Introduction
(p. 6-8)
If you have this book in your hands, chances are that
you stand in an exhibition, in a room dedicated to the
artist Dora García. Not far from you should be a sign
that indicates that this book, or rather a certain number
of these, is what constitutes the exhibited work. Equally
not far from you, there should be a guard, who from time
to time casts a glance in your direction and surveys your
comings and goings. If you have opened this book and
are reading these lines, you will also have cast a glance at
the guard beforehand, and looked for a sign of approval
or prohibition. If you now continue to read, you will
not know whether the absence of any explicit sign in
return for your mute questioning signifi es his complete
indifference, his tacit approval, or whether he is now
approaching and will express disapproval a moment
from now.
It would equally be preferable to continue to peruse this
introduction in a different place, at home for example,
or in a café, at a moment and in a position in which you
would be far more disposed to reading. The thought has
already crossed your mind that it is particularly tiresome
to read standing up in an exhibition, and this book, by all
appearances, is made for reading; it is even composed of
text alone. So? Take this book, put it in your pocket, in
your bag, and leave. If you dare. If you don't do it now, if
you regret it later, you will have to come back, purchase
another entrance ticket, and there will perhaps be
another guard who is more aggressively disposed. After
the end of the exhibition, it will no doubt be a very rare
coincidence that you should fi nd this book, elsewhere,
in this same confi guration. You will only be able to fi nd
it at the Section 7 bookstore in Paris, the headquarters
of Paraguay Press who published it. Besides, it would be
a fair option for remunerating authors' labours and to
support independent publishing.
This book has the ambition of documenting eleven
projects realised by Dora García between 2006 and
2008. These works are situations that were conceived
by the artist; situations of interaction with varying
contexts (an exhibition, a fair, a building, a city) and their
different audiences, via intermediaries – professional
actors, amateurs or people she met by chance – who
are interpreters and are at the same time given the
responsibility of incarnating characters, and functions,
to make them exist in the real world, and to archive
their existence by describing from day to day their
actions and gestures. Very often, publications have
accompanied and documented these performances, but
this book illuminates a different side to the realisation
of these works. What is published here is the private
correspondence the artist had with these interpreters,
before and during the performances' existence. Slightly
edited for purposes of legibility, this correspondence,
essentially via email, is published in chronological order,
in which it came into being. It is defi cient on various
counts: fi rst because certain parts have been lost, and
because the form itself of the epistolary exchange
proposes a non-organised, non-hierarchical distribution
of information, where trivial details go side by side with
general points. The book's meaning is therefore revealed
in a fragmentary and elliptic way: a history «seen from
below» that refuses – deliberately – to show an overall
view of these works, or any offi cial line whatsoever, be
it the artist's viewpoint, or the critic's, after the event.
On the contrary, this correspondence with the actors,
who share the responsibility of the work with the
author, proposes a documentation that considers these
works as so many phenomena. It shows how the latter
are empirical constructions, the result of compromises
between various interlocutors, perpetual adjustments
of situations with their environment. Here, the artist is
but one interlocutor among others, the spectator being
another, and the work, according to the words of
Jacques Rancière in
Le Spectateur émancipé (The Emancipated
Spectator), “is this third thing of which no one is the
owner, of which no one possesses the meaning, which
holds the mean between them, avoiding any identical
transmission, of any identity of cause and effect.”