PAKSA

THE TENNIS MATCH

Exibitions

Credits

Video Text

Participants

In 1997, I presented Project 1967, "THE TENNIS MATCH", in the Perspective Room of the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art. On the floor, I outlined a tennis court with sidelines made of neon lights; the net was four metres high, obviously preventing the game from proceeding. At each side of the net, there was a sign which said intermittently "you are a winner" and "you are a loser", so everybody realised that they were observing a peculiarly symbolic game.

A large screen projected a video entitled "TENNIS" while I read from a text.
The images projected were created with the Adobe Premier PC Program. At the end, the video showed me standing, from the back, and with a bar-code on my neck, indicating the inevitable social label, the excessive dualism in the ruling contemporary neo-liberalism that was increasingly dominating the productive sectors of society.

The net was opposed to nothing other than the concept of WINNER - LOSER games. The video text compared this sport situation with our culture full of opposites such as:

success - failure
rational - irrational
body - mind
intuition - intellect
technology - nature

as if they were paradigms. Mankind tends to represent ideas in terms of antinomy. Binary logic and similar dual relationships still control computer science, linguistics, structuralism and even psychoanalysis. In this project I wanted to expose our western ideological concept, reinforced by Christianity with the opposition of GOD and DEVIL. We may be approaching the belief that such a highly competitive context is the only one possible and that the whole world is based on a gigantic"unavoidable" antagonism.
We must ask ourselves whether the economic world is real or not," a pure and perfect world" displaying the logic of its foreseeable consequences, ready to repress either automatically or individually. We must also wonder whether neo-liberalism would establish a utopia or rather be transformed into a political program, a utopia only imagined by the scientific description of reality.

The final basis of this economic order is the structural violence of underemployment, precarious economic conditions and the threat of job losses.

Tension, opposition, polarity and binary logic still structure our way of thinking and feeling even though the illusion of a truly great change has already vanished into thin air.