César Aira

This short text by a key contemporary Spanish-American fiction author focuses on two of his chosen themes: the creative process and the relationship between visual art and literature. César Aira addresses them from the perspective of the writer who seeks inspiration, stimuli and methods in art. He has become quite conversant with the intrinsic mechanisms of contemporary art, after seeing a reproduction of Duchamp’s Large Glass in 1967, which cast a spell on him that has never been broken. Aira has always found the unorthodox in contemporary art to be an inexhaustible source of visions. An outsider to the art world, his perspective is fresh and original, as when he applauds the potential of distance between work and viewer or speaks of the stubbornness with which contemporary artists refuse to have their works photographed. Ultimately, he concludes that, with respect to past eras, a work of art today is more relevant when there is less possibility of its being reproduced photographically.    With an afterword by Francesco Bonami