Absurdo

Absurdo uses the collage technique with the intention of introducing the participant into a game that is almost impossible to solve with the aim of breaking the inertia of meaning as that which responds to the natural order of things. To achieve the central objective of the game, the participant must represent the notion of FREEDOM by organizing each of the elements that appear in the space of the canvas. The distribution of the objects responds to a single form and the participant must find it to achieve the relationship between the thing and the meaning. An almost ridiculous task to perform due to the low probability of completion.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

The collage technique introduces two big questions that break with the inertia of the established; they are subject to the nature of reality and the nature of painting itself, as stated in the press release for the exhibition Collage by Margaret Miller. This opens up the possibility of exploring the relationship between the thing and the concept, between what is represented and what is representative.

In this way we can understand that the articulation of elements distributed in space and ordered in a certain way generates a final result that we could understand as significance. With this we understand that Collage is “A new artistic language that questions the very roots of representation” Marchan Fiz. With this idea we manage to question the very nature of reality and affirm the idea of ​​its establishment. Now, if we agree with these lines of argument, we can take a step further and ask ourselves: Is the basis of significance only given by the random relationship of elements supported in the social space? If the answer is affirmative, we may possibly be left in a disbelieving position that closes the door that the collage technique/theory itself opened for us. With this I am trying to bring the political-hegemonic plane into play. For this reason, the significance is mediated by social, economic, political and religious interests. In short, significance is a set of interrelated elements that responds to historical processes, that is, what was previously understood in one way may now be another and change again tomorrow.

From these points, absurd aims to navigate the plane of meaning, breaking with the idea of ​​the natural relationship between what is represented and what is representative, making use of the ridiculous and interaction as tools of interpellation.

Meaning is built on a changing river, we build fictions, useful, but fictions nonetheless.

Biography

• MARCHÁN FIZ, Simón. ([1974], 2012). “The collage principle and object art” in From object art to concept art. Madrid: Akal, pp. 241-260.
• MILLER, Margaret. ([1948], 2018). Press release about the Collage exhibition. New York, MoMA Press, pp. 1-2, Translation: Raúl F. Lacabanne.
• GROYS, Boris. ([2010], 2014). “Politics of installation” in Becoming public: the transformations of art in the contemporary agora. Buenos Aires: Black Box, pp. 49-68.