Open work. Verbal notes on the artistic proyect in Ikebana política (2019), by Claudia del Río, and Diálogos (2019), by Liliana Porter and Ana Tiscornia

Abstract

Writing and conversing about artistic practice are verbal actions that, in Claudia del Río's Ikebana política (2019) and Liliana Porter and Ana Tiscornia's Diálogos (2019), form a sprawling, multifaceted work. In both cases, though in different ways, words extend the visual production in a convergent language. We are faced with an open work: through discourse, we access the ongoing framework of an active, malleable artistic project. The sketches are not hidden away as an ignominious and secret reverse side of the final version. The artists publicize their reflective processes as part of the meaning of their work; they calculate on stage; they ask themselves, and us, the readers-spectators, questions.

In this work I compare two variations of this feminine economy of openness: the exposure of an intimate face of the work in heterogeneous registers. Fragments of conversation, notes, poems, lists form overdetermined and abundant textual devices as a luminous alternative to hierarchical and causal reasoning.

The singularity of Claudia del Río and Liliana Porter's interventions lies, as philosopher Rosi Braidotti (2015) argues, in "rejecting the universalist tendency of critical language" (p. 134), that which combines the male perspective with the general human perspective. If for Porter unmasking pretentiousness is a work of dialogue, for Del Río it involves sweeping away the boundaries between disciplines. Fluid and unpredictable, the authors' artistic discourses open the doors to other avenues of aesthetic knowledge.