"CUERPO +9000, from bodies to lines" : by Fabien Danesi

16/10/2008

Fabien Danesi is a Ph.D. in art history, former fellow at the Académie de France-Villa Médicis in Rome, and lecturer at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne.

    In 1994 Dolores Aguilera started the incredible project of making 9,999 drawings of nudes in charcoal, a classic technique that artists have been using for centuries. But Ms. Aguilera is ferociously self-taught, so this work is less a return to know-how or an ode to skill than a risk, a gesture vested with an immediate energy. Charcoal was the first tool ever used to draw: it carries within it a share of the primitivism that we can only fantasize about today, for we are aware that human nature, far from being immutable, expresses a cultural conditioning from which we cannot entirely escape. At most, we can play with it. Before starting to draw, Ms. Aguilera destroyed everything she had made until then. That contemporary potlatch was a way of integrating  this rudimentary material’s use into a system that would be a necessity as much as an arbitrary choice driven by her singular desire to see this endeavour through to a successful conclusion.

    Nine thousand drawings have been completed; 9,000 drawings of the body that break with the academic genre of the nude; 9,000 drawings that confront us with the rawest intimacy; 9,000 drawings in an elliptical, deliberately spare style. In most cases, a few serpentine contours accompany a more emphatic line in one or two places and a definition of the model by spreading the charcoal on the paper’s surface with fingers.
    That brisk schematization leads each figure to slide towards abstraction. Sometimes the thickest lines hint at a sex or a navel. The groin is emphasized while curves give shape to the torso and thighs. But the figure is usually outlined to disappear in the swiftness of completion. The stroke is concise, like a lighting bolt. Intensity is the target—the intensity of observing as well as capturing. Dolores Aguilera refuses do-overs. She does not go back and correct, instead leaving the charcoal’s imprint on the paper the way she delivers it in the moment of creation. Spontaneity and control balance one another out in what she likens to “a dance”.
    Her drawings are actually “exercises” in consummation. They focus their charge on promptness of execution. Ms. Aguilera seeks to continuously express climax. In that sense, she could lay claim to being part of a modern tradition that since the 19th century has considered speed a factor of visual power. In contrast with a painstaking approach, this process requires breaking with the past and letting something happen that has for a long time been called interiority, a term that has an outdated ring to it for some contemporary critics. It suggests ideas like depth or authenticity, in short a whole vocabulary of metaphysics that fails to take into consideration the changes sensibility has undergone throughout the 20th century under the "tyranny" of material progress and the violence that went with it. She would rather use the word impulse, especially since it encompasses a dimension that cannot be overlooked here: eroticism.

       Georges Bataille wrote, “sexuality and death are but the acute moments of a festival that nature celebrates with an inexhaustible multitude of beings, both of them having the sense of unlimited waste to which nature proceeds against the desire to last, which every being feels.”1

    Dolores Aguilera’s transgression of limits is visible in each individual drawing as well as in their sequential succession. Her drawing style features sinuous lines that interrupt each other and open the body up to the white surface. Figure and background endlessly interpenetrate one other, translating each being’s discontinuity posited by Bataille. Brisk lines confine the flesh as much as they break it up. This kind of treatment points to a feverish agitation that underscores the disconcerting arousal engendered by sexuality, or, more exactly, by our sexual human condition. The huge number of drawings relates to the immeasurable abyss that, Bataille says, every individual dreads just beneath the surface in orgasm. CUERPO 9000 + 999 DRAWINGS sketches an infinity.

    The number chosen sets an end to the project without really closing it because the 9,999 pieces can never been seen all at the same time. It is the profusion of existence.
 
    Ms. Aguilera speaks of her drawings as a group, not a series. She is not wrong. A series subjects the parts to the whole by emphasizing the points they have in common. But the multiplication of drawings is not intended to underscore the similarities between them. On the contrary, the point of the huge number is to bring out their differences. “We think abundance protects us but in fact it strips us bare,” she writes. The enormous amount of figures is there to make the onlooker pay attention to their dissimilarity. Each drawing is distinct. It matters little that some look stronger or more successful than others. That would mean being limited to belief in a judgement of taste. Here, the mass imposes a new way of seeing where each drawing’s quality is based on what separates it from the rest, despite the spare aesthetic means and the effect of repetition that inevitably flows from it—for eyes in a hurry.


    The effect of saturation, in other words of seeing such an overwhelming number of drawings all at once, makes the differences grow even sharper: once we get over the head-spinning immensity, each drawing reveals its singularity. Dolores Aguilera worked against the automatic reflexes that interfered with creating the whole, for the desire to have the unpremeditated gesture burst out defeated her hand’s reflexes each time. At first, she used only small sheets of paper: 30 x 42 cm. But the charcoal’s movement gradually needed more space, leading her to increase the surfaces from 65 x 50 to 120 x 80 cm. After having been fully contained, the line stretches out without losing its charge and intensity. It remains an outflow, excess. It is a burst of energy released in an instant that wanted to stretch itself out.


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    In keeping with this idea Ms. Aguilera’s drawings show the very act of their creation. If they reject the traditional idea of the finished, it is because their execution is understood above all as a process. The principle of transformation is at work in the lines and masses of the bodies in the process of becoming veritable abstract landscapes. The allusive dimension must not be downplayed: these drawings are not, strictly speaking, representations but rather evocations. They suggest more than they determine in the strict sense of the term. Ms. Aguilera does not, then, rely on the European tradition, which has emphasized anatomical accuracy since the Greeks. It is worth recalling that in the 15th century the detailed study of the human body went hand-in-hand with the development of Alberti’s laws of perspective as an instrument in order to understand, using an explicitly scientific logic, the workings of the surrounding world.
    The bodies Ms. Aguilera draws are diametrically opposed to that rational conception. As the project’s origin underscores, they seem to be in a transitional phase: the ceaseless accumulation of drawings makes the single, perfect work—the famous masterpiece—impossible, preserving only the tension of its exigency. The artist prefers the sweeping stretch of a curve to minute details. On paper she adds as much as she subtracts, mixing solids and voids. When black charcoal meets white paper it creates a rhythm that transcribes the vigour of life, in the same way that Chinese aesthetics do. The philosopher and China expert François Jullien says, “The Chinese took very little interest in anatomy, which looks very crude in their drawings, because they pay less attention to identity and to the specificity of morphological components—organs, muscles, tendons, ligaments, etc.—than to the nature of the exchanges taking place between the ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, giving the whole body its liveliness. That is why, in their eyes, it is not a problem to depict the nude body as a bag, a receptacle pierced with holes, but one that contains infinitely subtle energies whose dissemination it is important to follow.”2
    Ms. Aguilera’s style also has something to do with a conception of the body that stresses the fluidity and exchanges between interior and exterior. In her drawings the body is not hemmed in. It is altered in order to seize its ever-changing shape better.

    For each time, the drawing is a rough sketch, or, rather, a shortcut that tries to preserve all of the figure’s potential. Dolores Aguilera reveals the body’s emergence as a form. It happens or is born more than it is. And taken as a whole, the 9,000 drawings signify this ongoing renewal process

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    In the Western tradition such a reduction of visual means for a unique motif such as the body inevitably leads to the interpretation of essence. The nude would be the metaphor or symbol of the Being. It would designate the absolute presence that artists have always wanted to reach. But that is one of the misgivings I feel when looking at Ms. Aguilera’s work. We have talked about it on several occasions. Personally, I am resistant to the idea of art having this ontological dimension, which, in my opinion, is a way of legitimising a singular work by imposing a general character upon it—if this is not natural. I rather lean towards doubt and scepticism. It seems to me that uncertainties are always richer for the visual arts than truths, especially when the latter are portrayed as ultimate. During a conversation Ms. Aguilera corrected me: not essence, but existence. “Everything is feeling, wandering and anxiety before taking shape. The grace of existing will be given to he who has the boldness to stand still.”

    Does that aphorism cast doubt on my interpretation of the movement and visibility of the process of creation? I do not think so, insofar as the anxiety and uncertainty in question can also be read in the charcoal’s inexorable return to the human body. That obsessive return also happens to be the form of Ms. Aguilera’s project. And the growing number of drawings does not cancel out the urgency felt in each. It remains and fully participates in the work’s development. So I will not say that form but, rather, its movement—a term implying the withdrawal of all transcendence and so-called universal superiority—replaces an overcoming of anxiety or disquiet.

       What I understand in CUERPO999+999DESSINS as an erasing of the social and historical dimensions of existence in favour of a certain permanence prompts another misgiving. Aren’t these bodies the sign of an immortality that the human body still struggles hard to achieve, whereas the accelerated production of objects and thoughts seems to push the possibility of lasting a little further away every day? At first Ms. Aguilera’s project reiterates, in my opinion, a hope that fails to take our society’s evolution into account. But her approach, which engages time in a non-linear, non-cumulative dimension, is a veritable strategy of creation, a way of giving oneself a certain amount of independence from the references of the past, of not bending beneath the weight of the great historical figures who have used charcoal and whom culture today readily calls geniuses. 

      
    Dolores Aguilera’s approach echoes Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence: “Perpetual renewal assumes that the force grows on its own through free choice, that it not only has the intention, but also the means to protect itself from repetition, from falling back into an old form, and therefore that it can always control each of its movements to avoid that repetition or to be incapable of returning to the same position” 3.

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    Art criticism too often boils down to panegyrics. Pompous praise seeks to reassure us that the works under consideration carry on the Western aesthetic tradition as a synonym of beauty. From this viewpoint, art would always be the guardian of a form of excellence; the last rampart against the levelling that emerged in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution. This humanist fable by and large is based on the assumption of a common sense making it possible to judge art in the perspective of a selection promising of universality. Trouble is, the grandiloquence of such an ideal must negotiate, specifically, with the exponential growth in the number of works and the replacement of objective criteria of quality with a dissemination and fragmentation of the visual arts creation that is hard to imagine.
  
       Faced with this paradoxical "democratisation", which corresponds to a real anthropological mutation, some people have been tempted to see nothing more than a form of cultural decay in the era of mass media. As long ago as 1983, Jean Clair wrote about the previous two decades, “Levelling. Monotony. Dive into the undifferentiated. Art, too, seemed to succumb to the fever of egalitarian theories. A bleak surge backward. A single look had to make it possible to take in every art phenomenon. A single art for all and by all. The sweeping abolition of differences: the monotonous swirling of words whose meaning had long been forgotten.”4 The chapter heading was “The Return to Drawing”. It suggested that this technique had allowed some artists to hold their ground against the period’s decadence and revive the great tradition. In the continuity of the Italian Renaissance, the disegno was perceived as a form of protest against contemporary society’s move towards a mechanical future. Praise of  sensation, of physis, the better and easier to pour scorn on the movement that began with technological modernisation.

    At first, Ms. Aguilera’s drawings could fit in with what can only be called a form of reaction. A quick glance would lend credence to that kind of interpretation, which tries to establish a dividing line between worthless industrial products and art whose nobility stems from a direct relationship with nature. But her work raises too many questions and it is therefore impossible to restrict it to this approach, which is too stereotypical. It is not based on nostalgia of any kind.

       Ms. Aguilera has deliberately chosen constraints. She has imposed very narrow rules of creativity on herself with the aim of clearing away her subjectivity and being able to approach something that would be the work in its individuality—a way of being in nothingness, rich with every kind of potentiality, to extract the most demanding art from it. CUERPO9000+999DESSINS raised questions for me that I did want to dodge just for the sake of conformist acquiescence. That is the best invitation I have found to encourage the onlooker to confront it, for art must remain an experience that casts doubt on our convictions.

Fabien Danesi, July 2008

 1 Georges Bataille, L’érotisme, Paris, Minuit, 1957, p. 69
 2 François Jullien, De l’essence ou du nu, Paris, Seuil, 2000, p. 74.
 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, La volonté de puissance. Tome 1, Paris, Gallimard, 1995, p. 335
 4 Jean Clair, Considérations sur l’état des beaux-arts. Critique de la modernité, Paris, Gallimard, 1983, p. 131

Traduction : Glenn Naumovitz