Esther Ferrer
RATIONALIZE THE PLACE

Esther Ferrer describes a moment in her working process in the early 80s, when she was tired of arbitrary artistic methods and knew that she had to make a transition to working with numbers:

After several years of working with geometric structures, defined according to my own criteria, one day I had the desire to create structures in which my own esthetic preferences would play a secondary role. I wanted free structures capable of evolving by themselves, following their own internal logic. One day, after having tried several possibilities without results, I had a dream about prime numbers, and I decided to work with them. This was the beginning of the series El Poema de los numeros primos.1

From the beginning of this work, she was fascinated with the infinity of the series of prime numbers and frustrated by the limits of the paper and canvases and other surfaces on which she drew them. In a single wall hanging one can place a grid of more than a thousand units, containing more than a hundred prime numbers, but the observer must stand rather close, the structure is more to be read than to be seen, and as a gallery experience, such works can seem rather private and rather strange. A few times, as in the installation at the Fondation Danae (Pouilly, France), Apollohuis (Eindhoven, Holland) or Galeria Trayecto (Vitoria, Espagne), Esther Ferrer was able to extend her sequences into architectural spaces, and the result was much more satisfying for her. Floors and walls and plazas are not infinite either, but they stretch out and flow and go beyond frames, and they somehow seem more appropriate to the prime number series than small contained spaces.

Esther Ferrer continued to find new sets of rules for connecting the prime numbers and for showing the spaces between them, and this became practically an obsession in her work for the next few years, an obsession that resulted in over a hundred different pieces of many different sizes, shapes, and materials. Sometimes she began at the upper left and worked down, as with normal writing, sometimes she began in the center and spiraled out, sometimes she began as one normally does, with 1 2 3…, and sometimes she skipped the lower numbers and began with 1000 or 4000 or 15.000.000. Usually the structures have a rather loose improvisational quality, because of the curious way that the prime number sequence evolves, but a couple of Ferrer's most remarkable pieces create a regular long line, because they spiral out from 41, 43, 47 …, following an observation of the Mathematician Stanislav Ulam. This great variety in her prime number series is one of the things that most interested her as she was doing it:

The first thing that surprised me in working with prime numbers was that whatever system I used, the result was always beautiful, and the second thing was that this result was more and more beautiful as I progressed further and further in the prime number series. As the surface became larger, the result became more beautiful and the structure more varied, never symmetrical, always moving. This is the reason for which I always thought of realizing these works on a monumental scale as floors, walls, tapestries and such. When one enters the universe of prime numbers, one has the feeling that this is a numerical translation of some magnificent universal chaos, which is continually changing, never equal, but yet always the same: a chaos inside of which there is order - a very strange bizarre order. The work with prime numbers is fascinating and at the same time very reassuring, very detailed (I am never sure that I have completely avoided errors) and certainly obsessive, so obsessive, in fact, that I arrived at a point where I had to abandon this work, at least for a certain time. Trying to probe the mystery of the hypothetical and curious order that I imagined could exist in chaos, I risked going very far, even too far… arriving at some point where no return will be possible.

Mark the Place

Why do we want to mark specific places? Sometimes it is to commemorate or make sacred a place, as when we make a monument or a tomb. Sometimes we simply want to indicate ownership, as when we build a fence or make a national border. But sometimes we just like to mark spaces, empty spaces, spaces that interest us. This part of the catalogue is more like that. First there are the Napoleon triangles, which demonstrate a theorem originated in the era of the emperor, though surely not his own invention.2 A new place has been found and marked, a space that has no sentimental meaning, no legal significance, just a place that defines a curious geometrical fact.

Spaces occupied by works of art are usually defined by frames, and this way of marking places has been of particular interest for Esther Ferrer over the years. In the post-Duchamp world, it is we who decide what is artistic, it is we who place the frames, and by placing frames around nothing, as Esther Ferrer sometimes has, this idea is carried to its logical conclusion. It is not a nihilistic conclusion, however. When frames frame other frames that frame other frames that frame other frames, the logic is imbedded on many levels, and the frames themselves become artistic objects. Sometimes, when there is something inside of one of Esther Ferrer's frames, but it is usually just an objet trouvé, just a non-artistic object, which becomes artistic because we choose to see it that way, and there we are, back with Marcel Duchamp. And when a Ferrer frame is done on a large scale, like five meters by five meters, as was the case in the 1999 Venice Bienal, where the spectators could stand on either side of a large gold frame, could step through the frame, could make their own transitions from art to reality and reality to art, could look at other people doing the same thing, and look at themselves in the mirror at the same time, then the whole gallery and everyone in it somehow becomes a work of art.

Animate the Place

Performance has been the real focal point of Esther Ferrer's work, especially since the mid-60s, when she joined Juan Hidalgo and Walter Marchetti in the group ZAJ. In many cases her performances have been presented in theaters and museums, because performance art and sound poetry events are usually presented in such places, but when possible, she has often preferred to move completely outside the framework of art and to employ her artistic ideas to animate non-artistic places, to construct events in the streets of Venice, in la Rue Marcel Duchamp in Paris, on the beaches at Amalfi and San Sebastiàn, in the plazas of Reggio Emilia. As the last decade of the century passed, she found herself saying more and more often, "Art is in the street." This is of course a reflection of John Cage, whom Esther Ferrer knew well, and who was an important influence for her, as for the whole Fluxus generation. It was Cage, more than anyone else, who allowed noise to penetrate the sacred space of music, who redefined "silence," who demonstrated that it was better not to separate art from life, since the two are destined to coexist in any case, and visual artists like Esther Ferrer have conveyed this message in visual terms. One of the most important characteristics of art objects in the past is that they have always been inanimate things, intended to be placed in museums, museums that are essentially tanks of formaldehyde, where dead artifacts are preserved. Life, on the other hand, breathes, moves, dies, refuses to be conserved, and as living beings, we of course identify more with life than with death.
In her art objects, as well as in her performances, Esther Ferrer has consistently chosen the temporary rather than the permanent. She has never worked with stone or bronze, always preferring fragile materials like paper and thread, and in fact, many of the maquettes and structures that she made in the 60s and 70s have already torn, crumbled, been replaced, or otherwise disappeared. It was not that the artist didn't care about these objects. She simply did not place great value on their eternal existence, and found it more important to go on to the next idea.
But just as Esther Ferrer's living breathing performance art can animate non-artistic spaces, her ephemeral art objects can live and breathe in museums, without drowning in the formaldehyde, and this is particularly clear in her installations. Consider, for example, the "Silhouettes," installed at Koldo Mixelena in San Sebastian in 1997. Seeing this piece in a museum - three thick ropes suspended from the ceiling with almost mathematical precision in three concentric circles - one has the impression that they are just ropes. They have not been submitted to any manipulation, and after the exhibition they can easily return to their normal context, perhaps attaching boats to piers. Of course, someone may wish to present this installation again, and in fact, it was presented a few months later at the Museum of Modern Art in Seville. In such cases the installation may be made with the same ropes, or with other ropes if the ones used earlier are not available, and in this way the installation is always the same, but always different as well. In all cases, however, the ropes are just ropes, and become works of art only for a few months. But as we already noted, art is mainly in the street, and a better example of Esther Ferrer's metaphysics can be seen in the photograph of the 13 people sitting in chairs on one of the streets of Reggio Emilia (page …). The sun is shining, and it would be quite a normal day in Reggio Emilia, and quite a normal street, except that those 13 people all have sticks of bamboo balanced on their heads. Those 13 sticks animate the whole situation, transform the scene into a work of art, transform the bamboo sticks themselves into art.
Like the ropes, the sticks of bamboo had only a very temporary existence as art objects, and they soon returned to reality. But where is this reality? Well, someday after the exhibition, Esther Ferrer might very well give you one of those sticks of bamboo, if you needed one to support one of your house plants and then, as you look at your healthy upright begonia, solidly propped up by the bamboo stick, you will know that the rope and the stick are not like other ropes and sticks. They will still somehow have the feel of art, and the whole atmosphere around these objects will be animated in a new way. Text for Ferrer's exhibition Galérie Satellite (Paris) Le Poème des nombres premiers II. If one takes an arbitrary triangle and constructs equilateral triangles from each side, either on the inside or on the outside, the centers of these three secondary triangles will form an additional equilateral triangle. De la accion al objeto y viceversa - exhibition at Koldo Mitzelena Kulturunea in San Sebastiàn 1997, and at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporàneo, Sevilla