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If I offered you the intimacy of my thoughts, of my current perceptions of research, acute, disjointed, conjectural, a-conclusive and product-less, would you regard this offer as empty of concrete material? Would you rather wait for another proposition without risk and laden with clarity, just another demand for what you do anyway, a recognition of what you already know you can do and can execute without fail? Self-reproducing and chronic, does the state of your production rely on this assurance? How often are you offered the close intimacy of potential failure? Not failure as some built-in conceit, but the possibility that what I suggest, as a point of departure, will lead you nowhere that you can recognise in the first instance.
Conceptual intimacy. Sometimes announced, sometimes sensed, sometimes vehicled through vectors of art, rare in any case. Sometimes confused with relationships that override the intentions of reaching the intimacy of concepts. Sometimes too latent to be drawn upon and recognised. Sometimes built into fearfulness, the fear of ridicule in the act of withdrawal, and that clumsiness of disengagement. Sometimes not even requested or highlighted as that specific contact that punctuates apparently aimless communication. So do we need a crisis to bring conceptual intimacy into play?
They say that today everything must be visible to be apprehended as art. There is neither underground nor cell of resistance because when lights are permanently on, even nocturnal mythic falls prey to the potency of illumination. This art that is visible and informative in its desire to communicate social conditions, advancing without respite, search-engine-like, this art is never intimate. To be intimate, it would have to accept not just the darkness of unknown and disparate propositions, but also clothe this readiness in forms that cannot be seen, accentuated, and made into the art we know today, that of heightened communication but little contact. Idealism? Obscurantism? A return to the cryptological requirements of intimate contact? Do you read in these words an anachronistic flashback to the early avant-garde of our mutual modernities? Is this some craving for a lost challenge, the clandestine and encoded art production that confronts rather than consoles society, that addresses the role of the artist as aesthetic disrupter, closet revolutionary, sentient and subversive at once?
Conceptual intimacy could be a counter-pole to communicational abstinence, the increasingly a-democratic resistance to global exchange. It would make strategies of conscious withdrawal emerge within a new context, not so much opened out and disclosed, but sensed as increasing depth, that depth of unforeseeable, yet humble concerns to generate meanings through shared experiences. Are you experienced? Are experiences the stasis of repetition, the resort of the formulaic? Or are we talking about the experienced, of elements that, together as fluid sediment, constitute and identify an on-going willingness to experience? I am experienced = I am ready to exchange that question, to begin entering the accumulation of incommensurable experiences, where knowledge is a resource and reservoir to be pooled with you.
Does conviviality lead to intimacy? The formalisms of conviviality are not just choreographies of eating and drinking together, but continuity that is structured as a modular component within the event, before it begins and once it has taken place. Why make a fuss about hospitality as if it were the centre of the focus? Maybe it's the invitation, how it is conceived, produced, disseminated, and apprehended, that counts. Do you travel far to invite someone to participate in an act of conviviality? Is that act contained in the process of inviting that person? Or is the continuity that makes conviviality an act of engagement beyond the moment of sheer presence, is it to be found in the notion of the aftermath? And that aftermath, does it not play precisely on the pre-sentiment of potential intimacy? If we believe gatherings are, in themselves, sufficient to act out aesthetic propositions, then we are clearly fooling ourselves. Today, the punctuation that makes sense of social syntax, that like an X-ray accentuates the silences, gestures, and intimate transfers of new meanings, is located in the latency of impending solutions either side of that which we can see.
© Clémentine Deliss
Dakar, August 2002
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