THEORETICAL OBSERVATORY

The Critical Device: Art that Unveils Itself. (Text from 2020 relating to works conceived in 1991©)

The aim is not to theoretically denounce the mechanisms of mystification in contemporary art, but to stage them, materializing them through a device that functions simultaneously as a work of art and as an instrument of demystification. The artistic operation departs from the awareness that the installation is exactly what it criticizes, an apparently casual assemblage of objects that, once inserted into the artistic context, automatically acquire the status of "work of art". But this transformation is immediately revealed and neutralized by the label "smoke and mirrors", which functions as an interpretive short-circuit. The mechanism set in motion is twofold and reveals a profound understanding of the dynamics of the contemporary artistic field. On one hand, the installation presents itself with all the formal codes of contemporary art, the use of varied materials, the apparent casualness of the composition, the semantic ambiguity of the assembled objects. On the other, the explanatory label does not provide the customary intellectualizing keys to interpretation, but brutally unveils the mystificatory nature of the operation.

The title "smoke and mirrors" assumes here a literal and programmatic valence. It designates precisely what a vast portion of contemporary art represents, a curtain of mystification that prevents one from seeing the vacuity of content through the apparent complexity of form. This creates what can be defined as a "critical estrangement effect". The viewer finds himself before a paradox: the work explicitly tells him that it is a deception, yet continues to function as a work of art. It is impossible to look at it with innocence, because it has already deconstructed its own mechanisms of legitimation. The mockery that is set in motion operates at several levels of social stratification. First, it mocks the public that allows itself to be impressed by assemblages devoid of authentic expressive necessity. But above all, it mocks the system of contemporary art that has transformed incomprehensibility into added value. The title "Contemporary Art" thus becomes an empty formula, a label that can be applied to anything, provided it is inserted into the appropriate context. The label "smoke and mirrors" functions as a mirror that reflects back to the artistic system its own mystificatory nature. One does not place oneself outside the mechanism in order to criticize it, but uses it to self-destruct. The operation has the merit of calling things by their name: what is often passed off as profound and meaningful art is, literally, "smoke and mirrors", an optical and conceptual deception that makes the empty appear substantial, the banal appear complex, the superficial appear profound.

The Fragility of Legitimation Mechanisms

From a sociological point of view, this operation reveals the fragility of artistic legitimation mechanisms. A simple label is enough to unmask the artificiality of an entire system of values. "Smoke and mirrors" thus becomes a metaphor for a more general condition, that of a society that has learned to mistake mystification for depth, obscurity for complexity. The subtlest irony of the operation lies in the fact that the installation, precisely by denouncing itself as a deception, ends up being more honest and therefore more authentic than many works that present themselves as profound and significant. The paradox is that art which declares its own vacuity becomes paradoxically fuller of meaning than that which feigns non-existent significances. In this sense, the critical device performs a genuine operation of "clearing the smoke": through the explicit declaration of its own mystificatory nature, the work restores transparency where the contemporary artistic system systematically produces opacity. It is an operation of perceptual hygiene that allows one to see through the smoky curtains of contemporary art.

Ultimately, "smoke and mirrors" is not only a critique of contemporary art, but a pedagogical device that educates the gaze, that teaches one to see through mystifications. It is an operation of mental hygiene that restores to the public the capacity for critical judgement, freeing it from the condition of interpretive subalternity to which it is often relegated. Authentic democracy requires the democratization of access to aesthetic experience. An art that systematically evades comprehension, that deliberately produces "smoke and mirrors", does not contribute to cultural emancipation, but to its opposite, to the reinforcement of dynamics of exclusion that perpetuate social injustice. Only an art that recovers its communicative function can once again become an instrument of social transformation rather than of reproduction of the existing. The operation points to a possible path: that of an art which, instead of hiding behind apparent complexity, has the courage to show itself for what it is. An art that, paradoxically, precisely through the denunciation of its own artificiality, recovers a dimension of authenticity that the system of contemporary art seems to have lost.

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