The Uncertainty Principle

Located in the MACBA Chapel, The Uncertainty Principle is an intensive programme that through lectures, performances, films, videos and artists’ presentations will analyse the many different ways of generating a hypothesis. Tackling a problem involves constructing one or more ideas that help us to think about the nature of what we call the world. Judged from this perspective, contemporary artistic production offers itself as a major opening for speculating about different aspects of the world, its sentient aspect, its political dimension, its ability to establish relationships between things, between subjects and matter, and so on. In short, to think about and generate ideas – ideas that appear to us in the most distinct forms – is art’s great virtue.

In 1969, the American artist James Lee Byars developed a performance piece entitled The World Question Center. The original idea, which was not brought to fruition, entailed gathering one hundred brilliant minds including thinkers, scientists and artists together in a room, locking them behind closed doors and inviting them to ask each other questions they had been asking themselves. The final version of this project, produced for Belgian Radio and Television, is a performance piece in which Byars contacts all of them by telephone.

This project sets out from the same starting point: the importance of maintaining a space for raising questions and generating hypotheses. The titles of the four strands of this unusual debate, for which we wish to transform the La Capella museum space for the period of one month, are drawn from Byars’ oeuvre. His work is among the collection’s new acquisitions and is to feature at the forefront of each assemblage of works in the programme.

The MACBA Chapel space has been transformed for the occasion by another artist, Tobias Putrih. His work involves analysing and producing ephemeral architecture which develops the notion of actor-spectator bequeathed by modernity and the avant-garde. As part of the Tobias Putrih collection, he has produced a piece especially for the programme which we wish to carry out for the museum space.

The presentation of the MACBA Collection is the ideal framework for propitiating an environment in which to be exposed to the huge effort of reflection that artistic, sculptural or scientific creation entails. Pascal claimed that we are thinking reeds, gloriously singular and gloriously vulnerable. Our models of thought and action have as many possibilities as they do forms, and as a result one of the big challenges we have to face resides, on the one hand, in creating and maintaining spaces in which we try out ideas, and on the other, in generating situations that might favour their transmission. The future is but the exercising of thought.