As if it were / One leaves that directly

Société / Brussels, 1999

Mark1

UV print on paper

100 x 70 cm

“As if it were” is a statement made by Lawrence Weiner for an edition published by Nicole and Herman Daled. The sentence “As if it were” was translated using the AltaVista algorithm in 1999: while changing languages, the meaning of the sentence has changed. The artist then stopped the process at "One leaves that directly".

As if it were (1999) by the Brussels artist Alec De Busschère is a good example of an approach that refers directly to the practice and formats of conceptual art, while extrapolating them to our time, to the use of tools and to the reference to contemporary subjects. Here, the starting point of the working process is a quote from Lawrence Weiner, "as if it were", going back to this work on language but using a technology which, unknown in the 1960s, is now an integral part of our language practice. In fact, each line of the work corresponds to a new automatic translation using the AltaVista algorithm. After 22 iterations through French, Italian, German, etc., the original quote became: "one leaves that directly". Reading it line by line, the viewer witnesses this transformation of meaning step by step, the failure or error of the system. He is thus confronted with the self-poetry of an algorithm which, in spite of the determined rules, fails to convey the correct meaning, but rather, as it develops, submits another one. The hypothesis put forward by the quotation begins to resonate. The "if" becomes the starting point for associations and reflections: as if it were understandable, as if it were a human being, as if it were a language, as if it were a work of art... In this way, De Busschère adopts Weiner's principle, which gives the spectator the role of interpreter, while drawing him into an overhaul of the process and into the absurdity that results from it, an absurdity that is further reinforced by the technological obsolescence of a piece that is nevertheless recent, a relic of an era. We can assume that relaunching the same process today would reveal a different meaning, an updated meaning, a witness of another era.

Manuel Abendroth

"Daily Computations", L'Art Même, n°74, Novembre 2017, p. 21.

Mark2