry or Malevich's battle cry - U el el el teka! It points to a breakdown in the order of meaning and claims all as null and void.
Artworks rely on these very toxins to allow for an existence beyond a mere thingness. They do so through the language of the mute or through what Beckett describes as the desecration of silence and the enigmatic. Nevertheless, their protest lies in the logic of negation which allows them the possibility of simply being resigned as things among things. Although the functionalist work of art may approximate the appearance of usefulness, it does not respond to any external or practical function. Without the intent to be fulfilled as architecture, art continues in architecture's vein to strive to articulate the seemingly functional in order to pose questions as to how the nature of domestic, institutional or public space can play a role in the formation of the human subject. Although architecture has historically provided art with a critical language, architecture has resisted following art's example. Architect Peter Eisenman interpreted this as contemporary architecture's very weakness - in its resistance to proceed from those questions initially asked by Piranesi in relation to the Panopticon to challenge the traditional subject-object relationships. Eisenman noted that it was the investigations by artists such as Dan Graham, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Robert Smithson, who throughout the 60s and 70s displaced the viewing subject from his/her position in an anthropocentric stability.

Like a Porcupine
How is it possible for a project such as Manifesta to learn from the structure of an artwork in order to behave socially and politically without having to immerse itself in reality? To find the possibility of articulating from a distance, but nevertheless poignantly, in approaching the subject but not only one defined as the viewing subject? How is it then possible to build this into the process of Manifesta as an internal critique of both its own development and the place that has essentially consigned its form as a way to promote culture as a reflection of the city? If Manifesta, by its very nature, is a category of representation that links art with the specifics of the urban, how then can a project such as this one help to extend the language of architecture and urbanism in order to explore how culture may serve to catalyze change rather than be something purely ornamental? In these circumstances, when everything seems to be written on the sleeve of the place of Manifesta's inception, the key still lies in looking for what is not there and finding it elsewhere, although not too far from home.
Driving several kilometers inland past San Sebastian's first beach and the monumental Kursaal, one encounters a port that is altogether antithetical to the picturesque San Sebastian in almost every way - politically, socially, economically and demographically. Decaying ships and vacant warehouses indicate a port and a surrounding town that seem to have been short-circuited from their former construction, maritime, trade and fishing activities. To contrast the two areas simply, San Sebastian, characterized by a tertiary economy, symbolizes leisure at its very essence, and Pasaia, a secondary economy, points to labour in decline. Although it had been Manifesta's initial intent to inhabit Pasaia to reflect the spectral doubling that characterizes San Sebastian, what evolved was far more critical than merely establishing a metaphorical dimension for an exhibition. The more rational collaboration sought out with the Berlage Institute in the form of the Office of Alternative Urban Planning and the expressive sculpting into Ondartxo as an open-ended and evolving museum - these projects broke Manifesta out of the immediacy of its scheduled time bracket and interwove it into the fabric of city and regional planning. The resulting inter-articulation of San Sebastian and Pasaia anticipated the possibilities of a future construction of behavior that overrode the debates about possible results. As noted by Sebastian Khourian, the contingency endemic to the region was observed as a vital force rather than a weakness in order to create the possibility for entrance to a place that formerly prevented entry.
It is art's privilege to defer political activism and to retain its power in promoting an awareness on the part of the subject of the social limits imposed by the city planning or by governments. As Adorno claims, perhaps autonomous art does not necessarily change political attitudes, but its effectiveness under advanced capitalist conditions lies in its ability to mount crucial resistance, which may inevitably lead to such changes. Insofar as a social function can be predicated for artworks, their social essence requires a double reflection on their being for themselves and on their relations to society. By crystallizing in itself something unique onto itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as socially useful, the artwork criticizes society by merely existing. Artworks arrive as the most profound instances of social alienation, their objectivity - the distance between the subject and freedom - constituting the artwork as a testament and a reminder of unfreedom.