On balance

Can a tightrope walker be a warrior? Can you maintain your balance above the vast ocean of contingent anxieties while at the same time managing to cut deep into the ideas you've taken for granted, to strike poetic blows, to touch the heart? When you chat with Mircea Cantor, you are stunned by the distance he knows how to take from everything he would be told, from any familiar ground you would like to bring up. It's simply disarming! Mircea is that warrior of the symbolic fields evoked by René Daumal when he describes the relentless battle he wages "with the tumult of lies and multiple illusions". Daumal fights his battle with his own poetic conscience and his desire for truth as his weapons, which he calls "his little razor-sharp sword": "I never know where I put it. Then, when I find it again, it seems to me that it hangs heavy and is difficult to wield, my little sword of destruction". René Daumal says of the use of the word "war", which hangs heavy over the spring of 1940: "It will be known that I am serious and that these are not just noises I make when I open my mouth"^1.

Mircea Cantor works on the load of true meanings, which he chisels to give it the poetic force capable of awakening. He shares with the Japanese art of haiku poetry the insatiable demand for fairness and perfection and the longing for essential simplicity. Mircea practises Chinese painting, and this contributes to the intuitive concentration of poetic forces towards which all his attention is directed. The titles of his works bear witness to this justness. Often they announce a change(Lanscape Is Changing, I Decided not to Save the World, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi or Don't Judge, Filter, Shoot) or add a codicil to what is visible and without which the work would not reach its completion: Talking Mirrors is a cowboy hat filled with petrol, With a Free Smile presents a clay coffin as a piggy bank. Cantor knows his art history, recognizes his predecessors, but no trace of citation in his work. Nor any reference or rumination on contemporary art standards.

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By its very use, the sieve is an object placed at the very boundary separating heaven from earth. Gold or diamond prospectors shake it in a frenzy to sift out the coveted nuggets of what will return to the dust. In English, the word 'sieve' means an area dotted with holes, and in colloquial English it refers to the rags of the destitute, punctured as if they had been the target of machine-gun fire. The work Don't Judge, Filter, Shoot, produced for the Marcel Duchamp Prize exhibition at the Pompidou Center, takes the form of a monumental rosette made up of hollowed-out sites. The filter is a parable of our capacity for judgment and discernment, which is depicted here as imprecise, imperfect, altered, capable of letting through only the essential. The sites are grouped six together, in reference to the recent discovery of graphene, a highly conductive form of graphite crystal, said to be two hundred times stronger than steel. Its structure, in six conductive yet invisible points, is mysteriously echoed in the motifs of the handicrafts.

On the edges of the vertically arranged sites are placed concrete and gold bullets. Mircea Cantor pays attention to the material of the objects he produces. Concrete, often synonymous with hardness and longevity, echoes Seven Future Gifts. It is both a material reviled by those who have seen cities rise too quickly, and celebrated as an extraordinary invention - the liquid stone that Le Corbusier and other architects concerned with sustainable development have seized upon. The golden bullets are what a marksman saves for special tragic fates. The artist tells us no more. But there is in the melancholy of this work a keen sense of opposites as well as a deep disillusionment. The bullets, whether made of concrete or gold, evoke firing squads, snipers, wars and the death that comes from a distance, unjust and blind. And yet today there are weapons thousands of times more sophisticated than these outdated beasts. Only the latter belong to an iconological register that is as explicitly fatalistic as the sinister seams of the skeletons wrapped in their hooded cloaks.

Future, expectation, the immeasurable multiplicity of premonitions - The Need for Uncertainty, Unpredictable Future, Ciel variable. The Need for Uncertainty, so present in Mircea Cantor's work, sometimes also appears in the exact sciences, which are totally alien to the thinking born of the "humanities". These are joined by the "uncertainty principle", enunciated at the timid beginnings of quantum mechanics, or even the "uncertainty triangle", which is a principle of astronomical navigation. In Mircea Cantor's work, uncertainty is also a concrete, tangible poetic element. It is the expression of irreducible power, of permanent rebirth. The Epic Fountain, three ten-meter-high columns made of gold safety pins grouped together to form the double helix structure of the A.D.N.- is the monument celebrating mankind in permanent potential mutation since the discovery of the human genome, which the artist interprets as the opening pages of a Homeric adventure.

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Citiți textul integral în nr 6/2012 al revistei Arhitectura / Read the full textin issue no 6/2012 of Arhitectura magazine