" Dear Clemente "

by Boris Nieslony, 2009 (preface for a catalogue by Clemente Padin, Uruguay)

Dear Clemente,

Thank you, yes, thank you for the invitation, for the challenge to write a contribution for this publication, yes,
to even assume the preface, to tell a story, to "compose" the prologue. 

What will not be, what you cannot expect is any theoretical discourse concerning you, leave alone about you. No description
of a person or any imaginating you. And to lead the discourses, that are what you already do all those decades, there is 
nothing to repeat.

But our bondage is the encounter.

But what are the encounters? The encounter?
 

A dance through and upon a mine field!


I will write to you, I will write you this letter as a personal approximation, line for line out of the un-understood encounter
as it happened to me. First out of the name, then the works will emerge.
 

I did not know you, maybe not even know you today either, but your name was flirring around and circulating in countless mail art
lists in this, still so far from me - world. You were living your name that long, but I could never see you at all that long.
You were writing that your mail art activities started in 1969; my first contact with the art form mail art went back to 1976.
Someone wrote that names are carried by angels and are thus incarnated into the world.
When did I see your name, this angel? "You took space. Your name was everywhere - maybe an unfortunate correlation?"

My early fascination concerning the mail art was the ideological component of a radicalized democratic consciousness.
(At least I thought so) The term globalization was not fallen into any "Zeitgeist" yet, but your stamp art was already incarnating
the coming signs and the symbolic terms, for example neo liberal - seen that different through your eyes and meant differently,
diversinating from any current political understanding and transformation of the term and blown into a wonderful implosion later,
that marks the recent financial- and economic crisis.

Beautiful as well the image of your stamped prints, your portrait and the speech bubble out of your mouth - yeah! It implodes alike.
Beautiful as well - that the epic drops, jump in the gun into the grotesque. 

As "the historic anecdote" mail art survived. The claim of the " fast approachable and non-fake able way of the communicative exchange
of a fast communication being the artwork - resistive and not created for the art market"; this claim does show its absurdity in 
countless photocopied products, catalogues, mail art archives and collections.
This factory-like entitlement: given a theme, some 30, 100 or more "original-duplicates" shall be created, a documentation of 
the participation is guaranteed (many of this assurances never reached me) and nearly every day 1-3 of such requests. Overflow. 
And then, the end of mail art took place nearly in complete silence. 
Many of the ideological premises were mayflies, politically not hand able or overthrown by the daily politics. Black holes. 
Created by the centers of gravity and gravitation by the impact of the power. Humans vanished. 

Political power, the "product art" and technological inventions gobbled up the little fragile plant mail art. 
I had nothing to object to these three standpoints - and especially, the esthetical standpoint was the crucial one. Mail art, 
because art became a sheer product, could never be any concurrent to the other art disciplines, and could never keep up at all. 
The transformation of the communication in sense of "art" was executed by the new media, but this with a major gapping; 
the pendiculum stroke back first and painting was en vogue. 

My desire was - I wanted to see the humans, wanted to look at them, wanted to speak with them, I wanted to see, what they were 
doing and how that changed their perception, I wanted to hear, how they would speak about it. The first thoughts about the "encounter" 
derived and how to show them in public spaces. 
In Germany this term had no good connotation. It had a religious taste - but this spiritual fact was in my desire. 
What I did no longer want at all, any cultural icons, happening politics and human being reduced to a stamp. 

I withdrew from this fabrication and the anakasm to produce and you, your name vanished out of my horizon. This network inter-collapsed 
(of course there was and always is, all the ones, keeping the mail art alive until nowadays).
I had and perceived no information any longer. No one wrote me, that you swell vanished for two years into a carcer. 

Into the field of vision, the focus of my interest entered the 70ies, those big sister-brothers of the mail art
a) The direct political action, without any direct political partisanship, founded by the human self in it personal amelioration and 
b) The principle and art of encounter and how it takes place. 
Both are immanent: they are hard to overcome and overthrow in the production of products, they are flexible, floating, and erratically 
in their appearance. They are hard to esthethize, and one cannot force them into any conic or hierarchic systems at all. 
Field theories and discourses transform the ideologies; they become variables and flexible, even interchangeable, become the methods 
of any optional thinking. 

Principles of political culture, derived long before the arts and as well the mail art are even not to be developed even more stringent 
and to be carried further. They form into concrete questions correlating to the artistic concepts, methods and strategies. 
What impacts and how? I am constantly asking myself, an art accomplish this? Does it have to accomplish this? 
What and how are cultural and social instruments, for whom and in which time? Instruments of the knowledge, the desire? 

This very sentence that you precisely positioned: "In each product, that a human wants to transmit are characteristics of the correlation 
between the society and this human encoded."
Instead of the product I will refer to the "correlation" as it does include the product. The product, the merchandise excludes too much 
in itself. 

Because it was...
... An autumlike day in Hamburg, coolish, sunny, a schlendering around the waters of the Hamburg Haven, a strolling and a "speaking 
with each other", an encounter took place. She told me about a book and that there was to read: in old Greece, in Athens would rule 
the principle and paradigm of the Agora. This would contain, that the being of each free Athenite would be, to be human among humans. 
This being would not have to be understood as the correlation, but as the essential principle. 
Admittedly, I have to add, that the term of "the relation" is of a socially newer date and does change strangely in the bourgeoisie-social 
context.
This being, to be human amongst humans, incarnated in the wonderful book "Vita Activa" by Hanna Ahrend, that burned in then in my heart, 
in my head. This was a never to be forgotten encounter on this sunny, coolish autumlike day. 

The thinking of that, what is to be understood polical, did change in me, radical. The big political "Counter-Game", the antagonisms 
in the (so called) diverse structures of the power showed as the trap, the fake. 
Then it always happened: the end of the block- systems 1989-1991-1993, the divesting of the always present, always impacting archaic-humanoid 
characteristics. Genocides in Yugoslavia and Ruanda etc. 
I did read: in the years 1945 until 2009 there was only in the months of September and October 1945 no war or civil war to be found on 
this planet - hard to prove, but significant as a statement. 

What happened in Uruguay in 1989?
When did you, your name appear again? This question questioned to me. Still I did not encounter you, you did not encounter me. 
Your name dropped - please excuse me - in these times into this oblivion. 
When I think about it today, it seems to me, as if I would be transformed, but did not know, what or how I did change - I myself neither, 
it was something in this times. 
Between the out-phasing of the mail art and the internet and the boundless use of email communication there lay a brisant and highly 
dynamiting decade, I lived the 80ies like a deep breathing in,
a deep breathing in and then a wide wide breathing out. 

We have discussed (here I refer to Germany and the activities of the various and pluriversal self-organizations, artist houses, 
artist run spaces, etc.) the originating networks since 1982.
How does one diminish, even better prevents any of this new, other networks of any ideological characteristca, as it was still 
to be found in the mail art to be consistent? 
How does one trans-step the "community" of the various "Artist-Run-Activities" in the worldwide centers out of their local 
relativity into the capacious political and social worldwide network. And how does one then inter-relate these diverse networks.
How do the cultural and political and social activities artistically, esthetically? How impactive are they? 

Radical questions onto the political actionism. To be seen, that the understanding of the political exhausted itself in 
the positioning and delimiting of cultural claims. Terretories were artificially created and then occupied. This was 
the avant-garde. The goal, a clever organization as the political impact. It was constructs and they were manipulated 
by economic interests in a massive style. 
Where have I been? The territories did not interest me. 

Dear Clemente, in this times we were (should only speak about myself though) that much focused onto this questions and the constructs 
and as well that much caught, tied up. The technical developments in its speed was only that much slower then the streaming of our 
thoughts and ideas. 
It was a big black hole, gravitation at the same time with a high mental virulentia.
(Until now, the "virus" a synonym of this impact - did you not execute a performance in England with the title "Anthrax"?) 

For the first time this - seen from my perspective, out of Germany onto a Europe, the paradox indeed: the movement was very 
slow and thus of an incredible speed. 

How did you experience this time, you fisher of men? 

That alien, that much an inner afar - what is this, this Uruguay? How?
I was told: that the land is deeply rooted in the "melancholia". Slowness, monotony and thoughtfulness would lie about the 
streets, the houses, the grass and the earth. There would be wind blowing over it and the time would stand still. I was told: 
the sad thoughts would have to be danced; no one knows it better then you, in your poetic events it is clearly to be seen. 
And then this dancing, in the nights, in the streets, the sigh and the sounds of Tango, - is this Tango really born into your hearts? 
Where does this land really exist? What do I know of the afar? How and only does the wind tell me about the befallen dance? 
Who is telling the stories?

Back. Invitations are outspoken, frameworks concepted, organizations founded into life, that occupy no territories, then the 
encounter was the essence of developments. The donation ("Gabe") came into the center of focus. 
One of the light houses of the 80ies, the wonderful sentence by George Brecht:
"When you want to know something, then spend your time with someone, who knows something." 
(1) 
Communicative tubes as the performance, the image, the poesia. 
But what are encounters, what is the poesia of the encounter or its gangrene? 

Dear Clemente, this letter, oscillating between the memories, or to none, because it is about you, your name and the day, 
that we stood in front of each other, in November, cold, wet and way too early in the morning.
If I would only know, why I write you, I would stop, but I am hindered by a need, a desire, a questioning: how are the paths 
of the coming closer, a burning of the uncertainty, curiosity is only a weak reflection of the gangrene. 

But there was more, the years before, there was reason, the dialectic of the uncountable, a dialectic of the assuredness, 
we would stand in front of each other (here the burning trap: is every encounter synonymous with itself and with its endless repetition? 
Are you a synonym for the one that waits to encounter me still?) An assuredness over the years constantly deepening lies in the encounter, 
even if I do not know the one that I will meet. 

Martin Buber did one write: Encounter exists not in space neither time, but space and time exist in the encounter. 
What uses me and how to transform an encounter into the have happened? 
Be prepared; prepare the framework for the option. To come close, but to pass through closeness and to come close to that, 
which cannot be cleared or explained with the "understanding"? It is a trace. The trace of the civilization - the being prepared, 
an inner courtesy. 

To write a letter, line by line, to come closer, to approach a certain human being, within the donation, the donating back of 
which is not namable but is surely this inner courtesy. 

Then again the irruption. From an already forgotten side your name irrupted again into my life, that raid was the concrete poesia. 
In the 60ies of the last century, I had a strong but undefined interest in concrete poesia. This in the context of the research 
of poetry in general, and as defined by Comte de Lautreament, the "Poetical Purloin".
I was onto the radicalization of the contexts of life that went far beyond the daily praxis - because of the poetry. 
This poetry could no longer be only spread on any sheet of paper. 

Inflatious eject of publications and the mass production do characterize the way of the concrete poesia. They show themselves as 
to be the exercising system of the self-augmentation, the self-exaggeration of creative production with the tendency to cave 
immanent poetical questions. They seem to me as the culture of the fragments without the vertical tension, like poetry of shreds, 
a poetry that brought the fragments into appearance and still does. 
This is one of the reasons, why the concrete poetry as production, as the routine came out of my focus then. 

There was a taint, showing like this:
An event should be poetry, because it was defined like this with a held up finger, look here! This is poetry, inspite of no poetry 
taking place. Then again, in a different place poetry happens and again only few do perceive it or recognize this happening as poetry, 
because the defined is missing, luckily. 

The raid happened in at least two different ways. The appearing of names, that I knew before from different contexts, 
the appearing of new names of new works and the appearing of raids in characteristics of thinking and contemplations, 
that had lost their relevance. There were experiences and correlations in knowledge that posed that different questions, 
the cards were mixed and juggled in a different style. 

Not to be disregarded is the timely component - the view of today, the memory does change the impulse of the started, 
changes the reasons of derivation.

How is the difference to be understood for humans that live or lived in a dictatorial country contraired to humans that 
claimed for the revolution in an authoritarian, post-fascistic country?
What is time doing? How are the translating systems, the transformations? 

These political actions in Germany, in Europe had according to my perception three basic trends: an ideological-political, 
an existential-philosophical one and one, concerning the general lifestyle. 

This trends had strong impacts onto the culture and arts, were still nevertheless not integrated as any part of the arts. 
This changed massive. (I did not forget the activities of the "Letteristen" and of the "Situationiste Internationale" - 
though I came across them much later.) My activities end of the 60ies was existentionalistic and referred to the political reality 
"West-East", but they lacked any reference to art, there was no zone of art for me existent. (But as you surely know, 
Joseph Beuys is the direct opposite and in case we would be both mentioned in any discourse, I could explain you this issue and 
my antagosm against it.)

Zone of the art. Maybe too early in this letter, but the phenomenum is a way more basic one or better said, a fundamental question: 
How are the firecrackers to be thrown into the rampant, paralyzing being of a society? 
Can the "Zone of the Art" be such a firecracker? I always doubted it and not alone. But how was it in your case and the zone of the art? 

I read: "Art serves society" on a t-shirt that you wore in the performance "Por el Arte y por la Paz". You re-enacted with the help 
of two German artists' torture and methods of torture. Re-enacted! 
?
Did the art take its inner track? Authenticity does claim a feint of the arcane; the faking of knowledge - which - arcaned is 
there the language of life, the ensuffered life. 

What did live through? Can I, may I ask you this question? I do not want to talk the hidden small, it is burning questions: 
Shall the art be the fiction of the factic? Or is life and art the facts with different challenges and fields of impact? 
Who is standing in whose service? You asked that question in your performance "Service", but what is the answer? 

Or is that, what the art incarnates in the works, just a fiction as the factic in the life of a human being? 
Here as well, the discernment is stopped by the inner courtesy. 
I did read: "Truth is no crystal that one puts into one's pockets, but an infinite liquid, that one surrenders into."
I did read as well: "The potential within the works should be represented at a low turned volume".
A very beautiful thought. 

Zones of the art. Not unclasping. To cut sharper and to keep in focus the burning questions.
In the zone of the art, that, what I saw - only in video, in a circle, not bigger then a human being? Symbol? Art history - 
man as the measure of all things? And/or is the zone of the arts a territory where one can experience "The Artist in Action"?

Why is this question burning? Is this necessary? Can man be the measure? 
Does not interlock the burgle of the poetry into the daily moment interlock, that the moment is measureless? (How beautiful 
this would be in every event.)
You wrote"Poetry should be made for all" - and at once - and out of my mouth is dropping, nearly: 

"Just do it". No, my dear Clemente, in and one of the most burning questions is: 
Can poetry be made? 

I think, I do not have to tell you, how many of the poetic techniques, methods and more then unforgivable programs do exist. 
But between all the methods of speech, the correlation and interlocking of terms and word plays a short lives, an appearing 
and vanishing and incomprehensible ghost, the poetic act. 

Dancing, glooming, bedazzling, burning like the sun - and when she goes down, then the moons of the methods moonset. 

You read, too: Who has eyes, that see and who has ears, that hear. This is of a big help! 

To create poetry, I think, no. Experimental poetry is the field of research of the history of literature and is being 
negotiated in the essays of the literature market, history of terminology. This has nothing to do with any poetry at all. 

What is this for a moment, an image "overcomes" and overtakes, interferes with your life and it is shown and becomes images 
only through you. It is not the Clemente to be seen, but it is the image, the poetry. The poetic act takes place and takes 
over a human - the human - to incarnate. 
You remember? A man grips a wooden pile with both hands and rams it from above into peace of meat, that lies on a big, flat stone, 
seen in the performance "Just do it".

He is ramming the pile in the nearly always same rhythm onto the piece of meat and over and over and the meat is becoming 
smoother and smoother. This is an archaic fact. Only the fact? How is the difference, and when the poetic act takes over human, 
pile, meat, stone, movement, time and event? What is intensifying the glance? - The wonderful term of the allotropy.

This allotropically view is convulsing, embracing times, and dissolving them at the same time into the timelessness, 
creates a spiritual embarrassment.

You write about communication that often. Communication between you and the others (which ones?) You, fisher of men, you write, 
that you want to make the distance between actor and audience; you want to make this separation vanish. You fisher of the cheekily. 
Don't you chase the winds? 
And do you really manage? Is this really happening, when I see the images, the video of the performance "Help me to stick", 
is this distance really nullified?

Or is there not any benefit; are there not hierarchical structures within the performance?
Tougher the question then there:  "Considering the ethical attitude of the artists opposite the society".

This is throwing me into a dilemma?
Is this one, I call it here critical composure of opposition to another position, both within the society? Does not society 
include position(s) and opposition(s) at the same time and equalized and does thus only form society? 
And where is then the "ArtZone"? Position, Opposition, both? 

Maybe both, because you perform all classical institutions and alike the "public space" with your art. Is the "ArtZone" possible? 
Or is it then a zone, being a strategically element within the "making-off" art (creating of a product) and no essential happening?

And then the service - again, one question chases the other, that I feel burning for. You wrote. "The Artist is to the Service 
of the Community"- YESYESYES - NO.
The same question as asked above: can service be "given"? And. Did not yet every service had to capitulate, because it fell 
mandatory into a form of mimicry? 
Positive experiences with the service, that I made, where to be found, shown - there as to be representing the "Service as 
the trans-artistically technique /creation of frameworks/blueprints) of a transitive communication".

When the service is to be seen and understood as the publication between two and/or more systems of values (or believes) , 
that are to be found within an action, then each system of values does need forms of translation (instruments, methods, a codices) 
that can be called service. Has this to be achieved and guaranteed by the artist? Does one not need a framework of a social art 
and not (only) single persons (to take the image of the artist in such relevant questions a little aback)?

How is the service within the communication of the diverse and multiple cultural systems to be seen?

When I am wrong, please correct me. Me as well, I do consider the principle of service to be very important, as well in the 
necessary regards to neutralize the egocentric position of the artist, to embed him into the socio-cultural functions and not 
(only) to be dominated by the art. Transitive communication per se. 

Yes, my dear Clemente, this would be talks, word and vine should flow, would flow as all these my burning questions.

You are standing there in front of 16.000 people - is this your fan club? How do you communicate with 16.000 people? What is 
there to be read by Vigo, by Marin, have to watch out and to read, what you did write about them? (I think, they gave you truly 
very much). You wrote so much, opened doors and windows wide for the experimental poetry and the art of action in your country. 
Already 1969, you did publish the magazin"OVUM" (or published its 10th edition). 
Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay a burning, eruptive Latin-American triangle. 

The desire. More! To dive deep into the things, to become and equal them. 
And when I then try to imagine, that and how in this time the situation in this triangle must have been, then the story comes to 
my mind, that I once wrote down:

"It had snow. The ravines, fields and trees were white, and the white of the first snow did often confuse the birds, and they 
loose orientation.
Suddenly a bird was hitting the windscreen. In the back mirror Yves saw, how it fell to the ground. Yves stopped and drove back 
a little. It was a little bird, a little robin, confused, but still alive, its eyes blinked. I took it into my hands, out of the snow, 
it was warm in my hand, very warm, birds do have a higher blood temperature then we, and we drove on. 
From time to time I looked at it. After half an hour it was dead. I took it and put it on the backseat. What surprised me was its weight. 
It was weighing less then before, when I took it up from the snow. I was weighing it in one of my hands then in the other, 
to double-check my impression. As if its energy, when alive, the fight for survival would have increased its weight. 
Now, it was nearly without any weight".

I aligned this story under poetry into the world bank of my memories. 

Back to you, my questions, my thoughts. This letter would expand into the boundless, if I would even more go deeper into all issues 
and already now, all texts that I find from you, longer and longer. As well, especially today, ballast, well adequate for the archive. 
Many questions are asked there, partly answered, but more then to be quoted, your ecological thoughts about the water, the air, 
the contamination of the earth. To point out, to show, to drag into focus, is this what you call service? 

What does zone 1 mean, the magical for the ritual, zone 2, the catharsis for the transnational action and zone 3, the neutral for 
the cleansing, the clarification?
What was with the microbes in the UK? Where did the idea derive from - the incidence, incidental into the British kingdom? 
The language plays along. What is there else that I cannot grasp? But then again thank you, thank you for the report of the: 
"Trip to the old world". Anthrax. Fast topic, rapidly taken, even more taken up on. Beautiful description of the encounter. 
Could see a touristic photo in your documentation. It more then confused me, this photo, but you wrote beautifully about your encounter. 

Then there is something else, my thought streamed, flirred, I was so more then thrilled by the "Juan Maria".

But the real craze is, no questions derived or appeared, an unconditioned yes, out of two, three images a cosmos of options appeared. 
An invasive imagination. I saw the letters, big as men, with and by men dancing and danced thought the streets, saw the letters 
intermingling and saw them thrashing apart again to a salad of letters, I saw a dance like life, a life of Juan and Maria. 
The image shows - Life as energies, an overtaking, and straddling, bubbling, chaotic poetry. The hidden energies into the presence 
of this very two persons trans-incarnated into the quoir of the human voices. In the capillarcells of the choir, this mental net, 
a vortex that I will call image "out of and via and into and around freely streaming ideas". 

And I as well, do love scarecrows, this homey wonderful figures. At the borders of the countries, in the border barracks, one should 
position scarecrows that control the passengers. 

Did I want to write about the encounter, you and me? 

What else did happen?
Right now I hear in the radio: that in the year 1955 it was allowed per law in Germany (mostly in the schools) the put the word 
I in front of the sentence. 

Then
It dreamt to me in those days, where I write this letter to you, a dream: We were in a haven areal and spoke about humans and 
their relationship to their houses, and that every human should have a house, that every human should leave his house, but that 
every human somehow need his house, that he should take it along and that he somehow always does take it along, no matter in which 
form it did incarnate. What is with the human and "his" house? 

We spoke about, that we should show it as a performance and we built a house out of panel sheets. Big enough for a human, that he can 
tand comfortably init, the house without windows, with a Luke on the rooftop to enter, that can be locked. From the outside we painted it 
"light-not-too-light blue" In the middle of the roof, a big, strong bail. Inside a construction where someone could grab, to protect oneself. 
You entered it from the above. A crane drew the house up high and started to swing it. When it was really swinging, the crane let it go 
free and the blue house was flying with you inside far out and aways over onto the ocean. 
- Just do it -

I awoke from this big picture and fell afterwards into a deep sleep. 

There you stand, now, in this cold, grey in the rain wet slight fog, on this November morning, cold and freezing, drops dripping heavily 
from the branches, in this earliness, and then this eyes. How could I only at all put the length of this moments into words, the glance, 
the offered hand and your outspoken name? 
Arrived after years. 
This glance created as well this "spiritual embarrassment".

To take the suitcase, come, to offer a hot shower, then a hot coffee - so good that you are here. 

Boris Nieslony 
April, May 2009

1. George Brecht, Fluxus artist,  died 2008
2. Robert Musil, poet

Translation: Sibyll Kalff, May 2009