Reflections on No-man ’s lands

José Iges

It is curious that the term which inspires both these paragraphs and the exhibition to which this publication is dedicated does not even appear in the dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language. In order, then, to make up for this absence, let us recall that no-man’s land is most often used to describe the space between enemy lines on a battlefield. It can also mean the strip of land between two countries or sovereign states.

Thus no-man’s lands are essentially dominions between. For that very reason they are also spaces that may cause disorientation. They are like landscapes enveloped in a fog. They are territories of indeterminacy or muddling of the rules generated by two perfectly regulated systems. Pockets of –relative– disorder caused by the adjacent order.

To engender a no-man’s land would appear to be a simple task, then, with the following recipe: on a field of operations where the movements are plainly regulated, suddenly change the rules of play. This way we meet the two necessary conditions enabling us to designate as such a no-man’s land:

– A place between two territories.

– The two adjoining territories must be ruled by precise and known laws.

This differentiates no-man’s lands clearly from heterotopias, which are spaces for otherness, for deviant attitudes –speaking in social terms–, which means that in such spaces there is a certain suspension or explicit repeal –a certain distancing– of the rules established by that society, while no-man’s lands are flatly spaces of confusion, of transit.

But, although is it a territory of transit, not any public space should not be regarded as a no-man’s land since such spaces are, or should be everyman’s lands. When we say no-man’s lands are spaces of transit we would underline that, in contrast to heterotopias, they have an obvious component of provisionality that makes –potentially or really– uncomfortable our mere presence in them. (In terms of these considerations, the peculiarity of squatters is that in occupying buildings they engage in a sort of re-zoning of this no-man’s land, colonising it, and making it a habitable space).

Colonisation presupposes regulation, so we could say that the act of colonising liquidates a territory as a no-man’s land. Thus we should stress a third feature of no-man’s lands: they are de-regulated, or possess a fluctuating or ambiguous regulation.

• Towards a Redefinition of the Term

All the foregoing leads us to a redefinition of the term. This effort is essential if, starting from the observable characteristics of no-man’s lands that can be designated as such, we wish to expand the idea, now using the poetic metaphor as a tool to describe other spaces and realities of our present-day society. From what we might call the observation of the real world, we proceed to a mental model that enables us to create a formal model –as is suggested in the dynamics of social or psychological systems–, the design of which can by no means ignore the aesthetic realm in which its formulation is effected, since our task is primarily to draw up proposals from the perspective of art.

Thus we shall regard as a no-man’s land any space –real or virtual– in which there are no rules or the rules can suddenly change –in sum, a space of/for disorientation.

This signifies an essentialisation and, perhaps even more, a stylisation of the conditions which, as we observed previously, a no-man’s land must meet to be designated as such. Now, and without losing sight of the examples commonly recognised and described as no-man’s lands, we can employ this term to designate other spaces or systems that meet the conditions specified.

• Uninhabitability. Chaos

It is obvious that, mindful of the conditions that a space or system must meet to be regarded as no-man’s lands, we could designate as such the island of Robinson Crusoe. And doubtless it was, in a strict sense of the term, since nobody inhabited the island until the famous castaway did. At that moment –that of his disembarkation and occupation– it became a colonised land. It would appear, then, that no-man’s lands would be systems not only of disorientation, due to the lack of known reference points –de-regulated systems of systems of unknown, insufficient or ambiguous regulations– but, above all, uninhabited.

However, following the flow of this argument, the uninhabitability of no-man’s lands is less a condition than a consequence of its essential features. Such lands are, if you will, systems or spaces of solitude. In this respect, we should point out the inscrutablility of such spaces, which are even –and above all– aesthetically ungraspable. If everything in our world has been suffused with aesthetics, as some say, it appears that the no-man’s lands may be the last redoubts of signification without an inventory having been made, hence unaestheticised.

Meanwhile, no-man’s lands are territories without a brand name or logotype. Without an owner, since they are as wild as the partial of total absence of regulation allows them to be. But they are not utopias, since they do have a well-defined topos and an undeniable existence.
Noman’s lands are systems –or spaces– of absence, of negation: of non-regulation, non-presence, non-aesthetics, non-ownership. At all events, their obscure existence seems to assure us, by contrast, of the existence of a brilliant world that is increasingly connected, global, interrelated, telepresent and communicable. But they are not so much the other side of the looking-glass of that world, as that portion of chaos that that world left behind it and around it in its efforts to order itself. In this instance it is not an apparent chaos, that could be a part of a degree of order that is inaccessible or incomprehensible from our own conventional order and which, for this very reason, we may interpret as chaos. No-man’s lands would behave like pockets of chaos generated by the exercise and the expansion of the order inherent in the system that surrounds them. As a slightly laboured analogy to help us understand that formulation, we might allude to the petroleum deposits formed over their centuries by a process of decomposition, under high pressures, of organic remains. In this case, the pressure is exerted by the social, economic, political and cultural system in its regulatory expansion, and which needs spaces where it can unload –and pile up– all the disorder that its imperfect ordering paradoxically generates (in any case, Gödel’s theorem warns us of the imperfection created by any system, no matter how perfect and complete). And its most obvious remains are the residues –human and material– that our opulent society produces.

• Wastes

In this sense, the artistification of waste is a characteristic of 20th century. avant-garde art. With real objects in two dimensions (Schwitters), the collage put into practice what some painters has shown simultaneously on a canvas (Cubism, Surrealism), while the Dada world contemporaneously brought this attitude to language, using its decomposing remains to construct his phonetic poetry. Cage made music from the supreme container of music –silence, the void of music and sound– to place within it a music made precisely of acoustic residues, randomly, of course. Vostell and other artists in the 1950s and 1960s brought the collage to a new phase with the décollage, in which to the residue in the form of a pasted posted they added a destructive action of shapes and signs. Thus it was nothing new in the last century to employ waste in the visual and auditory arts, nor should we forget the deliberate use of kitsch and, more generally, the redefinition and artistification of everyday objects from Duchamp until the present day. Appropiationism in the many artistic genres and realms –from video to music, from literature to net-art– is the latest manifestation of the use of wastes, although this practice is often associated with the categorisation as waste of the materials used and re-made –we are referring to their ethical and aesthetic degradation as a necessary previous condition.

In contradiction of what was said earlier, it would not appear that the noman’s lands behave like unaestheticised reserves of signification if the materials used to construct our propositions are taken from those cultural rubbish tips. However, it is true that both the cultural dumps and the people who collect and recycle organic garbage constitute a legitimate part of the noman’s lands as we have defined them.

We can also describe as no-man’s lands the barren scenarios of human cruelty and brutality: the Auschwitz extermination camp, Ground Zero on which the New York World Trade Center towers once stood, the zones contaminated by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, or the Allied actions in the Gulf War, or the Jenin refugee camp that was levelled by Israeli tanks.

We propose to allude to these wastes from the fragment. That, it will be said, is not original either. However, in the artistic examples mentioned those fragments were gathered with no break in continuity, nary a pause. That engendered a unity of a higher order that immediately became aestheticised, the more so when its results were shown in traditional art exhibitions and distribution channels. It is in those channels that our own proposal moves, though it will show the fragments unrelated to each other, with an interval of separation between them. The addition of fillers and empty spaces seems necessary to help us assimilate the proposal, since the open spaces will ensure the distancing of the fragments, whereby we intend to make their conceptual de-activation more difficult. In other words, in our proposal the no-man’s lands will be places of imprecise or uncertain regulation constructed of wastes taken from our cultural and media rubbish tips, with the aim of causing disorientation.

• Cracks in the Stage Set

At bottom we find ourselves with the old idea of the stage set: we live immersed in this bewildering environment that we have all constructed together, one that performs the functions of reality but is only a stage set. And from time to time, from amongst its unavoidable cracks, we see half-buried chunks and hear half-choked howls, indisguisable shreds of those residues mentioned above. It is a vision of a world that is certainly despondent, not because it points to the fact that chaos is overtaking us, but rather because this chaos is the product of an imposed, projected order: created by the power structures since time immemorial with the sole intent of their own perpetuation, mindless of the interests of the human species as a whole or of life on earth in general. All ideals, much sooner than later, have been betrayed. The bureaucratic world that has been created as a substitute, in order to perpetuate values by default has ended up by contaminating culture and social life, and it now threatens to dry the wellsprings of creation, and even of life itself.

Naturally, it is not a question of becoming arbiters of a new way of doing things, of founding a new religion or sect, or to lodge a simple and rhetorical denunciation of this complex and profound state of things. Nobody or almost nobody would see this as necessary, nor even recognise themselves in the mirror of such questioning. Probably not even ourselves. Rather, it is with a playful approach, aided by interactivity, that one might pry open the awareness a little, via little shocks, whip stings of information; these are the visions of those fragments that scratch the stage set, revealing it for the precarious thing it is by showing the seams. This is also the reasons for which the residues can be offered only as disjointed fragments, with no possibility of composing a formal unity, since that would immediately engender another stage set, another deceit, another illusion.

We would be thinking rather of a installation-type mise-en-scène of spaces for disorientation, and ultimately for reflection.

• Intervals

In The Lost Interval, Gillo Dorfles showed us to what extent it seems necessary to arrive as a kind of de-semiotisation, or at least, to re-establish a level where there are can again appear ‘virgin signs’, uncategorisable, unbreakable codes, blank pages that cannot be interpreted with reference to any meaning whatsoever.

With his comment he seems to be approaching that still unaestheticised territory which, as we have pointed out, is to be found in some of the no-man’s lands that our work addresses. But, speaking of intervals, it occurs to us that while these cannot always be defined as no-man’s lands, all of the then do indeed behave as intervals. An obvious example would be the grooves between the cuts of old vinyl disks. They hold no information at all, although it would not be true to say they are empty, since the needle running down them obtains parasitic sounds or static. What we can affirm categorically is that the grooves are there to separate, to differentiate; that they are useful in detaining the flow of sound to facilitate our comprehension of it. And what they separate, as it turns our, are perfectly regulated systems, whether symphonic compositions, pop music, or speeches.

The same thing happens with the parasite sounds in short-wave broadcasts. When we twist the dial we find something quite different from absolute silence, but it is a sound with a signifying capacity. It is like a tangle of waves, as Gómez de la Serna might have said; residues of the transmissions themselves, of the technology used to emit the signals. These are pockets of chaos between areas of signification –the broadcasting stations and their programmes. In sum they are simple and eloquent examples of what we understand as noman’s lands under the expanded definition that we have been using.

• Territories between the True and the False: The Foreigner

The landscape created by the communications media is made up of verbal, sound, and visual materials and strategies, as is known. Each of these field –in isolation or convergence– can supply –and indeed does supply– a thematisation of the real world, and, furthermore, an interpretation. It need hardly be added that the interpretation is biased, even when there are no political, economic or ideological issues at stake. Neither do journalists themselves escape this relative disinformation. Thus the image of the world that reaches us through the media –one-dimension in most instances– is neither true not false. It is necessary to interpret it, to mark it out, to compare it with other sources of information and experience in a bid to construct the most objective and complete evaluation possible of the facts, whatever they may be. The media increasingly confine themselves to telling us stories. We might say, then, and quite legitimately, that that mediatised image of the world is situated in a no-man’s land between the true and the false, and that the information with which we are customarily supplied by our mass media constitutes an immense no-man’s land of the events of the world.

In light of all the foregoing, it should be obvious that the feeling of being in a no-man’s land is something subjective, as is true of any feeling, although what interests us here is to isolate the characteristics that allow the question to be addressed more objectively. It also seems obvious that, in light of the foregoing, the dominate sensation when we facie this stage set that the world has become, once we have become aware of it as such, is one of alienation, of feeling like foreigners in the world.

From this perspective, that of the foreigner –linked, obviously, to that of disorientation– the world could be divided into two type of territory –the familiar, and the strange. Accordingly, territories that some would regard as strange would be not be so for others, which –in this respect and under this criteria, at least– it would be impossible, without committing the sin of subjectivism, to classify a territory, space, or system as a no-man’s land, since it would be so only for some, but for others not. And here the problem moves in another direction, since if for some a land is “no man’s” in the sense that it is strange and disorienting, then any space or territory can potentially become a noman’s land or be classified as such. And this, on the other hand, demonstrates the reality of our legislation and of the so-called world system which changes by virtue of rules presumably intended to preserve the welfare of the citizenry in general but with respect to with this citizenry has little control, even in the democratic countries. Again we find ourselves facing an idea that ratifies what was said earlier: an alteration of the conditions of the surrounding areas can suddenly transform a space into a no-man’s land. It makes it strange, foreign, and potentially or actually disorienting. In the world in which we live it appears that the only possible lands are no-man’s lands. Or perhaps this is the latest and more elaborate act of sleight-of-hand by the power structure.