Dan Graham: Beyond

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Here is a link to the review on the show Dan Graham: Beyond, that I made for Wyndwood Magazine.

Times Square and a candle’s flame

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Our perception of color is very different from what it was for nineteenth century spectators or for the Europeans of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. It is also very different from the way in which a member of a tribal community in Africa or in the Amazonas basin perceives color. Technological development produces new colors and new luminous intensities. Flashy, blinding, violent colors that rush past the gaze.

New York’s Times Square owes at least part of its vitality to light: billboards, neon signs, giant screens that transmit phosphorescent images and that seem to substitute walls with television signals, with lights like radiant jewels. The clear night sky has the effect of a glowing and uninterrupted dawn. Broadway’s luminous chaos is one of the great celebrations of capitalism, consumerism and spectacle.

The impact of these new colors is as immediate as it is intoxicating. One can’t help but be pulled into the streets’ contagious enthusiasm and participate in the chaos by walking at the same pace as the frenzied masses. Walking on Broadway stimulates the senses like a big party, as time seems more vertiginous, moments seem quicker and more fleeting. More than just a walk, this experience is best described as a blast of youth and even as euphoria.

It’s obvious that we are inserted in a sensibility that is different from that of past periods. It is ironic that at a time that has produced such diverse attempts to integrate art to life –a problem that emerged mainly with the avant-gardes– the distance between the two is far from being a thing of the past. In fact, art and everyday life may well farther apart now than in any previous historical period.


Visual arts previous to the twentieth century offer innumerable examples in which art effectively participated in society and even in political life. I would like to specifically consider the case of Flemish painting in the fifteenth century. The Flemish painters’ use of oil-based paints originates in techniques for painting armaments for tournaments and to give color to heraldic emblems outside houses. Oil-based paints produced a brighter pigmentation than tempera or encaustic. In addition to using oil-based paints, the Flemish painters saturated the color by using a technique that consisted in superposing numerous layers of a same nuance of shade, so as to smoothen transitions between dark and light shades. If we consider that this saturation of color was marshaled to render an impressive array of details, to produce diverse textures, and that it was also combined with the novel use of perspective, then we can have a fuller grasp of these paintings’ excess of reality. These paintings’ reality was perhaps more abundant and fuller than everyday life. These paintings produce the strongest effect if we imagine the gleam that they must have had in a world in which rooms were lit only by candlelight, a quiet and slower world in which a widespread faith in spiritual forces prevailed.

The colors of Flemish paintings still prove to be intense to today’s viewing public. Whether in the clothes that drape virgins, in the sheen of metallic bowls, of brooches, jewels, coins or mirrors, these paintings’ initial spectators must have contemplated these colors in awe. The candle that is lit in the chandelier of the Van Eyck brothers’ “Arnolfini wedding” didn’t only symbolize the love that consecrated the matrimonial union. Thanks in part to its color, and to the minute details with which it was reproduced, it also represented the experience of this love. The painted symbol was not reduced to its literal meaning, as it wasn’t simply an element endowed with iconographic meaning. Rather, it was an image that affected the senses. The lamp was laden, almost excessively, with a connotation that was both semantic and affective. Would we be capable today of understanding the intensity of a devotee’s fervor while contemplating a triptych narrating the scenes of a saint’s life? Doesn’t this consist in an intimate integration of art into everyday life?

The Count-Duke of Olivares’ nose.

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I
When he travelled to Rome for the second time in 1649, Velázquez was very warmly received as the personal friend of King Felipe IV. Yet Velázquez was upset that no one seemed aware of his prestige as a painter. Seeking to rectify this display of ignorance on behalf of the court and the local artists, Velázquez swiftly painted a portrait of his servant Juan de Pareja. Pareja then followed his master’s instructions as he immediately set out to show the portrait to the wealthiest families of the area, all the while signaling out and praising the striking resemblance between the model and the image. This anecdote –narrated by Ortega y Gasset (1953, IX)– is an eloquent witness to how important the copy of the original was to Velázquez and his contemporaries. Even though Velázquez’ works transcend in multiple ways the mere ability to imitate the visible [1], the trade of painting could be judged according to the resemblance between the model and the image.

Aside from dealing with the praise he received for his skills, and with the drive to copy reality, one should note that Velázquez often had to deal with the malformations of his models in comparison to the aesthetic norms of the period. Juan de Pareja offers an example of this. At the time, his African ancestry must have made him seem like quite the exotic figure. It is also well known that some of the recurring characters in Velázquez’ paintings were mentally challenged, miserable or physically deformed (dwarves).

II
Considering this drive towards realism, the equestrian portraits depicting the Count-Duke of Olivares (the first of which Velázquez would execute in 1633) must have posed an uneasy challenge: how could Velázquez attenuate the model’s large nose? Aside from being a nobleman who was one of the foremost patrons of his time and one of the figures who was closest to the King, the Count-Duke of was also a large-nosed man. In the Equestrian Portrait , Velázquez depicts him donning his military outfit, with his right hand pointing forward, as if he were motioning to go forward, while the horse whinnies, and the painting anticipates to us that it may be necessary to act bravely [2]. Yet unlike Velázquez’ striking profile of Felipe IV on his steed, the Count-Duke’s face appears as slightly tilted to the right, in a three-quarter pose that attenuates the real dimensions of his nose and simultaneously offers a convincing portrait in terms of the requirement to copy the original. Why would a painter who prides himself on his ability to imitate reality resort to such a subtle trick? It isn’t difficult to come up with an answer. The equestrian portrait was a sujet that was reserved for nobility –for scenes of hunting or of military strife– while the large nose was a trait that was deemed to be vulgar. Bakthin observes that popular medieval and renaissance humor considered the size of the nose to be proportional to the size of the penis.

Charles Laurent, the famous sixteenth century physician [...] speaks of the popular belief that the size and potency of the genital organs can be inferred from the dimensions and form of the nose” (Bakhtin, 1984,316)

III
This analogy lives on to this day and it can even be found in many the caricatures that Monet drew in his youth. It’s a commonplace to consider the nose as a cursed body part. We can find many proofs of this phenomenon in European literature. Characters from Cyrano de Bergerac to Charles Swann evince the same aristocratic contempt towards the nose that is wide, large or goat-like. In his famous poem, “To a nose” that begins with “There once was a man whom to a nose was stuck”, the poet Quevedo, one of Velázquez’ contemporaries, ridicules his opponent Luis de Góngora precisely by exaggerating the size of his nose.
The equestrian portrait of the Count-Duke reveals an ideological and aesthetical conflict in the subtlety with which Velázquez attempts to reconcile the exigency of copying the original with a prohibition related to social class. It can also be considered as a minor but relevant illustration of Adorno’s thesis that social struggles and class relations were also integrated in the work of art (1970, 232). For Adorno, art couldn’t exist without ideology, even when the artwork was the antithesis of the empirical world (236).
Velázquez’ example is notorious because, among other things, it proves that despite efforts to create an effect of continuity between the pictorial representation and the empirical work –that characterizes the majority of baroque art–, painting continues to subordinate the copy of the original to imperatives that reveal an ideological dimension. Velázquez’ sophisticated maneuver is evidence of the conflicts that can occasionally arise in the relations between artistic forms and ideology within the requisite loyalty to what is visible.

CITED WORKS
Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his world,
Ortega y Gasset. Velázquez. Random House, Inc., New York, 1953.


[1] Paintings such as Las Meninas or Las hilanderas are “extremely precise documents whose realism could hardly be outdone, yet they also display a phantasmagorical fauna” (Ortega y Gasset, 1950, 85)
[2] This painting possibly represents the battle of Fuenterrabia (Ortega y Gasset, 1953, LVII)

Waste Not.

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I
There is a sort of wellbeing to living frugally. The poets have offered images of such states of freedom from the material world. The opening verses of Arthur Rimbaud’s My Bohemia come to mind:

And so off I went, fists thrust in the torn pockets
Of a coat held together by no more than its name.
O Muse, how I served you beneath the blue;
And oh what dreams of dazzling love I dreamed!

As do the closing verses of Antonio Machado’s well-known poem “Portrait”:

And when the day arrives for the last leaving of all,
and the ship that never returns to port is ready to go,
you'll find me on board, with, light, few belongings,
almost naked like the children of the sea.

Not to mention André Breton’s “Leave it all behind,” a quasi-manifesto of libertarian insanity.

I also think of Tolstoi who, in his eighties abandoned all of his belongings, fled from his wealthy property and set off on a pilgrimage to nowhere, to end up dying in a train station, covered in snow.

II
And one could go on like this enumerating (collecting) images that describe a happiness which, at least for me, remains unfortunately out of reach. I’ve often longed to walk around like Machado, “with, light, few belongings”, out in the open air, with only my laptop in tow, and, in my pocket, my Ipod, headphones and my wallet (in which I would of course carry my bank cards and some of my dearest belongings). If only it were possible to live so frugally! Or if I could at least live without all of those things that end up seeming superfluous to me, and almost encumber me. But it’s stronger than me, and I can’t help but to give in to the unfortunate habit of collecting. It’s too easy for me to give in to the collector’s temptation as I accumulate postal stamps, cigar rings, matchboxes, art postcards, handwritten notes, magnets, books, DVDs, CDs. Anything and everything. I even occasionally enjoy contemplating the curious and rare objects that I’ve been able to obtain. Every collection has its gems and its exclusive objects.

III
When I still lived in Havana, I heard of the so-called “Cuban’s illness.” This condition consisted in endlessly and perpetually accumulating objects, as if any random object could be of use in the future. Apparently this trauma would have haunted Cubans in their daily lives, and would even follow them in exile.

At times, I even feared that I was suffering from this condition. My other more coincidental (and barely enjoyable) collections bear witness to this: shirts, shoes, jackets, pants that sleepily lie in my closet as the months and even years go by, without my even mustering up the enthusiasm to wear them. The other day, I opened a drawer and found cables, wires, transformers, switches, batteries and all sorts of screws, nuts and rivets. Before wrapping them up and throwing them away once and for all, a voice inside of me still enjoined me to hold on to these odds and ends that had even accompanied me from North Carolina to New York. Not to mention the dozens of plastic bags that I systematically store under the kitchen sink. Not to mention my toothbrushes. Almost unconscious collections to which I barely grant a second thought, bad habits that are so hard to lose.

IV
At the MoMa this morning, I was finally freed from the belief that I suffered from “the Cuban’s illness.” At least my condition wasn’t reserved to those Cubans who had to deal with such scarcity on the island. Right in front of me, on the museum’s first floor, the Chinese artist Song Dong had set up an abundant collection of objects that were so similar to those belongings that we accumulate as if by accident or out of inertia or laziness. At first sight, the installation resembles a warehouse or a small shop of old objects. But a closer look quickly reveals that this was a pile of useless objects.

I found, in Dong’s installation, dozens of plastic bags, neatly folded up in triangles, and so reminiscent of the ones that I keep in my apartment. I also found a row of empty toothpaste tubes, lids for plastic bottles, old toys stored in yellowing cardboard boxes, buttons, wrappers –such an incredible diversity of objects that filled me with the pleasure of knowing that my bad habit was human, all-too human, and that there were people who were even more inclined than me towards collecting useless objects. In a very direct way, “Waste Not” made me delightfully more aware of these collections that I barely noticed in my daily life.

Did I say useless objects?
I can imagine that, for Song Dong “Waste Not,” is endowed with a tremendous emotional charge. The objects that she gathered in the installations were all of his mother’s belongings, accumulated over half a century. Many of these objects had probably dwelled in his childhood home and, even worn down and obsolete, they still hold a strong sentimental value. It wasn’t only the family home that Dong had put on display, it was also his own personal fortune, from which we could trace his entire emotional itinerary.

III
To some extent, these were also historical documents. They recuperated a history of everyday life in China over the past fifty years. I can only fathom the diversity of evocations that this installation’s three thousand square feet could summon in someone who had lived their lives in Mao’s times and in Chinese socialism.

Vanessa Beecroft and Sade.

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I
Unless they take part in a ritual that requires a specific disguise, Sade’s victims are usually nude and silent (Barthes). It is the libertine who is always clothed as he is the one who possesses the voice that commands, interrogates and expresses opinions. Clothing is a sign of social hierarchy, of power over the victim, in the same way in which the word towers over the imposed silence. Being in the nude, donning an outfit or a uniform are all signs of a society that is divided into social categories that remain rigid and that are predominantly masculine.
Italian artist Vanessa Beecroft’s performances and photographs engage in a dialogue with Sade’s dynamics of power. Her models must pose and stay still for the exhibition’s entire duration. In Beecroft’s scenes, the woman is almost always nude and, when Beecroft includes men in these scenes, they wear a uniform. In this differentiation of genders, it is the woman, rather than the man, who is subordinated as she is reduced to her sexual and aesthetic dimension.
After having been applied the appropriate makeup, the models are forced to stay in the place that the artist has assigned to them –often as part of a triangular structure– and they must also remain in the assigned position. It is forbidden for them to talk to one another or to the members of the audience.

II
In “Visual pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, a controversial essay that is still discussed nowadays even if it was published more than thirty years ago in 1975, Laura Mulvey argues that, in film, the image of the woman interrupts the narrative flow so as to satisfy the masculine gaze. Vanessa Beecroft’s performances produce a similar effect: she offers the spectators actions that have been frozen in time and, in doing this, she forces each spectator –woman or man– to assume the masculine role.
Are these living sculptures? In an ingenious inversion, the model imitates the mannequin. The models’ stillness creates the same visual pleasure that one could derive from a traditional painting or sculpture. In Beecroft’s scenes, the aesthetic dimension is summoned only so that it can underscore and denounce its own repressive character.

III
The scene in which a group is forced to stand and to remain completely still reminds us of scenes of punishment that have occurred throughout history. Yet in Vanessa Beecroft’s work, this scene of punishment is staged, since the models agree to play the part of the victim, as if they momentarily accepted the rules of the pleasurable game. When punishment is staged, doesn’t it become a form of pleasure in its excessive theatricality? This is where Beecroft’s performances reveal their ambivalence: they oscillate between the criticism of the objectification of women that reduces her to an object of desire and the emphasis on the pleasure that victims can derive from their position in such a relation of power.

Vertigo

I
Life is round. I seek illustrations of this disquieting –and undoubtedly hermetic– image to which Gaston Bachelard dedicated the last chapter of his Poetics of Space. As I go back to Bachelard’s pages, I find that he quotes a sentence of Bousquet that is an even more evocative and enigmatic:

“He had been told that life was beautiful. No! Life is round.”

Bachelard paid attention to images of roundness: he recalled that Michelet understood the bird in its “cosmic situation” within the tree, as a center, as “a centralization of life guarded on every side, enclosed in a live ball.”

II
It seems to me that, in its own way, the scene of the kiss in Hitchcock’s film Vertigo also offers an example that “life is round.” The spiral that spins morbidly during the opening credits of the film, and acts as a visual equivalent of vertigo, can be contrasted with the camera’s circular movement around the protagonists in the scene in which they embrace. Madeleine, illuminated as if she were a spectral vision, begins to moves towards Scotty. As she gets closer, her body becomes more and more tangible, up until the moment of the kiss, when the camera makes a 360 degrees turn around the couple. The camera’s movement emphasizes the lovers’ bodily presence, as well as the physical and emotional intensity of their union. The camera has built a sphere, trapping the characters in a sort of bubble that could very well be likened to Bachelard’s “centralization of life.”
For a moment, while the camera spins, the setting of the bedroom turns into the bell tower where Scotty had lost his beloved. At this point, it is obvious that Scotty has overcome the vertigo, as it has been displaced by the embrace’s excess of life. Couldn’t this offer yet another definition of the roundness of life, alongside of Bachelard’s multiple definitions?

When a metaphysician tells us that beings are round, he displaces all psychological determinations. He rids us of a time of dreams and thoughts, at the same time that he invites us to actuality of being.

Adrien Piper's business cards

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American artist Adrien Piper created the above business card in 1986. In her installation, stacks of these business cards were laid out on a table and members of the audience could pick up as many as they liked and hand them out as they pleased.

Piper works on her identity as a woman and as a black person. What’s striking about the business cards’ text is that, from reading it, it’s impossible to tell the gender of the person who is speaking, although one can deduce that it is written from the standpoint of a woman who feels that she is perceived (and besieged) as a being who is dependent upon masculine protection. As it appears printed on a business card, this text is somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand, it seems to assert a femininity that seeks to be accepted as equal to the situation of the business card’s (male) reader whose solitude makes him weak. On the other hand, the figure of the solitary man has traditionally been paradigmatic of masculinity itself, since it encompasses the misunderstood artist, the scientist who proves his truth against the community’s prejudices, the cowboy, the courageous soldier, the athlete whose performance distinguishes him from his team, the frenetic libertine, or the “poète maudit,” at grips with moral conventions or with the unconscious’ conflicts. By engaging masculinity’s diverse meanings, Piper wants to cease to be associated with the fragility and the subaltern role that society has stereotypically attributed to women. At the same time, the note is informed by what Baudrillard, in his opposition to radical feminisms, considers to be the essence of the feminine: the ability to seduce. Piper’s declaration that she has no intention of flirting is a flirt. She puts herself out of reach only to titillate and then inflame desire. Her very intention to assert solitude in a public space (that of the gallery and of the business cards) gives her gesture a masculine intonation that vixens like Marlene Dietrich and Katherine Hepburn have also turned to their advantage, as they distanced themselves from the stereotype of the sensual blonde whose sex appeal stemmed from her lack of intellect.