Ciprian Burete: Untitled
20 minute presentation for AEROPONIC ACTS - growing roots in air, DAI's 3 day marathon of lecture-perfomance acts, May 2019.
An introduction to a journey I intend to make after DAI. It would be a bike trip to El Barraco, in order to meet the amateur painter Juan Carlos Jiménez Sastre, brother of the passed away cyclist Jose María Jiménez. Through telling the story of the 'El Chava' Jimenez, I would like to focus on the matter of talent.
Ana Teixeira Pinto, Ghalya Saadawi, Laura Harris and Antonia Majaca responded to the question:
Haven't you discovered the joy of painting?
Report by Ayesha Hameed:
The room is dark apart from a screen with a documentary-in-process accompanied by generic muzak; an image being formatted for Instagram of José María Jiménez or 'El Chava' who died in 2003 freezes as the cyclist’s career is detailed by a speaker off stage. The speaker talks about a bike trip they want to take to El Barraco to visit the cyclist’s brother, amateur painter Juan Carlos Jiménez Sastre. A simulated video game in the form of a DAI bike trip follows, which transitions into the artist biking through the countryside, now discussing the aspiring painter whose talent they wish to investigate. Burete explores different definitions of talent and intelligence, including the secretion of myelin related to developing habits and skills. If skills are created through practice, what about talent? We learn that El Chava stopped cycling due to depression and died at 32 of an embolism. The projection is turned off and a light at the back of the room illuminates a small diorama/slow globe of a cyclist moving through the fields in an unending loop.
Ghalya Saadawi asked after how one deals with the discrepancy between where one is located (in art school), and where one wants to go, which she thought was dealt with here by exteriorizing this discrepancy between potential and reality through the cyclist and the desktop performance. She thought the exploration of neuroscientific literature, ‘feels like a beginning with potential.’
Antonia Majaca enjoyed being puzzled, which she said was a rare quality different from being irritated or frustrated. The presentation felt custom-made for this context and for DAI, she said. ‘It is context specific which works, to reflect on time here.’
Laura Harris liked the phrase ‘making peace with middle ground,’ which proliferated across the story. The question for her seemed to be: ‘How does one find joy in the map of action, and where does habit become the sacrifice of joy?’ She liked the open-ended ending.
Ana Texeira Pinto informed the group that the artist has a recurring interest in cycling but that here there were new twists, one of which was the question: ‘How do you quantify achievement in art?’ This context was outside the usual ones of sports or the market, in which the cyclist’s brother is the protagonist – the obscure figure of the painter. She addressed how this context communicated that ‘it is only at the death of an artist when you can stabilize the value of their work.’ Further, she said: ‘The negative space of the story presented is the field of contemporary art.’