conquering the impossible
yamashita+kobayashi
Infinity, 2006

Infinity, 2006
video. 4´38˝courtesy rasche ripken, berlin

Appropriately, the exhibition curators have quoted Camus
saying , on the subject of modern man, that “ there is nopunishment as terrible as useless and hopeless labour”.
Postmodern man reviews this statement, and, from within the realm of absurd humour, invests useless labour
with the taks of paving the way to the unlikely. Only he
who takes practices in the absurd is capable of conquering
the impossible, sentenced Unamuno. Because of these
metaphysical and existentialist resonances, absurd humour might well be the very essence of humour, and theonly kind which offers the human being a path towards
overcoming his own condition.
The place of absurd humour in contemporary art islocated at the crossroads of two events; in the first place,the embracing of popular culture by the art discourses
and formats. Postmodernity, in its search for alternatives
to the most rational orthodoxy, championed the recuperation of experiences related to sensory conditions (taste,hearing, smell) which, in ethnographic terms, belong to
the pre-human stage. Dance (let us recall the “Club culture” explosion), song (one can’t open an exhibition withouta live gig these days) or comedy, have been unleashed inorder to nowadays become a part of the equally elitist but
much wider perceptual repertoire of art practices. On theother hand, currently there is a manifest infantilisation of
the artist’s discourse, both in form and in contents. TheTEXT BY MERY CUESTA

371

concepts of mobility, connectivity, and ubiquity, and theimages of a consumers’ society, inoculate a behaviourism
which no-one is safe from: Forever young, I want to be.
Physical and mental maturity are a double-edged sword.
Drawing and humour, as a synonym for spontaneity andadolescence, are recurrent under this social and aestheticpressure. This could explain the reason for the current
success, in the art circuit, of the amorphous, childish
drawing, an impostor of spontaneity.
Yamashita+Kobayashi work with a sense of humour
which couldn’t be further removed from the aesthetic ofapparent carelessness. Love relationship, urban neuroses,
or evasion, are some of the issues delicately alluded intheir works, with a muted sense of humour which comesvery close to the absurd in the sense of the realisationof an effort which precedes absolute infertility. Effort isone of the concepts that buttress the creative process of
this artist couple. Pieces like 1000 Waves (counting andenumerating the sea waves up to 1000), Candy (licking,over 6 months, a sweet the size of a football until it reaches the size of a green pea), are representative of theemphasis on the development of labours with a normallysterile and anecdotal objective. So much for so little ina capitalist society such as the one around is a rotundly
anti-system gesture.
It took 5 days of obsessive walking to trace the symbolof infinity on the grass of a park. The path left after theirstroll is similar to the so called “Desire Paths” which wedraw in cities, short cuts to speed our transit, but also
gestures opposed to the will of the authorities, who trace less convenient itineraries for us. On Flickr, there is agroup dedicated to compiling images of these paths (Desire Paths. But it was Bachelard that set a precedent to thisconcept, in The Poetics of Space, where he examines architecture and urban and domestic spaces from the vantage
point of spontaneous gestures derived form use. Thesepaths cover the Universe, he says, like our own, practised
designs, calibrated to the use of our inner space.
Poetics and need are the two main elements that inform the concept of “Desire Path”. Yamashita + Kobayashi fight the latter (the need) with its opposite: folly. And
this act of refusing use triggers the first element: poetics.
The “Desire Path” of Yamashita + Kobayashi is that ofpractising infinity and conquering the unconquerable.

YAMASHITA+KOBAYASHITEXT BY MERY CUESTA372373