The great paradox

“Restorers are hyperrealist artists,” wrote Édouard Levé in “Casa,” a radio play script included in the volume Unpublished (Eternal Cadence). It could be formulated the other way around: the writers and artists of realism are restorers who are updating, time and again, an aesthetic that expired decades ago, so that it can continue to be exhibited, sold in that museum of the present that is the industry of images and stories. Contrary to this anachronism, the French creator—who affirms in his Self-Portrait that on the borders he felt as good as if he were nowhere; who finished writing Suicide just before putting an end to his own life as well—created a photographic body of work based on dramatic staging and a series of books that teleported literature into contemporary art.

Conceptual literature, as Thomas Clerc calls it in the prologue to Unpublished, in the vein of Georges Perec and Marcel Duchamp. It is the constellation of Max Aub, Ulises Carrión, Miquel Bauçà, and Verónica Gerber Bicecci, all of them also authors of fictions or documents that expand into exhibitions, installations, or encyclopedias, setting up a fleeting camp on an unexpected border. Since it is almost impossible to overcome the limits between languages and, above all, formal frameworks, despite the canonization of countless figures and cross-border projects, David Maroto has dedicated the two fascinating volumes of A New Medium: The Artist's Novel (Greylock) to exploring the parallel tradition on the other side of the looking glass. Not that of the artist's book, but that of the novel as "a medium in the visual arts," determined less by "the intrinsic qualities of that artifact" than by "the institutional environment in which it operates." Books in which it's possible to trace the traces of an artistic process: the performances, installations, or Tarot card readings in which they began to be written; the scholarships or residencies or the curators who explain their existence.

The circuits of contemporary art are perhaps the last territory conquered by the novel.

The contemporary art world may be the last territory conquered by the novel, that omnivorous genre that began by appropriating the Arthurian cycle and love in verse, was perfected by Cervantes, then invaded the illustrated essay before becoming the serial novel, and during the 20th and 21st centuries, with its structure and ambition, inspired many of the best comics, podcasts, series, and video games, to the point that we don't know if the "great American novel" can be found in bookstores or on platforms. That perfect machine that, nevertheless, 99% of the time, stubbornly ignores, if not poetry and essay, then certainly television, cartoons, the world of sound and video games, the pixel, contemporary art. There are few cultural paradoxes as strange, as desperate.