Terre Di Nessuno
Or the Fissures in Reality

Alicia Murría

With the advent of conceptual art, what had hitherto been called art was opened to new theoretical and physical formulations whose consequences are still being felt today. New formal repertoires borrowed from the domain of visual communication, and new procedures linked to the development of technologies were allied in this transformation. Video, film, radio, photography, photocopies, text and illustrations, sundry printing techniques –most recently, digital technologies– and all kinds of supports achieved a new dignity and legitimacy as formalising media and as artistic genres, as well as a dimension as documents; to this repertoire was added performance and other art forms involving the body. Minimal art had opened a wide gap by giving conceptual components pride of place over the processes of making art, which now came to be regarded as impersonal. Meanwhile, Marcel Duchamp’s ideas had become the framework for understanding the function and concept of authorship, while leading also to a redefinition of the spectator’s role and the terms on which a work of art should be received. Somewhat later on, the Fluxus movement headed by Georges Maciunas sparked another change by merging musical media and resources with strictly visual art (configuring the trilogy of place, object, and sound). Maciunas, along with Maxfield, McLow, Flynt, Ono, Paik, Brecht and Vostell, or Cage and Patterson –these last dealing more strictly with sound– would help to mark out these new artistic territories in the United States and Europe.

Alicia Murría, José Iges and Concha Jerez

This brief and basic sketch of such an intricate map serves at least to indicate the artistic traditions that have nourished Concha Jerez and José Iges. The latter defines himself as an artist whose school was the radio, and radio art is his frame of reference and a sphere to which he has contributed numerous works. However, and despite the polarity of this medium, few people are aware of the artistic possibilities it offers, or even that if offers any at all. Iges was trained as a musician, and from an early age he moved towards contemporary works, especially electro-acoustical ones. His work shows traces of the most varied influences, from minimalism –though more as a substrate than a direct link–to Fluxus, to which he ones the intermedia idea which has become central to his artistic/musical proposals, and with John Cage as the outstanding figure in this territory of sound. At the same time, his theatrical approach to the concert is not unlike that of other radio artists, such as Luc Ferrari. But the Dadaists, the theatre of the absurd –with Jarry and his pataphysics in the forefront– and Boris Vian have also marked his personal evolution, which is dominated by a certain conception of the artist as prestidigitator, and by his ironic worldview. Iges is known and recognised for his broadcasts making known the works of other contemporary musicians and composers who work outside the strictly commercial circuit. In a word, Iges can be described as a rara avis in the Spanish artistic panorama.

It is not surprising that Iges works with another artist in an orbit of similar interests. Concha Jerez and José Iges have an understanding that has allowed them to work fruitfully together for the past thirteen years. Jerez also has a solid musical background and a long career in conceptual art –or, as she prefers, in the art of the concept– as well as an objectual formalisation that looks to the poetics of the materials of art povera. The discovery of Fluxus –and especially the emblematic figure of the German Wolf Vostell, who lives in Spain– marked a turning point in Jerez’ career, as did her discovery of John Cage. In the Spanish art scene she is closely linked to members of the ZAJ group, and particularly to Juan Hidalgo and Esther Ferrer, but also to Nacho Criado and Valcárcel Medina. In the mid-1970’s Jerez began experimenting with the new technologies and with performance. Her solo work in the 1980s and 1990s centred on the installation –with a personal interpretation of work with space-drawing, the spoken word, sound, video, action, and intermedia works, as well as the use of text which attains central importance in her work. Behind all this is a highly elaborate conceptual project which delves into such themes as place and non-place, interior and exterior time, and the concepts of the limit, fragment, ambiguity, self-censorship, legibility (by means of her illegible writings), interference, and memory.

Iges’ interest in space and in the specifically visual, and Jerez’ interest in sound, led them to collaborate, in 1989, on projects in parallel to their individual productions. Since then they have jointly created a score of audio-visual installations, performances, intermedia or multimedia concerts, interactive installations, net art, and pieces for radio. Many of these works have been presented abroad and remain largely unknown in Spain.

The several essays in this catalogue furnish a detailed review of the creations of Jerez/Iges but, as an introduction, it seems wise to sketch in a basic notion of the philosophical underpinnings of their joint productions. Theirs is a critical view of the world that surrounds us; of the structures of the communications media and the impoverished and manipulated forms that are imposed on us by these media; of a mass culture in which television sells its own, autonomous reality; of a world in which, says José Iges paraphrasing Ignacio Ramonet: Reality tends to be substituted by its own mise-en-scène. And, one might add, in which nothing exists until it becomes –is re-worked into– news.

These concerns inform much of their work, and reflects a certain pessimism. However, their productions also open a space of dissent, which make such criticism possible. To do so they employ a variety of mechanisms, among which interference has become the most characteristic. This interference may be visual or auditory, textual or symbolic. Because in the shattering of conventional discourses, in superpositions and mixtures, they show us the possibility of driving wedges into those discourses, giving new and paradoxical meanings to those realities. These interferences, as we have said, can be made up of auditory or visual elements. Among the former we find fragments of official speeches, interviews with unknown passers-by, street noises, or the sounds made by toys or alarm clocks. But we also hear human voices reading texts or uttering meaningless phonemes, which are transformed into signs that occupy space –inscription and description– like a scale model of the world.

As regards the visual interferences, these come from joining decontextualised images and superposing the most varied objects, many of them cheap toys, kitsch items, or pieces of dismembered dolls, and act as a synthesis of the consumer society, testifying to its opulence and to that devalued aesthetic that simultaneously symbolised the depreciation of experience and its substitution by an empty representation. This way of operating, via accumulation, poses the idea of the inventory as a narrative possibility. The inventory also serves as a souvenir, a reminder, and a weapon in the struggle against the forgetfulness that is imposed upon us. Likewise, the idea of the stage set serves to underline some of these ideas: media culture as the great show window of everything they try to sell us every day, and the discourse as an essential part of this same stage set, showing us its fissures.

This acid criticism of the various realities in which we find ourselves has also focused on such questions as control and surveillance. We are surrounded by infernal machines which are so common that we are asked to see them as innocent, with no ill intentions; I am referring specifically to electronic surveillance devices that are said to contribute to our security. This theme is central to some of the more complex joint production of Jerez/Iges. The interactive installation Polyphemus’ Eye merits a careful reading since, despite some differences, it has much in common with these no-man’s lands. The title of the earlier work, presented at the Ars Electronica Festival in 1997, referred to the huge eye that observes us through the different manifestations of electronic surveillance. It is a stalking eye, and, as the artists said, an impersonal, economical eye, the eye of the surveillance systems. When we speak of an eye, we would do better to speak of a single vivisectionist brain whose decisions are nourished by thousands of little eyes and ears. First we have the ubiquitous security cameras, and then the wire-tapping systems, and the tiny hidden microphones that can pick up our conversations, and, beyond all that, with the advent of the Internet, our bodies, and with them, our public and private activities, appear continually deconstructed and regenerated, like a sort of digital Frankenstein made up of small fragments, of evidence which, naturally, can be used against us. The indiscriminate selection of data about citizens destroys an inalienable right like privacy, marking the limits of freedom. And becomes a factor in criminality extending suspicion under the cloak of deterrence.

In Polyphemus’ Eye, this watchful eye became a peephole which made the spectator into a voyeur. In parallel, a camera recorded the spectators movements and showed them on a monitor which was, at the same time, what was really being observed. Another camera steadily transmitted to the Internet images of what was happening there, rendering effective this telematic supervision. In the Internet one could take part in a discussion of the subject. Another giant screen displayed images taken by security cameras on the streets of several European cities, which were mixed with those of the spectators themselves; visitors could move the cameras or record the conversations taking place in the first of the two spaces. This devourer of privacy became in its turn something to be devoured by the eyes and ears of the others. Thus the screws were tightened which made the spectator an integral part of the work itself.

In their most recent interactive installation, Net-Opera (which was also designed for the Internet), many of Jerez/Iges recurring themes were addressed again. There were images of ruins, of displaced populations, of war, etc, taken from the daily news and merged in an almost ghostly fashion with other images of superficiality, luxury, and excess which dwell with the others in a natural way are also presented like images from the news. This mixture of fragments of the different realities takes on a new dimension thanks to the spectator-activated sensors that interact with the exhibition space with these endless layers or representations of the real.
And now we reach Terre di nessuno, a project that summarises the artists’ current concerns, and takes up themes that they have used previously, that are here presented, both visually and conceptually, in new formulations. Also new is the technological sophistication of the exhibition, which can be seen as a kind of multimedia Intranet featuring video, light, sound, etc. and which allows the visitor who crossed the threshold to interact with and alter the contents of the exhibition. The Borgesian idea of the labyrinth is mixed with the image of a board game known to almost everyone, ludo, chosen because of its specificity as a territorial game whose rules are continually changed, which is disorienting to visitors who seek reference points in each installation and the path between them.

This technological edifice was not built to be visited as a conventional exhibition, since what happened in the various zones resulted from the actions, movements and choices of the spectator/participant, from the number of them present at each time, and also from telephone calls from outside. These actions affect both the real exhibition space and the virtual space of the Internet. In this respect, then, Terre di nessuno has had a former life, a life in parallel to the exhibition, and a later stage.

What the visitor finds are differentiated and interconnected spaces in which there converge video projections of very disparate images, collage-style fragments of the present, panoramic sounds with snippets of official speeches, fake patriotic anthems –broken hymns–, scraps of conversations; complicitous winks, like the invented flags, figures borrowed from the Comedia dell’Arte, mirrors that invite us to enter those other realities (again, Borges) or which regress to the infinite, interrupted columns that support nothing, lights that blind rather than illuminate, and a selection of real and false news items where this territorial game is the guiding thread, though instead of guiding us with rules known beforehand it disorients us with rules that are constantly changed; and it is we who with our steps stimulate devices and sensors which activate a disconnected world with infinite folds in which even a telephone call can create new visual, auditory, or textual situations.

Beyond the sensory and perceptive experience furnished by the moving images, the sound and the light, the exhibition addresses and disassembles –employing mechanisms of approximation that include the world of the communications media– what are called no-man´s lands: real and virtual spaces that are discontinuous and deregulated, because of changes in the rules or the absence of precise rules, which converts them into uninhabited spaces which, by the same token, can become genuine reserves of signification of which no inventory has been taken.
It is a terrain full of fissures that open to the possibility of generating, and inscribing, new discourses.