2010 | AGGTELEK curated by Laura Plana Gracia

Space Riders: 9 June – 17 July 2010

The sculpture does not have to exist.
It may not even have a shape or anything.
It may be badly done, badly designed and badly conceptualized.
Yet, if it is made, it must be a bitch of a shape, in any of its features.
It must have more than one manifesto. This is the first one and it will be short.
It may be based on the reading mistake I made yesterday when I read “shaves” instead of “slaves” in a text about a sculpture by Michelangelo.
It may have its own mistakes as referents.
It must be made to fuck people or to get yourself fucked.
It can be shitty as hell.
It can be small or immense, but never monumental.
If it is for a white room in a gallery, museum or institution, it may have 5 paid morons so that, at a specific time, they beat the shit out of the organizer, boss or gallery owner. Only inside the white room, though.
It must be built with fury.
It may be inspired by the Sex Pistols’s “What a fucking rotter”.
It doesn’t matter if all of the above is out of fashion.
The invisible sculpture has no one to stare at, so no one cares about it.
If the sculpture does exist in any form, it must be looked at so you can get your ass kicked.
The invisible sculpture can cause blood but must not have its own blood.
It can be so invisible that it may only exist during 30 seconds while having a conversation.
It cannot be a fart you happen to drop at some inauguration.
The statement in number 19 is not an invisible sculpture.
The invisible sculpture may never come to exist correctly.
Regarding number 11: once the beating is over, help the victim and take him/her to a hospital if necessary.
The invisible sculpture can become public.
If it becomes public, it is obliged to do so in restricted areas, such as dumps or after-hours, even though the latter is not all that public.
This manifesto can be confusing and misleading.
The invisible sculpture must be a chaos.
No one needs to love it.
It doesn’t have to represent anything in particular and does not need to have a concept or idea.
The invisible sculpture must be based on a contradictory philosophy, but this is not to be explained here now. This will be addressed in the second manifesto.
The invisible sculpture can be destroyed 5 minutes after presenting it.
The invisible sculpture can be inspired by Ciudad Juárez.
The invisible sculpture can be the dead and/or disappeared people from Ciudad Juárez.
It does not have to build anything new.
The invisible sculpture can be a simple idea.
This idea may go astray.
The invisible sculpture will never lick anyone’s ass.
If anything, it must be the one getting its ass licked.
The invisible sculpture does not have an ass.
The invisible sculpture can be used for fighting and hurting people in political demonstrations.
The invisible sculpture’s manifesto will be continued elsewhere.

1.The shape needs to become an event.
2.If the shape doesn’t become an event, it must turn into different types of action.
3.These actions can be generated in a large variety of ideas.
4.Actions do not necessarily have to be an act.
5.The monument must be an act of protest against oblivion. How can this be achieved?
-in the creation of ideas that keep transforming
-every idea the invisible monument has can be independent of the others, or be generated in a flux where one idea becomes another idea and so on.
-Ideas can be regenerated every once in a while.
6.Ideas may be put together and the monument can be a form-in-action or a potential-form.
7.The form can change constantly.
8.The form can be represented in whichever way, it does not necessarily have to be objectual.
9.The monument should be a sort of happening.
10.A happening as a process of activation of ideas and objects.
11.Objects don’t have to be something that takes up space, and if they do, they can take up a space in a given moment in time.
12.The invisible monument has to be in permanent transformation.
13.The invisible monument can annoy, rebuke, bother and spit at anyone who looks at it.
14.There will be no problems regarding presentation or representation.
15.The shape of the monument can start off as an abstract geometric form.
16.The monument’s changing concepts, signs and shapes may be pretentious.
17.The monument’s changing concepts, signs and shapes may be ridiculous and stupid.
18.It must have an idea that becomes inscrutable at some point, that’s why it’s a monument, and an invisible one, for that matter.
19.The elements used may be silent.
20.Elements can provoke resignation, a very common feeling when analyzing many art pieces.
21.The monument can contradict itself.
22.The invisible monument can separate and divorce its “monumenta” (in the feminine sense of the word) and have little monumentalities (in the sense of children).
23.The invisible monument can have an internal logic of narrative, written and speaking system.
24.The narration of a little story can benefit the monument.
25.It must be a potential structure of ideas that keep regenerating.
26.It must not have an end.
27.It must —and this is an obligation— evolve and change.
28.It must not have strict rules. If it does have them, they can go killing themselves.
29.A formal body must exist in time and die or leave that space. This can be the skeleton of the monument.
30.Forms can be born little by little. But the process that generates them must always be explained in some way or other.
31.The way processes are shown doesn’t really matter.
32.The invisible monument will always be unfinished, so it’s always under way.
33.It must be ridiculed.
34.With time, forms become ridiculous and obsolete.
35.Structures must be easy to take apart or to break.
36.It does not necessarily have to have a specific structure or shape.
37.Concepts do not need to be original. If they are, they must be incomprehensible for the generations that want to understand all the invisible monument’s biography.
38.The invisible monument must resemble a human being as far as its functioning system goes.
39.Its functioning doesn’t necessarily imply swallowing, defecating, fucking, breeding, etc.
40.It would be more correct to say that the monument must be formalized as if it had feelings.
41.Monuments are made to be contemplated and to take pictures or have portraits of yourself next to them.
42.But the invisible monument does not have to have any attribute or quality.
43.Any process must have —is obliged to have—  a time of analysis and formation.
44.Every process must have had a dialog.
45.Dialogs improve the moods of forms.
46.Forms must have answers to basic questions.
47.The monument can keep asking itself questions.
48.Forms can be an environment.
49.Everything must be disintegrated, deconstructed and destructed.
50.Everything must be integrated, constructed and created.
51.The monument doesn’t need to be a monument.
52.The invisible monument doesn’t have to be an invisible or visible monument.
53.It may have a relational situation.
54.It may be post, anti, alter or whatever it feels like being.
55.It may be things we still don’t know about.
56.The monument can be a poem by Richard Brautigan.
57.The monument doesn’t need to be a sculpture.
58.The sculpture can be many things.
59.An article can be a sculpture.
60.A discourse can be a figure.
61.A drawing can be structured as a political action.
62.An element can become a performance.
63.The monument must learn with time.
64.The monument must not resemble a school building.
65.The sculpture doesn’t have to be a monument.
66.A monument can be a sculpture or a form or a structure or a figure, and, at the same time, it cannot be any of the aforementioned things.
67.The sculpture can be nothing and therefore the monument can also be nothing.
68.Everything can be transformed into nothing.
69.The formalization of ideas and concepts can be structured into different forms.
70.The invisible monument must not have an intelligible genesis or a rational creation process.
71.It doesn’t need to have any difference, nor an irrational creation process.
72.The invisible monument’s creative process can be diversified into different structural and objectualplanes.
73.Ideas can become independent.
74.Concepts can be in correlation with the monument and become disperse in new forms that do not represent the invisible monument.
75.The invisible monument may or may not have collaborations.
76.The invisible monument doesn’t have to have a title, but at some point, it needs to have the talent Maradona demonstrated in the 86 world championship, especially in the England-Argentina match.
77.The creation itself can be strange and different, but it must fight for some ideals.
78.Ideals must always be modified, altered and counterproductive.
79.Ideals that are counterproductive for oneself must be respected.
80.The invisible monument cannot respect any idealism.
81.Processes cannot have any goals.
82.The creation process is endless.
83.The creation process has an end (a prurpose).
84.The results of what happens to the invisible monument don’t have to be an alteration for the continuation of the monument.
85.The invisible monument can have Leo Messi’s serenity and humility, provided he doesn’t change.
86.It must have a savoir faire that resembles that of Barça in 2009.
87.But it doesn’t necessarily have to speak the language of Maradona or Messi, but it can say boludeces (Argentinian word for “silly things”).
88.The invisible monument, which doesn’t need to be invisible, doesn’t have to comply with these codes.
89.The creation of the monument doesn’t have to comply with any rules or norms.
90.The monument can be anti-Kantian and may not respect anyone at a psychological level.
91.At some point, the invisible monument must wonder if it needs to make anyone happy.
92.Happiness in this case would not be related to sexuality (please read point 69 in a different way).
93.The invisible monument doesn’t have to be anything mentioned in this text.

Aggtelek begins developing actions that interact with space and materials – building, destroying and re-building again, sculptures, characters, objects. Cardboard boxes, adhesive tape, painting, constructed architecture, monuments and the ephemeral inhabitants in perpetual synapses. Together with performance, subtlety and evasion – the work investigates methods in process, implying performance and theatre, object-making and schenography.

Interested in the relation between performance and sculpture and the function of the creative process, Aggtelek creates ephemeral assemblages. ‘Aggtelek’ is taken from the Hungarian city – defying the authorial concept, death of the author, as Boetti declines “it is not the material, it is the attitude that signifies” as in the linguistically critical Barthes narrative.  As a collaborative, Aggtelek acts without personalization, referencing a place, not a person.

In video works, Aggtelek re-invents the concept of the narrative. Lewis Carroll and his work, Alice in Wonderland is used as a model for the development of the idea about ‘voyage’ as a kind of narrative in contemporary literature, constituting the search as the paradigm of the evolution. The labyrinth first with scenographic sculptures defending it. The nonsense character touring the non-site, where time unfolds, disappears, and, in time-capsules, future becomes past.

The Sci-Fi influence in their temporal narration constitutes one of their artistic typologies. Kurt Vonnegut appears as a reference, using both appropriation and re-invention of literary structures.  Based on deconstruction, broken-body-parts-sculptures defy a post-condition in the narrative tradition of contemporary language. In this way, Aggtelek are concluding a silly illusion of art and compiling a collection of absurd and illogical characters that belong to our quotidian world.

The paroxysmal situation-ism and its derive is a kind of strategic artistic language; through sculpture and video Aggtelek encounter an international artistic style reworking contemporary materials as plastics, foams, lights, cardboards with the intention to recover the poetics of materialism in a disenchanted world, without function. Referencing production modes from constructivism and critical theory, they re-signify the material as a concept. It is a new minimalism determined by the production models of Sci-Fi.

As Barthes and the linguistic construct the idea of the lack of sign – and the significance of the object lost – Aggtelek’s work becomes supported through the ideology of the joke and satire.  Maintaining the practice of performance – it is something that implies effort and a compromise in the development. It is also said that the non-signal works, those who only develop market structures, as banalities and commodities, encourage the institutional tradition, the mainstream, but not the institutional critique.

We recognize a style created by many divisions, one that defines the search as a paradigm of the creative process in art, expressed through voyage, nomadic, derive, interrogation, those elements in a non-finite condition. In that way, the sci-fi definition of time as a process in which, say, Lewis Carroll defines, the capacity of invention is a futuristic potential, a symbolic re-signification of the imaginary. But in as sci-fi models for knowledge and art production, they never exclude the determinism of the present, summoning the poetry of the space. In this sense, the poetics of the space is equal to the codifications as a human answer. In these poetics, they use literature as a model to turn the experience of art into a communication of ideas, developing models for thought and science. The poetics of material, as well, result from the influences of minimalism and the reification of the sign, defended by post-structuralism and deconstruction, giving them not only to the creation of objects, but spaces.

The nomadic concept implies the performative elements of the works – and the consequences are many. Action and theatre become the center. Constantly influenced by Fellini, Pasolini and the Masonic Italian style, the objectuality becomes abject. The Aristotelian discourse is used as a contraposition of the objectual discourse, where the sculptural language, based on materials, is used by the melancholic mode of reception and the institution as a place of pedagogy.  Apart from the Italians (whom are thanked in the videos), other key influences include Boris Groys, Stalin, Malevich, Valerie Solanas, Rauschenberg, Piero Manzoni, Gelitin, The Divine Comedy, Cervantes, Quevedo, Heraclitus, Dali, Spielberg and Kurt Vonnegut, known for his humanist beliefs as well as being honorary president of the American Humanist Association.

Vonnegut is widely considered one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century.

Satire, black comedy and science fiction are used to serialize the concept of production under the influence of communicating art as a model for social criticism, like Baldessari’s or Gilbert&George’s photographic panels’, deploying the logic of conceptual materialism and its social and anthropological dimension.

The criticism strives in the Masonic and pornographic style, that invites, seduces and eroticizes the subject. The video titled, Slash Theatre Of My Mundo, the abject is presented from the tradition of satire – and the joke as mode of critique. The grotesque, kitsch and awful are the consequences of being a body.  This body language as abject-subject is illustrated with the artist-cum-actor due to the trauma that implies the mechanization of work and the loss of humanism. The joke is used as relief; a way of surviving in a hypothetical art world.

The melancholic process which produces the recognition of being vile turns to the historic and pedagogic. In an abstract way, the idea of the death of the author manifests through appropriation of contemporary art, classical literature and humanist culture. The conflicts between the mode of production history is a way of making art, the problem exists within totalitarianism.

Finally, the uniqueness of the object – models are not for serialized abstract production, but for the unique objectivity of the figure as a meaning of understanding the rules of the universal world. As in Sky Vision and Primary Form, these two films evoke the meaning of quality, the minimal discourse that gives the object its aesthetic category, thus prioritizing the emotion of the work as a strategy to change history, the emotion of the history consequently defining the aesthetic.

The fantastic and mundane serve to create characters – research for the shape and material becomes emotive, poetic.  Through performance, objects/sculptures registered in video projection, Aggtelek’s work recalls that of Hirschorn, West, Dada, Constructivism, Tatlin and Schwitters.

-Laura Plana Gracia, May 2010

For the exhibition at CRISP, Space Riders investigates “form”.  Beginning with one video which narrates a science-fiction adventure, or an ‘epopeya’ about the sculptural future in which two astronauts wonder about the origin of matter and get involved in a roadtrip through the universe, seeking to find the form that will come.

The nostalgia of searching a new path for “shapes” (either creating new creative processes or conceptual innovations) leads them to new propositions in their work when they treat objectuality in space – in this case, the exhibition space.

If You Were A Rat Who Crawls, Maybe You Could Appreciate My Fucking Drawings With More Detail But As You Probably Are A Lord Who Walks Upright You Can Only See Them From This Perspective (2010) is a drawing on the gallery’s floor created from the sculpture, What A Gas! (2010) hence deeming it a ’sub-conceptual’ work – the concept starts where the last one ended.  Sub-conceptual is a term related to sub-conscious to sub-normal, etc.

As Pascal said once, “All badness in this word comes from our incapacity of being seated in a room doing nothing.“  We should have payed attention to Pascal’s words but probably you would not like being under our skin in that moment of our impossibility of drawing.

“We have always wanted to present a drawing or a sculpture or whatever, which had been made in a really bad way.  We did it, but those drawings were too terrible, even for us, and let us completely do subnormal.  Even though the idea was great for what we were looking for, which was to make a sub-conceptual piece, our intention was to materialize something “sub-”, related to the subconscient and to the “sub-cultural”, but not to something sub-normal or idiot, it means something under what we understand as intellectuals.” – Aggtelek, June 2010

Notre Suckin’ Monde (2010) is a sculpture – but it is only exhibited through an info-mercial video with an expiration date of 31 December 2010.  It is inspired by on-site / non-site concepts of Robert Smithson.  As the sculpture only exists in the gallery as a presented video would classify the work as non-site. This can change into an ephemeral piece if it is not sold – which means it will be destroyed.  It will become site-specific if it is sold. The sculpture exists in the exhibition space but not in a physical way.  The sculpture, made of cheap materials taken from the artists’ studio is a readymade analyzing each used object in the sculpture and giving it a conceptual future that is waiting for us.  The concept of the sculpture is explained in the video.

Invisible Sculpture (2010) sits near the invisible monument, independent and difficult to see.  It is the contraposition of the monument – but also a manifesto.

Invisible Monument (2010) is a manifesto and is planned as an annex of Space Riders (2010) – written and explained ideas to make possible an invisible monument.

Space Riders (2010) is a galactic trip in which two astronauts live a conceptual sci-fi adventure.  After their spaceship swallows two objects related to the art word, they fly to the first intergalactic highway, the Meccatune Road, a path which is modified by those who pass through.  It ends in the year 2666.  In this voyage, they are called into question hypothetical issues about artistic creation in an unknown future supposedly active life in outer space.  Which creative process will be developed in 2058? Which kind of art will be shown in Mars? Or which is the form that will come?

The film (and consequently the exhibition) is a starting point; a philosophical galactic fable about questions of creative processes.  A process that will be developed through the simple question about the origin of matter, through form – and how a concept is solidified in an object.  The two astronauts try to find an answer for their questions of the entire universe.  New planets with new goods and a new galactic highway (the Meccatune Road inspired by Jason Rhoades).

AGGTELEK Xandro Valles (Barcelona, 1978) & Gema Perales (Barcelona, 1982) live and work in Brussels and Valencia.  Recent solo exhibitions include Luis Adelantado, Valencia (2010), Galeria Magda Bellotti, Espacio Algeciras, Madrid (2010) LABOR, Budapest (2010), Instituto Cervantes. Brussels (2010), Jozsa Gallery, Brussels (2009) Centre Cultural la Mercè, Burriana, Castellón (2008), Galerie Adler, Frankfurt (2008).  Recent group exhibitions include Remote Viewing – Best of Loop, Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona (2010), Biennial de Rennes, curated by Raphael Jeune, Couvent des Jacobins. Rennes (2010), Remote viewing: New Video Art, curated by Paul Young, Pacific Design Center. Los Angeles (2009), 46 Certamen Internacional Artes Plásticas de Pollença, Museu de Pollença, Mallorca (2009), CIGE 09. Beijing (2009), Crosstalk Festival, Budapest (2009) and  included in the collections of: DEPART Foundation, Rome (IT), Stedelijk Museum Het Domein, Sittard (NL), Colección ABC, Madrid (SP), Circa XX. Córdoba (SP), Fundación José García Jiménez, Murcia (SP), Fundación Norte, Santander (SP), Ayuntamiento de Puerto Lumbreras, Murcia (SP), Ayuntamiento de Burriana, Castellón (SP), Museu de Pollença, Mallorca (SP) and MEFIC, Murcia (SP).