El artista Paul Chan tiene inmensas virtudes, entre las que destacan: su claridad al hablar sobre su trabajo y las cuatro letras de su apellido, que acomodadas en ese orden, componen una de las sílabas más afortunadas en cualquier idioma. 

En la maestría en la que actualmente soy estudiante, me pidieron hacer una reflexión sobre el primer trimestre. Me puse un disfraz y actué este bello fragmento que encontré en youtube.

La representación fue extraña, tanto que a la fecha muchos de mis compañeros juran que vieron a Chan en un salón de la escuela, hablando sobre Odiseo.

                                                             The potency of art. 

Thanks for being here, can anybody hear me.

I want to start by waying an ancient Greek term: polytropos, like all ancient Greek words, polytropos holds a range of meanings, its ruffly translate as: versatile, wildly, many turning, ingenious. Variations of polytropos denotes crafty, shroud and many devised, resource full and inventing. Argubley the most famous use of polytropos is in the Odyssey. Homer describes Odysseus the hero of this epic poem as embodying polytropos. Writer and poet Steven Mitchels who recently did a new translation of the Odyssey in 2011 translated as infinitely cunning. How is Odysseus cunning? Homer portrays him as a master storyteller and a legendary cheat. His renal for devising strategies and ways to cheat gods and men. He tells grand lies and tall tales, his cunning is in short and in part his creative instinct, but not only. Odysseus cunning it’s also bound up with his use of reason, in so far is reason can be described as the means by which mental representations are used to conceptualize and produce insights that further in hands what one knows, what one does and what one make hope to gain in the future. Odysseus deploys reason to understand and reflect on himself in a situation at hand in order to see what he is able or not able to get away with, by finding and some times even inventing choices were non are evident or given, this mind fullness is what distinguishes him from other Homeric heroes and what makes him so prudent and at the same time, so dangerous.

The cunning that Odysseus embodies is, if you like, two-fold or dialectical, he is creative, inventive and resourceful, precisely because he is reasonable. In so far his reason is a creative process in its own right, for what Odysseus emblematizes is how understanding what is most real and true about reality.  He indoors by the grace of what he is capable of imagining and creating, out of what he knows or is wiling to find out…. like an artist.

Of course what Odysseus wants most its to make its way back home to Ithaca, not make art, but this notions are not so far apart, consider that for the Greeks the idea of homecoming its intimately tight to the notion of identity. Being someone in the ancient world, met one had to take the trouble to get into some in the first place, this is what its been called the fruitfulness of trouble in Odysseus, the suffering he undergoes and the calamities that before him, act like different artistic materials that he uses to force his identity and to win recognition there by confirming the value of his own existence.

In the Odyssey the way home it’s a grand and singular form of expression, here i want to emphasize the notion that cunning it’s not outside the bounds of reason at all but its a fitcher of it, reason it’s not only expressed as the capacity to evaluate what it’s happening to us, around us and against us, it is also something that it’s produced, like a composition. Odysseus for instance use is reason to try to persuade his man not to anger the gods and to stay together as a unit so they have a better chance of getting home….. Odysseus illustrates in an emphatic version what i think we intuitively understand:

That reasoning its discursive and compelling when it is also aesthetical, reason is something we made to convince others of the wordiness of what has been made and serves the interest of the maker as a semblance of what he or she wants others to recognize as what is more real about our shared reality; and one of the consequences of understanding this interdependency between reason and cunning is that enables one to see just how crafty, ingenious, adaptable, deceitful, resourceful and high spirited reasoning can be as a try to justified why ot to be believed.

It is to me the creative act xxx excellence.

It is of course debatable what the art made today its truly creative or merely just an act, on the other hand i want to suggest that this arena we called art, is where the dialectical relationship between cunning and reason is most heightening and alivening. 

In my engaging with this arena one has the potential to gain insight into how this relationship influences all the lies outside this arena.

For being exposed art means among other things: seeing all the wildly and ingenious ways someone has try to make using what its redly available, something more that what is there.  A work try to do its trough its formal properties, this properties in which a work expresses itself act like arguments a work makes to try to convince us that it is worthy of being agreeable, every work argues for its own right to exist on its own terms, typically by any means necessary, this is the cunning of art.

There are many arguments today about why art matters: it is a form of authenticate what its more human about humanity, its celebrates and affirm the diversity of cultures and identities values of individual freedoms, it is a good pedagogical tool for teaching social and political ideas, it is a sound economic investment, it gives pleasure and so on. Among this competing claims i want simply to add one more and a farely prosaic one of that:

It is that the experience of art served us from being xxxxxx.

In experiencing how a work try to convince us of its worth and its right to exist, we come to grasp how its aesthetic qualities echo in spirit and in form all the manipulative means by which people use reason to try to convince us of the value of what they are saying, doing or selling.

So looking at art and try to comprehend and appreciate what it is, we are also at the same time engaging in the practice of recognizing and evaluating all the trades that artwork embodies.

Going to a gallery or a museum or wherever you happen to see what you believe it´s art, it is a lot like a spending an afternoon with a bunch of grifters, all try to cun you in the believing that they are indeed authentic artworks, you dont loose anything of course (except time) but what you gain, potentially gain however is insight in to what make something truly delightfully… cunning, and in the process perhaps learn a little about the trade craft of taking someone for a ride, so that you may realize what is happening the next time someone its taking you for one.

Thank you.