Texto del catálogo personal de Esther Ferrer , publicado con ocasión  de la Bienal de Venecia de 1999.


"So, without a doubt, I did well, yes, well enough, in not moving from my post as observer. But instead of observing, I had the weakness to return mentally toward the other, to the man with the cane. Then the murmurs were heard again. To reestablish silence; that is the role of objects.”

Samuel Becket, Molloy

That's what history is reduced to. A series of lost chances. We had all the pieces from the start, but nobody knew how to put them together."

Paul Auster, The Palace of the Moon

Sitting on a chair in the utmost silence, Esther Ferrer places an object upon her head. Without making the least expressive gesture, she balances it there for an indeterminate amount of time. It is an easily recognizable, familiar object. We might even say, banal. Its use doesn't respond to any kind of symbolic need. Nor to any fetishism or aesthetic quality. The insignificance it exudes is absolute, although no less so than any of our most sacred ideas or habits. After a few minutes the object is removed and replaced with another. The process is executed in silence, not a word is spoken.

While the artist carefully places a large glass on her head, we try to find the hidden mechanism by which the object was chosen. Entering that secret dynamic, we try compulsively to discover the raison d'être which, in the language of logic and the syntax of reason, could justify - even in a crude and clumsy manner - what is in truth always unjustifiable: the presence of some things that, despite acquiring life through our presence, are fully independent of it.

The effort is in vain. The objects succeed one another and the sandcastles built of our ideas crumble precipitously as the artist places them on her head. As a consequence of this, everything is reduced to dust. On breathing it, we become aware that it is the same dust that Marcel Duchamp accumulated and that John Cage scattered trough sound. On the artist's head both artists overlap and intertwine. And they do so from tangential fields. During one of the many moments in which they are superimposed on the virtual chess game of thought, an alarm clock rests in precarious balance on Esther Ferrer's head. Its stability is similar to that achieved earlier by hammers and feathers. Following all of these objects, a roll of toilet paper invites us to clean our view. Seeing that we don't see, time passes in silence.

Objects and dust, dust of objects, ashes of signs, timeless silences... the puzzle undoes itself in our hands while it tries to be put together. Why these obj....? The question hasn't been found and isn't even formulated in full, when it dissolves in our mouths, trying to hide its clumsiness. Juan Hidalgo, who as Walter Marchetti reminds us, was born "ZAJ", deconstructs the question from the shadow of one of his first etceteras: " Why ask ‘what for'?" "For what ask ‘why'?" (1) The questions reveal themselves to us as something other than objects. They only sleep in our vision. Nonetheless, the objects, oblivious to the sleeping questions, are ever present. Awake. Enveloping. And also, on the head of Esther Ferrer.

"It is very difficult - commented the alter ego of Rose Sélavy - to chose an object, since, after fifteen days, one ends up either liking or detesting it. One should reach a kind of aesthetic indifference. The choice of the ready-made is always based on indifference as well as an utter lack of taste, good or bad" (2). If we depart from this assumed disinterest - and we do so, moreover, without falling into the customary idolization of the Duchampian message - we can discover to what extent the objects Esther Ferrer usually uses participate in a similar expressive skepticism. Due to the plastic incredulity from which they arise, the objects present themselves as secularized and agnostic, impassive before any sort of trouble of a communicative nature. Stripped of any aura of artistic holiness, they are free of any imposition of meaning in regard to a hypothetical and venerable value of a transcendental nature.

Nevertheless, while this fact characterizes an important part of her work poetically, (though not all, since on some occasions her use of specific objects responds to the ironic-constructive needs of the work itself; for example, the series such as Dans le cadre de l'art , or the corrosive Juguetes Educativos (Educational Games), the emotional imperturbability that the glasses, the hammers, the feathers or the rolls of toilet paper are capable of exuding, should not make us forget something that John Cage himself - basing his thought in Zen - made clear: "We find ourselves in a situation that doesn't coincide with any center, that is to say (...) we are uncentered. In this situation, each thing is what is in the center. There is, therefore, without a doubt, a plurality of centers, a multiplicity of centers. And all of them interpenetrate (...). For a thing, to live means to be in the center. That supposes interpenetration and non-obstruction" (3). At the same time, it also carries with it the "possibility of anything happening", a fact that allows for the "opening from all that is possible and to all that is possible" (4).

For this reason, the objects assume a complex and ambivalent reading (5). They lack a voice but nonetheless speak to us. They are out of place, but their place is central. They flee all sentimentality, but hurt our feelings. They don't possess any idea, but they provoke the riot of our own ideas... They rest on Esther Ferrer's head in silence during an unspecified time. A minute? Perhaps two or three? It hardly matters. Once they attract our attention, they are hidden and replaced by the others. A rose is a rose is a... The glass is now a small television set, and that is now a boat, which is a funnel, which is... The only thing we can be certain of with these objects is their eccentric centrality. While being nothing, they are everything (or, if one prefers, while being everything, they are nothing), time continues to pass slowly, very slowly. Nonetheless, we don't know where it's heading. Our only certainty is perplexity.

In the great book ZAJ of form, dedicated to the “basic principles of composition, its technique, the favorable days to compose, the storing and treatment of ideas and the 48 fundamental kinds of composition,” Walter Marchetti reminds us, among other issues, that “one thing could come after another” (6). Familiar with this assertion, Esther Ferrer shows us its validity. Nonetheless, she does so without passion, elegantly using the impersonal didactic distance with which Magritte indicated that the pipe we all see is not a pipe, since what we see is only a painting, that is to say, language, semblance. Thus one thing gives way to another. Correspondingly, after one object, another arrives. Esther Ferrer''s work is in this way similar to what the characters in a Borges story do, as they carry around an enormous sack full of equipment. This makes it possible for them to show the object they wish to refer to instead of using words. Nonetheless, despite this objectual coincidence in which a shared linguistic phobia can be noted, the comparison with the Borges story should not lead us to any particular conclusion. It is important, for this reason, not to precipitate, since not everything turns out to be so apparently simple. And it isn't simple, from the moment when what one thinks perhaps turn s out not to be what is exhibited, or what is said, or what is silenced.

Let's return to the beginning. Sitting on a chair in the utmost silence, Esther Ferrer places an object on her head. Without making the least expressive gesture, she balances it there for a few moments. This time it is a dustpan. It is easily managed, since its flat and balanced surface permits a comfortable placement. Watching it, we enter the inside of a space in which words have disappeared. We can only confront the things and these, as we know, are our masks. Also our idols. Words now discarded, language suspended, meaning put to sleep, we are left with objects and their shadows. But these shadows are no longer those of ignorance. Chuang Tzu notes: “The purpose of words is to transmit ideas. Once the idea is caught, words are forgotten. Where could I find a man who has forgotten words? It is with him that I would like to speak” (7).

Nevertheless, time passes. Today Chuang Tzu would not have this conversation with a man, but rather with a woman, a woman who, every once and a while, puts an object on her head. And sometimes this object, for example, a small but not in the least bit innocent war toy, by a curious metamorphosis is transformed inevitably into a hyperphallic object of a much more didactic nature. This constant objectual use we are referring to generates a permanent state of linguistic anorexia and/or an expressive-emotional apathy which facilitates the articulation of certain significant mechanisms capable of point in any direction, excepting of course that which possesses an exclusively descriptive value. The work we are confronted with is not one based on either assertion or metaphor. It does not seek to arouse small talk. Nor digression. The semantic operation it impels us to is none other than that which comes from the absence of intermediation. For this reason, these works play with the weight of simplicity, that cut by which one tries to make the discursive into a mere incursion of the obvious.

From this perspective, Esther Ferrer's production in solitary flows through one of the winding channels in that too broad delta propitiated by Fluxus, that area of movements and constant flow that make up a boggy and multiform geography of islets whose points of contact are defined by the differences in their distance. From these, the ZAJ encounter is made, which, if in the intemporal, was always a possibility – as Juan Hidalgo (8) has pointed out time and again, - in the temporal, it was like a bar in which, as Walter Marchetti wrote in one of the cardboard communiqués published in 1966, “people enter, they leave, they stay, they have a drink and leave a tip” (9). This entire framework of references entails the intersection of Duchamp and Cage, Fluxus and ZAJ, Zen and chance, in order to facilitate the failure of unidirectionality. In this sense, the artist herself reflected on ZAJ, indicating that it “does not teach (it is not a school), nor does it deny (it has other things to do), nor affirm (ZAJ affirms itself in being as it is), nor does it demonstrate (ZAJ is indemonstrable), nor des it conquer (the conquerors bore ZAJ, much as dogma, manifestos, theories or long explanations do), nor does it destroy (there is always someone who has a calling for that sort of task), nor does it provoke (people are provoked all by themselves), nor does it amuse (it does not pretend to replace the circus), nor does it bore (although, as Satie said, it is much easier to bore than it is to amuse), nor does it guide (perhaps because it doesn't know the way either), nor does it make one smarter (it trusts that each one will do this work him or herself), nor does it bury (let the dead bury the dead)” (10)

Keeping this appraisal in mind, it can be said that Esther Ferrer assumes a lot of influences in her work, which filter down to the uprooted and anartistic action of a plastic formation in which the binomial art-life is resolved in a non-contradictory fashion. To quote Bonito Oliva's words about Fluxus, that formation is loyal to a new physical and mental space in which the beauty of neutrality prompts the affirmation of a slow form (11). Despite this, nonetheless, we should not forget that the conscious flight from all description and/or deneutralization that our artist proposes does not carry with it the necessary abandon of meaning. Consequently, the objects, which she uses, can assume whatever protagonism they wish since, as has been noted earlier, they are the center of a discourse populated by centers and as such, void of centrality. These objects interweave an indicative manner of speaking; a manner of speaking made up of mute signals and reduced vestiges, of obvious testimonies and non-narrative exhortations, squalid observations and bare indications. A manner of speaking that flees from demonstrating, given that it wants to be circumscribed to showing. For that reason, it is similar to that “Act of humility,” as the experimental poet Felipe Boso entitled one of his poems: a short text in which he says, in his customary laconic tone, “Llamemos / a las cosas / por su nombre: / cosas” – “Let's call / things/ by their name: / things” (12).

Esther Ferrer is not seeking to do more than to establish a silent eloquence sustained in against-rhetoric , an eloquence by means of which the objects cut short any verbosity and abjure any small talk. Loquacity on the wane, all linguistic faith reduced, the artist propitiates this process, sharing through her actions and performances a (specific) space and a (present) time. These elements are transformed, thus, into the chief hubs of an activity that takes place through contact, that is to say, through that presence to which the artist herself has referred so many times. As a result, the object becomes the work of art, the work becomes action, action becomes presence, presence becomes instantaneity, and instantaneity becomes the carefree explosion of things that write only the course of an objectuality that pushes at a vibrant and calm, empty and full, luminous and obscure now.

One object – as we have already noted – leads us to another object, one time transports us to another time. Likewise, one reflection takes us to another reflection. Thus, as Esther Ferrer continues mutely in her chair making not only a peculiar and unpredictable grammar of things, but also transforming herself into a pedestal of pieces whose museum is none other than life itself, the paradoxical mark of Piero Manzoni, though inverted, also makes its weight felt. If at the beginning of 1961 the artist-canner had made his magic bases in order to turn them into pedestals of a body and a world transmuted into work, several decades later, Esther Ferrer metamorphoses the artist into the pedestal of a work that is no longer necessarily placed in the body. That does not mean by any means that the artistic role of the body is rejected (we might think, for example, of a performance like Intimate and Personal, whose objective is the free mediation of the body, whether it is one's own or that of another, and in which the artist reminds us with acid sarcasm – given the phallocentric need for control and mediation – that to mediation – that to execute it “it is not obligatory for men to measure their penises, either erect or not erect” (13). What in truth this exchange of pedestals implies is the displacement of the functions of the artist; removed from all romantic-demiurgical reference, the role suffers a severe and never gratuitous chastening. The artist is limited to behaving like a simple support for her own expiration, at the same time announcing the autumn of her presumed genius. This aspect of her work reflects the keenness with which Esther Ferrer has assumed the commitment to the ephemeral by which she defines her work and her career (14).

This search for that which lacks substance and weight – for that which resists the discourse of gravity – had already been formulated by Cage when referring to Duchamp. In a very short text, the composer wrote: “The rest were artists. Duchamp gathers dust” (15). There is little one can add to a statement of this kind. Once again, although this time responding to Zen resonances, the dust reappears. And along with it, again, so does Esther Ferrer, sitting on a chair and in silence, while she tumbles our sand castles and fortresses of ideas in order to invite us – of course- to experience objects, actions, or even the passing of time as “a pure making read what was never written” a pure “making sound what was never heard” (16). From this perspective, the conquest of lightness to which this objectual syntax pushes us, allows for the intertwining of the meaning of a discourse in which, though a succession of objects, what is revealed is not so much what they carry in themselves but rather the very fact that they happen, that is to say, that the objects all unfold – and erode- within a space and within a time.

It is the movement or course, which permits the outlining of the things, and makes it possible to draw them from the context of their temporality. It is time, once again, that constitutes the dimension in which the things acquire the fragile consistence in which they are clothed, an illogical and absurd consistence that made of clarity, simplicity and austerity not only affirms the existence of an unstable and ephemeral order (17), but also the very uselessness of all order, the weakness of all denseness, the incidental and circumstantial nature of all occurrence. Nonetheless, the time into which we are immersed when we leave our existence – even briefly – is shared with these objects; it is not a time, which could be attributed to time. The succession of instants into which we are submerged and in which, far from any name, we reflect by means of a duration without hours, marks the course of something that does not wish to be time. This period occurs in a space that saunters between the physical and the mental, a space which, far from representation and theatricality, shows us the need for stripping away and dispossession, the inevitability of abandon, the demands of emptiness.

Time arises as an objectual requisite by which vision is articulated and completed. Its protagonism, nonetheless, turns out to be more than contradictory, since what also characterizes many of Esther Ferrer's works is their perhaps not premeditated, but for that reason no less improbable, possibility of ending. For this reason, pieces and actions are constantly postponed or in the best cases, determinedly forgotten. In this regard, for example, one might remember not only some of the many works associated with the measureless series of Numeros primos (Primary Numbers) or performances such as Cara y cruz (Heads or tails) (in which the artist begins her action throwing a series of hand painted coins at the audience in order to assume the performance concluded the day on which the coins return to her hands), but also proposals such as that in the Silla Zaj (Zaj Chair) (in which the viewer is invited to sit on a chair until death do they part). Nevertheless, despite the importance of the temporal factor in these works – whether as an element of closure and/or as a mirror to exhaustion itself – when we speak of the presence of time in Esther Ferrer's work, we are referring to another issue.

If we observe a work in progress like the Autoretrato en el tiempo (Self-Portrait in Time), we confront a temporality that in part approximates that poetic of the moment to which the performance pushes. Based on the circumstantial symmetry of the face and on the constant asymmetry of time, in their structure these” self-portraits pose the conjunction of what is unstable by means of the balance of what is changing. The face with which we identify ourselves – that face which is also the center of an empty center – is only capable of responding to transformation; from there, we csee that its enduring nature is only possible in its capacity for change. Starting from a contradictory game in which transitory identities overlap with fragile presences, Esther Ferrer's work assumes a renewed direction, both in her photo actions and performances and in her objects and installations. Time is transformed into a requirement of the gaze and things are transformed into objectualized duration. The period of time, the course, for its part, disintegrates and multiplies. It is for this reason that once more Cage appears: “Duchamp showed the usefulness of adding something (a moustache). Rauschenberg showed the usefulness of taking something away (De Kooning). Well, we are anxiously waiting for multiplication and division” (18).

Multiplication and division have already arrived. The only necessary requisite to perceive them is to know that knowing is redundant. This is an exercise that, despite its difficulties, Esther Ferrer has been practicing since her association with ZAJ dating from 1967. It is not odd, therefore, that in one of his analyses of the group, the musicologist Daniel Charles should refer to the Zen anecdote that Juan Hidalgo often cited: “'An illustrious man' went one day to see a Zen master “to be instructed in this exceptional philosophy'. The master kindly invited him to a cup of tea while they talked. When the master finished preparing the tea according to the strict ceremonial ritual, he began to fill his visitor's cup and continued pouring the amber green liquid until the cup overflowed. One seeing that he didn't stop, the guest could contain himself no longer and exclaimed, ‘Master, my cup is full!' to which the master responded putting down the teapot, ‘just like this cup, you are full of your own theories and opinions. How can I make you understand Zen if you don't start, at least, by emptying your cup? (19).

Esther Ferrer's actions empty us and in doing so multiply us. Perhaps the importance of their silence resides in this fact. And perhaps it is in this circumstance that we find the cause for the fact that the person now sitting on a chair with an object on her head is no longer Esther Ferrer.

HIDALGO, Juan, De Juan Hidalgo, Madrid, Artes Gráficas Luis Pérez, 1971 pp.s/n. Independently of this first edition the author's text and etcéteras are reprinted in Juan Hidalgo de Juan Hidalgo (1961/1991, Pre-Textos, 1991.  

- Cage, J. op. cit . p. 180.

5 - To this effect, Gloria Collado commented too restrictively, given that an appraisal of this kind should be nuanced: "Esther Ferrer's relationship to objets could be anything but different. Whether a tank or toy, a spoon, a hammer or a cauliflower, each is used as in life, because it is needed, or useful, or simply can be done" - COLLADO, Gloria, "Esther Ferrer. Ante el espectador" - Lapiz (Revista Internacional de Arte), n° 108, January 1994, p. 38.

6 - MARCHETTI, Walter, Arpocrate seduto sul loto , Madrid, Artes Gráficas Luis Pérez, 1968, pp.s/n.

7 - MERTON, Thomas, Por el camino de Chuang Tzu - Madrid, Visor, Alberto Corazón Editor, 1978, p. 157.

8 - HIDALGO, J. op. cit., pp.s/n.

HIDALGO, Juan, ZAJ , Madrid, Conserjería de Cultura y Deportes, Gobierno de Canarias, 1987, pp.s/n.

10 - Ferrer, Esther "Fluxus & ZAJ, in PICAZO, Gloria (Coord). Estudios sobre performances, Sevilla, Centro Andaluz de Teatro/ Productora Andaluza de Programas, Junta de Andalucía, 1993, pp. 44-45. This same text was previously published in Catalan in the collection Estudis escènics Quaderns de l'Institut del Teatre de la Diputation de Barcelona, n° 29 March 1988, pp. 21-34.

11 - BONITO OLIVA, Achille, "Ubi Fluxus ib motus", uin the catalogue for the exhibition Ubi Fluxus ibi motus 1990-1962, Venice, La Biennale di Venezia/Mazzota, 1990 , pp. 13-25 and 26-38.

12 - Boso, Felipe, T de trama, Santander, La isla de los Ratones, 1970, p. 58.

13 - FERRER, Esther - "Intimo y personal, una propositión/ Intimate and personal" in the catalogue for the exhition Esther Ferrer: De la acción al objeto y viceversa, San Sebastián, Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa/ Koldo Mitxelena Sala de Exposiciones, 1997, pp. 68 and 148.

14 - COLLADO, Gloria - "Gauzak/Las cosas/The things" in the catalogue for the exhibition Esther Ferrer... op. cit., pp. 40, 41 and 137.

15 - CAGE, John, Del lunes en un año , México D.F. Ediciones Era, 1974, p. 91.

16 - BARBER, llorenç "Acercamientos varios al fenómeno ZAJ desde el mundo musical" - Catalogue for the exhibition ZAJ , Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 1996, p. 35.

17 - The artist has always worked with objects and space, and has made them into one of the fundamental elements in her actions (...) These objects are used to create situations that are illogical and absurd, but the fact is that the artist also works with the absurd, and she tells us that amid this she tries to construct something: a certain unstable, ephemeral order, that provides a certain balance, although this may also be ephemeral and unstable. The clarity, simplicity and banality of her actions, and the neutral manner and personal indifference with which they are carried out, are features of the installations and objects that she presents, to which we need to add an exhibitional austerity and a poetic thread that is not without a certain irony" AIZPURU, margarita, "Esther Ferrer, ekintzatik objktur, objektutik ekintzara/ Esther Ferrer, de la acción al objeto y vicev ersa/Esther Ferrer, from action to object anbd vice versa" in the catalogue for the exhibition Esther Ferrer... op. cit., pp 23,24 and 133.

18 - CAGE, J., op. cit. (1974), pag.92.

19 - CHARLES, Daniel - "ZAJ: Tao y Postmodernidad" in the catalogue for the exhibition Fuera de Formato - Madrid, Centro Cultural de la Villa, 1983, p. 164.