“That’s how things are and that’s how we have reported them.” This was the phrase with which the Antena 3 newscaster signed off every day, declaring that things were just as he had described them and as the images had shown them. This kind of authoritarian attitude of here-you-have-all-you-need-to-know denied any hint or possibility of any other interpretation of these images. As if zapping was merely a game for those who refused to understand things as they are or to accept that there is one description of the facts: condemned to lose their way, draft aimlessly and not understanding anything.

The figure in La distancia correcta (The right distance) is always surrounded by images on all sides, and ends by manufacturing a bomb that could both put an end to this kind of laboratory of images in which he lives and also set them free.

La distancia correcta is a film projected onto two large screens on which a parallel action is played out on a single stage: a kind of workshop or basement, without any windows or exterior points of reference but with an office desk and chair, a few scattered objects, and above everything a large screen on which appear various images, bits of film, etc. On this stage a figure appears, at times wrapped up in his thoughts, preparing something; at other times, he moves across the huge screen, among the images, trying to reconstruct the thread of some plot. In other words, performing. He acts among the images and tries to reconstruct some logical meaning. Occasionally he turns his back on that other reality that is obsessively projected onto a screen that occupies all his living space.

Since he is obliged to live with the images, he tries to find the right distance from them: somewhere between attempting to be inside them and trying to destroy them.

Dance damned things

Mabel Palacín’s project tries to show precisely the right distance from – or the right relationship with – the images, between two extremes that in fact connect with each other: anaesthetising oneself against them or plunging right into them. The right distance is what every individual has to find: the distance between the inability to read images and interpret the world beyond its mere superficiality, and the absolute madness involved in losing oneself totally in these images.

The figure in La distancia correcta confuses reality and fiction. He gets involved in actions that have nothing to do with him and that only exist in the fiction of the screen. In the same way as a child is able to fantasise with reality and take fiction as fact, he empathises radically with what is happening on a cinema screen.

The opposite of this childlike predisposition to fantasise with reality and vice versa is an adult position characterised by being pragmatic and mechanistic.

However, the protagonist of La distancia correcta is an adult who shows childish traits and lapses into what Pierre Bourdieu has called an adolescent state. That adolescent state, which Bourdieu has applied to figures such as Don Quijote, signifies the intermediate point between the child’s naïve quality and the adult’s experience; the point where it is possible to maintain the ability to fictionalise reality and at the same time to keep a back door. The character in La distancia correcta fictionalises reality, takes fiction as fact, duplicates the reality with what happens in the fiction, and vice versa. He plays in both camps at the same time and is immersed in this confusion, as if his actions and his being in the world were determined both by reality and by fiction. But is it not perhaps always like that?

In fact, our way of life is constructed not only through our relationship with reality but also through our relationship with fiction, and the image clearly acts as the intermediary with reality and the carrier of fiction.

How we assume the mediation between reality and fiction will depend on our way of life. As a place about which to think, as an explanatory metaphor or paradigm, the adolescent state would consist in being sufficiently naïve to think beyond how things are supposed to be, or how they are presented or explained, and sufficiently experienced not to believe that things are as we are told they are, as the newscaster tried to make out.

That newscaster is a prime example: he serves as an explanation of an attempt at a one-directional use of images, an imposed use of images and of reality, which precludes any interpretation and opinion. Against this one-directional approach, artistic practices are characterised by operating on interpretational possibilities, in a speculative terrain. La distancia correcta speculates on the possibilities of an interpretational distance, in other words, the search for that distance.

In this respect, Mabel Palacín’s work signifies not merely a possible position for the viewer but the function of art as a place in which reality and images are questioned. And in case there is any added confusion, this is also a political function.

The predisposition to fictionalise reality and take fact as fiction, to go beyond the appearance of object and to seek and reconstruct logical meanings – in short to ability to fantasise, to develop the intellect if you prefer – is matched by the type of thinking that is developed in art. Thinking, discussing, writing and accepting the intellectual and vital importance of such complex or such simple constructions as a urinal are only possible from a position that takes an interpretative distance or that uses certain keys from an adolescent state; an attitude that tries to discover how to think and see beyond the appearance of things, but keeping a back door open in order to avoid falling into fanaticism, and to make us aware that we are dealing in fact with windmills.

It is precisely here where I believe that thought in art today is essential, on account of its discardable, precarious side, its unstable construction.

What’s going on in the street

Gustave Flaubert once wrote that his dream was to place the entire world in quotation marks, to put the whole of reality in quotes. So if Madame Bovary was an attempt at doing this, removing from the continuum of reality the life and dreams of a provincial lady of the period, Bouvard et Pécuchet was much more ambitious in that it tried to extract from reality the maximum number of fields of activity to which two idle characters could devote their time. Flaubert’s supposed naturalism consisted fundamentally in trying to apply that maxim – which simply amounts to indicating. Indicating the world, reality, objects, things, in order to be able to think about them. In other words, to be able to interpret them far beyond the continuum of reality and to see behind them, in order to demonstrate that reality is neither flat nor unanimous.

Although perhaps Flaubert was not able to count on the fact that that longing to put the world into inverted commas could actually materialise, and far from indicating reality, the excessive differentiation could make reality even more invisible.

Today, images are responsible for providing us with the confusion between reality and fiction.

The enclosed basement or study in which the leading character in La distancia correcta lives is arranged as a kind of summary or metaphor of a world surrounded by images, a world that is perforated and filmed. A world that is totally in quotation marks, an overwhelming unfolding of images. A world that, following Baudrillard, is no longer beyond its own hypervisibility and does not exist beyond its own image.

What La distancia correcta signifies is the position we are able to take up as spectators of this world-image. To a certain extent what runs along the background of this distance is the need for judgement, the need to work with a critical eye.

When Flaubert spoke of his yearning to put the world in quotation marks, what he meant was that reality without inverted commas means nothing and it is necessary to point out reality in order to think about it. And that is where the spectator comes in. It is we spectators who have a chance of constructing reality, because it is the spectator or the spectators who interpret and construct a possibly logical meaning. But only one of the possibles.

Perhaps La distancia correcta means the vast distance between the definite article and the indefinite article: between believing in the existence of the narration of facts, the logic of meaning, and moving or dancing between various possible logics and meanings. And then it is not a definitive state, it is not a place to arrive at, but a moving, elusive, variable space. As if the only possible right distance is defined in the very search for it – as happens with the character in the film – or in some way in its definitive non-existence. In other words, in doubt as an acceptable vital and existential position.

David G. Torres
Barcelona, October 2003