Anagrams of Desire
(Thus, their reference, though kept secret, is no less objective. To encrypt is not at all, in the first place, to feign; quite the opposite, isn’t the cipher strategically destined to insure the authenticity—as much as the secret—of the message?)
— Anne Garréta, Not One Day (Pas un jour). Dallas: Deep Vellum Publishing 2017, p. 107
Ana Jotta, installation view, On peut...On peut encore..., Wiels, Brussels, 2024, photo by We Document Art.
A pattern does not emerge. You either see it or you don’t. It is there: on and off, in and out of sight—to be continued like a line of thought. Once you have been to a few of her exhibitions and come across a number of her works, you might think there is nothing, really, that draws them together: are all of these Ana Jotta’s? You might buy into the story, fall for the idea of their elusiveness, that the artist is underappreciated, too hard (and too fast) to catch.
It is pretty much unavoidable. But it is not the only way of looking at Jotta’s work, thinking with and against it. This past year’s exhibitions at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco [1], Kunsthalle Zurich [2], and Wiels in Brussels couldn’t have stood farther apart. And where the exhibition in Zürich, curated by Miguel Wandschneider, focused on introducing Jotta to a wider audience (its opening strategically coincided with Zurich Art Weekend and Art Basel), the exhibitions before and after, in San Francisco and Brussels, were based on an expanded concept of “drawing” in Jotta’s work. Curated by Wandschneider and Anthony Huberman together, the San Fransisco and Brussels shows were accompanied by a dialogue between the two of them—effectively breaking with the “soliloquies” that took place in all three cities.
Ana Jotta, installation view, Composição, 2024, Kunsthalle Zürich, photo by Cedric Mussano.
Soliloquy is a work, the translation of Fala-Só, a foldable, expandable forty-meter “scroll” on blue twill, following a solitary figure as (s)he manages a square rectangular shape—a sheet of glass it turns out—moving across the canvas as if crossing the street. The scroll meanders through the second space of the Wiels show like a comic strip, around the square pillars, to create a room inside the room where you can see the other side of the piece. The working class figure walking along the blue fabric is drawn in bleach, bleeding through the material in tones of white and pink: more luminescent where more of the stain remover was applied, blurring the outlines with occasional drips, ma(s)king what is fixed unsharp and dirty as clean.
Soliloquy is also not a work, but the title of Jotta’s second exhibition with greengrassi in London [3], where the blue banner was shown after its 2018 debut at Temporary Gallery in Cologne [4]. In San Francisco, Zurich, and Brussels, the invitation for this show is connected by a piece of string to another postcard, printed for her first London show Don’t flinch, don’t fall, leave the light on (2019), a cutout image of a teapot [5] with the initials AJ perforated or dotted onto it. Drawn directly onto the wall, two plumes of steam exit its nose that resembled an upward (somewhat) and downward (without doubt) looking J, with a small circular cloud in the middle. All three of them are executed in charcoal and blue marker/oil stick, as if tracing each other.
Ana Jotta, Chuva da Tarde (Afternoon Rain), 2008. Pen marker and acrylic paint on portable projection screen. Never the Less, 2023, CCA Wattis Institute, photo by Nicholas Bruno.
What surprises me during and after some months of looking again and again at the works in the exhibitions and the images thereof is the way(s) in which Jotta draws the line: a defiant refusal, saying “no” to the idea of a single, steady stroke, set once and never to change again—her rejection of any shape that is not also an aperture: drawing escaping itself by withdrawing.
One. The temporality of the wall drawing(s) saves them from their originality, from having to be identical with themselves. Drawn and redrawn, their uniqueness is at odds with notions of the singular and value as we tend to see them: “this movement, which is as it were a kind of swirling of dust taking a particular form, becomes visible to our eyes only through what it has collected along its way, it is no less true that other bits of dust might as well have been raised and that it would still have been the same whirlwind.” [6] Jotta’s clouds of steam, like speech bubbles, can look and sound a bit different every time they are placed, every time they are uttered, more or less like a J—jay.
Two. It is suddenly inherently necessary or unavoidable that the images Jotta must use, and draws from, exist already and are appropriated, but in a peculiar sense: less as ghosts we live with (Jan Verwoert) [7], or dedication (Isabelle Graw) [8], but rather as repetitions, rehearsals—lifelines. The Dutch farmer girls, in traditional garb with hats and clogs and tulips, dancing the polka atop an unfolded, decorated sheet of wallpaper in a 1987 Untitled work, are continuations of the black-and-white images on an old storage jar that was given to Jotta. Some of the girls have colored dresses; others are rendered as outlines like the tulips underfoot. Their pattern is extended to a much smaller drawing from 1991 where the flowers reappear in black ink on paper, while, just the opposite, the dancers are suggested fully as dots in a paint-by-numbers, to be continued in the mind, in principle.
Three. Another way of saying what I am trying to say: that the line(s) are always a meeting point. Perhaps the three drawings of a toilet paper puppy that were part of the Wattis exhibition illustrate this best: the dog’s contours overlaid, but not exactly matching, in black and red, suggesting movement, 3D notepads, cinema. Tripping over itself, the cute creature actually seems to be picking up speed. In another series of large-scale cartoonish drawings of militant rats Pontinha, Estação Rateira (Rat Station, 2010), the mismatch between outline and coloring-in blurs the foreground and background, causing a kind of double vision. Both schematic and unfinished, sketchy and analytical, Jotta’s expanded drawing situates itself as a response to the all-pervasive medium of print and reproduction, copying, emulating, and sticking to an outline while at the same time breaking with it, leaving traces, whether you know the sources or not. In the language of Jean-Luc Nancy: “it appropriates itself.” [9] In terms of perspective, it is no longer so clear where you ends and je begins.
And although ‘je’ is not how the letter J is pronounced in French, there is something (someway, somehow) in favor of misreading the pronoun in Ana Jotta’s several Que sais-je? screenprints, as they appeared in the Zurich and Brussels shows and her exhibition at Immanence in 2022 [10]. Referring to a collection of instructive, pre-internet micro-encyclopedias, a French precursor of the “for dummies” booklets that explain a topic to the general audience [11], the use of this title sits somewhere appropriately between a quotation and an expression, straddling what is authored and what is not.
Ana Jotta, Que sais-je?, 2011. Silk-screen print on kitchen towel. Installation view, Composição, 2024, Kunsthalle Zürich, photo by Cedric Mussano.
Recognizing if something is uttered or asked often depends just intonation and punctuation. The act of questioning in the Que-sais-je? prints—or rather, the language of questioning—aligns with the types and characters that appear in Jotta’s work: the figure of the clown, holding up the mirror to society, stubborn or stubbornly industrious and animals like the donkey (Âne in French), the ant operating in file, misunderstood, outsiderish, intermediate states such as smoke, clouds, rain. Smoke can really coil into the shape of a “J”. Some umbrellas, the ones you walk around with like a cane, do open up into the tenth letter of the alphabet, if you want to see it that way. And this is something that, in the universe of Ana Jotta, cannot be ignored.
The trademarked J that Jotta sees and makes us see in so many places and situates in so many of her pieces, which she has decided to sign her work with—because in Portuguese, the letter J happens to sound like jotta—is not just obsessive, funny, or a practical joke. It is an experiment, as linguistic as it is realistic, and how a fragment or detail explodes into the framework of her practice as a whole. Just imagine hearing your name called out in a crowd (you will look up, around you, as will others). Remember that time you stumbled upon a book titled after a family member, lover, or best friend: we are effectively trained to listen to our given names like a dog.
Ana Jotta, installation view, On peut...On peut encore..., Wiels, Brussels, 2024, photo by We Document Art.
And although none seem to do it as pervasively, there are a few other artists who make work of this, in distinct ways of formal and informal experimentation. On her (regularly discontinued) Instagram, Diamond Stingily has been posting the photos friends sent her of shops, bars, and venues with “Diamond” in their name. Hans Schabus has poked at the everyman character of his own first name with his Café Hansi, an artist bar decorated with what seemed a family of mugs, teddybears, posters, and other objects with the name “Hans” which he collected over a fifteen-year period, functioning as a semi-permanent exhibit at the mumok in Vienna for several year [12].
One could say that Ana Jotta has made one single letter in the alphabet her own—but also that she already lost her name to it. We never choose to be called A or J. Someone else does that for us and gives us this name instead of another. No one owns the alphabet. It belongs, on the contrary, to everyone. Rewriting her name the way she wants, the repetitive recognizing of this J is an act of reclaiming what we never wanted and never had anything to say about, with an exclamation mark !
Footnotes:
[1] Never the Less, The Wattis Institute, San Fransisco, Sept 7 to Nov 11, 2023.
[2] Composição, Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich, June 8 to Sept 15, 2024.
[3] Soliloquy, greengrassi, London, Dec 1, 2022 to Jan 14, 2023.
[4] DAS – IST – DAS ?, Temporary Gallery, Cologne, April 22 to July 15, 2018.
[5] Untitled (2023-2024) is the only work that appeared in San Francisco, Zurich and Brussels. While the piece was otherwise identical, in Zurich the teapot was missing.
[6] Henri Bergson, “Philosophical Intuition” (Lecture given at the Philosophical Congress in Bologna, April 10th, 1911), in Key Writings (eds. Keith Ansell Pearson & John Mullarkey). London: Continuum 2002, p. 236.
[7] Jan Verwoert, “Living with Ghosts—From Appropriation to Invocation in Contemporary Art,” in originalcopy: Post-Digital Strategies of Appropriation (eds. Michael Kargl and Franz Thalmair). Berlin/Boston: Edition Angewandte/De Gruyter 2019, pp. 152-157. Originally published as “Apropos Appropriation: Why stealing images today feels different,” Art & Research 1, no. 2 (2007).
[8] Isabelle Graw, “Dedication replacing appropriation. Fascination, subversion, and dispossession in appropriation art” (“Wo Aneignung war, soll Zueignung werden. Ansteckung, Subversion und Enteignung in der Appropriation Art”), Louise Lawler and others (ed. Philip Kaiser). Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz 2004, pp. 45-67. Reprinted in Remastered. Die Kunst der Aneignung/Remastered. The Art of Appropriation (eds. Florian Steininger & Verena Gamper). Krems/Berlin: Kunsthalle Krems/Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König 2017, pp. 77-91.
[9] Jean-Luc Nancy, “Painting in the Grotto,” in The Muses (trans. Peggy Kamuf), Stanford: Stanford University Press 1996, p. 70, 89. Cf. p. 96: “I recognize there that I am unrecognizable to myself, and without that there would be no recognition. (...) The traced figure presents all that.”
[10] A comme encre as part of Festival d’Automne, Immanence, Paris, Oct 8 to Nov 12, 2022.
[11] Que sais-je? (Wikipedia).
[12] Hans Schabus, Café Hansi, mumok, 17.03.2017 – 25.09.2022. I am also thinking here of how Marcel Broodthaers’s M.B. can become a work in and of itself, and Ulises Carrión’s project Rob and Marta (1983), a mail art piece only addressed to and asking for responses from people named Rob, Marta and variations thereof: the rule for this correspondence, of course, was broken by contributors with other names who still wanted to take part.
