Page 59 - Fernando Sinaga. Ideas K

Dialectical Movements
What is the difference between sense of absence and absent sense?
To what extent should an artist understand the implications of his or her findings? These questions raise not only the issue of the cryptic nature of
art but also the possibilities of aesthetic reception and its expectations. The importance Sinaga attaches to the experience of art (sensitive, tactile, visual) above and beyond any accumulation of information is related to the states of alert of perception, constant tension, vision, awareness and self-awareness. Such intensity can only stem from a radical questioning of the procedures that make up the very activity of art, which is both experience and knowl- edge. Blanchot’s mysterious statement heading this essay would
seem to mark this state of constant watchfulness; the artist strives for results only to reveal that there was nothing where the investigation ends and that
it was all a roundabout way of showing what was truly important, the very process of the quest. Art is always an essay, an attempt in which the work is never the product of immediacy. He writes: “In my view, innovation does not act by pursuing an objective but attempts only to find out what is pursued, and exploration therefore transcends the old sense of purpose. Every act of creation designs new codes, and therefore every innovation has something undecipherable about it.”2 In the manner of a Chinese proverb, it might be said that art is the path of the non-known leading to a form of knowledge. There, the tension between intentions and results remains as a zone to which the artist (any artist) had no direct but only indirect access, as furthermore there is hardly ever a linear connection between the former (intention) and the latter (result) but a constant cheating and self-cheating in which desire, the unconscious, dreaminess, and impulses play out a long chess match. There are few definitions as fitting and poetic as Sinaga’s own about what he does: “I am unaware of the meaning of everything I do or of everything I produce
as an artist; I only know that I draw water from the well every day and that this activity is rather dangerous and risky.”3 And he writes elsewhere about the frame of mind, a far cry from the alienated work of salaried labour, which surrounds the moment of creation: “A contradictory state in constant percep- tion of the real that is confused and obscure and at the same time perhaps somewhat superior to understanding itself. It is considerations of this kind that have made me see art as a form of knowledge and it is this condition which, in my opinion, affords its revealing nature, making it in turn influen-
tial in the reflexive awareness of the present. Art no longer exists in its own right or for its own sake; rather, it belongs to that whose image it is.”4 Sinaga makes the artistic experience a space where identity and non-identity, the cognitive and the perceptive feed on each other to the point that you cannot
2. Fernando Sinaga, “Lenguaje y origen”, op. cit., p. 61.
3. Fernando Sinaga, “La inconsistencia de lo visible”, interview with Fernando Castro, op. cit., p. 122.
4. Fernando Sinaga, “Ûzuluz”, op. cit., p. 56.
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