In 2005, the Paris-based artist Alejandra Riera and Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona published the book Maquetas-sin-cualidad (Models-without-quality).1 The book appeared after the exhibition 'maquettes-sans-qualité, travail en grève/treball en vaga/work on strike', which took place at the Fundació Tàpies that same year and displayed extensive parts of Riera's long-term project 'Un problème non résolu, <1995-…>' ('An Unresolved Problem, <1995-…>'). Initiated in 1995, this project can be characterised as a co-operative, experimental- research initiative that investigates the conditions for and possibilities of political action in diverse social contexts. During the project, the participants use and produce documents that relate to political situations of everyday life as well as to specific moments of political activism - for example, the Kurdish struggle in Turkey or the campaign of the sans papiers for legal documentation in France.
This large-scale, wide-ranging project is subdivided into intermediate stages, which mark new directions of investigation and working constellations. Riera refers to them as maquettes-sans-qualité, or maquetas-sincualidad. Each of them is numbered and accompanied by subtitles that indicate the starting date, the current status of work and details on the content.2 And each assembles various documents from the project, such as photographs, captions, texts and video documentations. The maquetas can be considered an archive of the project's activities - but an archive which refuses any defined or logical structure. Instead, the documents appear in 'discontinuous arrangements'. Riera herself describes the maquetas as 'the form that has been given to an imaginary space, a refuge that leaves room for the multiple voices brought into play by the corpus of an unfinished work of artistic practices'.3 With these words she underlines not only the notion of collaboration that is essential to the maquetas, but also their function as an open concept which may be subject to further modifications and interventions.
In order to present a maqueta to the public, its original informality is sometimes transformed into a 'fixed' presentation temporarily displayed in an exhibition space.4 At the show in Barcelona Riera presented five maquetas. Formally, these were translated into separate colour-coded sections on the walls of the gallery. Within these coloured areas, the exhibition assembled a plethora of standardised sheets with text and photographs, large photographic collages and projections of video documentaries. The form of presentation, as well as the large amount of written text, resembled the pages of an open book. Indeed, the exhibition pointed to the fact that the archival logic of the book form is a fundamental aspect of the project.
Given this background, it is no surprise that the publication Maquetas-sin-cualidad differs from a traditional exhibition catalogue. Instead of interpreting and commenting on a pre-existing exhibition, it contains the exhibition, collates all sheets of text and images from the gallery walls and converts them into a bound volume of 350 pages. Even though some of the texts included in the book reflect on specific aspects of the overall project, these reflections are not situated within a theoretical frame external to it, but instead are treated as immanent, 'artistic' parts of the maquetas. In this way, the publication questions dichotomies of before/ after and of inside/outside, as well as the hierarchy between 'authentic' exhibition and 'explanatory' catalogue. As a means of presentation, the book is equal to the exhibition. It simultaneously documents and consists of the maquetas. And in so doing it creates a new form of display, a multiplied and itinerant form that ensures the public accessibility to and archival utility of the maquetas even after the end of the exhibition. It is this same function that this essay makes use of in order to introduce diverse aspects of Riera's artistic practice.
Peculiar Difficulties
When approaching Riera's work, we are immediately confronted with a high degree of complexity and peculiar, ambivalent structures. This makes interpretation difficult, and is perhaps one of the reasons why her work has received little public attention despite her participation in the last two documentas. However, that immediate 'difficulty' is an important and deliberate aspect of the work, by which Riera aims at complicating the habits typical of the contemporary art context. Even before opening the book, this is exemplified by the term maquetas-sin-cualidad, which posits a form whose 'quality' is its 'non-quality'. Although the assertion of 'non-quality' clearly is wrong with regard to the elaborated frame of the maquetas, the contradiction it expresses is a precise reflection of the desire to set the work apart from 'high art' value. The subtitles of each maqueta support this logic with phrases such as 'trabajo inacabado' ('unfinished work'), 'trabajo-en-curso' ('ongoing work') or 'no resuelto' ('unresolved'). Emphasising the maquetas' incompletion, these expressions position themselves in paradoxical contrast to the traditional function of titles as signifiers of the complete nature of artworks.
In the book, the maquetas present the reader or viewer with an enormous number of documents, each referring to a very specific context. The huge amount of topics and narratives may lead to a desire in the viewer for an overall narration, a possibility suggested by the consistency in the form of the maquetas. However, this does not come through on the level of content. The discontinuous, essayistic mode of organisation demands that the reader interpret the collated documents in their individual fragmentary density, as well as track down possible relations between them. For example, a photograph of the elegant setting of a philosophy conference in Buenos Aires in the 2a maqueta <1997-…> is juxtaposed with a photograph of black people sitting on the pavement. The accompanying label identifies that scene as a public discussion following a protest action of the sans papiers in Paris, and relates the fact that during this event the French ambassador Stéphane Hessel recommended the 'illegals' to cooperate with the police. The text clearly stresses the contextual differences between the two images, but it also suggests a fragile connection between them: a connection that is based on the difference between the privileged field of political theory and the precarious reality of urgent political action. The two pages invite us to reflect about who is talking about whom, from what perspective and with what effects.
Reading the maquetas offers a layered network of meanings that simultaneously support and contradict each other. This is the case not only for neighbouring documents, but also for those that are further apart. For example, two female characters (the Kurdish politician Leyla Zana and the Palestinian-French actress Hiam Abbass), who appear in several maquetas represent some kind of fragile 'main narration'. They invoke the idea of feminist solidarity, and complicate it with accounts of cultural difference, migration, discrimination and political imprisonment.5 These motives are further developed with documents referring to travel, information and mediation, and to the disastrous effects of modernism.
This essayistic structure demands active participation in the production of meaning, and at the same time gives occasion for a reflection on such participation. In this regard, visual elements which point towards the act of looking and the desire for knowledge acquire particular importance: for instance, photographs of media images and practices, of exhibition spaces and libraries, or recurring motifs of blocked or open vistas. In a similar way, the presence of texts in Kurdish in the 4a maqueta <2001-…> confront the non- Kurdish-speaking readers with their inability to understand this historically repressed language, and, hence, invites them to reflect on the representational and hegemonic function of language. Another important formal element is the use of black, horizontal rectangles that appear on nearly all the pages of the maquetas. These black areas, most of which contain photographs, create a consistent formal structure that suggests a documentary 'discourse of sobriety'.6 Yet, as the formal coherence does not correspond to a coherent content, the black motif constitutes an independent aesthetic that ambivalently intervenes in any 'direct' documentary style. Additionally, these black rectangles stress the visual properties of the images they contain, as well as their representational, mediatic function. On all these levels, the maquetas are given a precise form in order to defy formalist goals. Their complex structure tries to thwart a dominant art discourse that transforms critical, 'open works' into commodities.7 In such a process of absorption the critical intentions become a legitimised surplus value, upholding the illusion of a privileged, 'alternative' art sphere. Jacques Rancière recently coined the term 'metapolitics of the resisting form' to describe that logic.8 Here, the 'critical' work becomes a substitute for political action: a 'hyperpoliticised' fetish in relation to which any possible response is reduced to a state of permanently having to catch up with it.9 Under such conditions, the active, political potential of the viewer - the possibility of critically supporting, continuing or opposing the politics of 'social' art practices - is curtailed rather than encouraged. It distracts from the genuine social status of art, and makes it hard to reflect the specific political positions of its protagonists - including the self-critical reflection of the important, yet problematic position of the viewers themselves.
The maquetas confront the logic of the 'critical form' with their peculiar 'difficulty'. This constitutes a response to the habit of consuming pre-packaged aesthetic solutions - while the actual issue at stake is how to work collaboratively around conflicting realities. Thus, the purposely awkward complexity of the maquetas transfers the exploration of those conflicting realities into the maquetas' own form, and turns art into a form of political action itself. This doesn't mean that the maquetas leave the realm of art altogether. Rather, they attempt to open up interstitial spaces within this realm, following a two-fold notion of the maqueta as model: on the one hand, the concept of a working model that provides leeway for potential action, including that of the audience; and on the other, the idea of the maqueta as prototype, which offers practical, alternative models for action. Such models not only set out to address the social conditions outside of art, but also to point to the borders of art, where its problematic social conditions are to be experienced and brought into a productive process of transformation. Riera addresses this double function when she writes: 'A maquette is a miniature model of a theatre set, of a building, of an architectural ensemble. But a maquette can also be a sketch, an escape plan, a miniaturised model of a space, where one can speak, think about the world and ourselves within it; a model without guarantees, a sum of rudiments for the building of an inhabitable place whose birth would be long and complicated.'10
Forms of Collaboration
A central issue within this framework is the question of collaboration. Firstly, this question is posed in relation to the system of art itself, as no author is named for either the publication or the exhibition. While a brief enquiry will reveal Alejandra Riera as the person who traditionally would be identified as author, such an enquiry will lead directly to the maquetas, not only exposing the audience to differing voices of authorial production, but also explicitly addressing the issue of authorship as problematic.11 In this quest for Riera as 'author', the main issues of feminist art history are perfomatively enacted. Since the 1970s feminist critique has pointed out that the myth of the artist as independent producer serves to impose an elitist and patriarchal attitude, regulating the different possibilities of access to art production and art history, and covering up exclusions and collective forms of production of art and discourse.12 These issues are still pressing when dealing with recent artistic projects that employ participatory modes of production. Here, the 'dissolution' of the central position of the artist may actually result in a covering up of actual modes of production, and blur the way in which symbolic and 'real' capital is distributed. Under the pretext of a 'harmonious social commonality', differences between those who enable participation, those 'in the know' and the 'merely participating' are tacitly established, renewing the authority of the singular artist-producer.13 But with the maquetas, our uncomfortable quest for the author, simultaneously instigated and subverted by them, exposes these very concepts and mechanisms, and invites us to self-reflexively question our own ideas and expectations of art.
Using this as a point of departure, we are able to identify several overlapping levels of collaboration in the maquetas. First, from a classical point of view of production, the maquetas bring together documents made by diverse producers - for instance, a documentary film by Andreas Weiss, texts by Ruth Noack, Fulvia Carnevale, Doina Petrescu and the group Association (des pas). Riera's texts, photographs and the structuring frames are thus only parts among many others. In addition to this, her photographs are put into perspective by the use of the alias 'woman-photographer': 'A photographer, who might also have been a nurse or a sweeper, and their gazes on the world […]Photographernurse- sweeper, cited not as socio-professional categories but as their overcoming, their alteration.'14 Here, work is not defined as material production, but rather as the articulation of particular 'gazes on the world' that are contained within its materiality.
More important than the fact that the maquetas actually employ documents contributed by diverse producers is why and under which conditions these are produced. This issue leads to a second dimension of collaboration on the level of content - the very practice of collective production as recorded by the documents (which in turn are the material results of that kind of collective production). It includes debates, conversations, performative actions and concepts developed and carried out with different persons. An example of this is the interview 'Speaking about Roles' (1999), which Alejandra Riera conducted with Hiam Abbass about her work as an actress and her position between France and Palestine. Another is the project 'Cité des femmes', realised by Madjiguène Cissé and the women's network Refdaf in Senegal, which Riera documented in the 5a maqueta <2003-…>. In these cases, collaboration is present within the on-site action, but also within the act of representation. The strict separation between active, artistic 'subject' and passive, represented 'object' is called into question.
This does not involve proposing naïve, romanticised notions of equality. The protest video Hot Water (2001), which is part of the 3a maqueta <1999-…> and documents women's collective struggle for better living conditions in northern France, points this out.15 In the book, a text related to the video asks: 'What are we dealing with when filming or writing about other human beings? […] What would you want "Hot Water" to be in terms of montage and transmission technique?' 16 Here, representation (the act of filming) is addressed as something which is not in itself 'political', no self-evident emancipatory part of any radical protest community. Instead, its political function remains doubtful, and must be carefully developed within the political movement. Collective work is here represented as effort, as something to be worked on and always involved in a fragile process of becoming.
A third level of collaboration, also crucial to the work, is the collaboration with the audience. This level is closely connected to the essayistic form of the maquetas as discussed above. A particularly poignant example is a double spread from the 3a maqueta. The left-hand side shows a female museum visitor looking at Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas (1656). The right-hand side presents a photo of two women, separated by a partly glazed door. A caption below identifies the women as sans papiers, communicating in a squatted council office through a barricaded door. The contextual differences between the images - the safe, secluded space of the museum and the precarious actions of the 'illegal' individuals - could hardly be more striking. In formal terms, however, the images are quite similar: both show the back of a head in the lower right part of the image, a person standing in front of a vertical plane and looking into a 'different' room. In this combination, the figure of the mirror acquires particular significance. In Velázquez's painting, a mirror in the background reflects the Spanish king and queen that, according to the logic of the painted space, should probably be located in front of the painting. In this logic, the photographed viewer, who physically occupies the position of the royal couple, is identified as illegitimate, as being in the wrong place. While this is part of the painting's play of perspectives, the photograph underlines the uncomfortable nature of this constitutive 'falseness', as the head of the museum-visitor disrupts our own view of the painting. In the image to the right, the mirror is evoked by the placement of the two women in front of and behind a glass pane. Here the 'not-actual' reflection of the mirror actually turns out to be a 'correct' mode of identification - a direct communication which takes place in spite of its precarious conditions. But still, we are not able to enjoy and absorb this image as an example of successful dialogue. While we are still looking at it, the museum visitor from the other photograph starts to intervene, reminding us of our own ambivalent position inside the museum. From this mediated perspective, the two women underline the fact that our identificatory gaze is 'illegitimate' because we are not part of their immediate communication and precarious situation. Yet, they also insist on the fact that we are politically addressed by the image: we are asked to confront the content of the photograph, as well as the fact that our specific form of 'communication' is radically mediated.
The maquetas not only use images to discuss politics, they also invoke what we can call, after Rancière, 'the politics of images'. 17 They address the fact that we encounter 'mere' images and that our political activity has to take place primarily on the level of the imaginary. This political imaginary is partially prefigured by the maquetas: by their contents and topics, which insist on concrete political action, and by their structure, which reminds us of the specific political status of representation. However, the maquetas are no substitute for our own looking, thinking, feeling or acting. The 'political' of the maquetas exists only because of their viewers, because of the work of those who listen to different 'voices', and who actively relate these 'voices' to their own specific perspectives. The viewers are not 'politicised', but rather are invited to develop a critical precision with regard to their surroundings and their own position within them. In this way, the maquetas' insistence on their own incompletion is not just a suggestion that Riera will extend her archival practice, but an appeal to the audience to continue, on their own, the work on the 'unsolved problems'.
The Book as Format
What does this mean in relation to the book as an aesthetic object? As pointed out before, the book format expands the public access to the maquetas and enables a closer work with the images and texts. This format, however, also implies the loss of the short-term, provisional character the maquetas acquire as presentations within temporary exhibitions. Instead, it is permanently available as a material, consumable object. As such, it not only acquires a certain market value as a book, but can furthermore be invested with the symbolic value of an 'independent' work of art. From this perspective, the book potentially becomes a comfortable, coherent form that contains and arrests the difficult, reflexive (in-)formality of the maquetas.
For this reason, it is of particular importance that within the whole publication, traces of the printing job are visible. These traces point towards the production process and, hence, to the material and formal character of the book. They mark its specific aesthetic quality and function, the fact that it is representing and archiving texts and images. These marks can therefore be read as an invitation to practically apply the working concept of the maquetas to our own use of the book. They seem to introduce the book as a maqueta in its own right - as a tool, which proposes its contents and formal means for further work, aiming at further collaboration with the readers/viewers. As a maqueta, the book becomes a mediating form: something which informs us and at the same time is there to be transformed for the future. It calls into question how much and in what respect our involvement with a book and/ or a work of art can or cannot be political engagement - and that how we use the book is also our responsibility.
- Angelika Bartl
Maquetas-sin-cualidad (en la fecha del 19 diciembre de 2004) (fragmentos) , Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2005. Besides Nuria Enguita, the director at Fundació Tàpies at the time, Noemi Cohen and Clara Plasencia worked on the exhibition and publication. Wherever possible, quotes have been made from the English translation of the text, published in a brochure to accompany the exhibition.
2 For example, 3a maqueta-sin-cualidad, <1999-…> (trabajo abandonado) (abecedario(s) y anexos) Leyla Zana - Hiam Abbass - una mujer-fotógrafa - … - un problema no resuelto, <1995-…> (3rd model- without-quality, <1999-…> (abandoned work) (alphabet(s) and annexes) Leyla Zana - Hiam Abbass - a woman-photographer - … - an unresolved problem, <1995-…>).
Maquetas-sin-cualidad, op. cit., p.9.
See, for example, her contributions to the exhibitions 'Stand der Dinge (Teil 1)', at Kunst-Werke in Berlin (2000), 'Dinge, die wir nicht verstehen' at Generali Foundation in Vienna (2000) or Documenta11 in Kassel in 2002.
In relation to the 1a maqueta, see Ruth Noack' 'Gewaltstrukturen, strukturelle Gewalt und die Macht der Bilder. Gedanken zu einem Kunstwerk im Jahr des Scheiterns der "Operation Provide Comfort"', Springerin, March/May 1997, pp.24-31.
Bill Nichols introduces the term 'discourse of sobriety' in relation to documentary film. See B. Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts of Documentary, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991.
See Boris Groys, Über das Neue: Versuch einer Kulturökonomie, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1999; and B. Groys, 'Kunst im Zeitalter der Demokratie', in Bice Curiger (ed.), Public Affairs: Das Öffenliche in der Kunst (exh. cat.), Kunsthaus Zürich, 2002, pp.5-11. For a critical discussion of Umberto Eco's notion of 'open work', see Annegret Jürgens-Kirchhoff, 'Das "offene" Bild - Überlegungen zu einer ästhetischen Kategorie', in Peter Klein and Regine Prange (ed.), Zeitenspiegelung: Zur Bedeutung von Traditionen in Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft: Festschrift für Konrad Hoffmann zum 60 Geburtstag am 8. Oktober 1998, Berlin: Reimer, 1998, pp.348-61.
Jacques Rancière, Das Unbehagen in der Ästhetik (trans. Richard Steurer), Vienna: Passagen, 2007, p.54.
See also Jacques Rancière, 'The Emancipated Spectator', Texte zur Kunst, vol.58, 2005, pp.35-51; as well as J. Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons on Intellectual Emancipation (trans. Kristin Ross), Stanford University Press, 1991.
Maquetas-sin-cualidad, op. cit., p.9.
See especially Maquetas-sin-cualidad, op. cit., pp.11-13.
See Linda Nochlin, 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?', ARTnews, 1971, pp.22-39 and 67-71; Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981; Nanette Solomon, 'The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission', in Joan Hartman and Ellen Messer-Davidow (ed.), (En-)Gendering Knowledge: Feminists in Academe, Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1991, pp.222-36; and Silke Wenk and Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, Mythen von Weiblichkeit und Autorschaft, Marburg: Jonas, 1997.
See Beatrice von Bismarck et al. (ed.), Games Fights Collaborations, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1996.
Maquetas-sin-cualidad, op. cit., p.13.
For a more detailed discussion of the video see Angelika Bartl, 'Aufteilen der Räume. Perspektiven auf und mit einem Dokumentarvideo in der Kunst', Bildwelten des Wissens 5, 1 Systemische Räume, 2007, pp.28-38.
Maquetas-sin-cualidad, op. cit., p.238.
I am referring here to the German title 'Die Politik der Bilder' of J. Rancière's book The Future of the Image (trans. Gregory Elliott), London and New York: Verso, 2007. Translated by Daniel F. Herrmann
