Text by: Antonia Dupain
“He did not want to compose another Quixote—which is easy— but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages that would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.”
—Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun,” announced Solomon in the Bible. And if in this compendium of books, written years ago, it is confirmed that what was, what will be and what has been done will be done again, we are left with no choice but to review the Enuma Elish and other earlier texts in order to locate the initial metaphors that, as Borges said, comprise humanity and should be reused. Thus we are trapped in the cave with a video projector, or the announcement that the end that is far away will arrive, since we are always on the edge, at the end of it all. The author died, God arrived late, and the Tao is ineffable.
I intend to trace the concept of the copy, and to do it I must talk about the new. But the new is invented and has been worked through the rhetoric of postmodernism: there is nothing new under the sun, it is said. Due to their experiences Sherrie Levine, Hank Herron, and Elaine Sturtevant will laugh at this pretension. They will say to us that the appearance of uniqueness was invented with mechanical reproduction and was not undermined, as Walter Benjamin would argument. The figure of the author appears with the ubiquitous image and the multiple copies, the anonymity is apparent.
In my school days we learned by copying, I made a sketch of Colombia's map on tracing paper, used a stylus to draw an image, repeated formulas, and assigned them to memory: Patos volando igual a número de ratas trotando for ideal gas law PV = nRT1. Renaissance painters had groups of boys working in assembly lines; copying day after day, grinding pigments, drawing are learned by osmosis, by the flow of information, cognitive mimesis. Copying is a learning method demonized in most places in the West that defend innovation as a unifying value. They try to protect the design, the idea, and the novelty in a warm bubble ready to burst. Copyright and the transnational companies are an oxymoron. Imitation is only prevalent in certain areas of knowledge and the invitation is to learn through educational competences.
This five-hundred-word text that you are reading at this moment exists within the context of a painting exhibition, and I have been commissioned by a participating artist who does not execute his own works to write it. He does not paint. The “Made in China” models of production as the formulas in contemporary art thrive. I am tired of seeing such recipes duplicated by artists and other creators, but I write about the repeated gesture in order to dress up the irony with other words. And also because I perceive a cry, a clamor for utopias and disappearances. Yet we are the protagonists of a great Dionysian novel that renders our life a mirage. We only need to ask the artists who have disappeared, those whom I do not wish to name, in order to let them go in search of the miraculous.
1 Translation: “Ducks flying equal to the number of rats running.”