JILL MAGID Thin Blue Lines: infinite models compressed in a finite space
The thin blue line that Jill Magid traces in her current exhibition at the Centre d'Art Santa Mònica is not the one that -in the contemporary definition of the term- is formed by the uniformed body of the police -'the boys in blue'- for the purpose of keeping anarchy at a safe remove from decent civilization; the sensation of public insecurity before a sensation of security. Despite the fact that one of the works presented here by the adoptive New York artist -Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy, L.O.V.E.- prominently features a police officer in the New York subway, and the artist sets up an intelligent play with the deliberate use of the police-related expression as the title of the show, which as well as the piece already mentioned includes two other works whose fine blue lines converge in the angles of a diamond or underscore sentences from a novel by Jerzy Kosinski (another adoptive New Yorker), institutional security is not the principal theme of the exhibition.
The thin blue line that Magid draws is a very fine, non-existent trace between art and life, an invisible line that establishes no separation between her person and her work. There is no body of police, no academic body, no cold conceptual calculation entrusted with the task of protecting Jill Magid's private life from the product of her ideas, converted into pieces of art in which the prevailing qualities are absence -of what was or of what will be- and the action that sets creation in motion, the action-creation that obliges us to behave like the protagonist of one of the stories in Steps by Kosinski (1933 - 1991), a man that becomes the lover of an office colleague by way of an interposed third person who persuades his friend to seduce the woman and let him spy on them:
When I got home, I threw myself on the bed. Instantly, my image of her split in two: the
woman in the office, clothed, indifferent, going back and forth, and the blindfolded naked girl
who gave herself on the orders of another man. Both images were sharp and clear… but
they refused to merge. For hours, they displaced and replaced one another.
Jill's work is just so, just like this paragraph: a body of work that shows us observing who watches as it shows itself and sends us home with the double image of the world that the artist observes and manipulates at the cost of her own memory and of the events that spark off her intervention in order to generate not only a piece of art whose price is marked by its real cost -in dollars or in life- but also, and above all, the vanishing point of a future, of a destination to be collected that came into being as an infinity of possibilities.
Like a theory of fractals.
About three weeks before he committed suicide, Jerzy Kosinski sent in reply
to my father a one-and-a-half page letter in which he explicitly rejected my
father's application of the theory of the fractals to some of his books.
[…] My father had very carefully read a few of Kosinski's works, especially Steps
and The Painted Bird, and, by way of a Polish immigrant who had settled first in
Argentina and then in the United States, had managed to contact the writer born in Lodz.
My father's friend and Kosinski were neighbours, they were both living in Manhattan.
The point is that thanks this man my father engaged in a brief correspondence with
the author of Being There, brief but intense, in that three letters were sent and
three replies received. In the most cordial manner my father expounded his eccentric
theory to the writer: in his view, both Steps, and The Painted Bird reproduced,
subtly and convincingly, the notion of the fractal; in other words, the notion of
infinite models compressed in some way in a finite space.
Gabriel Báñez
Infinite models compressed in some way in a finite space: like the lie. Like the lies that Kosinski told about himself all through his life as an undeclared Jew; the lies he wrote about his life in his supposed autobiography, The Painted Bird: like the enormous lie that was his novel Being There (1971), a plagiarization of the 1930s Polish novel The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma, and in due course exposed as such by The Village Voice in 1982, years after its publication and subsequent film adaptation (with a screenplay by Kosinski himself), the film being released in Spanish-speaking countries as Bienvenido Mr. Chance (1979). Welcome, Mr. Chance. Infinite models compressed in some way in a finite space. The head of the dead Kosinski, the suicide, in a plastic bag. End of the infinite.
The ashes of Jill Magid converted into a diamond that will be mounted on the ring of her Auto Portrait Pending, which will cease to be so, will be finalized after her death and cremation and the subsequent transformation of the carbon of her lifeless body into a precious stone. End of the infinite.
Make of me a diamond when I die. Cut me round and brilliant. Weigh me to a carat. Ensure that I am real.
Jill Magid, tightrope walker on the thin blue line that traverses a space in the air and travels from her work to herself, several metres off the ground in a free fall that will always land in her own existence, in her attitude to art and life, which is the opposite of the suicide of Kosinski - or of whomever.
Jill's passage along the fine bluish wire marks the inverse path to the suicide of K. - or of whoever.
That which is the opposite of suicide, which is not life as we live it, but life as Jill Magid detonates it, exploding its infinite models by exhibiting herself and transforming her own story in the finite space that accommodates each of her works, which demonstrate that it is not only the lie that answers to the definition of the fractal, but also the provoked truth. The truth that is fed to convert into event, work or concept all the infinite models that fiction contains, limitless until we intervene in them to transform them into possibility.
Let's say I am the protagonist of someone else's novel.
Let's say that Jill Magid is the protagonist of a novel by Kosinski, of an impossible novel by the Polish Kosinski, whose English was never good enough for him to have written any of the books that he published in that language; novel and stories that were fed by ghost writers in the shadows that created on his orders or undertook to translate into English a Polish novel. By another person.
Let's say I am the protagonist of someone else's novel.
Let's say that, faced with a writer who lies and kills himself by asphyxia, Jill was left with no alternative (as a reader, as a writer and as an artist) but to take the leading role -at the cost of her own life- in some fine fractal stories by Kosinski, that she then underlined with fine blue lines…