EXTRAPOLATIONS CURATORIAL STATEMENT
by Humberto Ramirez

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Perimeter, Radius and Center:
During the last two decades of the 20th century much of the discourse concerning cultural resistance was focused on the paradigm of ‘center vs. margin’, this model was of great value as it provided a structure with which to critique the privileged zones of power while simultaneously generating forms of action that envisioned the margin as a site not only of abjection but also of great interventionist opportunities. At the core of this model was an understanding of the disciplinary power of surveillance so richly and historically extracted by postmodernist theory from the glossy envelope of humanism. The model proposed a center fraying at the edges as the resources and interests of power diminished creating zones of relative autonomy, possible creativity and identity.

The model of center vs. margin could alternatively be visualized as the relation between perimeter and center as mediated by a radius. This relationship is fixed by the two point coordinates of center and perimeter and as such it is fundamentally determined by the immovable location of the center shooting out its infinite rays towards the fixed, identifiable but variable locations of the perimeter.

Such a ‘fixed’ model has lost relevancy as power in its contemporary configuration is in constant movement, it has no nationality or specific physical/geographical location. There is no longer a ‘center’ in the sense of a specific locus of power. Consequently previous models of power and cultural resistance need to be reexamined so that they more accurately reflect the actual dynamics of social and economic transactions.

One of the most valuable notions conceptualized by Michel Foucault proposes that power is never fixed or permanently located at any one point but that it rather circulates through an endless set of tributaries.

Tangent:
As the model of power has shifted, so have strategies of resistance. In particular the sophistication of surveillance systems mandates a new form of action. A tangent is a line or a plane that touches a given curve or solid at a single point. More importantly the tangent and the curve it touches have the same slope or direction only at that specific point. It is the specificity of that contact that is of relevance to a discussion of tactical modes of action. The tactical calls for highly specific actions addressing contingent opportunistic events, it seeks to offer as small a flank as possible in terms of a residual image and operates in a concise time frame. It doesn’t seek to perpetuate itself or the opportunity that generated the tactical action but rather concentrates on the specific creative potential of that unique opportunity. It does not create or act in an autonomous space but rather functions by necessity within the domain of the ‘other’.

The ‘essential’ and the ‘universal’ are then erased from this model as origin and territory are both impossible and at best discontinuous; both in a perpetual state of flux and change.

The tactical emerges and organizes its momentary configurations without any other allegiance other than those that the situation demands; it rapidly splinters and dissolves to again reorganize into yet another configuration under another set of circumstances.

Extrapolation:
If one considers the viability of the tactical as determined by the unanticipated emergence and dissolution of an action, then the origin of the vectors that originate that action and how those vectors disperse after the action, become critical considerations. Extrapolation is a practice that infers or estimates a value by extending outside of a known range to predict a variable at an unknown range. While the objective conditions of a given situation might call for intervention, from a tactical point of view, the situation and the intervention do not need to occupy the same ideological or physical space; they only need to touch momentarily in a tangential manner within an open field of associations. One of the great analyses of tactical action is Margins & Institutions (Art&Text#21), the extraordinary essay by Nelly Richard on the ‘Avanzada’ the highly controversial and heterogeneous group of artists that under the Chilean dictatorship (1973-1989) carried out complex actions of a highly tactical nature including the humble but massively effective ‘No +’ (1983) by the collective CADA. In the chapter ‘Ellipsis and Metaphor’ Richard points out the complex dynamics of tactical political action in regards to surveillance and censorship. In that regard she quotes the critic Adolfo Brunner as stating ‘ it is the facticity of power that rules not its normativity’, in effect stating that for official language the boundaries of any political system are best left unstated. Conversely what we come to understand from Richard’s analysis is that appropriate counterstrategy for tactical resistance is not to illuminate its intentionality but rather to occlude it through ‘ellipsis or metaphor’. Extrapolation is both a critical and generative tool, it emerges from a known domain and extends into theoretical space seeking to tangentially touch at a singular and defined moment an object only to continue in its untraceable and incrementally uncertain trajectory.

The art profiled here functions strategically within the realm of ellipsis or metaphor, in one case, fracturing syntax by outright omission, in the other by opening an ample territory of interpretation where absence acts as ‘punctum’; both without completely disarming the signifying potential of language. What is omitted is crucial, as it calls from its point of absence for a type of presence only available through extrapolation. Extrapolation differs from interpolation by extending beyond its original known range to produce uncertain, subjective and poetic value, in doing so it opens up and destabilizes the interpretative field of culture and at the same time partially cloaks its intentionality. Finally, extrapolation as a creative endeavor could be thought of in terms of what Craig Owens called ‘The Allegorical Impulse’; a way of giving form to ideas and historical artifacts that while abstract in their archival state are given new life by restaging or recalling them into the relevancy of actual events. The desire to extrapolate from history is then also a desire to actualize and personalize it by intersecting the present and past and in doing so giving form to what otherwise would be destined to oblivion.

Humberto Ramirez
2006

>>Click here to go to the Extrapolations exhibition.