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Alejandro Cesarco
Author: Naief Yehya
ArtNexus No. 61 - Jun 2006
|  | According to Gilles Deleuze, there are basically two ways to read a book. The first is to consider it as a box that admits us to its interior in search of meanings, and the next book we read could be considered as another box contained in the former or which contains the precedent. The second way is to understand the book as a “small machine,” and the only concern in this case would be to see “if it works and how it works,” as Deleuze writes in Pourparlers. It seems that Alejandro Cesarco takes this last approach to texts, or “pretexts,” as he refers to the existing narratives that he uses as the primary materials of his work. His main interest is to explore how meaning is re-contextualized through memory, the acknowledgement of influences, and the natural opacity of language. Cesarco conceives art as “a big déjà vu,” and constructs his work by cataloging, classifying, appropriating, reading, misreading, and retelling other people’s stories.
Cesarco, who is Uruguayan and a Brooklyn resident, considers language to be our most precious cultural value: “nothing can exist outside of it, we depend on this heritage to build our identity.” Cesarco was selected by Art in General’s New Program Commissions to create an original piece, and the result is the intriguing Marguerite Duras’ India Song, which consists of a two-channel video projected onto two freestanding walls, a text by the Argentinean writer Daniel Link, three ceiling fans, and a wall painted deep red. The video projection is a selection of footage from Marguerite Duras’s classic film India Song (1975). Cesarco appropriated a number of brief, apparently insignificant glimpses and establishing shots, which he transformed into mysterious contemplations of an empty universe of decadent opulence and fading colonial privilege. In Cesarco’s India Song, even the echoes of rumors and gossip are now mute. We could be looking at a mausoleum or an abandoned shell of a building, about to collapse. And we can delve into the fossilized memories hidden in the architecture while we are guided by a neutral and alien voice.
The artist offers four chapters or readings of Duras’s work, in the form of sequences made by digitally extending images of the movie. The chapters are separated by long pauses and have voice-overs reminiscent of the voix-off technique used by Duras. Each narration takes us closer and closer to the emotional meaning of the film. In the first segment, one voice reads in a monotone from the back cover of the book India Song. The second is a mere description of the colonial mansion’s living room. The third briefly describes the characters. The fourth and final segment identifies with the characters and their emotions. Link’s text is a dialogue between two characters that takes place while they watch India Song projected on a wall.
If the objective of this approach was to create a method of dissecting this film, the results are rather bizarre, especially considering the structural complexity, visually distant settings, the schism between dialogue and images, and variations and reflections. Nevertheless, this appropriation has a very different intention. Instead of a systematic analysis of the film, Cesarco looks for accidents in the interpretation. As he put it, “the idea is that the work tends not to have depth and just be reflective, flat, all the meaning is constructed outside of the work.”
Cesarco offers a number of readings of the same material. He takes a play by Duras, the film she directed, a reading of the scenes he chose, Link’s take on the same film, and the audience’s perception of it. Through these multiple readings, the artist explores the way meaning is attributed to a text. The text becomes a machine in the Deleuzian sense. Duras was always concerned with the nature of meaning just as much as she rejected traditional, closed narratives. In this sense, Cesarco’s choice is obviously adequate because Duras would consider every element as an equally significant carrier of potential meanings in her movies. It is the spectator’s responsibility to attribute, read, and interpret the combinations.
Cesarco has said that his work is “a formal reformulation of historic conceptualism.” By paraphrasing and repeating somebody else’s work, he is not attempting to return to the past but instead to create something new. The voice in the fourth chapter explains that text is a processor of history. By recounting an anecdote, it produces a new object. As we watch the four parts of this piece, each viewing seems to spawn new narratives. The text as a meaning-producing machine appears to work.
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