At Art Basel, Alejandro Cesarco presents a mise-en-scène comprising wall texts, a slide show, framed photographs, and an artist’s book. The work reconfigures the conventions of the detective story to imagine the viewer as a private investigator, ensnared in self-reflexive observation. While holding out the promise of meaning and order, the installation will use the codes of the genre to disarticulate narrative structures of reading and looking.

Both detective and noir genres connote the use of a crime story to provide insight into the socio-political disorders and moral dilemmas of the time in which they are written; they look critically at the illusions and hypocrisy, the rotten power structures and the brutal injustices of a superficially respectable society. Protagonists like Phillip Marlowe tend to be isolated and estranged, existing on the margins of society and, as outsiders, capable of seeing with a satirist’s eye. As much as anything, it is the investigator’s ability to strip away pretence and reveal the sources of corruption that gives him his effective agency, granting him a freedom within a hazardous environment. Analogies to the art-world and a romantically inscribed role of the artist are not coincidental.

Cesarco’s installation comprises a framed group of photographs of “flowers found in crime scenes,” an artist’s book that brings together images of fedora-clad private investigators and S.S. Van Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories, and a slide show that pairs a series of textual fragments with a pensive voiceover read by Lawrence Weiner. The slide show unites written reflections (“The paranoid representation of the writer as delinquent who erases his traces and hides his crimes”) with comments and narrative clues spoken in a rich, deep baritone (“Entangled in a web of lies”, “A loud knock on the door”, “A faraway bitterness haunted him.”) The sequences are forced to resemble a film or a commentary, however, a story is never fully developed or explained. Rather, the texts and voiceover narrate an account that betrays itself, producing paradoxes, generating meanings that are at the same time excessive and deficient.

The detective story is a meta-narrative of attribution, one that asks how we construct meaning by assembling observations. With the voiceover spoken by Weiner (who reads a script written by Cesarco), the work both references and departs from Conceptual Art’s use of language. The installation does not try to tell a story or set up a logical structure (although it perhaps inevitably does), but rather concerns itself with a desperate attempt to reconstruct a story. It narrates an inevitable urge to make — what is seen, connoted, remembered — intelligible.

At the leading edge of a young generation of artists taking up the strategies of Conceptual Art from the margins, Alejandro Cesarco (b. 1975 Montivideo, Uruguay) shares with Conceptualism an abiding concern for reading and for relationships between words and images. But he turns these structures of distribution in on themselves, materializing translations, repetitions, misunderstandings and memories, and actualizing meaning as something felt rather than deduced. His works have included films, including one where his grandfather (a Holocaust survivor) performs a script that Cesarco wrote on the limits of bearing witness; a group of large silkscreened “pages” produced collaboratively with John Baldessari (entitled Retrospective) that work through the legacy of Conceptualism in a back-and-forth of framing and annotating; and a “sculpture” consisting of receipts for flower arrangements which Cesarco sent to ten female artists whom he admires (among them, Louise Lawler, Yvonne Rainer, and Andrea Fraser). This installation in Basel follows Cesarco’s recent solo project at Tate Modern, London (2010) for which he installed three films of his father in the same location on different levels of the museum, as if they were frames in a discontinuous but repetitive film strip, foregrounding the viewer’s memory. Other recent exhibitions include Activating the Collection: One Without the Other, at the Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City (2011) and Nine Screens at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010).

Alejandro Cesarco is representing Uruguay this summer at the 54th Venice Biennale.