Originally published in Art Nexus, No. 31, February ­ April 1999,page 119 and 120.

Restless Words

Pablo Helguera

Few artists in Chicago have the inquisitive creativity of artist andwriter Eduardo Kac, who has moved from working with holography to computerprograms, from installations to networked events. In one case, Kac surgicallyinserted into his ankle, in full view of the public and live on television,a microchip which recorded him in a digital database used for locatingstray animals. Kac has also invented a telerobot (which he calls "Ornitorrinco",or platypus), which can be remote-controlled by various users through theInternet.

Kac's different experiments in poetry, holography, digital technology,and robotics reflect his creative curiosity and the clear, focused andrigorous interests of a sensitive intelligence. Kac engages the seductionof the new, but always committed to the essence of literary experimentationand visual poetics.

Though Kac has spent many years in Chicago (first as a student and thenas a teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago), most of his exhibition projectshave been carried out in other cities. After a brief absence from Chicago,Kac has now returned with fresh energy and an interest in showing his workthere. The result was the exhibition presented in the Summer of 1998 atthe Aldo Castillo Gallery, entitled "Language Works", and curatedby Julia Friedman.

In this exhibition, the visitor was presented with a sample of Kac'sconstant fascination with a series of themes, including the way languagefunctions, and the frontiers between the visual and the textual, the technologicaland the literary. Since the early 1980s Kac has explored language throughholography, a medium which allows him to present a specific word-imagein a three-dimensional form and in motion. Using this medium, Kac workedfor more than ten years on the development of what he calls holopoetry,poems which can be read in different ways depending on the direction orthe position in which the spectator looks at them. Without a doubt oneof the fundamental influences on Kac's work has been the legacy of Brazilianand international visual poetry. Subsequently, as seen in "LanguageWorks", Kac explored other kinds of interactivity through computerprograms. In this exhibit, the visitor was able to navigate poems throughwhich he could read the verbal material in many different ways, dependingon the decisions made by clicking on the screen. Creating a poem in thisway with many reading options (a well-established literary tradition inLatin America: see for example Rayuela, by Julio Cortazar, or Blanco, byOctavio Paz) makes the reader more active and a creator of meaning.

The works in the show had complex conceptual origins. For example, anotherwork, entitled UPC, consists of a video projected onto the wall with diagonalletters crossing the screen to form phrases such as "Nothing aboveto left or right nothing below". Kac has a great familiarity withsemiotic theory and provides significant explanations of his experiments.It is difficult to imagine, however, that any spectator would notice theconnections between this work (UPC) and the fact that, as the artist pointsout, his work adopts a nihilist position, suggesting that the rigid dichotomiesof the past, such as the political left or right or the "above"(heaven) and "below" (hell) of religion, are being overcome byglobal economic forces. (UPC, incidentally, is the acronym for UniversalProduct Code.)

Seen in this way, the ultimate strength of Kac's work does not necessarilylie in the conceptual structure on which it is based or the source of theartist's inspiration (which are not the starting point for the viewer-reader),but rather the impact of the intrinsic poetic dimension. There is no needto be a specialist in semiotics to understand that there is a language,both visual and literary, in these cold pieces of apparatus known as computers.For a moment we can forget that we are in front of an electronic screen,and temporarily feel the presence of poetic space. In the final analysis,the objective is not to explain, but to present an infrastructure thatgenerates a multiplicity of experiences and interpretations. Wittgensteinbelieved that language was only useful in allowing us to realize how inefficientit was in describing the world: "I am only describing language, Iam not explaining anything." In Kac's case, too, language is not definitive,but neither is it useless: its usefulness lies in its ability to be manydifferent things as we use it to navigate through the seductive labyrinthof his works.

Pablo Helguera is the Director of Education of the Guggenheim Museum,New York.

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