"The Entire Treasure of Uncertain Knowledge"

Antonio Rego is a curious man. This is not a bad thing. Too few people today are genuinely gripped by an inquisitive disposition. After all, genuine curiosity has a child like quality, what the writer Jorges Luis Borges called an ‘invulnerable innocence’. As a consequence of this innate curiosity Rego likes to listen and to talk. When I first met him we talked for five hours. He told me his stories I told him mine. We mused over the great, seemingly intractable problems of our age and bitched and moaned about the petty, trifling injustices of our ‘profession’. The mysteries of love and relationships, the baggage of personal history, the failings of politics, the daily struggle for economic stability, our pleasures, our follies, – it was all there. Sometimes the talk was serious, earnest – impassioned, at other time’s bawdy, vulgar, irreverent. Occasionally we knew exactly what the other meant. Then at other times, we didn’t have a clue.

Throughout our lengthy exchange of anecdotes, opinions, jokes, rants, stories and lies, I was keenly aware of Rego’s apparently insatiable hunger to discover how I had attempted to organize my life. Actually organize, is the wrong word. After all, it implies a kind of rationalization or ordering of existence. And as we quickly discovered in our conversation, both of us were stoically resigned to the unpredictable nature of being human (as Phil Kay remarks in ‘Roundabout’ "only be sure of your unsureness"). Nevertheless after telling me how he had attempted to construct his own lines of ‘resistance to human misery’; he wanted to know how I had tried to deal with the predicament of being human. How had I tried to attain some sort of partial salvation in an apparently indifferent, often hostile universe?
_____________________________________________________________
One of the Italian writer Primo Levi’s last works was "The Search for Roots". In it Levi chose extracts from his favourite books, prefacing each with remarks regarding how these texts had, through their celebration of laughter, their espousal of knowledge, their grasp of the injustice of suffering and the stature of man offered him redemption and hope. In the introduction he wrote: "How many of our roots come from the books we have read? All, many, a little, or none, depending on the environment in which we were born, our temperament, and the labyrinth that fate has assigned us". In "Deep under the Skin" Rego embarked on a similar quest to discover the impact literature had exerted on a broad cross section of artistic friends and colleagues.

While Levi’s anthology amounted to an occasionally revealing, often confusing self-portrait of a man, Rego’s video operates as a broader illuminating portrait, or map, of a class of cultural producers. On one level the video is a celebration of the power of culture, an ode to the enduring power of art, in this case literature, to enrich human existence. It is also, of course, in its totality, a text itself. Complete with a plurality of voices, reading extracts on a highly disparate range of subjects (love, war, suffering, death) the video is a projected, 2 dimensional encyclopedia. As with all Rego’s video work, it is highly ambitious and demanding. This is a work that requires time to spent with it. It asks for repeated visits to the gallery, in order to make new connections, hear different tales.

In the afterword to the Primo Levi book, his friend and fellow writer Italo Calvino, offers some interesting, pertinent remarks on why Levi’s work should be regarded as an encyclopedia as opposed to an anthology:
"Concerning this encyclopedic tendency we should understand what we mean. In other times, the term ‘encyclopedic’ supposed a confidence in a global system that embraced within a unique discourse all other aspects of knowledge. Today, on the contrary, there is no system that holds; in place of the circle, to which the etymology of the vocable ‘encyclopedia’ refers, there is nothing but a whirlwind of fragments and debris. The persistence of the encyclopedic tendency corresponds to a need to reassemble, in an ever precarious equilibrium, the heterogeneous and centrifugal acquisitions which constitute the entire treasure of uncertain knowledge"

This need to reassemble in an ever-precarious equilibrium, heterogeneous fragments stalks Rego’s work. In the video ‘Roundabout’ this desire to engage with, and offer a platform to a diverse community of people and opinions is again prevalent. A series of distinct protagonists, chosen for their ability to communicate, seduce and beguile with ideas, stories and polemics, offer a range of informal lectures from the front seat of a car. Some of these lectures are polemical, some philosophical, others are humorous and personal. Occasionally they are explicitly political – the lecturers clearly motivated by seething rage and frustration. Rego is patently present in the car (he is occasionally addressed) but remains silent, acting instead as our surrogate. In many respects he is merely a conduit; an instigator of discussion. Because of his silence, his invisibility, the lectures in effect become addressed to us.

The earlier quote by Italo Calvino sighted the widely acknowledged collapse of confidence in what was once referred to as the enlightenment project. Put briefly the idea and hope that knowledge could be organised, managed and directed towards continual, ever-increasing happiness and prosperity for mankind. As Calvino remarked, after the collapse of this project we only have fragments and debris. Today few people blindly believe that we are marching steadily forward. Typically Rego (possessed as he is with an impish, mischievous sense of humour) slyly alludes to this. In ‘Roundabout’ all the protagonists’ lectures occur while the car repeatedly goes round in circles. However while the piece does allude to the obvious limits or folly of excessive faith in the power of knowledge, it is also, just like "Deep under the Skin" a strident assertion of the urgent need (both social, political and personal) to continue to doggedly persist in trying to "reassemble, in an ever precarious equilibrium, the heterogeneous and centrifugal acquisitions which constitute the entire treasure of uncertain knowledge".

John Beagles 2002