Literary critic George Steiner suggested that Nabokov’s greatness derived partly from the fact that he learnt English as a foreigner. Nabokov’s „return to the reserves of language“, his „rediscovery of the resources of style“ was possible, Steiner claimed, because he „approached English from a certain distance“. When viewing Alejandro Cesarco’s exhibition at Mumok, „reserves of language“ is a crucial notion in grasping the position and proposition of the show.
An artist’s relationship to art history is akin to that of Nabokov’s to English language: it is chronologically, culturally or linguistically distant. And, as with Nabokov, it is this very distance that allows her to employ the artistic language from the past, initially conditioned by its context, liberally to suit her own concerns. This is only achieved, however, after much toiling to attain fluency. And it is the access to the process of attaining fluency, usually education or acceptance to a „scene“, and not the actual language, that is socially conditioned as age, gender, geography, political climate, class and economical or ethnic background all have influence upon it.
Cersarco clearly understands this because the works in this show do not refer to this or that iconic project by canonical artists, as is customary in referential art. Instead, his works are produced ‚in the style of’ historical conceptualism, convincingly capturing its manner and disposition without deriving legitimation from concrete examples. The works also implicitly point to many socio–political issues historical conceptualism failed to address, such as the issue of gender, which prevents them from turning into empty exercises in technique. This is most visible in Four Modes of Experiencing Regret, a framed inkjet print that shows the mechanism of regret in a quasi–academic table. It divides the perception of regret into „Romantic“, „Comic“, „Tragic“ and „Ironic“, and lists the characteristics of each mode with an accompanying image of a male and female hand holding each other in a way appropriate to the corresponding mode, though the basis for the correspondence appears to be arbitrary. Its school–like aesthetic, and its absurdity and wry humour clearly point to one of the essential attributes of conceptualism, namely its hilarity, explored by seminal figures such as Douglas Huebler.
The conventions of an artistic style and the process of its acquisition are thematised in an installation The streets were dark with something more than night or the closer I get to the end the more I rewrite the beginning that is built around the art of detective story writing. The nucleus of the suite is a free booklet which contains Twenty Rules For Writing Detective Fiction written in 1928 by S.S. Van Dine together with photographs of generic male detectives, all wearing fedora hats. On the cover, there is a femme fatale.
This piece is complemented by The Reader, a slideshow with a synchronised soundtrack. The slides display fragments from theoretical texts on the detective story, and they are always followed by the sound of a deep male voice reading a cryptic quote like „Entangled in a web of lies“ taken from detective stories.
The slideshow and the booklet are surrounded, or framed, by four black and white photographs of flowers and two wall texts. The flower pictures were given a title at once explanatory and mysterious (Fragile Images That Keep Producing Death While Attempting To Preserve Life: Flowers found in crimes scenes 001–004) while the wall texts are simply called Footnote #10 and Footnote #19. Footnote #19 is a quote from French film theorist André Bazin, and it includes the information on where the quote is taken from as though it is a footnote for an academic text. Footnote #10, on the other hand, is enigmatic. It starts with the number 4, not 10, and shows only a short dialogue. The literary devices of footnotes and numbering undoubtedly refer to Marcel Broodthaers. But Cesarco again manages to invoke a historical figure only through style.
The voice in The Reader belongs to Lawrence Weiner and the dialogue in Footnote #10 was taken from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, facts made available only in the accompanying catalogue. However, this information is not essential to the reception of the works. They are not about Weiner or Hitchcock. Rather, these extra layers function to create the ambience of legibility, as a deadpan and authoritative male voice is one of the signatures of conceptualism and enigmatic dialogue is a familiar trick in detective stories.
It could be claimed that Cesarco is a stylist but not a formalist. In other words, he explores the ability of style to influence, or even determine, the reception of the meaning of art without falling into the historicist fetishisation of style. Exploration of style requires fluency in the language of art, and Cesarco’s examination of how one attains this fluency is where the critical potential of his practice lies. As mentioned above, an artist can only start to approach art and its history from distance, and fluency is required in order to tap into the „reserves of language“ and gain entry into the society of art. But the path to this fluency is socially conditioned, and by focusing on the issue of style, Cesarco exposes how fluency in its language is prerequisite before one can even begin to negotiate one’s place in the social, intellectual and economic fields of art.