Presentation by Héctor Blas Lahitte at the Isaac Fernández Blanco Spanish-American Museum.

By Héctor Blas Lahitte

Many thanks for joining us. First of all I wish to thank Marta and Rubén, as well as Alejandro, for giving me the chance to participate in this event. It is significant - especially so for a scientist - to be in touch with art from an epistemological, theoretical viewpoint. We tend to make rather complex presentations, but I will try to be brief and make this one as simple and entertaining as possible. I am indeed pleased to have the chance of sharing this with you. The first thing that called my attention as I came from La Plata with my wife is the fact that, only a short while ago, this was a no-place – as Marc Augé, the French anthropologist who visits Buenos Aires nearly every month, would term it – but in a short time it has changed into a highly significant place, where very shortly we will be provided with esthetic emotion. I had thought of many introductions, many ways of talking of this, because I imagined talking to people who usually have little to do with what one does . This may have to do with the wish, but, in general, speaking about it is always richer and your presence here is a strong motivation. I thought that making a symbolic interpretation of Marta´s work would be rash, risky, daring; while commenting on Rubén Vela´s poetry is very complicated because everything has been said by his own words - he has indeed aroused emotions. On the day that Marta and Alejandro and myself were together in La Plata, I commented on the fact that very seldom are two aspects of art such as poetry and sculpture seen playing together. Besides, only rarely are they presented together with a text. This led to thinking that it might be beneficial to us all, in order to be involved, to talk about what esthetic emotion is rather than refer to a particular work. This means talking of things we can consider as artistic, and what we acknowledge as artistic somehow resembles religiousness, somehow science – while shedding sparks of unicity and allowing us to soothe our conscience, transceding the limits of language and reason in order to reach a stage which is not the everyday kind of thing . I would like to begin by telling you what happens to us biologists, especially those who take up ethology, when speaking about water mammals: no sooner do we mention water mammals than everybody thinks of dolphins; and when speaking about dolphins, their intelligence is mentioned. This happens very often and it reminds me of a story that may seem a bit silly, but is in fact one of the Cartesian disgraces which the Western world is suffering from, and one which we must try to get rid of. So perhaps this would be a good excuse to begin a reflection on something we seldom refer to. I mean the preconcepts from which we approach things that we believe we know, when in fact we know very little about them and they are seldom mentioned: very little is said about religion, it being politically wrong to speak about religion; a little may be said about systems of beliefs; we know nothing about art but we feel our opinion must be given, and most people speak about politics, which is empoverishing to us. So, let us begin our reflection right from there. Is is a fact that there are no intelligent dolphins, intelligence not being a trait that depends on the dolphin. For there to be intelligent dolphins, something must happen resembling what happens here, where there must be an audience: as well as a pool with a dolphin and a trainer, and somebody must be checking the experiment for it to be acceptably said that what happens is intelligent. But it is not the dolphin that is intelligent – it is us human beings viewing as intelligent what the sea mammal is doing. What it does is jump through the ring held by its trainer, then it is rewarded with food while the audience claps. This is the evolving context. The evolving context is the one which includes at least all of these items, and the same happens where art is concerned: it does not make much sense to speak of a beautiful work or a talented artist or a group of talented artists. As in the foregoing case, there must be an audience, something must be exhibited,there must be those responsible for its having become a work, and also somebody enjoying what he or she is watching, from the viewpoint of esthetic pleasure . Only then are we facing an art piece, only then are we facing art. While in La Plata I had the chance to see Marta´s work at the Chamber of Deputies, and afterwards we shared a program, and I had a long talk at her home, with her and with Rubén, on how this book came to be made. I was fortunate to have it before it reached you, and so I have already read it. There are in it interesting reflections by José Emilio Burucúa. He mentions a very interesting comment from anthropologist Avy Warburg , which I feel completes all of the symbolic capacity and theoretical development in anthropology on the subject of masks, but there is something else I wish to comment on: As you know, both poetry and art, viewed as two sides of art, have to do with the right hemisphere - with what we may conceive as metaphorical. At present, the world we live in is in need of metaphor – the human being needs metaphors in order to continue living, to continue believing, but of course in this case two things are taking place at the same time: lineal representation, which makes it possible that something may be turned into either poetry or prose - in this case it is sheer poetry, and sculpture is a sort of knot, a global pattern bringing together an amount of textures to be framed into an integral totality, which is the work we are looking at. Within this text lie the photographs, which may amount to making an empirical test of coherence: it is neither the work by Marta, nor the work by Rubén. It is a reproduction of Rubén`s poetries with photographs of Marta´s work. It is a introduction into the principle of pleasure - to speak in Freudean terms, an introduction after which we should approach the author of the poetry, the art work and its authoress. I found it wonderful that they should be able to achieve as much as they have by resorting to entirely different things: different matter, i.e. paper and pencil – papier crayon, as the French would put it – and a variety of raw materials, transforming them into colour, texture, composition, sizes, transforming a space that was nothing at all into an enveloping space which is the sculpture itself. Then, if we think of what a piece of work like the one on my right side is, we will see it as a whole. But if we had to express this by means of poetry or describing what we are looking at, we would have to make a linear representation. And a linear representation requires a lot more space, as well as many other items which only through poetical reason can link what is said to what is shown. In the case of Rubén and Marta, two movements have taken place: masks were commented upon by Rubén Vela´s poetry, and poetry by Rubén Vela was represented by Marta´s masks. It seemed to me too daring to make a symbolic interpretation of the work: I think that artists – any type of artist, those who can move us - work with an amount of material from which they build an image in their brain. Those of us working in cognitive sciences, as is the case with Alejandro and myself – he in medicine, myself in biology - know that one of the eye functions is informing the brain so that it will build an image. All of you here in front of me, ourselves included, have no doubt as to the images we build: you are sure that we are here in front of you, you could even tell what we look like, you could describe us. Of course each description will not be similar to the others, but none of us will doubt about the images made in our brain. Just notice how we, human beings, even those in science as is the case with Alejandro and myself, do not know how it is that the brain makes images; we may explain this from a neurophysiological point of view, but we have no doubt about them. At a later stage, when those images are in our brain, the difference between artists and scientists lies in that the former are able to translate them into metaphorical terms, whereas the latter degrade them into terms of descriptions that they suppose somehow resemble what we have seen, but when they have passed through the sieve of our conscience – as you know, the purposes of the conscience are wicked, since we are born with eyes ready to see, but it takes us years to speak, and as much again to write. This means that at the beginning the eye was as rich as is hearing, but we are making it poorer and degrading it all the time. Once there was a very talented, famous English anthropologist by the name of Marshall McLuhan. He died not long ago, and even more than his work, it was his having been an advisor to Woody Allen in the latter´s films that caused him to be known to the people at large. But Marshall McLuhan, who lived in Canada and was a very elegant, charming man, wrote three texts – three among many which were all very important and have been widely read throughout Latin America and Europe. One of them was entitled “War and Peace in the Global Village”; it became famous because from then on even those who had never read it learned the word “global” – a word that is now being widely misused. What McLuhan meant is that having reached the era of electricity, we have became connected – inevitably connected at that, except in the case of electricity failing. In the latter case, the Gutenberg Galaxy would replace it – this being one other important writings of his. “Classroom W ithout Walls” is another important text of McLuhan´s, where the printing press is viewed as having rendered education democratic, with everybody gaining access to information which up to that time had been available only to those who could access manuscripts. Of course manuscripts were themselves a step forward with respect to oral tradition, inasmuch as they meant recording what was being done. Well, when dealing with the age of electricity, McLuhan said that its importance lay in the fact that the written word no longer monopolizes the means of communication. Others not based on lines have been added, such as art in all its forms, visual representation in all forms being presented as global patterns, as whole entities coinciding as closely as feasible with the possibilities of our eyes. When you cast a glance, you see everything, but when you have to describe it, you have to break it into pieces, there is no alternative to this. Artists are such when their eyes can build an image setting off from the quantity of information they gather, and at a certain time a gleam is produced. They can present it in a different way, and besides through immense daring, ??? Artists count on the missing half of their work being contributed by the viewer. If that originates pleasure, it means that the work is good and then the artist is praised for it. This is so in the case of Marta and in the case of Rubén - there is no doubt about it. But it is also interesting to know that what we call metaphoric aspects of representation is gathering strength; that Western culture - as opposed to what is taking place with the other cultures, - had a greater need of metaphors: we do not want rational explanations, we want to be moved, to believe again – and the only way of still believing is not breaking the metaphor. Metaphor is what allows us to go on perceiving a wholeness without having the need to explain it. Artists count on that. I have called this “formative clues” . Artists have the chance to give us formative clues and leave empty spaces for us observers to be able to include details that the work has indeed foreseen as details to be completed. Those are the gaps in the context that we have to fill in, and that is what gives us the possibility of co-participating in art, as indeed happens when we think of the difference between reading the newspaper and reading a novel. When reading a novel, we have to stick to the order set by the author. All we can do is say that we do not like it, but wehave to respect the presentation, chapters, epilogue, and we even look at the bibliography. But in the case of a newspaper, all of this is mixed up on the first page, it is a global pattern which is also a Gordian knot where there is a quantity of pieces of information, various photographs, headlines with different lettering in various sizes and requiring that we turn the leaf over in order to understand it. Well, in the case of art something similar happens. If somebody tried to break the metaphor into texture, composition, colour, size, in order to understand it, the work of art would no longer be such, it would have become something else. Much the same happens with religion. Any among the Catholics present here can try to make a representation based on the categorical syllogism, based on Our Father Which Art in Heaven, Hallowed Be Thy Name, which is a metaphorical representation in which we believe and one that moves us, in which we are addressing Him and saying that we are referring to a being who has the traits of a father, who orders us and conducts us. We would by no means believe in this, we would not address our prayers to this, if we were told how much tempera it took, how much glass was used to make a mask, nor would we be interested if we were told how Rubén managed toframe his poetry, much less would we be able to understand it if we began to reason it out. It would take all sense away from our gathering here, this conjunction, this juxtaposition which ends up in a marvellous, truly beautiful text. This conjunction, this juxtaposition ending up in a marvellous, truly beautiful text, would have all sense taken away from it. It is unlucky that, as we learn our language, we lose many capacities. The language of categorical syllogism or this language of reason is what causes us scientists to believe that there are descriptions available to us that can bring the matter to an end: Immannuel Kant´s NING HANG SIG. It is sheer nonsense to try to get to the heart of it by a description, or to believe that by detailed descriptions we will understand what the brain is. It would seem that artists in the Western Christian World are meant to remind us that this is not posible, that it will be convenient to us to begin to perceive a wholeness. We are making a mistake and it will be suitable for us to return to this: do not ask the ax what its function is. An ax has no function. For it to function, it requires an arm and something to hit on. The function is connected with the colour of our skin. For it to appear, sunshine is required. We get a suntan, which is a consequence of a relationship between the sun and the skin not dependent either on the sun or on the skin. Artistic interpretation does not depend on what is being shown, nor on what we add: it is a conjunction of both. Before ending, allow me to comment that that, when watching Marta´s work, what happens to me is that I do not believe her masks may have had anything to do with what they conceal. I believe that they are renderings or possible lives of Marta´s which she has been able to bring out, and which represent some sort of an empirical test. We can approach it by identification, projection and transfer, and so find a part of ourselves which had been lost and which we will very much enjoy finding again. As checked with Alejandro ,our capacity as human beings to physically represent the activity we require for building images is negligible. Artists have the possibility to provide us with empirical references to remind us that we do have that capacity, that representative activity which we cannot refer to anything. I think the foregoing is a sort of introduction to remind us that, hopefully, this world that we cannot understand and which soon we will be unable to live in, may yet be made possible. Thank you...

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Dr. Hector Blas Lahitte. Biologist, an Academician in Natural Sciences an Antropologist and Doctor in Social Psychology. He is Director to the La Plata Ethnological Museum.