Residual or emergent?

Residual or emergent? The art of unmasking art
Notes on art-percentual (fragments)
A statistical analysis of David Palacios’ installation: Still Life, The End

By Carmen Hernández

The work of David Palacios is marked by the desire to redirect the representational field of contemporary art, as an autonomous sphere with its own mechanisms of production and circulation, and attempts to foster a closer relationship with social reality. His work calls into question some of the artistic mechanisms that produce and reproduce knowledge, and which culminate in institutionalised models.

The analysis of the constitutive elements of this work (or still life), randomly scattered within the exhibition space, expresses itself in graphs that are –apparently—supported by an elaborate statistical study. These images, with precise colour bars, introduce the ironic overtone of an approach that is totally bereft of the characteristic artifices of the installation. An approach that not only calls into question the genre of installation’s physicality but also its capacity to communicate. By calling into question the “genre” of installation, the artist makes an ironic comment on the possible “scientific” approach or rigour associated to art history and criticism when undertaking merely material analyses, of proportions and forms.

David Palacios emphasizes the idea of chaos in order to posit a complex representational critique that includes the different modes of address in the visual arts, the transcendence of discourse and the role of the author. In this sense, he attempts to give visibility to the taxonomies employed by art, which contradictorily favour material identification over the symbolic dimension.

The supposed “analysis” that the artist undertakes, with his bars and graphs that give information about the physical traits (composition, age, processing technique, size, colour, weight) and provenance of the elements (nationality, origin), allows for the creation of various associations, simple or complex depending on the references that the spectators may be able to articulate. It is possible that there may be different levels of intensity in the perception of the spectator, some more distant, others more intimate, similar to what happens when some objects are recognized by their former owners. David Palacios is a collector whose choice isn’t biased beyond a personal attraction, and, in this sense, it not strange to discover that many elements in the work have pertained to other previous ones, somehow making it into a kind of assembly toy or certain handicrafts that are difficult to classify. The objects are valued in regard to their movements and trajectories, and not by a value that rests on their materiality (or supposed quality). Their life is thus determined by the individual or collective capacity to assign some kind of use to them.

The deconstruction of “genre” is evident in this literally “still” life, at least in terms of its capacity to communicate, since its parts do not represent associations between them other than the material aspect that is highlighted along with the other taxonomies selected by the artist. Its histories make an ironic comment on the disciplinary techniques of classification (archaeology, archival and library techniques, museology, among others) insofar as the operations chosen by the artist predominate. Even though the cards or labels correctly identify each one of the objects, brought together they cannot articulate a coherent discourse because the relations of discordance between them have been accentuated by revealing themselves as lent, received as gifts, acquired or as parts of other incomplete works of the artist. One of the few traits they have in common is the use they are given.

The objects received as gifts from friends and other acquaintances, are decontextualized and useless, they indicate a sort of banality and introduce the spectator into “the sense of nonsense”. This can be interpreted as a jab at art, which bestows upon itself a role of transcendence.

Differently from other positions taken by artists, in which they try to re-examine the value system of art through a reflection on aesthetics, Palacios points towards the value given by a social imaginary. The production of the real meaning of artistic or aesthetic experience –with its constant interaction of residual and emergent forces—lies in the exchange between individual experience and collective acknowledgement. In this process, use value can take on many functions such the pleasure of play, which has a privileged place here because it marks in great measure the transit of representations, their state-of-the-art quality or obsoleteness. Face to the transcendence of an authorship that is so much stigmatised by the “licence” of gesture, David Palacios, opposes to this notion the role of the author as an intelligent provocateur who extends the trace of art over to the social sphere and is, at the same time, capable of introducing use value in the field of art in order to destabilize established models and to favour provisional judgements.