Catalogue work. Cover. Digital version:

The third part of the email message for the Work-Catalogue #1 contained the first of the announced “secret documents.” A text that appears to be a report made by a Cuban counterintelligence agent, with enough details to assume that said agent belongs to the art world and is trusted by most of the artists and intellectuals who are part of that world. Someone, in short, who is invited to all the parties and exhibitions. Alejandro González and Yeny Casanueva mention agents Douglas and Jorge, who supposedly gave them a device, like a flash memory, so that they could save photographs of their own works. Apparently, the device still contained the documents that the artists then converted into content for their work. It would not be strange if both were frequent visitors of the Cuban artists. In my time it was Rudy, but in my time Rudy did not visit my house or lend me paper for my Remington (we did not have computers then). So this whole anecdote, if true, would speak first of all of the familiarity that exists between the artists and the police, which would be a sign of how explicit the negotiation processes are between the intellectuals and the power, represented in this case by the agents of the surveillance apparatus.

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I still find it strange that both agents would have lent the artists the supports of their information without verifying that they were “clean.” We already know that the police are not known for their intelligence, but we should not exaggerate; the Cuban government may be incapable of getting fish, despite living on an island, but in matters of surveillance and espionage, one assumes that they display a sophistication that could be worthy of praise, if it were not for the objectives they pursue.

One of the issues that this work presents to us is the relationship between truth and verisimilitude. The other is the importance of the public, no longer as an ideal participant in the work, but as a construct referring to the communication system that the work itself seeks to articulate. In this sense, the Work-Catalogue #1 seems to seek the construction of what José Luis Brea calls “an abstract device for the collectivization of experience.”[1] That is why I am also inclined to think that the content of the work is not limited to the set of texts that compose it, but extends, for example, to the series of allusions and references that it provokes (many of which also circulated on the Internet) and that not only function as testimonies of the public's reaction, but as links with which the reticular structure on which the construction of a community is based is generated, even if it is virtual.

We can ask ourselves why the statement of an artist is enough to accept that an object is a work of art. The question may seem out of time because we have long accepted the answers a priori. Tony Godfrey, in his book on conceptual art, sums it up thus: “If a work of conceptual art begins with the question ‘What is art?’, then, regardless of any style or medium, we can argue that this question is complemented by the proposition ‘This could be art…’”[2] I want to draw attention to the fact that we usually overlook the second option, that the answer to the question about the definition of art could be: “this is not art.” And whenever I think of that possibility, I think of the work of Marcel Duchamp. That is why I am pleased to read this quote from Duchamp in Godfrey’s book: “One point I would like to make clear is that the choice of these Readymades was never dictated by aesthetic delight. This choice was based on visual indifference, with a total absence of good or bad taste. In fact, a complete anesthesia.”[3]

The Work-Catalogue # 1 could be oscillating on that limit between the definition of art from art or the annulment of the artistic by the “artistic” manipulation of an extra-artistic reality. In that case, the true reading of the statement “You are in front of a work of art” would be “You are not in front of a work of art.” But that would still be an artistically justified sophism. However we see it, it is the artists who direct our reading. And is that not a good reason to consider that we are in front of a work of art?

The fact is that, after the initial moment when I thought I was facing spam, sent by someone who wanted to joke, I accepted the idea that I was facing a work of art because there was a text that announced it as such. And I liked the idea, among other reasons because from the first reading I assumed that the documents reproduced there were apocryphal. Then I noticed that people referred to this work with an enthusiasm in which there was no room for doubt about the authenticity of the published documents. And that made me like it even more, because I felt that the public's credulity was also being manipulated. In that case, the public's credulity is more important than the veracity of the story that constructs the work. Curiously, it is for this very reason that I can doubt said veracity. Because even if those documents were not authentic, the situation to which they refer is sufficiently credible.

For me, reading a text as artistic almost entails the need to read it as fiction. I say this and immediately think that what really happens to me is that I receive and read any story as if it were composed of a series of fictions. And the fact that the story in question is a police report has no influence at all. I don't want to take the paradox to the extreme, but it occurs to me that Douglas and Jorge could be the co-authors of this work, just as Alejandro and Yeny could be the authors of the report.

Thinking of these texts as fictional made me feel that I was faced with a very sharp way of parodying, not only the surveillance structures, but the police language itself, in a game of perverse "infiltrations": the language of art filtered into the language of the police, filtered into the language of art. This double game seemed to me to be very consistent with the procedures of simulation and manipulation that many Cuban artists have resorted to for almost 30 years. But furthermore, this double game is what truly incites an aesthetic consumption of these documents, independently of their content. Ultimately, the poetics of espionage lies in the fact that every agent is always a potential double agent.

To see the Work Catalog #1 Click here!