Inertia and Mass. Configurations of the Collective Actant in the Work of Isaac Cordal

Abstract

This contribution aims to investigate the work of Isaac Cordal, a street artist, sculptor, photographer and video-maker engaged on various thematic fields: from climate change to Euro-parliamentarianism, from education to finance, from biodiversity to palm oil, his work, in a more general framework, is an epochal reflection on the human condition.
The artist’s installations, implemented in urban and exhibition contexts, are displayed under the regime of miniaturization. Sculptures of men about six inches tall, bald and ugly middle-aged, are mass-produced and placed in spaces that, in the change of scale, become the terrain of a scene of contemporary wandering. Mostly in suits and ties, with a more or less leading part of system functionaries, these little men stand together, like insects, in the blind movement of the cluster. Isolated even in groups, without past or future, busy or motionless, we find them immersed in debris or up to their necks in water, in an act that seems to anticipate the epilogue.
In the river-form of Cordal’s work, we face the mass, as a collective actant, and the drama of the most impersonal of enunciations is revealed. The various expressive solutions lead us to reason about different aspects describing forms of the collective: from organisation to the mediation of devices, from the identity of individual actors to the configuration of a shared world, from mereology to narrative horizons. What is on stage, everywhere, is a humanity adrift, as a being-together on the verge of extinction, towards the totally extrinsic and inertial disintegration of the individual. Our analysis turns to the poetic elaboration of this limit case of the collective actant, in consideration of the entire corpus of installations attested in the artist’s official website. Just as in the illness, rather than in the state of health, we become aware of the functioning of an organism, so it is in the crisis of the collective that Cordal shows us the dynamics of its functioning. In his art, on the other hand, there is no catharsis, and what we observe has the appearance of a demonstration, by absurdity, of the forgotten chorus of human comedy.