André Cadere’s artistic method is characterised by the production of a precise disclarity. Even almost 30 years after his early death, this still makes his small body of »work« seem like an echo space that, as a model of a form of institutional critique that is as analytic as it is poetic, reaches far beyond its current status on the margins of art history.
The retrospective of André Caderes currently taking place in the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden makes the first comprehensive attempt since 1996 to reconstruct the decisive years of his artistic production between 1971 and 1978. Like the previous retrospective, this exhibition operates with a mixture of reconstructions of his installations set up on the basis of the artist’s own arrangements, and historical documents that cast light on the performative aspects of his work: two films by the artist Sarkis and the gallery owner Ida Biard, who document Cadere’s interventions and »Promenades«, and a selection of catalogues, invitation cards and other ephemera, which Cadere always saw as an integral part of his work. Even if the exhibition in Baden-Baden does not make any major new discoveries – something which, in an archaeological sense, is barely possible any more since 1996 at the latest – it still seems to be time to give renewed impetus to the process of the historical recognition of Cadere, which has often become bogged down.
It is not very surprising that André Cadere’s so-called »work« could not and cannot be smoothly integrated into museum mechanisms, as his artistic procedures aimed mainly at creating differences, occupying gaps and entering into parasitical forms of (institutional) participation. Cadere laid out the decisive parameters of his artistic strategy at the start of the 1970s, after he emigrated from Romania to Paris. Here, he developed the system of the »Barres de bois rond«, a principally finite set of round, hand-made wooden rods that were still to be produced. Each of these rods was to consist of multi-coloured segments of equal size. While the size of the individual rods is limited only by the fact that an individual person has to be able to carry them, the possible sequence of the coloured segments on each rod and throughout entire series is determined by a mathematical principle of permutation. Each of the rods resulting from this system also contains an »error«, a deviation from the system, that results from the deliberate exchange of two segments.
It is this idea of the »contamination« of a given system that Cadere transfers to the level of the »use« of the barres as well. On the one hand, he uses the institutionalised forms of the »display« of art by setting up the barres in exhibition spaces in a way that is very compatible with the common conceptualist practices of his time. At the same time, however, the wooden rods serve as perfomatively integrated instruments that he takes on promenades through the urban space, smuggles into other exhibitions, or uses as conversational catalysers. What is decisive here is the simultaneity of the different forms of use, which call into question the basic status of the barres and in this way open up a part of the ontological disclarity that enables reflection on the conditions inbuilt in the act of exhibition itself, whether these be of formal, social or political nature.
In this sense, the radicality – and topicality – of the field of artistic action opened up by Cadere is founded in the concept of autonomy that this field produces. It is a concept of autonomy that derives its punch not from the declaration of the unconditional independence of a clearly demarcated work but, on the contrary, from the paradoxical indeceivability of its relationality. The barres thus function not as self-contained entities that insist on a substantial identity, but rather as intervals, as marks of substanceless difference that become active in both a spatial, formal sense and a political, analytical one.
Translated by Timothy Jones