Esther Ferrer: a matter of time

For many years now, Esther Ferrer, 74, has been asking everyone she meets the same question: "What's infinity to you?" This Spanish pioneer of performance art who won the 2008 National Plastic Arts Award says that most people place the answer somewhere near childhood and dreams.

Time, repetition and that infinity that so obsesses her are the main themes of Esther Ferrer. En cuatro movimientos (or, In four movements), a retrospective organized by the Basque Museum of Contemporary Art (Artium) in Vitoria. Although Ferrer is one of Spain's most internationally renowned contemporary artists, her presence in Spanish museums is minimal. The prize she obtained in 2008, she jokes, turned her "from invisible to obscure" in the nation's art galleries. But this new show will take her to the three centers that co-produced it: Artium, Es Baluard in Palma de Mallorca and the Galician Contemporary Art Center in Santiago de Compostela.

A performance is an action the artist carries out live to elicit a response from the audience; spontaneity is the only ruling element. And in Esther Ferrer the form has an unbeatable representative. Last Friday afternoon, as an opener to the show itself, Ferrer offered a half-hour performance of Hablar por andar o andar por hablar (or, Walking for the sake of talking or talking for the sake of walking). Dressed in burgundy (she is still remembered for her nude performances), she paced across the main floor of Artium, sometimes quickly. She walked into the elevator and walked down the stairs, always talking to herself in several languages and looking as though she were about to ask the audience a question.

The retrospective, curated by Rosa Olivares, is as unconventional as Esther Ferrer's own work. Not all her work is there, although all her recurring themes are. The entire show is one big performance. For Olivares, the four pillars of the artist's work converge into a single element: time.

"Time happens infinitely, repeating itself with its presence in an infinite way, taking place and defining a place, a memory, history, oblivion and life," she says. "Memory and oblivion are the building blocks of history: place and repetition define a presence, a body that changes with time and a presence that is our life."

The exhibition opens with El tiempo (or, Time), which contains her best-known series of photographs: Autorretrato en el tiempo (or, Self-portrait in time) and Autorretrato en el espacio (or, Self-portrait in space), together with the installation El hilo del tiempo (or, The thread of time), as well as music scores and documents relating to some of her other performances.

In front of the black-and-white self-portraits that Ferrer started to make in 1981, carrying on until 2009, her face - divided in two halves - becomes a perfect mirror of the passage of time. "Everything changes so much that at first the pictures were taken by a photographer friend of mine in Paris, who specialized in ID card photos. But she retired and I had to find someone else to stare at as I was being portrayed," the artist explains.

A diffuse kind of grey dominates the early portion of the series, progressing towards a deep black before returning to a soft grey. "It's just like in real life. Time is captured right there," she adds.

And then there is the section called El infinito (or, Infinity), something that the artist cannot define. "I think there is no answer, and I despair over the fact that I will die without having understood anything. I think Heraclitus was right and that the cosmos always has been and always will be infinite, but what about us?"

Her fascination with this issue takes up the most visual part of the exhibition, which features her series on prime numbers - those that can only be divided by one or by themselves - and Pi, with its infinite decimals.

La repetición (or, Repetition) comprises the third section of the exhibition. And to Ferrer, repetition is a square. In her piece Recorrer un cuadrado (or, Walking around a square), which lasts one minute, she does just that with an object on her head (alternately a flowerpot, a doll, a phallus or another item). "It is an action that, no matter how exactly you try to reproduce it again and again, with lots of discipline, it never comes out exactly the same," she says.

The same happens in the section dedicated to La presencia (or, The presence), which shows a piece that Ferrer performed at the 1999 Venice Biennale. In it, the spectator walks in and out of a frame as though it were a door. This is what frames art, which in turn frames nothing. What is art? What is in front of the frame or behind it? And above all, what is art? Nothing? "Art manifests itself in many ways. A casual crack can be irresistibly beautiful. We mustn't close off any possibilities or sanctify anything."

As a matter of fact, Esther Ferrer never closes the door on a subject, nor does she condemn anything to oblivion. Before returning to Paris, she talks about a performance she put on several times at the Georges Pompidou Museum. In it, the artist threw one-franc coins at the spectators - for half a minute standing facing them and for half a minute with her back to them. "The performance should have been completed when, years later, the audience was scheduled to come back and throw back those very same coins at me. But then the euro went into effect and the piece remained unfinished," she laments. But she will solve the problem. It's just a matter of time.

Esther Ferrer, En cuatro movimientos. Until January 8 at Artium, c/ Francia 24, Vitoria. www.artium.org