Art Experience: New York City

Roberta Smith on Cameras

2011-09-07T07:58:00.000-07:00

Cameras, writes Roberta Smith, have come to dominate the way we experience art. At every exhibition we go to (in her case, she's writing about the Venice Biennale) we see other people, or ourselves for that matter, seeing the art through the mechanical eye. What does this all mean for art and its future?

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The Village Voice Inteviews The New Museum's Massimiliano Gioni on Ostalgia

2011-08-22T11:45:00.000-07:00

The Village Voice's Christian Viveros-Faun interviews the curator of the New Museum's newest exhibition Ostalgia, a show examining art in last twenty years made in the former East bloc. He writes, "The New Museum—running against its previous grain of presenting shows of trophy art and faddishly referential collage—has stepped up to provide this summer's most thoughtfully radical exhibition. Communism, anyone?"

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The New York Times Looks at the Summer's Art in the Streets

2011-08-22T11:30:00.000-07:00

From Sol LeWitt at City Hall to the giant bear at the Seagram Building, critic Ken Johnson recaps all of the public art gracing the streets of New York this summer.

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Margarita Aguilar is Named New Director of Museo del Barrio

2011-08-22T11:14:00.000-07:00

On September 12, Cuban-born Margarita Aguilar will take over the reigns as director of the Museo del Barrio in East Harlem. The former Latin American Art specialist at Christie's has held this post before, from 1998 to 2006.

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Contemporary Art and Internet Memes

2011-08-22T10:23:00.000-07:00

A film still from Interior Semiotics, a video piece by a student at the Art Institute of Chicago that "went viral" on 4chan.com for its "bizarreness"

In his essay in the latest issue of Art Pulse, Domenico Quaranta looks at "What Happens When Contemporary Art Turns into an Internet Meme?" What happens, Quaranta asks, when contemporary art gets out "from the safe niche culture that produces and supports it" and finds itself on the grand stage of the internet? What will this mean for art itself?

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Metropolis Magazine's Paul Goldberger Writes on the Fallacies of "The Architecture of the Future"

2011-08-22T09:43:00.000-07:00

This fanciful utopian image appeared second in a list of search results for "The Architecture of the Future" on Google

It's been a cliche in modern architecture from Le Corbusier to Buckminster Fuller to the polemicists of green design--the grandiloquent pretensions of architecture as a discipline for the future. In a witty and intelligent essay, Goldberger points out "What architecture is not designed for the future? All architecture, by its very nature, looks ahead. You don’t build for the past." He suggests that instead of consuming themselves with self-glorifying utopian dreams that are "usually wrong," architectural theorists should instead work to comprehend the architecture of the present.

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"Paradoxically, a lot of people who are held in thrall by fantasy images of futuristic buildings tend to attribute to architecture a power over their lives that they’re almost never willing to grant it in real life." - Paul Goldberger

Kellie Jones on Her New Book: Living and Writing Contemporary Art

2011-08-22T08:14:00.000-07:00

Scholar Kellie Jones writes in Art Forum about the ideas behind her new book Living and Writing Contemporary Art. She negated the importance of art education in understanding art. She writes, "that academic routes aren’t the only way to understand art: what it means to you, what artists are doing" is what matters. Is she right in this? Or is this view too optimistic?

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Another Look at Political Memory

2011-08-20T17:04:00.000-07:00

In our summer issue, John Perreault examined the hole in our social memory that spans the years of the Nazi occupation in France. He concludes that we have forgotten about our artistic demigods--Picasso and Matisse--did nothing to undermine the Nazi regime. In a separate review, Ernesto Menendez-Conde and I took a look at Damnatio Memoriae, a show at 57th Street's Greenberg Van Doren Gallery. This show concerned itself with a similar idea--the persistence or absence of political memory, in this case in Italy in the second half of the 20th century. In this month's issue of Cabinet, the editors seems to be thinking along similar lines. They have included "Historical Amnesias: An Interview with Paul Connerton," a piece dedicated to the exploration of social memory.

Continue to Cabinet's Interview...

Frieze Celebrates Twenty Years with a Look Back at 1991

2011-08-19T10:24:00.000-07:00

How has the art world changed since 1991? Frieze magazine editors Jorg Heiser and Jennifer Higgie lay out their opinions in a concisely written manifesto. The piece tackles burning questions on the survival of art magazines, the elitism of the art market, and the so-called absence of critical standards in aesthetic judgment.

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Art Review's Alex Coles Takes a Look at La Carte d'Après Nature at Matthew Marks Gallery

2011-08-19T06:44:00.000-07:00

Taking its name from an art publication founded by preeminent surrealist Rene Magritte in the 1950's, this exhibition, curated by artist Thomas Demand, examines idea of "nature as artifice." The show contains work by both relatively unknown and extremely well known artists--from the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri to Magritte himself.

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Triple Canopy and Its New Building

2011-08-18T08:15:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports:
Triple Canopy, the critically acclaimed up-and-coming NYC-based online arts and culture journal, has found a permanent home! Their new building at 155 Freeman Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn will play host to a series of events related to the magazine.

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The New Issue

2011-08-11T08:49:00.000-07:00

Our Summer issue is out! Find it on our website at www.artexperiencenyc.com. Essays and Reviews by John Perreault, Octavian Esanu, Ernesto Menenedez-Conde, Claire Lieberman, and many others! Topics include artists in France in WWII, art in the recession, the Cory Arcangel show at the Whitney, and Francis Alys' Story of Deception at MoMA P.S.1

Nicholas Cullinan, Tate Curator, Gives The Art Newspaper His Thoughts on the Late Cy Twombly

2011-07-17T15:51:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month, art lost one of its most magnetic and most highly regarded personages. Born in 1928 in rural Virginia, Cy Twombly spent most of his adult life in southern Italy, painting some of the most enigmatic and distinctive images in all of postwar art. Known well for his scribbling, abstract style and his interest in classical mythology, Twombly is a giant of the twentieth century's pantheon. In this elegiac piece, Nicholas Cullinan, curator of the Tate Modern's Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters, gives us a warm and endearing remembrance of the deceased artist. Half-obituary and half-personal account of Twombly's last years, Cullinan's final statement on the painter's legacy is well worth the read.

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The New Yorker's Richard Brody, Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, and Le Corbusier

2011-06-30T13:14:00.000-07:00

Allen with Owen Wilson, Cannes, 2011

Fans of the art and literature of the 1920's delight at all of their favorite genius that appear in the night in Woody Allen's latest film, Midnight in Paris. Allen's nostalgic screenwriter protagonist, Gil meets all the colorful personas of Parisian modernism: Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Hemingway, Man Ray, T.S., and others. The notable exclusion here, argues Brody, is Le Corbusier, the most famous architect of the Parisian modernist circle. How is "Corbu" any different than the other modernists?

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Le Corbusier

Rhizome's Jacob Gaboury Reviews Cory Arcangel at the Whitney

2011-06-25T14:30:00.000-07:00

The critically acclaimed show of the latest work of Cory Arcangel at the Whitney is reviewed this week in Rhizome's blog. The exhibition has artworks in a variety of mediums, including versions of video games that the artist programmed himself. The exhibition, suggests Gaboury, is an innovative way to artistically engage the failure of technology.

What Comes Next? The Peter Blum Gallery Looks to Young Artists Working Beyond Postmodernism

2011-06-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

Kara Tanaka
Peradam (Holy Hermitage), 2011

By Daniel Solecki

The goal of “LANY” (“Los Angeles-New York”), the new show at the Peter Blum gallery, is to present, through the work of seven young contemporary artists, a new vision of art in the 21^st century—how a new artistic zeitgeist relates to a rapidly changing globalizing world. Instead of focusing on a unifying aspect that connects the works, the artists’ differences in style and subject are presented as the highlight the show, as gallery’s press release suggests:

“Coming of age after the acceptance of pluralism and post-modernist thought, this new generation of artists, rather than sharing a singular approach, employs very different practices in their art making. However, it is these disparate ways of production that unify them. As expressed by the philanthropist August Heckscher, “A feeling for paradox allows seemingly dissimilar things to exist side by side, their very incongruity suggesting a kind of truth.”

While it is debatable how much the 19^th century industrialist and mine-owner August Heckscher knew about defining zeitgeist, we go along with the gallery’s theoretical aims as we examine the work. There are around twenty pieces in the exhibition, representing the blooming careers of seven young artists—four from New York and three from Los Angeles. The works are in an array of mediums and tackle a variety of themes. There is cloth sculpture of upright-standing African fabrics rolled into roots with drawn-on faces of refugees (Luisa Rabbia). There are gigantic “neo-fauvist” paintings with allegorical figures and exaggerated symbolism (Andy Cross). Deerskins are partially-shaved into “holy maps” of mountains (Kara Tanaka) and lotus blossoms are abstracted into black origami forms (James Melinat). There are “post-post impressionist” and folk-art-esque quilt designs (Benjamin Degan), huge acrylic painterly abstract shapes over sepia photography (Kevin Appel), and staid paintings resembling architectural models (Daniel Rich). If this sounds like an eclectic mishmash of irreconcilable styles and approaches, it is.

Attempts to qualify contemporary zeitgeist in the process of its formation (exactly what the LANY curators are trying to do) are similar to quantum physicists’ vain attempts to capture rare subatomic particles that disintegrate moments after their isolation. Critics and curators who are able to delve through the white noise of modern artistic production and designate “zeitgeist” are hailed as prophetic. Today, in an age of artistic pluralism, contemporary curators can have the luxury of taking a simplistic method in tackling the daunting task of zeitgeist-definition—combine the work of vastly different contemporary artists into one pool and label it’s variety “zeitgeist.” It is indeed very easy to say, “Here, look! Everyone is doing something different! Anything goes!” While that isn’t exactly what the curators at LANY do—there is indeed a message behind the choices—it is dangerously close.

The “kind of truth” that the curators are hoping the viewers draw out of their choices’ “incongruity” is that all the works are significant departures from the nihilism of postmodernism. The works are free of irony and even, in some instances, seem to search for a sort of sincerity. Tanaka’s deer-skins aren’t a pastiche of Native American roadside kitsch, like a great deal of Native American-inspired contemporary art (see Jaune Quick-To-See Smith), they are sincere spiritual musings about the connection between the animal and the cosmos. Degan’s quilt-painting Actor, attempts a reconciliation between the high art of Aeschylus’ Orestia (the word is written in Greek and English in the background) and the quaint beauty of folk art (the quilt) with the human figure as the unifying factor. Its equally impossible to find any sort of postmodernist play in Andy Cross’ Walking Liberty, an enormous canvas painted bright indigo with all sorts of stenciled and painted columns, numerals, fires, comets, and geometric shapes swirling around a bold female allegory. As much as it seems unbelievable, it seems like Neoclassical female allegories have found a way into the 21^st century. Rabbia’s refugees are also sincere—they are portraits of real people undergoing real suffering. Her characters’ searches for meaning aren’t regarded obliquely—they are explicitly rendered in the work itself as their root like extensions seem to search for soil on the gallery floor.

But what can we make of all this? As a young person myself, I know well of the sentiment behind artists’ refutation of ironic postmodernism in favor of more “sincere” art. This is the same complaint I’ve heard all over—in off-handed discussion with other students and in the novels and essays of writers like David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen and in this show too. Instead of ironically refuting and deconstructing the philosophies of times past—what is generally understood as the program of postmodernist art and theory—young people in the 21^st century yearn for meaning in what appears to be an increasingly meaningless world. Instead of ironically playing with the rubble of an old world and the pieces of a fragmented culture, these artists in LANY, like many young people, seek to build their own structures anew.

As I understand them, the philosophical ideas behind postmodernism—the incompleteness of language and mathematics, the inaccuracy of historical metanarratives, and others—have significant merit philosophically. But this, of course, doesn’t mean that good art has to stay true to these notions. Art should have the freedom to move and not be conservatively tethered to a particular philosophy. However, in examining this show, the movement away from postmodernism appears as a movement away from intelligent art. Rabbia’s refugee sculptures and drawings merely feel more like alternate versions of UNICEF posters than great political art—they embrace the abstracted image of the eternally suffering refugee as the truth of being a refugee, and disregard any notion of the refugee as a real, tangible, nuanced person who does things other than suffer. Tanaka’s new age maps of “holy hermitages” are little more than post-hippie kitsch that could be seen as outright disrespectful to the real cultures that their works rip off of. The Andy Cross paintings show a huge departure from contemporary styles, earnestly diving blind and headfirst back into the world of narrative painting and allegorical figures. While Cross’ vision is certainly bold, it is also outrageous. Why is Liberty wearing a swan as a hat? Why are there all these numbers and geometric symbols flying around? This is more than mere art historical referencing—it unconsciously forgets to account for a huge part of art history, namely, the modern era. It’s hard to see this as anything other than kitsch.

LANY presents us with a perplexing series of questions. Is all this really what the response to postmodernism will look like? Is this really what “sincere” art in the 21^st century will be—hopelessly naïve, unconscious of history and big ideas, and earnestly developing kitschy new aesthetics on the rubble of the old? I certainly hope not. I know these artists can do better. My generation’s artists and writers are set with a monstrous task of moving art to a new aesthetic, one beyond postmodernism, and, of course, still create works of fascinating beauty and ingenuity. I sincerely hope the generation is up to the challenge.

Ai Weiwei Released: Reuters

2011-06-22T08:24:00.000-07:00

Chinese news agency Xinhua has reported just earlier today that Ai Weiwei has been released from prison. The Xinhua report claimed that Ai was released "because of his good attitude in confessing his crimes as well as a chronic disease he suffers from." Ai Weiwei and his company Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd. had been charged with tax evasion, although many believe that the arrest was a result of Ai's radical blogging and anti-government activities.

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Ai Weiwei: Public Intellectual for the 21st Century - The Village Voice

2011-06-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

It's been months since Ai Weiwei was taken into custody by Chinese authorities and the art world is still reeling from it. His arrest, writes Christian Viveros-Faune of the Village Voice, has become the "first artistic touchstone of the 21st century...A Guernica-like event for the age of global ideological agnosticism." Ai is a public intellectual in a world with strikingly few of them. This article not only retells the story of Ai Weiwei, but also sets him, his art, and his controversial political blog in context of the present day--how his life's work relates to Arab Spring, internet unrest in China, and the state of the art world.

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ArtInfo's The Best Booths at Art Basel 2011

2011-06-19T10:21:00.000-07:00

Harry Callahan's "Light Patterns, Detroit" is at Bruce Silverstein's booth at Art Basel.

ArtInfo's Benjamin Genocchio is in Basel reviewing the booths being set up at the Art Basel 2011 fair in Basel, Switzerland. Highlights include Richard Serra's arcs, Robert Motherwell's works on paper, some of the famous Schwitters collages, and a ton more.

John Haber on Robert Mappelthorpe

2011-06-19T08:18:00.000-07:00

John Haber of the arts blog Haberarts.com reviews the recent show of the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe at the Sean Kelly gallery. Called "50 Americans," Haber pans the exhibition, wondering to his readers, "where are the Americans?"

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The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art: Funded by a Wal-Mart Heiress and Now Under Construction in Northwestern Arkansas

2011-06-17T13:14:00.000-07:00

Alice Walton, youngest daughter of the Walton family and heiress to the Wal-Mart fortune, has devoted the last ten years of her life to building a collection of American art for a new museum in Bentonville, AK a small town in the northwestern part of the state. The town, which incidentally is also the world headquarters of the Wal-Mart corporation, is hundreds of miles away from the nearest art museum. The new building, designed by Boston architect Moshe Safdie, is going up in earnest and should be open on November 11. Double the size of the Whitney, the first explicitly American art museum to open in fifty years will have an impressive array of works in its starting collection including Gilbert Stuart's Portrait of George Washington, Asher B. Durand's Kindred Spirits, and Japser John's Alphabets. Walton also has prodigious collections of George Bellows, John Singer Sargent, and contemporary artists like Chuck Chose and Roxy Paine.

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Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849

A Street Art Show Comes to Brooklyn: Will Graffiti Come Too?

2011-06-17T08:23:00.000-07:00

With its new show of the history of street art, called "Art in the Streets", The Musuem of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Los Angeles is breaking its own attendance records. However, much to the chagrin of local authorities, the exhibit has inspired a new wave of graffiti in the neighborhood around the museum. Many famous street artists like Space Invader and Smear have been arrested around the museum for attempting new works. As the exhibition completes its stay on the west coast before coming to the Brooklyn Museum next March, there is concern that New York will see a similar spike in graffiti.

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A New Vision from the King of Camp: Jack Smith at the Gladstone Gallery

2011-06-16T08:35:00.000-07:00

By Daniel Solecki

The Gladstone Gallery gets a blast from the New York of the late-fifties with “Thanks For Explaining Me”—a new show of the film, collages, and photography of avant-garde American filmmaker and visual artist Jack Smith. The gallery, which bought the rights to Smith’s estate in 2008, is showing off its new acquisitions with all the overpowering glitz and cultish excess that his work demands. Known as the “godfather of performance art” and a pioneer in the incorporation of Hollywood B-movie imagery into high art, Smith is known better by those he influenced (a long list which includes Robert Kuchar, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, and more recently, Matthew Barney) than in his own right. This exhibition attempts to set Smith on his own ground apart from the luminaries he influenced.

The austere gallery setting is set alive by several of Smith’s films, the sounds of which muddle together and can be even heard from the street. The films’ imagery is equally “loud.” Most of the films seem to depict unsettling B-movie visions of oriental orgies and other chaos—translucent moving images are layered atop one another and make-up caked androgynies in Arabian garb appear and disappear from the pictures at random. Facial expressions and are highly exaggerated, limbs are distended to mannerist proportions (which is strange, given that this is photography), men dress as women, and naked flesh is everywhere. There is an odd religious fervor inherent in everything Smith makes. His works seem like depictions of the sacred rites of a modern Dionysian mystery cult. This religiosity is compounded by the images’ baroque disorder and decadent orientalism—creating a series of artworks that resemble what would be if Cold War-era Hollywood had made Eugene Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus into a disaster film.

Smith’s collages, which cover an entire wall of the gallery, are equally erratic and over the top. Each collage is an arrangement of black and white papers and macabre photographs. Almost all contain at least one image of Smith himself beaming out at the viewer with his intense deep-set eyes. They are populated by cross-dressers strutting across Levantine landscapes or through hellish representations of the West Village.

The highpoint of the exhibition is Smith’s photography, which affords a viewer a closer examination into the occult world of Smith’s films. While keeping with the oriental imagery of the same imaginary world, the photography has less violent sexual imagery of the films. Their settings are completely different, almost Arcadian.

By just looking at Jack Smith’s work without context, one cannot gather its truly revolutionary nature. Before Smith, popular culture had no place in high art. Susan Sontag would have never written “On Camp.” When he started work in New York, the city was still in thrall of Abstract Expressionists and the high-modern Color-Field painters. Jack Smith is about as far from color-field painting as is artistically possible.

But aside from their revolutionary style, the works are fascinating in themselves. Smith inverts the 19^th century Romantic infatuation with the orient to create an astoundingly ingenious cultural critique. Instead of artistically investigating a so-called decadent culture for aesthetic value, like his Romantic predecessors, Smith takes the aesthetic idea of decadent orientalism and reflects it unto American capitalism in the 1950’s. In some works the connection is explicit, in others, implied. Smith’s works deconstruct American mass culture, revealing through all the glitz and camp, the orgiastic decadence of a real culture in decline.

Anish Kapoor Rejects Show in Beijing; Cites Detention of Ai Weiwei

2011-06-15T08:06:00.000-07:00

Anish Kapoor, 2011

Turner-prize winning British sculptor Anish Kapoor has rejected a proposal for show at the National Museum, citing the continued detention of Ai Weiwei, reports The Art Newspaper. Kapoor's sculpture for the exhibition would have appeared in Tiananmen Square. Mr. Kapoor dedicated his latest sculpture, Leviathan, to the imprisoned Chinese artist on May 10. The British Council, which sponsored the show, seeks Kapoor's reconsideration.

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Roberta Smith's Interactive Venice Biennale Reader

2011-06-14T14:47:00.000-07:00

Maurizio Cattelan, We, 2010

Roberta Smith's readers' responses, June 2011

Here's something wild in the world of contemporary art criticism: the critic is letting her readers also be critics. Now from NYTimes.com, Smith's "Everyone's A Critic" web publication gives readers a virtual tour of some of Smith's picks from Venice and asks for their opinions in six words or less. It's a fun exercise to participate in, and also to watch unfold. Try it!

Continue to the NYTimes.com Venice Biennale Reader...

MoMa and Getty in Competition for the Definitive 1970's Collection

2011-06-13T13:00:00.000-07:00

A detail view of Joseph Kosuth's "(Art as Idea as Idea). The Word 'Definition,'" 1966–68, Now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC

The Museum of Modern Art here in New York and the Getty in Los Angeles are in a fierce competition for the definitive collective of 1970's art, so reports ArtInto. The Getty has recently acquired some of the photography of Jo Ann Callis, Philip Jones Griffiths, and Leonard Freed and the papers of acclaimed curator Harald Szeemann. MoMa, in response, has picked up the work of Marcel Broodthaers, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, and Robert Smithson.
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frieze After Two Decades: A Collection of Letters to the Editor

2011-06-13T12:42:00.000-07:00

The British contemporary art magazine frieze has just turned twenty! In celebration, South African art journalist Sean O'Toole has compiled a list of ten of his favorite letters to the editors of the magazine. The most recent are from just last year but O'Toole includes some that go back all the way to 1994. Topics include the philosophy of art criticism, Ikea and art, contemporary African art, and Charles Baudelaire.

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Robert Filliou at Peter Freeman Gallery: Paleolothic Painting and Neo-Dada

2011-06-13T08:15:00.000-07:00

Paleolithic hand negatives in Lascaux, France, circa 23,000 BCE

Robert Filliou, Main d'artiste, 1967, three photographs on wood

By Daniel Solecki

Humor, ready-mades, and whimsically playful art historical references abound at a fantastic new show of the work of Franco-American Fluxus artist Robert Filliou (1926-1987) at the Peter Freeman Gallery. Filliou worked in an array of eclectic mediums, some of which are on display here—crayon on cardboard, assemblages of found objects, photography, and collage. Like his Dadaist forbearers and collaborators in the Fluxus program, Filliou sought a union of art and life that tended towards childlike “anti-art.” His work presents the classic 20^th century sardonic mockery of so-called “high art” and industrial capitalism from a truly distinctive and ingenious approach.

Filliou is different from other Fluxus artists in that his work directly engages the art historical canon, a facet contradictory to the ideas of a group whose manifesto explicitly states, “purge the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art.” Filliou’s peculiarity comes in part from spending the last years of his life near Lascaux, France, the town nearest of one most famous Paleolithic painted caves. His work in this show has the naïve feel of art that a cave-painter would make if he were, by some miracle of time-travel, lost in the modern world. Filliou’s caveman character is set upon trying to use art to find mystical meaning in modern objects. His whimsically nonsensical attempts to make sense of the modern world are endearing as they are humorous.

The exhibition is anchored by a set of three photographs of the artist’s hand, a modern play on the hand-negatives that appear as “signatures” on the walls of paleolithic cave-paintings. The images cement the “narrator” of the art as the caveman character and give clues about how this character sees the world he is lost in. Western Mandala, a set of haphazardly arranged broken clay bricks connected with wire and plugged into a brick port on the wall, shows Filliou’s caveman humorously misinterpreting modern technology as a harbinger of spiritual power. Pour pêcher à deux la lune (“Two to catch the moon”), a set of two fishing rods ostensibly to be used to capture the moon, reflects a similar play on naivety in the face of modern technology.

Most of the other works in the show are crayon or pastel on paper or on diptychs of found-cardboard. Most are spare, heightening the brown cardboard and dented edges of the boxes, much like the Lascaux bull outline paintings that emphasize the limestone cave wall. The imagery varies—in some diptychs there are inklings of formal composition—a childishly drawn man appearing in landscapes or with objects—others are seemingly random arrays of collaged found papers and written words.

One of the most interesting of these is The Sun Book Inside the Music Box and the Glory and the Loss—a cardboard diptych whose two sides are two independent compositions. On the left is a drawing of a music box covered in abstracted, multicolored suns and on the right is an abstracted sun with an arrow pointing upward. Below the arrow is written, “fin de poeme,” or, in English, “end of the poem.” The music trope and the rising motion of the poem call to mind art historical representations of the apotheoses of artists. Filliou here is playing on an artistic idea that the Fluxus project and its related movements deemed bourgeois and decadent—the deification of the artist.

Robert Filliou, The Sun Book inside the Music Box and the Glory and the Loss, 1973, cardboard box in two parts, glued paper and pastel

Unknown, Apotheosis of the Poet (Homer?), circa 500 BCE, red-figure vase

Instead of outright mocking this tradition, as would be expected when such a weighty theme appears in a crayon-on-cardboard composition, Filliou is strangely accepting of it. Through the guise of his cave-painter character, Filliou suggests that the idea of art-apotheosis is a timeless and essential facet of our understanding of art. The idea behind this one image is the idea behind the whole show: that we are all wired to make meaning of the world around us; that maybe we are all just like cave-painters lost in modernity, ever-hopeful that we may import our spiritual underpinnings unto the incomprehensible modern world. We do this, Filliou suggests, even if all we are given are crayons, broken bricks, a Xerox machine, and bent pieces of cardboard.

This show of the sculpture, photography, drawing, and collage of Robert Filliou runs until July 15 at Peter Freeman Gallery, 560 Broadway, Suite 602/603, New York

"Bienal" at El Barrio: The (S) Files 2011

2011-06-11T07:52:00.000-07:00

El Museo del Barrio is having a show of seventy-five contemporary Latin American and Caribbean artists from the New York area. Curated by el Barrio's Elvis Fuentes, Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, and Trinidad Fombella along with guest curator Juanita Bermúdez, the exhibition investigates the relationship between the art and the culture of the urban street and how this dynamic interaction brings about changes in mainstream culture.

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Full list of participating artists...

The Times' Roberta Smith at the 54th Venice Biennale

2011-06-11T07:23:00.000-07:00

Can't make it to Venice for the Biennale? Neither can we. Thankfully, there's Roberta Smith. The senior Times art critic covers the works of Thomas Hirschhorn (Switzerland), David Goldblatt (South Africa), Gedewon (Ethiopia), Yael Bartana (Poland), and many more. She also talks about the significance of Tintoretto's paintings at the center of the festival.

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Cao Fei at Lombard-Freid Projects: Thomas the Tank Engine Meets Globalization, Pollution, and Politics in 21st Century China

2011-06-08T08:36:00.000-07:00

By Daniel Solecki

A new show of film and photography by Cao Fei at Lombard-Freid projects is turning heads, and not just because of the international spotlight on Chinese contemporary art since Ai Weiwei’s arrest. Cao, like Wang Qingsong, another Chinese contemporary artist who has shown work in New York this year, takes on themes of Chinese history and the westernization of Chinese culture. Fei’s show here, called Play Time, uses childhood objects and characters from popular children’s television shows to address the relationship between western culture and the culture of the new China. A series of diptych photographs tells the story of a group of characters from the CBeebies, a British children’s television show popular in China. The characters, resembling robots and vaguely zoomorphic beings, are dressed in garishly colored full body costumes. Instead of frolicking about through an Arcadian fantasyland, the characters seem trapped in the liminal spaces of contemporary China. The group of friends finds shelter around a fire under a newly constructed highway overpass, takes a rest by a polluted steam behind a factory, and finds opportunity for fun in a hellish puddle on a landfill. In another diptych, the friends, all wearing luridly cartoonish frowns, bury one of their own in between trees in a paper plantation.

At the back of the gallery’s main room is a film called East Wind, depicting the travels of a dump truck with a Thomas the Tank Engine front delivering garbage from central Beijing to dump on the outskirts of the city. The title is a play on the name of the dump truck’s company Dong Feng, which literally means “east wind”, quoting a famous line from Mao Zedong that proclaims, “the east wind will triumph over the west wind.” In the gallery’s back room, there is another film—a series of three shorts done entirely in shadow-puppets. Called A Rock, a Dictator, a Transmigration, the shorts deal with themes from Chinese fairy tales and the reign of Mao during the Cultural Revolution as told through the child-like medium of shadow puppets.

All of Cao’s projects attempt to combine the world of child’s play with the real world—the world wrought with very adult problems. Effectively using art to engage homelessness, existential crises, consumer culture, and globalization is difficult to do without cliché. In using characters from British children’s television shows, not only is Cao Fei highly inventive, her approach opens up a new set of ways to think about the contemporary world and each individual’s relation to it. By approaching infinitely complex contemporary issues from the vantage of children, Cao is providing us with a clear parable—that in the face of vast chaos and towering ambiguity of the contemporary world, we can only react like meek children—with confused, cartoonish reactions to it all. In trying to understand the true historical scope of environmental issues, poverty, social fragmentation, 20^th century dictatorships, the relationship between the pre-modern and the modern, and the world-historically significant culture clashes between East and West in the globalized era, we are reduced to abstracting the world into recognizable symbols like the CBeebie’s dramatic frown over the grave of his friend or Mao Zedong’s face becoming a yapping shadow-puppet dog. Or worse, we will, like children, gloss over these huge unanswered questions—a huddled group of homeless people becoming a stage set from a cartoon, the clash between East and West becoming nothing more than mere child’s play.

The show runs through June 25.

On Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International at the Tony Sharfazi Gallery

2011-06-06T10:47:00.000-07:00

By Daniel Solecki

The early modernist artists and writers proclaimed that modern art reflects modern life. Because of its place in the public realm, architecture both follows and reverses this declaration—modern life comes to reflect modern architecture. Architecture and urban planning represent the most explicit way that the rumblings of the artistic mind affect the structure of society. Baron de Haussmann’s neoclassical street-planning logic gave birth to the modern city, cutting away all the medieval alleys to announce the birth of the grand Parisian boulevard and the era of enlightened urbanism. Several generations later, Le Corbusier, sitting in an apartment in Haussmann’s city, dreamed of superhighways along the Seine and modernist housing blocks paving over the worlds of the Ancien Regime and the 19^th Century alike, a dream realized in Robert Moses’ redesign of New York City.

Because of the immense work that goes into each project, architecture lends itself well to theoretical, fantastical designs never meant come to fruition. Among the most famous of these projects never to be built was actually a structure that was taken very seriously in its day and wasn’t regarded as a fantastical architectural dream—Vladimir Tatlin’s 1920 Monument to the Third International, a structure that represents, in the realest terms, an attempt to use art to change history.

A model of the so-called Tatlin’s tower now appears in a show of Russian Constructivist film and propaganda posters at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, an exhibition which runs until July 30. It is the first time a model of the structure has appeared in this country. Put together in 1967 by T.M. Sharpiro, Tatlin’s original collaborator, the model of the tower gives a viewer a true sense of Tatlin’s passionately hopeful utopianism. It would have straddled the Neva River in Leningrad and the route the original revolutionaries took to the Winter Palace during the 1917 uprising. The tower was planned to be 1,300 feet tall, consciously taller than the Eiffel Tower, which was then commonly seen as a monument to industrial capitalism. Seven-hundred feet in diameter at its base with three rotating levels, the tower looks like a modernist’s utopian version of the ziggurat. The first level is an annually rotating cube housing the halls of the party congress, the second is a monthly rotating pyramid housing the party bureaucracy, and the third is a cylinder housing a newspaper and a dome on top with a radio station. These forms are suspended within a spiral superstructure of glass and steel with a multi-lane highway going up the spiral.

What if the model of Tatlin’s tower went up, not in a show of Russian Constructivism, but in a contemporary gallery. It is natural to think so; many would agree that such a classic work has little place in Chelsea. Surely, if we saw it as such, we couldn’t take it earnestly. How could something so wild be sincere? Surely, we’d think to ourselves, its rotating levels, multilane highway, and Tower of Babel-style are some sort of postmodern pastiche of Las Vegas-style consumerist fervor. The supremacy of the propaganda machine atop the tower turns into a symbol of a culture that puts its own entertainment on the highest pedestal.

Of course is this interpretation of the model would be entirely feasible if it was built a decade ago and not almost a century ago. The Monument to the Third International was, of course, considered in highest earnestness in revolutionary Russia and was never built because of resource shortages during the civil war, not because its design didn’t appeal to party authorities.

To us, however, the Monument to the Third International seems like something out of a dime science fiction novel; a hokey and idealistic attempt to change history and society through architecture. Seeing this modernist classic in the Chelsea, a place synonymous with contemporary art, we can see the vast differences between Tatlin’s age and our own. We see plainly difference between an era stridently confident in modernity and scientific enlightenment and an era in which modernity is reviled and mocked as a culture coursing into barbarism.

Rather than looking at Tatlin’s model like a respite from naïve age, we should look at it as a reminder of how architecture can actually change history. While today, the idea of Tatlin’s tower seems to crush itself under its own bold, youthful idealism, we ought to be reminded of the power of bold architecture to change whole eras, just like Haussmann and Corbusier did in theirs. The Monument to the Third International is a reminder that art can indeed be used to change the structure of society—that from ziggurat-builders to the postmodernists, art has always had this potential, and always will have it. To accomplish this, however, the work probably has to start by leaving the drawing board, or in this case, the modeling studio.

Photography Reengaging with Painting: Art Forum on Florian Maier-Aichen at 303 Gallery

2011-06-06T08:42:00.000-07:00

Virtuosic Photoshop skills are on display at 303 Gallery on 21st Street with the latest show by the German landscape photographer Florian Maier-Aichen. A series of sublime landscapes inspired by Romantic masters like Caspar David Friedrich and Thomas Cole as well as abstractions derived from manipulated photographs, Maier-Aichen's work seeks a reconciliation between the world of painting and the world of photography through the medium of Photoshop.

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On Seeing Donald Judd in Chelsea on a Hot Summer's Day

2011-06-03T09:49:00.000-07:00

By Daniel Solecki

There is a certain air on a hot summer’s day in far Chelsea beyond 10^th Avenue. It feels dry and open, raw and industrial, desert-like. There are clouds of construction site dust picked up from new duplexes and auto-shops by the West Side Highway. It is an interesting place to find the minimalist sculpture of Donald Judd.

The David Zwirner gallery, having just bought the acclaimed artist’s estate, is now showing off its new acquisition. The show runs until June 25^th. Cloistered within this whitewashed, air-conditioned oasis, the late American sculptor’s work appears on a post-apocalyptically hot summer’s day like a gathering of sacred springs from a cooler planet. Judd’s nine sculptures in the exhibition are variations on the same theme—square-based, open-topped, metal-brushed aluminum boxes, divided in different sections by panels at the quarter and half marks. The panels and the bases of sculptures are brightly colored Plexiglas. Seen from above, the boxes look like the paintings of Barnett Newman, the colored panels becoming like Newman’s characteristic zips. From the side, the perfected metallic finish on the interior of the boxes radiates the colors of the panels—warm oranges or cool blues. The Plexiglass makes the matte aluminum flush with rich color. With the natural sunlight, one box comes to resemble a pool of glowing embers; another becomes a silent, abstracted fountain. Their edges are so perfectly edged that they reveal the imperfections in Zwirner’s floor. At certain angles, they seem to be levitating by a quarter-centimeter or more.

In his manifesto “Specific Objects,” written in Arts Yearbook in 1965, Judd proclaims the importance of spatial reckoning in works of art—that the work of art should not be a window to another world, but should actively engage its environment. It may seem trite to consider art in a commercial gallery context, but this is exactly what Judd’s work does—it forces makes the viewer consider the spatial dimensions of the work, no matter the conditions. On a dusty summer’s day in far west Chelsea, seeing Donald Judd’s mathematically precise and quasi-religious sculptures feels all the more like taking a step into a more perfect world, dimensions away from the auto-repair shop across 19^th Street. When I left the gallery to bike my way home, I found myself desperately wanting to go back to Judd’s world, and not just because of its wonderful air-conditioning.

A New York Hit Rises Above the City of Canals

2011-06-03T07:14:00.000-07:00

Remember Big Bambu? That whimsically haphazard, vaguely-architectural amalgamation of bamboo planks and shafts that last summer rose 50 feet from the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art? The same structure is now rising over the Grand Canal at the Venice Biennale.
One of the star exhibitions at the Met in 2010, "Big Bambu: You Can't, You Don't, and You Won't Stop," is now the Official Collateral Exhibition to the 54th Venice Biennale. Its 3,000 bamboo poles have arrived in Venice from New York by ship and are now going up in earnest. Carol Vogel of the New York Times visits the installation and other exhibitions now going on in Venice.
Continue reading her review...

From the Venice Biennale: A Look at Five Latin American Artists

2011-06-02T05:31:00.000-07:00

Art Info's Andrew M. Goldstein interviews acclaimed New York gallerist Frederico Seve on five Latin American artists show their latest work at the Venice Biennale. From Brazil, Guatemala, Colombia, El Salvador, and the United States, these artists are turning heads with their innovative projects. All of their works are rich with political resonance, commenting on the drug culture, paramilitary activity, and imperialism.
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An image from Brazil's entry "Cosmococa: Program in Progress," by Nevile D'Almeida and Helio Oiticica

An Historical Materialist Covers the News: Fernando Bryce at Alexander and Bonin Gallery

2011-05-31T17:39:00.000-07:00

By Daniel Solecki

“Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated by it by a thousand years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one” – Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History, Thesis XVIII”, from Illuminations

In his new show at the Alexander and Bonin gallery, Berlin-based Peruvian artist Fernando Bryce conducts a playful and whimsical take on history from a Benjaminian Historical Materialist perspective. A self-proclaimed para-historian and specialist in what he calls “mimetic copying,” Bryce’s work copying historical documents seeks the 21^st century response to 19^th century history painting—visions of history in art from a contemporary perspective. Taking on the Second World War and its recognizable plot-line as his base narrative, Bryce renders this modern myth into newspaper front-pages, turning the history of the war from a plot-driven narrative to a series of data points, leaving the viewers the task to create the story of World War Two for themselves.

Called El Mundo en Llamas (The World in Names), Bryce’s new show is a series of ninety-two large drawings of European and American newspaper front-pages and Peruvian posters for Hollywood films from 1939 to 1945. The papers are handwritten (or, in the case of the news photos and posters, hand-drawn) copies of original World-War-Two-era documents and images. The newspapers are from all over Europe and the Americas in a variety of languages, positions on the war, and design layouts. Each paper front details a different event in the war, starting with the invasion of Poland on one wall and concluding with VJ Day on the opposite.

In between front pages from The Daily Telegraph, The New York Times, Das Reich, and Le Matin are Peruvian posters for Hollywood films. The films are contemporaneous with the events in the war and reflect on the themes of the war—submarine films, Frankenstein’s monster, “El Super-Hombre.” These serve as Bryce’s way of showing the Latin American perspective on the conflict—not as mediated through the news, but as coming from the unreal world of Hollywood cinema. The film posters add a sense of chaos and break up the newspaper data. The posters parallel the overall theme of the show—just as the posters are representations of narrative, so are the newspapers and so is the whole exhibition.

If we take the front page of a newspaper as a symbol or representation of an actual event, all we see in Bryce’s exhibition are the representations, the contemporaneous interpretations, of pieces of data that constitute World War Two. There are no rumbling tanks, airplanes, whistling bombs, or German boots in Bryce’s version of the war—all we see is newsprint and portraits of the human parties involved (pictures of Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Tojo, etc). To Bryce, this is history: what is written, what is said, and what is drawn. We, the “posthumous” witnesses to history, assemble these images facts into a working narrative. Bryce is encouraging his viewers to acknowledge that history isn’t the perfect, rational plot-driven narrative we learn from textbooks and nationalist historians—history is a collection of memories, newspapers, and images; a vast and incomprehensible array of inconsistent data. We, now living after the fact, are tasked with making sense of it all.

In All Its Madness: The Contemporary Art Market

2011-05-31T05:44:00.000-07:00

When asked about the contemporary art market, we usually only remark on its seemingly inexhaustible capitalist engine driving art prices up further and further. However, while some artists like Richter and Warhol have been able to do extremely well, other artists of equal renown have been unable to garner nearly the same kind of market respect. In many cases, the prices for these artists have been depreciating. An article in today's New York Times investigates these peculiarities. It comes along with a useful graphic.

Andy Warhol's Self Portrait, 1963. It was recently sold at Christie's for over $38 million, the most ever for a painting.

Proof That "Music and Math are Brothers": Ryoji Ikeda at the Park Avenue Armory

2011-05-30T12:38:00.000-07:00

Paris based artist Ryoji Ikeda's latest sound installation artwork, the transinfinite, will be on exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory until June 11. Fusing the experience of harmony and mathematical aesthetic, Ikeda's screened imagery and sound patterning create a symphony out of "pixels, color temperature, sine wave, square wave, triangle waves, and the ratio and proportion of screen."
Continue reading on ArtForum...

Adrian Dannatt of ArtNet on Jan Frank's "Seven Months" at the Paul Kasmin Gallery

2011-05-30T11:31:00.000-07:00

A show of New York painter Jan Frank's latest work is on view until June 18 at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in Chelsea. Frank, whose career in the city spans from the seventies to the present day, has returned to the city's gallery scene after a near-decade hiatus following the shock of 9/11 with a show of 40 map-like abstract works inspired by the artist sessions with six life models.
Continue reading with Dannatt's review...

For Memorial Day: Michael D. Fay's "Drawing Fire: Into Ubaydi"

2011-05-30T08:44:00.000-07:00

In 2010, The New York Times published the writings, drawings, and paintings of Michael D. Fay, one of two combat artists working for the U.S. Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the city fills with military personnel for Memorial Day weekend, our minds turn toward the world from which they have returned--the unreal combat zones we can only otherwise get glimpses of in news videos and war photos. Here is modern warfare in all its horror and hope through the visions of the artist.

Art Healing?

2011-05-27T19:29:00.000-07:00

Russian artist Alexander Melamid, known by his parodies of Soviet Social Realism made in collaboration with Vitaly Komar, has opened an Art Healing Ministry, a storefront clinic located in SoHo.

Charles McGrath commented about the project at the New York Times.

Here is a link to Art Healing Ministry’s website

Emma Allen's review at ArtInfo

Playing with "the world in constant flux" : Helen Homan Wu of Art Cards Interviews Tim Knowles

2011-05-27T10:33:00.000-07:00

The British artist Tim Knowles' show at Bitforms Gallery is closing today, May 27. His work focuses on chaos theory and causality in nature and in human society. Examples of his work include attaching a drawing utensil to a tree branch and letting the branch draw as it moves in the wind and sending a special parcel through the post service that automatically takes a photo of its surroundings every twelve seconds. Here is a link to a transcript of an interview with Art Card's editor Helen Homan Wu:

Projects 95: Runa Islam at MoMa

2011-05-27T10:04:00.000-07:00

Opening May 27:
An exhibition of the work of Anglo-Bengali video artist Runa Islam will open Friday, May 27 at The Museum of Modern Art. The show will be on view until September 19. Both minimalist and poetic, Runa Islam's films have gained notoriety over the last few years.
Here is her video, Trust, made for the United Nations's Art for the World project in 2009.

For Rent: Consuelo Castañeda at the Americas Society

2011-05-27T09:49:00.000-07:00

The work of Cuban artist Consuelo Castañeda is on view at Americas Society at Park Avenue and 68th Street until July 30th. Castañeda, who has settled in Miami, is among the most well-regarded artists in the Cuban exile community.
http://as.americas-society.org/areas.php?k=current_exhibition

Love Through the Eyes of the Artist: Picasso and Marie-Therese Walter at Gagosian Gallery

2011-05-27T04:51:00.000-07:00

By Daniel Solecki

While strolling along a Parisian boulevard on a spring day in 1927, Pablo Picasso fell in love. She was seventeen years old, almost thirty years his junior; a half-Swedish blonde from Maison Alfort. Her name was Marie-Therese Walter. To say the 20^th century’s most famous painter was completely enamored would be but an understatement.

“I am Picasso,” the artist declared to his new love, “and I believe we can do wonderful things together.” Marie-Therese Walter looked back in confusion. Love-drunk, Picasso whisked her off the street to a nearby bookshop to show her prints of his work. Flattered, she agreed to his request to meet in Gare Montparnasse the following day.

Their Baudelairean encounter on the streets of Paris began the affair that Picasso admitted, “saved my life.” During their time as secret erotic partners from 1927 until 1937, Marie-Therese became Picasso’s muse. The incorporation of her physically striking and womanly form into his art marked his abandonment of Cubism and his adoption of new innovative styles.

However, the show of Picasso’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures of Marie-Therese Walter currently on view at the Gagosian Gallery on West 21^st Street isn’t as much about Picasso’s versatility or chameleonic stylistic changes and innovations that seem to define his legacy, it's a show about the how love looks through the eyes of an artist. The gallery does the reverse work of a "grand theory" style of art analysis; it examines art history not just as the response to historical changes like the advent of modernity or archaeological discoveries, but as the response to the seemingly frivolous, picayune, and highly-personal events of an artist's life. Art history was shaped, the show suggests, by nothing more than a chance meeting on the streets of Paris and the ups-and-downs of the tumultuous affair that followed. The Gagosian tells the story of how love, one of the most illogical, chaotic, and mutable aspects of human experience, is represented in art.

This huge show covers the entire period of Picasso and Walter's liaison and includes photographs, life-drawings, a slew of paintings, some well known, others from private collections, several sculptures, and a short film made of photo-booth pictures of Marie-Therese. It is especially remarkable the variety of ways that Picasso’s subject appears. Marie-Therese Walter here appears by the sea as an unapproachable abstraction of Santorini-colored stone, as sitting for a portrait in dainty clothes with Picasso’s distinctive distorted eyes and facial features, and as a sort of modernist Willendorf. In some of the works, every line seems to be painted with utmost tenderness; the curves of Marie-Therese’s body are distorted and sexualized into harmonious, rounded abstraction. In others, the rendering is chaotic, with stucco-textured blotches of paint or bronze and harsh warping of facial features.

The show links up Picasso’s ever-evolving style with the natural ups-and-downs of any relationship. While the curators do make it obvious that Picasso did love Marie-Therese Walter—one indeed can’t argue with the highly sensual images and the quotes from several drippy romantic poems that adorn the Gagosian’s walls—the artworks are so varied, with such different approaches to the subject matter that one can actually feel the changes in Picasso’s mind toward his subject. Here is a visual record of Picasso’s relationship—of the times when the love of his life and the muse of his art appeared to him as an ancient Venus and the times when the same person felt distant and distended. We, the contemporary viewers, are left amazed at how perfectly truthful to the experience of love it all feels.

Automatic Writing - William Kentridge

2011-05-23T13:39:00.001-07:00

William Kentridge at the New Musuem for Contemporary Art

William Kentridge’s Other Faces: Politics and Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa

2011-05-23T13:06:00.000-07:00

By Daniel Solecki

The latest installment of film and drawings from South African artist William Kentridge’s Drawing for Projection series has opened at the Marian Goodman Gallery (on view May 6 - June 18, 2011). Called “Other Faces”, the show focuses itself on questions of memory, perception, and coming to terms with life in post-Apartheid South Africa. It is anchored by an animated film that synthesizes Kentridge’s charcoal drawings into a narrative. The protagonist of the story is the white South African miner and industrialist Soho Eckstein who, at the start of the film, gets into a car accident with a black South African preacher in front of a mega-church in downtown Johannesburg. The two men get into a furious argument, causing an angry crowd of black African churchgoers to form around them. The film then dissolves into the thoughts of Eckstein as he contemplates his memories, his interaction with the preacher, and constant interruption with his financial work.

The film constantly oscillates perspective—at times we are seeing the drawings of the narrative and at others, visions and visualizations of Eckstein’s thoughts. The charcoal drawings that compose both the memories and the narrative are wild and complex, exaggerating rough edges and textures to an impassioned impressionism. An advertisement for the preacher’s event at the mega-church is seen torn at the edges. Winds blow over veldt landscapes, spreadsheets marred with red pen come alive with movement of abstract shapes and red lines, human figures from Eckstein’s childhood—his mother, his African nannies—emerge and recede from smudges and erasures, a drive-in theater is deserted and empty except for a single figure watching the screen filled with spreadsheets and red lines, an impressionistically rendered bird takes flight, and a black African mine worker swings his shovels about, his movements tracked by erasures and multiplied until his shovels become wings. Some of the drawings are reminiscent of Anselm Kiefer’s paintings of concentration camps; others seem to be psychological offshoots of Italian Futurism. The maps and over-head distended views of the city of Johannesburg seem to taken right from Pissarro’s visions of 19^th century Paris. The images of the memories are all marked by Eckstein’s spreadsheet’s red pen, which in the animations, seems to be trying desperately to make mathematical sense of the images, interrupting the smudgy, chaotic charcoal with harsh red line segments and arcs. Everything feels mutable, changeable, chaotic, subject to erasure or strike-through at a whim and yet always beyond complete erasure or oblivion.

Anselm Kiefer, "Abendland (Twilight of the West)" (1989);
synthetic polymer paint, ash, plaster, cement, earth, varnish
on canvas and wood, approx. 13' 2" x 12' 6"

As Eckstein tries to make sense of his past, it becomes evident that his memories—what defines himself—are chaotic and intangible; his attempts to make sense of their complexity using the spreadsheet logic of the red line, or any logic at all, are futile and baseless. The futility of self-comprehension is set in contrast with Eckstein’s violent encounter with the preacher. Both men are frayed at the edges (like the erasures in Eckstein’s memory and the torn sign for the preacher’s rally) and do not fully understand themselves.

It becomes readily obvious that it’s not the car accident that the men are angry about, but their failure to understand the jagged edges of their own pasts and of their own nation’s history. The frantic movement of red pen over Eckstein memories becomes actualized in the narrative when he screams in anger at the preacher and the crowd roars back. Like Kiefer, the Futurists, and others, Kentridge uses his art to build the bridge between the internal realm of human psychology and the external world of politics—the relationship between the memories of individuals and the collective memories of nations; the inner search for truth and a nation’s search for identity.

Art Experience: NYC, Vol. I, No. 1, Winter 2011

2011-02-05T08:13:00.000-08:00

Art Experience: NYC was created by Ernesto Menendez-Conde in partnership with Henry Hewes and Daniel B. Gerard. Art Experience: NYC is an online magazine devoted to Contemporary Art in New York City. Our goal is to offer updated information, insights and recommendations about shows and artistic trends in the city.
The first issue is currently online. You can see it and download it for free at:

Art Experience:NYC

The content of our first issue includes:

John Currin: Good paintings as defiant acts.
By Ernesto Menéndez-Conde

Roxy Paine: Placeless Steel.
by Federica Soletta

“nude”, Ugo Rondidone.
By Tamara Yadao

Koo Jeon-A: Constellation Congress.
By Arden Decker

Free. A show at New Museum
Tamara Yadao

Huma Bhabha: The Ugly and the Post-Colonial imaginary.
By Ernesto Menéndez-Conde

Bart Michiels: An imaginary journey into the mirror of history,
By Federica Soletta

Yumi Kori, Matsukaze,
By Arden Decker

A Group Show curated by Matt Moravec
By Ernesto Menendez-Conde

Traces, Daniel Canogar at Bifforms Gallery,
By Gerardo Muñoz

Everlasting Classic. Zou Cao.
By Janet Batet

Omar Chacon. Bacanales
By Ernesto Menendez-Conde

This magazine would not have been possible without the collaboration of the following people:

Beatríz Menéndez-Conde
Ángel Hernández
Emily Gerard
Scott Switzer
Robert Seaman, Esc.
Lester García
Gabriela E. Lupulescu
Jacqueline Loss
Kallen Tsikalas
Marcos Canteli
Florencio Gelabert
Yasmina García
Lisset Harryman
Rafael Díaz-Casas
Mónica López
Raysa Clavijo
Sun K/ Kwak
Julio Aragón

Liam Gillick: Art and Functional Utopias

2010-08-23T07:04:00.000-07:00

By Ernesto Menéndez-Conde

(originally published by ArtPulse Magazine March/May 2010, pp. 26-29)

What is social about art is its intrinsic movement against society
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1)

This commune is a place in which the design of the trays is better than in the outside world.
Liam Gillick, Literally No Place (2)

During the last fifteen years, the British artist Liam Gillick has created parallels between his personal shows and his own writings. Many of his exhibitions have run simultaneously with the publishing of a book. Frequently, the books are included in the installations, along with flat-color panels, text sculptures, architectural structures, videos, and designs. For “Three Perspectives and a Short Scenario” -the retrospective currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) of Chicago- there was the release of an anthology of essays titled Meaning Liam Gillick. Seventeen scholars attempted to define Gillick’s works, or offer hints for understanding his creations from a wide variety of topics. Meaning Liam Gillick somehow works as the catalog of the show. Even though this time Gillick’s texts were not included in the anthology, the parallelism of installations and writings remains the personal seal for his artistic events (the show at the MCA of Chicago was also accompanied by a curatorial project of the institution’s collection, also created by Gillick). Last year, while the retrospective was held in some European institutions (3), there was the release of All Books, a collection of the scripts and novels he has published since 1994.

For the artist himself, it is a mistake to over-determine this simultaneity (Gillick, 2006 167). Nevertheless, this parallelism seems to be a self-conscious artistic practice (Gillick 160-161) and it is at the core of his artistic production. The books are neither merely supplementary materials, nor incursions in a quite different field of creation. Gillick’s exhibitions, on the other hand, cannot be reduced just to his installations. Even if the artworks or books can be enjoyed as autonomous pieces, isolating Gillick’s artistic productions or underestimating the structure of the whole looks like a rather deceivable approach. The structure of his works seems to be precisely this parallelism between the writings and the visual images. He provokes the search for dialogue among the installations, novels, scripts, and essays he writes.

Liam Gillick, Three perspectives and a short scenario, 2008, installation at Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. Courtesy of the artist. Photos by Bob Goedewaagen.

This peculiar practice turns Gillick into a hermetic artist since it raises the need to find connections among his whole set of creative productions. The viewer/reader is challenged to produce meanings through attempts to establish a coherent system from a variety of sources and means of expression. This task, which even seems difficult to avoid, is one of the most rewarding intellectual adventures in Gillick’s body of works. However, it looks as if the interpretation must remain open, since there is always room for conflictive points of views in the quest for unity or even parallelism among his heterogeneous fields of production. As Julian Stallabrass has asserted, “Gillick is an artist that offers possibilities rather than holds a position.(4)” Gillick’s works, seen in their simultaneity, are always metaphorical, suggestive, and even enigmatic.
However, it could be argued that this hermetic character is very eloquent in its own right, at least if interpreted the way Theodor Adorno understood the social resonance of art. As the author of the Aesthetic Theory noted:

“Hermetic works bring more criticism to bear on the existing than those that, in the interest of intelligible social criticism, devote themselves to conciliatory forms.” (145)

These words, written more than forty years ago, are still crucial in order to understand the possibilities of art as a mean of resistance in contemporary society. Actually they are particularly relevant today, in a Post Utopian World, when not only, as Adorno states, the direct treatment of social conflicts in artwork is the weakest, and most superfluous link between art and society (229), but also at a moment when tolerance has become genuinely repressive (Jameson 110), and the opposition to Neo-Liberalism seems to lead nowhere. The critique of Contemporary Capitalism lacks a social project, which somehow could be envisaged as a paradigm, or could provide a direction to the unconformity. Since the fall of Socialism in Eastern Europe, all progressive thinking risks being dismissed as “Communism,” or as reminiscent of a repressive, authoritarian Modernism.

In Gillick’s works, the criticism of Neo-Liberalism also implies a critique and a redefinition of Utopian thinking. In his novel, Literally No Place, he talks about grasping the “idea of a commune, a functional rationalistic commune that can really work and be productive” (Gillick, 2009 204). He also insists on being “communal, but not communistic” (Gillick, 2009 206). Some of his artistic experiments could lead to these types of experiences. Instead of Utopias, Gillick proposes developing the notion of “functional utopia,” which would be displayed throughout time, and would be intrinsic to the structure of the exhibition. A “functional utopia” is a participative one. It must create a “better place, and actually have a better time, rather than just providing soothing images of experimental architecture and a mish-mash of interactive structure” (Gillick, 2006 282). Instead of projections into the future, functional utopias are an alternative present. Art institutions themselves, while the exhibitions last, could be spaces for implementing these “functional utopias.” The collective show A Viable space: Der Umbau Raum (Klünterhous, Sttugart, 1996) -for which Gillick wrote a text and also participated as an artist- could provide an example of these attempts. In A Viable space, the artists were using the gallery as a site for research, hanging out, viewing and production (Gillick, 2006 103).

Liam Gillick, Rescinded Production, 2008. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Gift of Mary and Earle Ludgin by exchange. Photo courtesy of Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York.

Functional utopias are in many ways related to Modernism, from Neo-plasticism to Bauhaus (some members of the Bauhaus movement, like Josef Albers, Kurt Schmith, and Marcel Breuer could be seen as precursors of Gillick’s installations), but the aims are quite different. Unlike Modernist conceptions, art is not pointing towards integration into life; it intends to maintain a critical distance from the social system.

By appealing to the hermetic, or by producing what the Spanish scholar Peio Aguirre has called “elusive social forms,(5)” Gillick takes advantage of artistic practices in order to create a social critique that also contains the conditions for exploring alternative means of social exchange. He places art in opposition to society, while, at the same time, conceiving it as a form of social consciousness.

Notes

1. Cited by Peter Bürguer in Theory of the Avant-Garde, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2002: 10.

2. In All Books, London: Book Works, 2009: 205.

3.The title “Three Perspective and a Short Scenario” has to do with the institutions in which the exhibition was shown. It is an itinerant project which was presented at the Kunsthalle Zürich (January 25 to March 30, 2008), Witte de With in Rotterdam (January 19 to March 24, 2008), Kunstverein Munich (June to August 2008), and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (October 10, 2009 - January 10, 2010).

4. Cited by Chantal Mouffle, in Meaning Liam Gillick: 101.

5. See Peio Aguirre, “Social Elusive Forms,” in Meaning Liam Gillick: 1-27.

Works Cited

Adorno, W. Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Gillick, Liam. Proxemics. Zurich-Dijon: JRP/Ringier & les Presses du Rėel, 2006.

___________ All Books, London: Book Works, 2009.

Altermodern?

2010-08-10T09:11:00.001-07:00

By Ernesto Menéndez-Conde

Altermodern? was originally published by ArtPulse Magazine October/November 2009, Vol. 2 No 3, pp. 26-29

Altermodern is the new term the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud proposed for understanding our present. The recent Tate Triennial (London, February-April, 2009) was devoted to consecrating, or at least putting this concept into circulation. In the introduction to the catalogue Nicolas Bourriaud wrote:

“The terms ‘MODERN,’ ‘POSTMODERN,’ ‘ALTERMODERN’ do not define styles (save as ways of thinking), but here represent tools allowing us to attribute times-scales to cultural eras.” (16)

Therefore, our contemporary culture would be, according to Bourriaud, that of the altermodern. The term attempts to “delimit the void after the Postmodern.” (12) The words for the catalogue, and even the whole show, are a sort of avant-garde manifesto, in which the definition of altermodern is displayed, demonstrated through the artworks and other supplementary texts and discussions. Altermodern would be a sort of constellation, in which art “needs to reinvent itself in a planetary scale.”(12)

At the risk of simplifying Bourriaud’s description of the present a little bit, his viewpoints could be summarized as follow: 1) In our cultural era, art is heterotopic. It goes beyond nationalities, immersed in global dialogues and creolization. contemporary art is essentially a hybrid. It is related to the experiences of migration, displacement, exile, and traveling to the point that “trajectories become forms.” 2) As a result, there is a fragmentation of the work of art, whose unity consists in being a network, a collective creation, or a process that generates forms. 3) Contemporary art assumes heterochrony. That means, it wanders through history, unable to understand time – as Modernity did – as a lineal progression, or conceive of it as an exhaustion, in which history and metanarratives come to an end (as it was perceived from the postmodern perspective). In the altermodern, there are multiple experiences of time (Bourriaud mentions anachronism, delay, anticipation, and the immediate) coexisting in a sort of web, articulating meanings with the purpose of revealing the present. 4) Contemporary art is a displacement of signs, in which materials are interconnected, developing a chain of references that are dialoguing with each other in order to produce a narrative, and in which storytelling plays a main role. 5) Altermodern is marked by exodus, by deterritorialization, and the nomadic. Staying away from traditions, the new art turns to a strategic universalism, creating a language which goes beyond nationalisms, or regionalisms.

The Tate Triennial illustrated all these points through the display of artworks and debates devoted to the postcolonial world, exodus, and travel. The series of pictures shown by Rachel Harrison are a good example of these altermodern practices. In Voyage of the Beagle, Harrison worked in a series of portraits that starts and ends with images of menhirs. The pictures are suggesting the idea of a circular journey (Kelsey, 2009). It is also a planetary voyage, a trajectory through signs, and history – including allusions to the future, as depicted by science fiction – since the portraits are references to cultural icons taken from all over the world, from mass-media images to avant-garde sculpture, from classic statues to African masks. The title Voyage of the Beagle was taken from the memoirs of Charles Darwin’s expeditions to the coasts and islands of South America. The title proposes an analogy between today’s global world (which the artist traveled through the images) and archipelagos. That fits Bourriaud’s intentions perfectly. In fact, he also uses the archipelago as a metaphor for the present:

“Here we are back with the image of the archipelago: instead of aiming at a kind of summation, altermodernism sees itself as a constellation of ideas linked by the emerging and ultimately irresistible will to create a form of modernism for the twenty-first century.”(12)
However, Voyage of the Beagle could be seen as well as an example of the postmodern aesthetic. The travel through space, signs, and history is related to postmodern strategies of parody, pastiche, and transvestism. In one of Harrison’s pictures, what seems to be a Japanese mask evokes Elvis Presley’s face; in another one, Gertrude Stein is portrayed in the manner of Buddha representations. It is hard to delimit heterotopy and heterochrony from postmodern artistic appropriation. All the references are aiming to produce a carnivalesque effect. As in carnivals, the idea of the mask, zoomorphism, wigs, disguises, corny crowns, and kitsch figurines can be found everywhere in Voyage of the Beagle. The two levels of reading enunciated by Charles Jencks – the eclecticism, and the use of kitsch with artistic intentions – which typify the postmodern aesthetic, are quite notorious in Harrison’s pictures.

Rather than evidence of an altermodern stage, Voyage of the Beagle could suggest that the theoretical hypothesis launched by the Tate Triennial lacks further development. It can be argued that, as Bourriaud says, neither postmodern nor altermodern are styles, so the same artwork features could be interpreted in one way or the other. However, after reading the catalogue, the difference between what Bourriaud sees as a “time scale of a cultural era” and the postmodern remains unclear, and it even seems to be supported by aspects that were already noticed by many theoreticians of the seventies and eighties.

The concept of art as heterotopia, for instance, was already circulating by the late eighties. In his book Hybrid Cultures (1989), Néstor García Canclini noticed that Latin American modernity was not only about national borders, ethnicities, and class distinctions. Latin American modernity was also an experience in which the sociocultural frontiers were erased, mixed, and interwoven, producing what Canclini called hybrid cultures. Postmodernism was not just a nostalgic complaint about the death of almost everything, but it was also a moment of travel and displacement. In his essay “Dall’utopia all’eterotopia” (1989) Gianni Vattimo used the word heterotopia in order to describe a universal and communitarian culture.1

When Bourriaud talks about the generalization of the hypertext (one sign directs us to a second, then a third, creating a chain of mutually interconnected forms), he seems to describe what was one of the main topics of postmodernism, which was strongly associated with intertextuality and the use of old signs with a new logic (Foster, 1984).

Postmodernim is over. Postmodernism is dead. Since 1989, if not earlier, some scholars and art critics have been arguing about the need for going beyond the term, not to mention the ones who, from the very beginning, remained skeptical about the word. There is no doubt that the debate about postmodernism was already fading away during the early nineties. Still, attempts to define this concept not only produced a significant amount of seminal texts about the emergence of a new sensibility and a new system of cultural production, but also, in a broader sense, they succeeded in creating a distinction between a previous past (modernism), and a new cultural moment (postmodernism). As Fredric Jameson has observed, from aesthetics to economics, from social relations to science, fashion and ideology, postmodernism has affected every single aspect of society (1999). Is this postmodernism, understood as a cultural dominant, actually over? Can we talk about a qualitatively different cultural stage? If so – and this is already arguable even though it seems globalization is generating a new set of complexities – how can we define this cultural present?

Globalization is an unprecedented phenomenon, and Bourriaud is trying to explore how it has transformed cultural production. This was the main – provocative and speculative – challenge of the show at the Tate Triennial. However, in my opinion, as a theoretical hypothesis, the description of the new term fails to establish a differentiation from the postmodern.

What if, by now, the death of postmodernism is, paradoxically, one of the many death certificates issued by the postmodern? Néstor García Canclini is cautious about the idea of labeling the new cultural moment with just a single word. Perhaps the new cultural developments cannot be subsumed in a system yet, at least not without falling back into postmodernism’s webs. In the end, we are not that far from postmodernism, and perhaps the new cultural era is still about to come, showing new symptoms, or new signs, but without being born yet, still germinating in its mother’s womb.

Note

1. Author refers to: Vattimo, Gianni. “Dall’utopia all’eterotopia.” Trans. into Spanish. Desiderio Navarro. Criterios 30 [Havana] Jul-Dec, 1991: 121.

Works Cited

Bourriaud, Nicolas. “Altermodern.” Altermodern, Tate Triennal. London: Tate Publishing, 2009.

Kelsey, John. “Rachel Harrison.” Altermodern, Tate Triennial London: Tate Publishing, 2009: 114.

Foster, Hal. “Re:Post.” Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Ed. Brian Wallis. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1999.

García Canclini, Néstor. “La globalización: ¿Productora de Culturas Híbridas?” .

Ernesto Menéndez-Conde is finishing a PhD in Romance Languages at Duke University. He has published in magazines in Havana, Spain and New York. He has also collaborated with Marlborough Gallery and Sotheby’s in New York.

Denarrations in Contemporary Art.

2009-12-13T20:44:00.000-08:00

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(originally published in ArtPulse Magazine, Winter 2009)

Big Bang, the Cristina Lucas video installation, which is currently being shown at the Pan American Art Projects in Miami, could be read from its allusions to some landmarks taken from Art History tradition. I will mention three of these images. Since the projection is unusually placed on the ceiling of the gallery, Lucas’ representation of the firmament could recall the cosmological view of mural paintings in Romanesque apses. The model’s posture, with her legs wide open, exhibiting her sex, might be immediately associated with Courbet’s painting, The Origin of the World; and the words written with a brush, which the performer has inserted into her vagina, evoke Shigeko Kubota’s Vagina Painting (1965). But Lucas’ installation works as a subversion of these narratives. Seen against the Romanesque wall paintings, the naked female body takes the place of the Christ Pantocrator. The reference to Courbet’s canvas (which was devoted to pleasing the male gaze) seems subverted by the gesture of writing with a brush attached to the vulva. Finally, in a sort of unexpected ending, the words Big Bang, light up as if somehow they were a constellation, like an advertisement made with neon lights, indicating that the feminist perspective contains a little bit of spectacle and consumerism. In Lucas’ video installation, there is not only a subversive use of a phallocentric discourse, or a Christian icon, but also the exposure of the feminist perspective as another narrative which could – and should – be subverted, or at least deconstructed. This sequence – which is a narration in itself – has to do with Gerardo Mosquera’s definition of “denarration.” As the curator has asserted, this term is related to “works that use a narrative structure, and simultaneously discuss, deconstruct, or even subvert narrative conventions.”

In Cristina Lucas’ video, the word “denarration” could bring to mind the strategic uses of Derrida’s “deconstruction.” Since there might be many conjunctions between the two terms, it is worth trying to differentiate them. Whereas deconstruction deals with language, and binary oppositions as bearers of semantic inequalities1, in denarrations, the act of analyzing, subverting, or even deconstructing narratives is an intrinsic part of the structure of storytelling. Denarrations are, therefore, paradoxical means of constructing narrations while dissecting, erasing or destroying them. If deconstruction is, above all, a tool for questioning the nature of philosophical discourses, denarration is primarily a tool for storytelling and structuring representation. That might help to understand why in some of the artists included in the show –like Vibeke Tandberg, Nina Yuen, Rodrigo Facundo and Tracey Snelling – there is an existential dimension, which is more related to storytelling and tends to be absent in deconstructionist practices. (The latter have been systematically part of the verbiage for the decentralization of hegemonic discourses, and the vindication of sexually and politically marginalized narratives).

The way Mosquera uses the term differs from the definitions developed by narratologists 2. Denarration, as he has presented it, is an open, inclusive, and rather experimental concept, which includes artists, who are working in very different, apparently unrelated, poetics. Gerardo Mosquera has curated a very plural show, in which the artworks are intended to produce meanings not only by themselves, but also by dialoguing among themselves, and insinuating the creative possibilities that could be considered within the horizon of “denarration.” By choosing seven artists, who are so different from each other, Mosquera has applied the term in a suggestive and flexible manner.

Aernout Mik, one of the creators included in the exhibition, avoids calling himself a video artist. He actually conceives his works as site-specific installations, since he adapts the sizes and formats of the screens he uses to the architectonic peculiarities of the place in which the videos are shown. The images displayed by the projector are therefore integrated into the space in which the projection takes place. Through this procedure, viewers inside the gallery become part of the artwork. Their own bodies and their own movements interfere with what is seen on the screen, in the same way that the environmental noise replaces the video’s lack of sound. The moment of projection denarrates the filmed images. In Mik’s installations, the actual gallery space subverts, or negates, the space of the representation.

In the video Alison by Nina Yuen, the author tells the story of what seems to be her own suicide. But Yuen is actually both the main character and the narrator who, as an outsider, is constructing the plot. In Alison, the author becomes a character, whose role is introducing uncommon ways of narrating the personal drama the viewer is watching. We see her inside the narration, telling the story by making drawings over some printed images, or burning and manipulating pictures of the protagonist. Yuen turns the act of storytelling into a fiction, which is integrated into the narration.

Tracey Snelling’s installations can be enjoyed through their countless small, and sometimes hilarious, details. Rear doors and windows take the viewer into inner spaces, in which there are very individualized stories. Snelling alters the proportionality of what she sees. Her use of the space is more poetic than realist. She introduces unexpected, imaginative associations, in miniatures that have the appearances of being very accurate copies of the real world. In her installations, there is a juxtaposition of imagination over everyday life. Still, in her complex artifacts that include neon lights, written words –sometimes as graffiti, painted sculptures, pictures, and images in motion- there seems to be nostalgia, and even a sense of alienation, which is negated by the impression of being in front of a playful, almost naïve, set design.

In a series of pictures, the Norwegian artist Vibeke Tandberg represents an absurd story of intimacy. In Princess goes to bed with a mountain bike, there is a woman with a small, carnivalesque crown. She wears a bathing suit and sneakers. She enters a messy space, which looks like a sort of atelier. Then she goes for a mountain bike and takes it to a bed, in which both woman and bike lie together. The images are vertically divided into two, and the right side is repeated in the following picture. Through this segmentation, the images follow a cinematic displacement in both time and space. Vibeke stresses the way the narration is conducted, combining stillness and motion, and using time as a dimension of space, while subverting fairy tales and pointing to an existential anguish in the everyday life.

The Colombian artist Rodrigo Facundo exhibits a series of drawings made in encaustic over wood. In his works, characters perform some gestures (like fighting each other). By overlapping the figures, Facundo suggests a sense of movement; however, the actions seem frozen. Facundo adds geometric lines, cubic forms, axes, and the letters x, y, and z (as if he were dealing with variables and geometric problems). These lines cluster the movements of the characters in claustrophobic spaces, and, at the same time, simulate analytical measures or sketches of unfinished projects.

In Perianes’ pieces, the handcrafted images of plants, landscapes, houses and trees are subverted by the introduction of simulated accidents that alter the traditional objectual character of the medium he uses. However, this opposition – between the conventional motives he represents and the unconventional breaks in the frames, holes in the surfaces, unexpected cuts, and assemblies – is somehow integrated in the representation, producing visual harmonies, and even keeping the sense of handcrafted labor. Perianes’ denarrations are hedonistic and, to a certain extent, formalistic ones.

Generally speaking, I would say that the display of the installations or the formal treatments of the pieces tend to denarrate the contents of the images. In the context of contemporary art, in which installations stress the objectual character of the artwork, and, as Boris Groys has said, there is a “re-auratization” of the object (2008, 80), the show “Denarrations” somehow goes against the tide. It calls attention to unconventional approaches to storytelling, ways of representing, and the subverting of narration in a self-reflective manner.

NOTES

1. Culler, Jonathan. “La crítica postestructuralista.” Criterios. [La Habana] No 21/24. Jan. 1987-Dec. 1988: 40.

2. “Denarration occurs when events or aspects of a fictional world are negated or cancelled. It is an ontological rather than epistemological alteration: the narrator does not simply correct a misremembered fact or revise an incorrect judgment, but rather changes some part of the fictional world.” (Richardson, 2006). In http://www.nordisk.au.dk/forskningscentre/nrl/undictionary/#DENARRATION, Dictionary of Unnatural Narratology, Compiled and Edited by Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson.

WORKS CITED

Groys, Boris. “Topology of Contemporary Art.”Antinomies of Art and Culture. Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Duke University Press, 2008. 80.

ART AND IDEOLOGY IN ADORNO’S AESTHETIC THEORY

2009-11-14T11:55:00.000-08:00

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Adorno considers that art participates in the ideological struggle by being what it is above all things: art. Adorno argues against realisms –including social realism (1970, 344)– and against cultural policies that tend to conceive of the artistic image as an instrument of class struggle. Art’s contents are only the most superficial link between the artistic image and society (229). If social critique is carried out directly and not by way of suggestion, it is propaganda and not art. It is a paradox that a work of art denouncing specific social injustice is usually framed within the system against which it allegedly struggles, sometimes even becoming complicit with this system. From the point of view of social critique, that which is hermetic is much more forceful than that which is explicit and intelligible (145).
L’art pour l’art is situated at the other end of the spectrum from the “art of social commitment,” as it puts forward a simplistic opposition between art and society. L’art pour l’art evades the perils of drawing its contents from social life. Instead, it contents itself with associating reality and ugliness (237). Under the banner of “beauty,” l’art pour l’art becomes an object that is easy to consume, it becomes one more commodity, subordinated to the very system on whose margins this art situates itself. This art’s intentional gesture of turning its back to society is at the basis of its efforts to separate artistic forms from any contents. This very same gesture provides us with an explanation for our present-day perception of l’art pour l’art’s formalisms as typical manifestations of kitsch (237).
Unlike l’art pour l’art, autonomous art isn’t synonymous with the “ivory tower” or with forms that are bereft of contents. It rather refers to a complex integration of contents within formal systems (7). The participation of empirical the empirical world in the work of art is crucial to understand Adorno’s concept of autonomous art. Even if the artistic image can’t dramatically sacrifice the contents, Adorno considers that forms are what express the work of art’s ideology. In order to perceive the ideological dimension of the image, the relation between form and content must be revisited as a dialectical one. It is necessary to delve in the contents of the forms: “What is socially decisive in artworks is the content [Inhalt] that becomes eloquent through the work’s formal structures” (230)
Critique is primarily carried out by paying attention to those artistic forms that reflect and reproduce social conflicts. In his discussion of Kafka’s style, Adorno concludes that: “In his writing, absurdity is as self-evident as it has actually become in society” (231). Yet even when the forms are vehicles for the expression of contents drawn from society, they are opposed to the empirical world (5). Autonomous art aspires to be identical to itself and, in that sense, it also aspires to be a unique and asocial object.

In this image, Adorno y Thomas Mann.

The Palace of Dreams

2009-11-10T18:15:00.000-08:00

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I
I can’t remember ever having come across a direct reference to Kafka while reading Michel Foucault’s works. I’m not saying that Foucault never refers to or quotes Kafka but only that I haven’t read such a quote or that I’ve forgotten it. As difficult as it may be to classify Foucault as a structuralist or as a post-structuralist intellectual, his interest in the problems related to modernity is evident, as in Kafka’s case. Foucault’s inquiries run through a gamut of themes, shifting from one to the next. From his initial works up until his unfinished History of Sexuality, his thinking moves from epistemological inquiries (as he seeks out the historical horizons of thought or elucidates the structures that give cohesion to the production of scientific knowledge at a specific period) to the relations between power and knowledge that are central in his later books.
It’s this interest in the connections between knowledge and power that likens Foucault to Kafka. The biopolitics of power, the constitution of the subject (defined in relation to a body of knowledge), the legal authority over life and death, are one side of a coin whose reverse can be found in Kafka’s stories. The author of The metamorphosis shows how the individual is subordinated by the devices of power, as well as the anxiety and the sensation of absurdity that emerge from a self-sufficient and inquisitive machinery that relentlessly interferes and controls every aspect of private life
Yet, Foucault and Kafka’s worlds don’t ever meet or converge. Foucault shows no apparent interest in describing the subject’s neurosis or anxiety, whereas Kafka never investigates the meaning of the institutional machineries that oppress individuals. Instead, Kafka always reveals this system as one that is both enigmatic and unpredictable.

II
In Albanian writer Ismail Kadaré’s novel The Palace of Dreams, Foucault and Kafka’s respective perspectives are superposed. Despite its kitsch and saccharine title, The Palace of Dreams is a sinister institution, closed off from the outside world and full of dark and labyrinthine corridors. It houses a tremendous bureaucratic apparatus whose purpose is to control the oneiric life of an entire empire. It’s a storehouse of infinite reports, files, folders and notebooks. It’s also a center of labor, structured by a neatly established hierarchical structure. It’s a system that has spread its tentacles over the entire territory.

III
At the base of this pyramidal structure we find the scribes who transcribe the dreams of the empires’ subjects. Above, are the couriers who carry the oneiric materials from the provinces and outlying areas to the palace. Above them, are the receptionists and then those who select the dreams that deserve to be passed on to the interpreters. In the higher sections, are the interpreters who are in charge of unraveling the political premonitions contained in the oneiric images, and also the obscure employees who confirm the veracity of the information that they have received and often do so by resorting to coercion and even to torture. Although its operations are worthy of a delirious caricature, the palace of dreams seeks to confiscate knowledge, in much the same way as the confession, as Foucault has demonstrated it to operate: instead of freeing individuals, it subjects them even further to dynamics of power.

IV
In Kadaré’s novel, the dreams’ contents could have subversive capacities. They therefore constitute information that is vital to the State’s security, since they could be useful to prevent a scheme from being hatched, an act of insubordination or a catastrophe from being carried out. The dreams’ interpreter thus bears no relation to the figure of the psychoanalyst, since these interpreters immediately discard the dreams related to emotional life, and psychoanalytic texts are entirely absent from the institution’s library. In this novel, the interpreter’s task is much more similar to the work of an intelligence agent who deciphers the secret codes of spies, than it is to analytical practice.

It’s precisely for that reason that specific skills become vital, such as the capacity to differentiate “false” dreams from “genuine” ones, or the ability to quote the “dreamers” in police investigations, in the event that some blurry detail might endanger the government’s stability. Totalitarian power can’t exist without generating a state of collective paranoia. Much like the government’s control over life in The Palace of Dreams, socialist societies were panoptical societies par excellence, as the State’s fear of insubordination generated, in turn, the fear of being watched, even when no one was watching.

IV
The novel describes the protagonist’s anxiety in the face of such an eerie task, which he continues to carry out while feeling the constant fear of making mistakes. What is terrible in The Palace of Dreams isn’t so much the excess of information that must be managed, classified and deciphered but, rather, the ongoing exercise of judgment that is required on the employees’ part. The person who selects dreams and the interpreters must make decisions based on their impressions, their insights and their creativity, but their work also requires of them a responsibility that could easily be deemed excessive. The interpreter must be careful not to provide a mistaken reading and must even anticipate the possibility of an error that can only reveal itself in the future, when a premonition will have been fulfilled. It isn’t its scrupulous precision –as in the rigorous registers and classifications that are characteristic of the Nazi’s archives– that makes Kadaré’s palace a bureaucratic hell but, rather, that margin of indeterminacy over which the threat of punishment perpetually hovers. This is a truly Kafkian trait. Without knowing clearly what specific transgression or crime he has committed, the individual can incur at any time in an unwise act that can worsen his already weak position in the face of the law.

*I would like to thank Ariana Hernández-Reguant for introducing me to this novel and for having given it to me as a present.

Dan Graham: Beyond

2009-10-31T04:47:00.000-07:00

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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

2009-10-18T21:40:00.000-07:00

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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.

2009-10-13T21:48:00.000-07:00

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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 example 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.

2009-10-12T06:06:00.000-07:00

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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.

2009-10-05T22:15:00.000-07:00

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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

2009-09-27T22:05:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-02T04:57:00.000-07:00

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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.

Anya Gallaccio’s roses

2009-08-15T04:12:00.000-07:00

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I
Scottish artist Anya Gallaccio (b. 1964) has worked with flowers for many years now. In doing this, she continually stages a tension between transcendence and ephemerality. Some of Gallaccio’s works prove particularly difficult to appreciate because they require that one spend a long time in front of these installations, still, careful and watchful, second after second. Since her art unfolds in time rather than in space, Gallaccio engages us into arduous contemplation: in their essence, her creations are ephemeral. Gallaccio’s flowers invite us to contemplate the splendor, the exuberance and the intensity of life in all of what it holds that is fleeting and perhaps inapprehensible. The pictures, videos and panels of inert flowers that document these installations only remain as residues of a work of art which literally has a life of its own. This is an excess of life that becomes manifest in an appeal to the senses.

II
This excess heightens our sense of smell: in one of her installations Gallaccio created a large horizontal rectangle on the floor, quite similar to a rug, in which she had placed ten thousand roses. It isn’t hard to believe that the gallery room must have exhaled an overwhelming perfume, so excessive that it could even seem unreal, a perfume that impregnates the space like an interrogation.

III
This excess also manifests itself in a visual plenitude, as they fill the field of the gaze. Some have compared Gallaccio’s installations to Mark Rothko’s paintings. Both artists create a chromatic space for contemplation. Rothko would saturate color by superposing layers or paint and creating horizontal stripes whose outlines were blurry, as if these were volatile spaces –aerial spaces?– or as if they were a mental attitude in which the border between consciousness and intuitions were equally blurred. Rothko’s abstractions are undeniably informed by transcendence: when spectators look at them, they also contemplate themselves in a mental attitude that is frequently associated to Zen meditation.
Gallaccio’s installations equally contain a transcendent element, even in such ephemeral pieces. Gallaccio uses roses, with the excessive pigmentation of their petals, to construct a fleeting overwhelming instant: the instant of ecstasy. Anya Gallaccio’s roses are Dionysian roses.

Sky Mirror

2009-07-25T09:24:00.000-07:00

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I
For five weeks in September and October of 2006, artist Anish Kapoor altered the public space of Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center with an installation called Sky Mirror. The artwork consisted in an immense stainless steel circular mirror, with a diameter of 10.6 meters, weighing 23 tons and pointing towards the sky.
Kapoor had already created similar pieces, although they were much smaller in size. In Manhattan, however, Sky Mirror created an even more disquieting effect since it foregrounded the sharp contrast between the reflection of the sky in the concave part of the mirror and the street’s usual bustle. As Kapoor himself has repeated more than once, he brought the sky to the earth. “Sky Mirror” created a quiet space, as it interrupted the city’s daily bustle, its sirens, its relentless traffic, its hurried pedestrians.

II
Just as in the Illiad’s well-known image of the “dawn’s rosy fingers,” Sky Mirror personified the sky by elevating it to the status of a divinity to whom it made the offering of contemplating itself. In the very heart of Manhattan, Kapoor relived invocations of cosmic principles that we can even compare to the invocations through which the Antiquity’s polytheistic cultures consecrated some of their monuments.
III
Sky Mirror also brought into play the association between the eye and the mirror. Spectators saw themselves reflected on the convex side of the work, as if they were being viewed from above. Sky Mirror can be interpreted in two directions: as a mirror pointed towards the sky and also as a work that turns the sky into a mirror that gives back a vision of the world from an unusual –aerial–point of view.

IV
Walter Benjamin had observed that boredom was a phenomenon that was inherent to modern cities and that it began to be experienced in massive proportions around 1840. For Benjamin, boredom began with the weather. Nothing bored everyday people more than the cosmos and this is why he considered that there is a deep connection between weather and boredom, as he wrote at some point in his Arcades Project. Could this equivalency still hold up in the face of Anish Kapoor’s’ mirror? I suspect that it could not.

The Great Wall of China as a metaphor

2009-07-23T19:53:00.000-07:00

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I
I’ve always enjoyed the way the Spanish language likens soap operas to the long and winding shape of the snake, by referring to them as “culebrones” (big rattlesnakes) The image of a large oviparous reptile is very appropriate to evoke those episodes that seem to go on and on, indefinitely, even if we already know how they will end. If one thing is certain for the soap opera’s viewers, it’s that the protagonists will wind up together again and that they will overcome any of the moral prejudices, class barriers or scheming that had prevented them from being together once and for all. The basic structure of the soap opera is premised on the idea of an inexorable destiny that favors the “good” characters and punishes the baddies. Spectators are entirely aware of this convention, in such a way that they don’t watch the soap opera to find out how it will end, since this can be foretold from the first few chapters –what keeps them tuning in from one episode to the next are the twists and turns through which the lovers are reunited, and through which love triumphs over lust, self-sacrifice over avarice, sincerity over manipulation, and courage over treachery.

II
In the Hellenistic world, Longo’s Daphnis and Chloe offers an early example of a narrative structure that is similar to the soap opera typical plot. It tells the tale of two lovers who overcome numerous adversities and are reunited in the end. If we go back earlier in time, we could even trace parallels with Homer’s Odyssey: its hero finally returns home after lengthy travels in which he is constantly exposed to nymphs and fairies that seek to both capture and captivate him with the temptation of pleasure. The predestined reunion of lovers became a commonplace many centuries ago. In the midst of the XVIIIth century, Voltaire was already ridiculing it when, after being submitted to a succession of catastrophes, the aged and tired Candide is reunited with the equally aged Cunégonde.

III
With the exception of parodies like García Márquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera, contemporary art has very few means of revisiting this melodramatic “predestined” love that always triumphs “at the end of the road.” Still, some artists have offered unusual representations of this soap operatic motif. This is the case of The lovers, Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s performance in which, during the summer of 1988, the authors set a rendez-vous at some point along the Great Wall of China. Each of them started out from one side of the wall, and in order to be reunited, they each had to walk for three months as if on a pilgrimage. This performance enacts anew the “predestined” reunion that is so typical of soap operas. The tired metaphor of destiny as a path suddenly took on a new vitality as it transformed itself into the path of the Great Wall. The exotic and legendary character that the Chinese antiquity takes on in Western imagination could equally allude to the magnetic and almost magical relationship that seems to guide the lovers as it brings them closer.

Notes on the grotesque

2009-06-16T19:45:00.000-07:00

I

The etymology of the word “grotesque” tells us that it derives from “grotto” or “cavern”. This original meaning seems to persist at least partially up to this day. The grotesque is related to telluric, subterranean and infernal forces, as it seems to apply these forces to humans: they simultaneously express physical deformity, the soul’s fallenness, brutality or idiocy. In sixteenth century France, the grotesque was conceived as the monstrous union between human and non human beings. There is nothing intrinsically grotesque about a pig, a donkey or a gorilla. They become grotesque as their particular characteristics are applied to humans. When mud is associated to feces, it becomes the substance of the grotesque. Simbioses involving vegetable elements with animal and anthropomorhic elements reflect the nightmares of the unconscious.

The grotesque is based on the representation of what Bakthin called “material body lower stratum” (growths, secretions, digestion, anal pleasure, etc.) or on the exaggeration of physical traits related to prohibitions or obscenities. Cervantes’ Sancho Panza is a grotesque character as he rides a donkey and carries his paunch around while dreaming of banquets and earthly possessions.

Laughter is inherent to the grotesque. In the world of base instincts, laughter is the most typical reaction elicited by stench and rotting. This cruel humor is very much present in one of the chapters from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The wake of Zosima’s cadaver takes place in a small stuffy roomed, and so, after a few hours, the venerable old man’s cadaver begins to disintegrate and produces a stench that inundates the room. Those present at the wake consider this stench to be symptomatic of Zosima’s corruption and they approach the casket to curse him while his humiliated disciple Aliosha must, in light of his pacific nature, bear the insults showered upon his erstwhile spiritual guide. The multitude’s curses, the way in which the venerable mystic is reduced to a stinking corpse and Aliosha’s muffled pain as he is incapable of putting an end to this absurdity all make this scene quintessentially grotesque. This incident’s ridiculousness provokes laughter and the misunderstanding evokes the comedy of intrigue, thus justifying Octavio Paz’ observation that Dostoyevsky’s humor was uncannily modern.

The grotesque is also a realization of phobias. Sancho’s misadventures, his skepticism or his gullibility prove to be funny, but his girth and his provincial way of speaking act as a warning to the reader against the sins of gluttony or envy, and against the simplicity of a rustic existence. A homophobe or a racist sees a homosexual or a black person as grotesque beings, just as the libertine proves to be repulsive insofar as he inspires fear of the degradations through which he seeks pleasure. Representations of the devil or of death are equally grotesque in this sense.

Just like carnival, the grotesque inverts social and semantic hierarchies (Bakhtin): in the scene from The Brothers Karamazov, the saint has become rotting matter and the devout people end up swearing. In Cuban artist Antonia Eiriz’ painting La Anunciación (above), instead of being an angel, the visiting spirit is a monster with a horrific expression on his face. It seems to announce the Apocalypse more than the birth of Christ. Instead of finding the Virgin with her loom, this monster finds a deformed being sitting at a sewing machine. Devotion becomes incomprehension and even borders idiocy. The peaceful gestures with which the Virgin receives the good news are substituted with her startled expression at seeing the monstrous herald. This inversion produces an effect of excess, of an excess of reality, as if in a momentary superposition of reality and the unconscious, of the visible and the nightmare. Thomas Mann, a continuator of the nineteenth century realist novel, aptly perceived the hyperbolic nature of the grotesque. In his “Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man,” Mann wrote that: “the grotesque is properly something more than the truth, something real in the extreme, not something arbitrary, false, absurd, and contrary to reality.”

Notes on the grotesque (II)

2009-06-15T15:28:00.000-07:00

Adorno defined beauty as the repression of ugliness, of what one feared (47). Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy” and Bakhtin’s studies of popular festivities during the Renaissance seem to confirm Adorno’s hypothesis, since they account for a historical weakening of the grotesque, as Dionysian vitality gave way to the Apollonian component and was marginalized, equally tempered in popular festivities. From Renaissance carnivals to Romanticism, the grotesque shifts from an orgiastic joy stemming from its relation to society and nature’s regenerative forces to Romantic authors’ morbid, neurotic and alienated visions that, as Bakhtin has shown, are precisely the elements that have suppressed the grotesque’s fecundity and its revitalizing function (56). Popular humor in Greek comedy and in Rabelais’ universe became, in like manner, a romantic idealization of the folkloric that tempered, sublimated or excluded sexual humor. The nineteenth century seems to return time and again, as if obsessively, to the grotesque yet this return renounces to the possibility of reviving the cycle of death and fertility that Bakhtin recognized in the carnival.

The presence of the grotesque in twentieth century art stems from the rejection of the modern, mechanized, pragmatic and burocratized world. Avant-gardes have embraced “the primitive”, as a way to critique both the social and the aesthetic order (Antliff, Mark-Patricia Leighten). The grotesque came to express the psychological imbalance brought on by capitalism’s dizzying development, with its traumatizing world wars, its dehumanizing technological progress, its cyclical crises and the loss of faith in spiritual contents.

In contemporary times, our society has become one in which the Oedipus complex has been attenuated, in which class struggles is purportedly a thing of the past, and in which revolt has become something akin to an "entertainment type value," as tolerance and correctness have become truly repressive (Jameson). Yet the aesthetic category of the grotesque still offers a margin for the formulation of “a symbolic refusal of everything which that society has to offer" (Jameson). Even if these possibilities make themselves more and more scarce, the grotesque still preserves its transgressive capacities and its political thrust, as it offers the terms for a decentralization of hegemonic discourses, for a confrontation of xenophobia and racism, for asserting the identity of alternative sexual orientations and for condemning the atrocities committed by so-called democratic regimes.

Notes on the grotesque (III)

2009-06-15T07:57:00.000-07:00

Pierre Bourdieu demonstrated that the enjoyment of artistic forms has generally been part of the elites’ symbolic capital, whereas those who belong to lower, subordinate social strata tend to be more interested in images’ literal contents. The elites proceeded to stylize their language as well as their way of living, they refined manners to such an extent that the latter became inscrutable, and, in doing so, preserved rigid divisions between social classes and perpetuated political power. Kings and queens entered their courts with such a slow gait that, in its near stillness, it expressed power’s sacred and atemporal character. This use of formalism in relation to power surfaces early on in art’s history. In Egyptian mural paintings, noble persons were depicted in a more conventional and schematic way, whereas slaves, peasants and other members of the lower classes were depicted through the spontaneity of their movements, and through more naturalist and individualized details (Hauser). Once nobility was ousted from political power, the wealthy continued to oppose the elegance and the stylization of everyday life to the bourgeoisie’s pragmatic ethos. A Sèvres porcelain indicated refinement when contrasted against the bourgeois’ cheap, vulgar and tasteless china. The gamut of Sèvres porcelain even harbored different textures that only an expert eye could distinguish. Although they may seem minor, each of these differences in texture asserted profound ideological distinctions.

Figurations of the grotesque originate in the vernacular culture that the perspective of classical humanism deemed to be a sign of barbarism. The avant-gardes infuse non-occidental cultural values into the grotesque’s figurations. The grotesque appropriates itself of the traditions that belonged to lower social classes, to colonized and subaltern cultures, and that manifested itself in popular festivities, in the slang spoken in markets, in the magic or religious rituals of nomadic and tribal societies. The grotesque was a powerful ingredient in the cultures of those who hadn’t been formally educated and of the so-called “primitive” peoples.

From at least as early as Romanticism, the grotesque has been integrated into the very same tradition of high culture that privileged artistic forms. An entire strand of the grotesque configured a figurative tradition that maintained a relative degree of autonomy from popular traditions: Ensor is more reminiscent of Goya than of the Renaissance carnival. Cuban artist Antonia Eiriz’ paintings reveal Goya’s influence as much as they do Ensor’s, yet, despite privileging the multitudes’ presence, they hardly contain a trace of popular festivities.

This type of affinity with previous manifestations of the grotesque caused a divide among cultural productions that were linked to the aesthetic category of the grotesque. We therefore find a broad array of creations –graffiti, vernacular humor, representations of anal pleasure or of sexuality involving children and the elderly– that have only recently begun to find a place –sometimes even scandalously so– in the institution of art. We can even define two strands of the grotesque: one that became acceptable in high culture and another, still subaltern, that continues to struggle for legitimacy and recognition. Both of them have undergone fragmentation, mutation and have also contaminated emerging cultural productions.

Enfolding 280 Hours

2009-06-14T05:45:00.000-07:00

Here is a link to my review about Enfolding 280 Hours, a show by the Korean artist Sun K.Kwak at the Brooklyn Musuem of New York. The review was published by Wynwood Magazine, Summer 2009.
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Photo by Zake Kim

Where is our place?

2009-06-08T20:35:00.000-07:00

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I
For the Venice Biennale of 2003, Russian artist Ilya Kabakov presented the installation that he realized with his wife Emilia, Where is our place?, a work that offers a vision from the experience of exile.

II
Although exile doesn’t necessarily give way to a form of nostalgia or to an idealization of the past, it is an experience that unhinges memory. An exile magnifies memories or obsessively transfers them towards the native land’s conflicts, as if attempting to perpetuate the personal history that was suddenly cut short. This is a way of countering one’s uprooting. The lost past becomes a promised land of sorts, a non-place to which one either cannot return or doesn’t wish to return. The exile embarks on a never-ending pilgrimage towards this non-place. Kabakov's installation suggests this magnification of the past.

III
Kabakov has hung enormous gold-framed paintings on the wall, setting them so high above the spectator’s gaze that they can only be perceived as distorted images. The gallery’s ceiling abruptly interrupts these paintings, as if that space were too small to accommodate them. At eye-level, the spectator can view an exhibit of smaller contemporary photographs, framed in black moldings and accompanied by the verses of Russian poets. Through the difference in size between each set of images, Kabakov presents the present as minuscule in comparison with the past.

IV
What is our place? can also be construed as a critique to contemporary art or, better yet, as a self-criticism. The paintings’ dimensions and their colors, as well as their high position emphatically assert a hierarchy in which the painted image of the past is endowed with greater value than the present’s photographic technique, since the latter requires the supplement of the poetic texts. Even if one disagrees with Kabakov’s traditionalist stance, Where is our place? offers a rare example of an installation of contemporary art that aspires to the consecration of that very same artistic heritage against which art has rebelled at least since the avant-garde’s emergence. It is an alternative mode of subversion in which the act of sedition actually reveres the nineteenth century, the object of most of the artistic irreverences of our times. It is a protest against protest that also becomes a self-critique since it is conceived and articulated through the visual language of the present.

V
Kabakov even added gigantic spectators, so tall that we can only see their shoes, their dresses and their pants’ hems. These sculptural spectators are the ones who can see the paintings hung so near to the ceiling. Where is our place? is also a critique of contemporary perception with its diminished capacity for aesthetic enjoyment. Kabakov uses the exile’s inability of ceasing to worship his own tradition to allow his spectators to perceive their separation from visual pleasure, another type of uprooting that isn’t limited to the separation from one’s native land. Kabakov reflects upon the present in which the aesthetic horizon of art tends to be diminished in favor of an ideological and technological dimension.

Jim Lambie at the MoMA

2009-05-26T04:06:00.000-07:00

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Imagine that you’re attending a performance of one of your favorite musician’s works and that the sounds coming from a heavy metal band playing outside seep through and prevent you from enjoying the concert that you had originally set out to attend. You may feel somewhat frustrated by this unexpected intrusion. Something more or less similar happened to me as I was beginning to concentrate on viewing Rodin’s sculpture of Balzac on the MoMa’s ground floor. Scottish artist Jim Lambie (b.1964) had covered the floor of the exhibition room with bright, flashy stripes.

While it may seem old-fashioned to declare one’s love for painting and sculpture in these art forms’ most traditional meaning, I have to admit that Rodin is one of my favorite sculptors. I find some sort of intuition present in his works’ execution, as in Picasso’s paintings or Calder’s drawings. In Rodin, the textures, the characters’ traits, their hands’ expressivity, their stance’s energy all seem to have been produced in one sitting, with amazing ease, as if the artist had simply played with the clay or the marble or as if his fingers had slid over them with the same natural movement with which one spins a door’s handle. When I visit the MoMA every Friday, I usually like to stop and contemplate that statue of Balzac. During the last few weekly visits, I had to renounce to this because the floor’s flashy stripes prevented me from gathering even an ounce of concentration, to such an extent that I even began to consciously avoid them. I am now getting used to heading directly towards the first floor, where I enjoy getting lost among the luminous effects created by the Icelandic artist Oliassen. Then, I proceed to other rooms.

Before I leave the museum, I see a young woman lying down on ZOPOP, the title of Lambie’s work. She seems to feel so happy, stretched on her back like a cat, her arms crossed on her face. Her boyfriend also seems very pleased to be there, as he sits next to her, his legs crossed. They take a few pictures of each other with the digital camera that they brought along, and they exchange a few caresses. I notice the sheen of ZOPOP’s colors and they seem to posses the chromatic intensity that one could expect from our twentieth century. This could also be a place to sit back. It occurs to me that this may be the installation’s meaning, and that it can be seen as an action that allows us to spend a while in an unconventional place. Rodin’s sculpture even adds a touch of strangeness to all of this, and it seemed to me that my stubborn insistence on isolating the Balzac sculpture from its context had been misplaced. Instead, I should have paid attention to the space that Lambie’s installation had created, along with the visual short-circuit that it had caused. The colored stripes questioned the usual way in which I appreciate a work of art. In fact, maybe the installation was meant to underscore how hard it now was for me to enjoy the Balzac. Perhaps the Scottish artist was using the audience’s experience to demonstrate that in the vertiginous world in which we live, aesthetic pleasure is seriously threatened by the surrounding visual violence. While the exhibit was on, Rodin’s statue had become an integral part ZOPOP. Although it seemed that Lambie had taken it hostage, he had used it to his convenience. Maybe I had even been too strict as I rushed to dismiss that bothersome flooring in my attempt too focus exclusively on specific subtleties of Rodin’s sculpture. Next month, I will once again be able to contemplate the image of Balzac but, until then, maybe I should also stretch out on the stripes and listen to Black Sabbath’s wonderful “Paranoid,” letting the heavy metal music seep through.

As I exit the museum, I have the impression that I’ve learned something, but I also hope that Lambie and the MoMa’s curators won’t attempt to make us view The Young Ladies of Avignon on a background of flashy stripes. I can’t see how they would be able to set a beautiful young woman in the wall.

The city laid out on the table

2009-05-20T19:08:00.000-07:00

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I

A friend from New York used to repeat a phrase that goes more or less like this: “The best thing about living in New York is leaving New York, and the best thing about leaving New York is coming back to New York”. And that joy, at least in my case, begins when, shortly before landing, the airplane is slowly descending over the city. From the heights I can see the bridges, the high towers and, if it is night, the freeways illuminated with the incessant traffic.

I do not know whether this sort of experience experienced the Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa; but the view of Manhattan from the window of the airplane reminds me of some of his installations. The city layed out on the table, tangible and at the same time vague, as if it were a “phantasmagoria” that emerges from a distant memory. The buildings like streamlined vessels.

II
My mother had put together a small bar. The wine glass holders, cups, trays and bottles had merely an ornamental sense. Those homemade bars, that perhaps today are old-fashioned, were an integral part of the Cuban kitsch of the mid seventies.

III
Suddenly, as if Garaicoa’s images had somehow altered my memories, those glassworks, located in the hall of my apartment, seem to me metaphors of a city at dusk.

Have a caramel!

2009-04-02T13:05:00.000-07:00

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I
Incorporating industrially produced objects in works of art, and elevating them to the status of art objects is one of the most commonly recurring practices in contemporary art, initiated at least since Duchamp and Dadaism. In this sense, the American critic Harold Rosenberg referred to “anxious objects.” These objects were therefore stripped of their utilitarian functions, no longer to be seen as commodities, as they entered the sphere of art and remained all-too unclearly defined, as if they were unable to take on a specific function or a concrete meaning. What could be the use of an industrially produced urinal in an exhibition room? Did these objects then become works destined for contemplation? Certainly not, at least not in the same way as Cézanne’s paintings which sought to exploit the plasticity of shapes. These objects were even less destined for the kind of enjoyment with which one views the stunning virtuosity that unfolds in Camille Pissarro or Vermeer’s paintings. Could spectators state that The Fountain, Duchamp’s well-known ready-made, is a beautiful work or that it is more aesthetically stimulating than the urinal that graces their own bathrooms? And in spite of that, the work is there, exhibited in a room, and forcing the spectator to express an aesthetic judgment. It is this very obviousness that proves to be disorienting. Many installations are intended to be enjoyed as conceptions, as reflections on the margins of art, as either poetic objects or objects of contestation, laden with political or metaphorical connotations, as games that incite spectators to intervene, to sometimes manipulate, complete or generate new possibilities on the basis of the artist’s suggestions.

II
Felix González-Torres placed a pile of caramel candies in the corner of a gallery room, allowing the audience to pick some up and suck on them if they so desired. The caramels only apparently retained their original function: in González-Torres’ work they were no longer solely intended to be consumed and digested as a treat but rather mainly as a work of art. This installation –of which the artist created multiple versions– was intended to be devoured, then to be transformed into saliva, then into gastric fluids, and finally, into bodily waste. It would moreover be consumed by a heterogeneous collectivity, chaotically constituted by the exhibit’s (participating) audience. This is an ephemeral art in which the act of sucking on the caramel becomes the gesture that simultaneously completes and destroys the work of art. The spectator takes on the paradoxical role of creating through a specifically destructive act.

III
Associated to the act of sucking, the caramel is undoubtedly endowed with very direct erotic connotations. The installation could thus be seen as that of a body that is dismembered through actions that could very well evoke an orgy. The spectator somehow becomes a participant complicit part of an erotic game involving each and every one of the participants.

IV
Yet at the same time, the caramel as an object also contains a good dose of regression: it points towards a basic infantile form of pleasure, an enjoyment situated in the palate. It can even bring us further back to the moment of maternal breastfeeding, which, following Freud, merges the necessity for nutrition with incipient sexual pleasure.

V
It is even fitting to summon the analogy with the religious practices of transubstantiation, such as the ingestion of the body of Christ through the thin, wafer-like host. Doesn’t something akin to this take place in art, in an art that hasn’t yet been fully deprived of its sacredness, in that very same art that reaches excessive prices on the market, that is preserved in the museum like an untouchable relic, or registered in books’ pages much like transcendental cultural events, in that very same art, finally, that in González-Torres’ installations is destined to turn into saliva?

Socialization of Art in Gerardo Mosquera’s The Design was Defined in October

2009-03-22T13:46:00.000-07:00

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By Ernesto Menendez-Conde
I
El diseño se definió en Octubre (Havana, 1983), written by the Cuban Art Critic and Curator Gerardo Mosquera, is a study of the relationship between art and politics during the early Bolshevik Revolution, a look at the years when the political and artistic vanguard shared the same obsession for changing life. The central idea of the book is the concept of the “socialization of art,” meaning the large-scale integration of art into society. Socialization would transform the very essence of art: it would dilute the distinctions between high culture, popular culture and vernacular culture, and eliminate the distance between creator and viewer. Simultaneously, art would cease to be a special category of objects enclosed in the space of a museum or gallery, instead opening up to other spheres such as social communication and moving into other activities such as graphic and textile design.
II
The Russian vanguard planned to socialize art via three basic strategies: bringing it to the streets, putting it to work as political propaganda and finally integrating it into material production. It was these experiments that gave Mosquera a glimpse of the potential for a radical connection between art and society.
Now he needed to examine them, taking care not to idealize them, and to identify where their limitations lay. As implemented in Russia, bringing art to the streets, including it in festivities and exhibiting it before the multitudes were hardly successful experiments. The capacity for dialogue was missing. Many of the avant-garde works had a utopian dimension. They were projections toward the future, often without any relfection on present-day conflicts. They failed to incubate communication: the most sophisticated, experimental art of its time was brought before a public for the most part uncultured and unversed in aesthetics. The avant-garde imposed its art, in an authoritarian manner, on the masses, relegating them to a passive role. The spectator was limited to contemplating the creation or at most following instructions given by the artist. Moreover, the avant-gardists completely ignored traditional arts, neglecting to integrate this rich cultural heritage into the artistic project.

Reading from the vantage point of postmodernism, Mosquera has in mind concepts like the creative participation of the spectator in the artistic image and “inclusive synthesis” of the cultured, the popular and the vernacular, which was hardly under discussion in the early decades of the twentieth century. Retooling the strategies of the Russian vanguard would take more than historical analysis. It was indispensable to incorporate the latest artistic practices and more up-to-date theoretical problems. The book is a continuing dialogue between the experiments of the early October Revolution period, the postmodern moment, and Cuba’s specific situation around the mid-nineteen-eighties.
III
If the Russian vanguard’s efforts to bring art into the streets had a limited effect due to the hermeticism of the works and the paucity of contact with the popular masses, art in the service of political propaganda would enjoy a greater vigor, with actors recounting the news before crowds of people, numerous topical skits, news and political commentary spoken in verse, and a proliferation of other innovative forms of communication. This was art not as a part of the fiesta or carnival, but as the fiesta or carnival. There, in one spectacle, in one political act, multiple types of artistic expression (music, theater, visual art, poetry, dance) converged, at the same time incorporating forms of mass culture, with elements of circus, cabaret and musical revue.
IV
The “culture of the abstract” also shaped the socialization of art. Realist constructivism affirmed the work of art as an object in itself, a piece of painted canvas, detached from its function of representing reality, whereas productivist constructivism had recourse to the same formal solutions to create industrial objects that were both useful and sophisticated. Through this deployment of the abstract aesthetic in industrial design, art helped to palliate the material privation the populace endured.
V
Art as political propaganda was by no means socialist realism, nor pamphleteering, nor finger-wagging academicism. It was a fusion of art and revolutionary agitation. Art as political propaganda, as conceived by the Russian vanguard, was radically opposed to the type of art as political propaganda in the later Soviet models, often tightly restricted to monumental sculpture, commemorative coins and canvases with patriotic and historical themes.

VI
In a more recent text, dated February 2007, Mosquera again ponders the relationship between art and politics in a post-Soviet world. In this new context, Mosquera returns to the possibility of a socialization of art. He cites several promising recent experiments in opening up art toward mass culture; equally stimulating attempts to erase the boundaries between fine art, vernacular art and art for the masses; and the more active role of intellectuals in community life. In Arte, Política: Contradicciones, disyuntivas, posibilidades (Art, Politics: Contradictions, Alternatives, Possibilities), published in 2007, Mosquera conceives variations on socialization of art derived from the practices implemented during the early Bolshevik revolution. This new essay is in many aspects a rereading of El diseño se definió en Octubre from the perspective of the present.

In his new text, Mosquera imagines a new type of museum. “Art travels in certain very specific, specialized circuits of distribution outside of which its impact on the world is virtually nil,” he says. Socialization of art calls for a reform of these institutions, which are often no more than buildings that hoard artworks detached from the context in which they were initially conceived. In Arte, Política: Contradicciones, disyuntivas, posibilidades, Mosquera envisions a museum that would exist at the same site where artistic creation takes place, a museum whose activities consist of collaboration with other institutions and joint acts of social communication. Rather than a space that houses institutionally validated works it would be a museum integrated into artistic practice, a museum that brings imagination into the streets.

Lutz Bacher's Secret Life

2009-03-20T07:02:00.000-07:00

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(originally published in Wynwood Magazine, April-May. 2009)
I

The display of the art pieces in My Secret Life -the personal exhibition of the artist Lutz Bacher, which is currently at PS1, the New York dependency of the MoMA- offers the impression of a group of isolated shows, rather than a retrospective of a single artist. There is a sense of fragmentation which is stressed by the compartments of the second floor of the building. Each hall is devoted to a single series of works. Bacher plays with the idea of the disintegration of authorship through artistic appropriation, which paradoxically is how she emerges as an author.

However, this fragmentation and this disintegration of authorship is rather a simulacra. In fact, the artworks are somehow connected in a dialogical way. Polyphony is perhaps a word that could help to define the installations. Bacher works in appropriations from several sources in order to produce a body of work in which the “stylistic” unity is one of a dialogue among different styles and media (from drawing, to photography, to video). In a playful and politically meaningful way, Bacher seems to hide herself in this plurality. My Secret Life, therefore invites the spectator to find the hidden meanings in the artistic display.
II

I would like to mention few examples of hidden meanings in Bacher’s work. In My Secret Life -the installation located in one of the halls in which the show is segmented- Bacher presents pieces from different moments in her career. There are four leitmotifs, alternating with each other. First, in the drawings and paintings of Playboy girls (Bacher hired some professionals to make the copies), the artist added some sexual and political jokes alluding to female desire, and therefore subverting the Playboy girls drawings which tend to portray females as sex objects. There are also pictures of politicians referring to power with nasty language, which is probably occult behind the politeness of their public image. The written joke exposes the visual as appearance, ideological montage and mass-media spectacle. There are photos of actors, and finally, color pictures of the popular, sexually ambivalent Troll puppets. The spectator might feel this is political art, but nothing is taken for granted, since he must construct his own meaning. Is the artist suggesting that well-known politicians -the Kennedys, Carter, Lyndon Johnson- share something in common with puppets or Playboy girls? Are they like movie stars? In what sense could sexual jokes be articulated into political partisanship? The four thematic motifs, by dialoguing with each other, by influencing one another, evoke an undefined chain of associations.

III
It is worth stressing the analogy between the artist’s “secret life,” disguised in several identities, and that hidden in the appropriation of mass-media images (from Hollywood celebrities, to Playboy’s Vargas Girls), politicians, Playboy girls, and actors disguised with spectacles. This analogy could be read as a critique of critical art. With a subtle irony, Bacher’s My Secret Life suggests that critical art is another mass-media construction. The critique of the status quo is unmasked as spectacle. In Bacher’s My Secret Life, critical art contains its own negation. Appropriation of mass-media images, political jokes and simulated disintegration of authorship support a critique against critical art, which, as the French thinker, Jacques Rancière has observed:

Critical art that invites you to see the signs of capital behind everyday objects and behaviors risks inscribing itself into the perpetuation of a world where the transformation of things into signs redoubles the very excess of interpretative signs that makes resistance disappear(1)

IV
The idea of an identity which is impossible to grasp seems to be one of the topics in two other installations. In Lee Harvey Oswald Interview, Bacher’s appropriation of documents -which she merely photocopied- renders a blurred portrait of the character she apparently attempts to define. The notion of the secret is also present. The documents are turned into the fragmentary layers of a puzzle which remains unfinished or incomplete, as if some pieces were missing. The spectator ends up not knowing whether Lee Harvey Oswald was working for the Soviet Union, the CIA or if he embodied the masculinity of a macho society. The psychological portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald is also unclear, oscillating between ingenious answers, and the psychotic. His face is reproduced to the point that Lee Harvey Oswald becomes an empty image. Some sentences of the interview are overlapped, thus making it difficult to even read the written words.

V
In Jackie and Me (1989) there is also an identity that cannot be exposed. The woman hides her face from the photographer, as if she were trying to keep it a secret. The story, which is told through both written testimony and pictures taken by the paparazzo, depicts Jackie Kennedy avoiding mass-media representations that have defined her identity from a masculine perspective. Jackie and Me could be read in at least two directions: Jackie and the paparazzo (who tells the story in the first person), and the identification between Jackie who, while running away shows that she wants to hide something and the female artist, who seems to expose an unnamed secret through artistic appropriation.

Jackie and Me is also a story of surveillance, since the paparazzo claims he is being watched by a bodyguard, at the same time that he is watching Jackie Kennedy. In the same room, surveillance is once again present in the video installation Closed Circuit which is a view -compressed in 40 minutes- from a camera located at the desk of the Pat Hearn Gallery, shot during nine months from October 1997 until July 1998. As in Jackie and Me, the public is interfering in the realm of the private.

VI
Video installations are a supplementary part of the show, which goes, as Lia Gangitano stated, “from still to moving, spatial to flat, silent to loud”(2). I would like to mention a last example of how Bacher produces suggestive meanings through the dialogue between texts and images, and the display of the artworks in the show. In a video installation called Blue Angels, there are two screens placed in a corner of the room. Here the title is a kind of humorous pun alluding to the pure visuality of the installation since the two videos of the blue sky are at a 90-degree angle. The name Blue Angels could therefore refer to the visual “blue angle” created by the screens. The videos are shots of planes participating in a military maneuver. The noise of the engines turns the view of the sky into a hell. Noise is ironically subverting the text. In a contiguous room there is another video installation called Crimson & Clover (2003). In this case the artist filmed the performance of the band Angel Blood during a well-known concert for the land. The titles of the installation and the rock band (Blue Angels and Angel Blood) are related and perhaps opposed to each other. Also the noise of the engines is associated with the sound of electric instruments in contemporary music.

In My Secret Life, artistic appropriation is a way in which Bacher emerges as a very personal and imaginative artist. It is a show in which there is an entanglement between the private and the public, Eros and the political, feminism and mass-media representations, political power and sexuality, the visual and the text.

Notes.

1) Rancière, Jacques. “Problems on Critical Art,” in Participation, edited by Claire Bishop, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2006, p.43.

2) Gangitano, Lia. “Lutz Bacher. My Secret Life” in PS1 MoMA Spring 2009 Newspaper, New York, 2009, w/p.

Perfect Lovers

2009-02-14T20:00:00.000-08:00

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In 1995, in an interview, Felix González-Torres said:

When people ask me, "Who is your public?" I say honestly, without skipping a beat, "Ross." The public was Ross. The rest of the people just come to the work...

Ross, the lover of Felix González-Torres, died of AIDS in 1990 (the Cuban-American artist survived him for six years). Perfect Lovers, two clocks next to each other, synchronized at the same time, is an autobiographic work, a vision of the hours of love, exalted by the proximity of death. These clocks that run together at some point will stop beating. Perfect Lovers, is a reflection about AIDS and in that sense it could also be seen as a political art, done in a moment where sexual minorities demanded a more active intervention of the North American government on the fight against the virus.
But beyond these biographic, political, and queer connotations, the work of González-Torres, is also a celebration of the love experience, of that prime moment in which the lovers seem to exist one for the other, submerged in a telepathic, in a prime of the desire.

Mario Benjamin: Reinventing the Past.

2009-02-03T06:58:00.000-08:00

(originally published in Wynwood Magazine, Feb. 2009)
I
For many artists of the so-called Third World, their cultural identity -if we can still use this term- is even in today’s global society, both a burden and an advantage. It is a burden because they are expected to create a body of work, which is somehow related to their cultural heritage. But it is also somewhat of an advantage, because the art market has room for these “authentic” revivals of otherness. To a certain extent, it seems difficult for these artists to go beyond stereotypes, and to offer views of their past or the traditions of their own countries under the light of our contemporary world. If we think of Haitian art, for instance, we might have in mind a colorful, naïve painting, or representations of voodoo divinities, and practices.
II
The Haitian artist, Mario Benjamin looks to disengage himself from these labels, which are strongly rooted in the mainstream contemporary artistic scenario. Benjamin is neither a practitioner of Voodoo, nor a Catholic (rather his personal beliefs lie within the Buddhist philosophy). Even though he is a self-taught artist, who began his training in Haiti, he doesn’t consider himself -and he is not- a naïve painter, and he negates any folkloristic or labeled attitude. When asked about artists who have influenced his work, he mentions Francis Bacon, Christian Boltanski and the German Expressionists. He declares himself happy to be living in the 21st Century, in which information runs faster than ever, and geographical boundaries seem to be increasingly less relevant.

This sense of belonging to the present doesn’t equate to forgetting either his past, or his own personal experiences, which nurture his creations. In fact, one of his installations was devoted to the Haitian Revolution of the late 18th Century. He is also in dealing with his identity as a Black man, and even with a Caribbean identity. But he approaches these sujets, from the perspective of Contemporary Art: installations, videos, collages, and paintings, in which there is an assimilation of hyperrealism and expressionism. Besides working on canvases and traditional techniques of painting, Benjamin uses non-conventional materials such as talcum powder, artificial flowers, hair, old furniture, or black lights.
III

There are certain features that give a sense of unity -and a personal touch- to the diversity of his artistic creation. First of all there is an integration of the individual and the collective unconsciousness. Benjamin’s portraits depict faces of Black men, who seem to be emerging from the shadows. These images have an intense expressiveness, which could easily be associated with personal, existential anguish. Benjamin himself has said he is interested in the representation of suffering, and his portraits are strongly psychological. At the same time, however, they reveal a sort of wilderness, a powerful intuition; as if human beings were still linked to nature or to an irrational, rather magical system of thought. If we look at these paintings as a group, as placed by Benjamin -in his installation Holograms, at the Kunstnernes hus, Oslo, Norway (2003), and other solo shows- we can perceive faces immersed, perhaps possessed by forces of the subconscious, the sexual, and the terrible. These energies are so dominant, so powerful that the paintings turn into representations of ugliness in the sense that Theodor Adorno defined it: Archaic ugliness, the cannibalistically-threatening cult masks and grimaces, was the substantive imitation of fear, which it disseminated around itself in expiation. (1)

In Benjamin’s installations we could also have a sense of this juxtaposition of the individual and the collective unconsciousness. In these cases rhythms create a flux, which could be linked to an overwhelming sense of the natural, and the magical way of thinking I mentioned earlier. In his show Les fleurs canibales, presented at the Galerie Monnin, Petion-Ville, Haiti (2007), there were some sculptural images of human figures decorated with patterns, which resemble the ones he included in the paintings hung on the wall. Through these affinities, Benjamin proposes a dialogue between the human body and nature. Men are represented in a hieratic way, with reminiscences of the archaic, as if they were priests in an unknown, perhaps secret, ritual.

Another relevant feature in Benjamin’s art pieces is the use of light. His portraits and installations, in which there are fluid representations of natural elements, present sharp contrasts between brightness and darkness. It could be said that light set against dark, black surfaces, has a phosphorescent quality. In every case light is very expressive. It adds an accent to an enigmatic and euphoric view of the world.

Finally, I would like to mention the importance of graphic elements. Benjamin’s images are jungles of lines, curves, and movements -sometimes chaotic and spontaneous, as in his series of portraits; sometimes following symmetrical structures, in which the same motif is repeated. But in every case colors are reduced to a narrow palette. Lines and rhythms play a main role in his work.
IV

From his earliest combined painting surfaces, and collages- Benjamin’s works seem to have moved from representations of human faces to biomorphic elements. From rather dark images to brighter compositions and lighter environments; from chaotic gestures or accumulations -as in Maison, his installation shown at the Musée d’art haïtien, Port-au-Prince, Haïti, in 1997- to rhythms, which sometimes have an ornamental sense. There is also a movement towards formalistic features and patterns. His recent work has to do with environments, spaces, and the experience of walking through an art piece. However, Benjamin keeps transmitting a sense of intense expressiveness and enigma, which somehow seems to be intrinsic to both his personality and his cultural heritage.

Benjamin is creating a personal and expressionist view of Afro-Caribbean traditions through the language of postmodern art. He shows an Afro-Caribbean identity reluctant to be defined, ambivalent, which cannot be reduced to any particular belief, and which is still immersed in a strong, magical way of representation. It is an identity that dwells both in the realm of the psychological and the ancestral. It is a past under the light of Contemporary art.

Notes

1- Adorno, Theodor W. The Aesthetic Theory. University of Minnesota (1997), p 47.

Art Street, Street Life

2009-01-28T06:59:00.000-08:00

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By Ernesto Menéndez-Conde (originally published in Wynwood Magazine, Feb. 2009)

Since Baudelaire’s poetry -in poems such as A une passante- the streets of modern cities have been a recurrent subject in both literature and visual arts. With the arrival of avant-garde movements, the streets became a privileged space for trying experiments heading towards the socialization of art. The attempt of integrating art and life, initiated by Dadaists, Futurists, and Surrealists, was increasingly developed from the midfifties onwards. Many artists challenged traditional art institutions (like galleries or museums) and opened art to unconventional spaces.

Street Art, Street Life, the last show at the Bronx Museum of Art, conceived by the guest curator Lydia Lee, renders a summarized view of the entanglement between art, life and the streets of contemporary cities. The show includes some of the most controversial artistic experiments of the last five decades. However, it seems near to impossible to offer a complete overview of the countless practices made in Contemporary art. For instance, you might notice the absence of some public art, like Felix González-Torres’ billboards, Christo’s interventions in architectural landmarks, Robert Barry’s hidden marks in sidewalks, graffiti and Chicano murals, among many other relevant artistic projects. But curator Lydia Lee succeeds in showing the streets as a place for artistic intervention, representations of outsiders and sexual or ethnic minorities. I would say that her main approach is seeing art in the streets as a way of challenging dominant discourse. In that sense in Street Art, Street Life, there prevails a political dimension, which is related to a view from subalternity.

There are two main topics in the show. The first one is the view of the streets as a space of surveillance, in which there is a loss of privacy. In Yoko Ono’s video installation entitled Rape, two cameramen follow a foreign woman. At the beginning she feels flattered at being interviewed, but at some point the filming turns into a kind of harassment, which makes her feel threatened. The French artist, Sophie Calle, shows documents provided by a detective who was hired to watch her. In Lee Friedlander’s picture, the shadow of a man is projected over the back of a woman, who is passing by. Also Following Pieces, by Vito Acconci, consisted in following the steps of unknown pedestrians. The artist participates in and imitates, in a playful, ironic way, the idea of surveillance and paranoia, which is a hidden means of social control in contemporary society.

A second subject matter of the show is the representation of ethnic and sexual minorities: Latinos, Afro-Americans, views from African and Asian artists. Tehching Hsieh spent a whole year (from September 1981 until September 1982) living outdoors. His artistic project consisted in not staying indoors during this period of time. It was a way of integrating art into life, or rather transforming everyday life into artistic practice. Living on the streets is also a way of facing the experience of homelessness. Adrian Piper disguised herself as a black male character who approached white women in a provocative way. The photographer, Amy Arbus, took a picture of a woman wearing a fur bikini. During the conservative Reagan years -Fur Bikini was taken in 1987- Arbus used her model as a way of promoting freedom. Jamel Shabazz shows a series of pictures focused on Latino teenagers and Afro-Americans members of poor communities portrayed with a certain pride of having a cultural identity. The Nigerian-born artist, Fatimah Tuggar, makes photomontages combining images of New York with African landscapes. Tuggar offers subjective visions derived from the clash between the most sophisticated world and traditional societies.

Street Art, Street Life includes forty artists and a wide variety of media: videos, photographs, written documents, collages, posters, drawings and even a painting made by Martin Wong. The show could be seen as an eclectic revival of the sixties and early seventies, in which there is a rebellion against both art institutions and structures of power.

Speaking of the obvious was never a pleasure for us

2009-01-10T01:29:00.000-08:00

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I
A work of art always goes beyond the author’s intentions. The creator is only able to offer an interpretation among many others that can be made of his work. Once the author finishes his work he is –like any other spectator- in front of an enigma. His signature, inscribed in a corner of the image, is not enough to confer him authority over the meanings that his creation may have. The political views of the creator do not matter either, and they could even be in conflict with what he wants to express in his work.

II
Many of Kcho’s installations, with their boats and tires transformed into provisional rafts, give the impression of being a tribute to Cuban rafters. The vertical position that prevails in the works, could at the same time be understood as a celebration of the utopian dream that this journey holds for the emigrant. The Cuban context of the nineties, characterized by the economical depression, the loss of faith in the social project, and the migration crisis, could be an appropriate frame for this interpretation. However, such interpretation has the inconvenient of being slightly reductionist.
The interpretative possibilities could be diverse. It wouldn’t be too far-fetched, for example, to see the boat as a metaphor of the insular. The island as a boat is a poetic figure that can found in other recent creations of Cuban art and literature creations. At the end of the novel from Reinaldo Arenas’ novel, The Color of Summer, the characters corrode the platform of the island and Cuba becomes like an immense drunken ship, adrift while the passengers” debate where to go, on which coast they should anchor or what social project they should choose in the middle of the libertarian chaos. Another version, probably also inspired by Arenas, is found in some of Sandra Ramos’ engravings. The map of Cuba is like a raft, built with the trunks of the trees and flanked with a set of paddles. The titles of some of Kcho’s works, like “Island” or “Archipelago” immediately evoke that quality of the insular, that has caught the interest of many Cubans creators.
Kcho himself, probably with the purpose of decentralizing the hurried connection among his images, and the cause of the immigration, has connected the installations with memories of his childhood in a fishing town of center Cuba.

III
From another point of view, in interpreting the installations we could accentuate the idea of pleasure, an enjoyment comparable to the one that encouraged the surrealists in their “objets trouvés.” To find the materials that Kcho uses in his work, we don’t need to go to any of the spaces in which the contemporary societies accumulate mountains of waste. We will have a lot more luck if we visit some of the more humble neighborhoods in Cuba -this means, the majority of the urban and rural settlements of the country-, since we could find them on the patios, the garages, in the improvised workshops, or even in the kitchens, and in the hallways of any house.
In a way that is very much related with the poetic vision of the rubble that is present in the everyday life, Kcho has referred to the energy that could be perceived in a worn-out object because it is excessively used. His way, his works have an expressiveness that the photographic reproduction is rarely able to transmit.

There are many things that are unpredictable, intuitive and playful in Kcho’s installations. These presences do not have a concrete meaning. They were included in the image just because the artist has found them visually pleasant. There is also the pleasure of activating the imaginary. The boats, frequently sustained by light scaffolding, seem to be suspended in the air, as if they evoke the experience of the oneiric flight.
There is also the pleasure of depoliticizing what is apparently political apparently (Barthes, 44) by forgetting, even if only fleetingly, the possible critical contents so as to return to the object, isolated from its symbolic value and its possible allusions to social conflicts.
Such a depoliticization that could be very relevant in the Cuban artistic scene, where the social critic constantly contributes to signal out in the work of art the same social order against which it formulates its attacks.

Is not my intention to prioritize o underestimate any of these semantic horizons. What I want to point out here is that, although to reduce the installations to one critical reading of Cuban society would be a plausible critical gesture, it would also be a gesture of misunderstanding towards the image itself. In Kcho’s installations, a boat is a metaphoric object that does not shouldn’t only be understood in a literal manner, or as a reference to the problem of emigration. Like in the title of one of his installations, the pleasure that the work of art gives does not consist in communicating the obvious. The art is an infinitely more complex experience, a space that is open to plurality and to mixing.

References
-Barthes, Roland. The pleasure of the text. Hill & Wang, New York, 1998.
Hill & Wang, New York, 1998.

Cuban (Counterproductive) Public Art

2009-01-08T13:35:00.000-08:00

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By Ernesto Menendez-Conde

I
Literary and visual artworks in Cuba today, with their ambivalences toward power, their moral claims and their occasional “rebel artists,” must play by rules of the game that tend to institutionalize social criticism in the realm of artistic production. Although they cannot go beyond certain limits, artists and writers are voices authorized to question power. In this sense they are exceptional—and privileged—figures within Cuban society. But they speak from a segregated, minority space, frequently addressing a public outside of Cuba. In other words, they speak within a system that strongly constricts the social resonance of artistic creations. In his conversations with French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, German artist Hans Haacke maintained that the artist must create a “productive provocation.” However, Haacke adds, this provocation will be inefficient if the media fail to fulfill their role of amplifying the message and serving as a forum for debate. Thus by his lights, the impact of a work of art resides not so much in the reactions of the spectators who view it as in the ability of the media to ignite and propagate the transgression. And it is here, in the aspect of resonance, that Cuban art with critical content, given its scant circulation inside the country, comes up against an all but unbreachable wall. Indeed, if we consider the indifference of Cuban media toward the expository activity of Cuban creators, we may speak of censorship, in the meaning defined by Jacques Derrida:

Censorship does not consist in reducing something to absolute silence. It suffices to limit the field of addressees, or of exchanges generally. There is censorship as soon as certain forces (linked to evaluative authorities and to symbolic structures) simply limit the scope of a field of work, the resonance or propagation of a discourse. […] Once a discourse, even if it is not forbidden, cannot find the conditions for an exposition or for an unlimited public discussion, this may be termed, however excessive it may seem, a censorship effect.

II
One of the greatest contradictions encountered by Cuban art in the last 15 years is that the artist, in critiquing the reigning order, depends for the circulation of the critical work on the very institutions targeted by the attack. Reasoning in the spirit of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, one might argue that to be subversive, Cuban creators would put forth not works that challenge power but representations with laudatory content. Two recent pieces of pro-government art exemplify this: Cinco Palmas (Five Palms) and El arca de la libertad (The Ark of Freedom). The first was completed in December 2006 as part of the megahomage to Fidel Castro on his eightieth birthday. It was a tribute to the struggle against Batista, in that Cinco Palmas was the place where the rebels regrouped, decimated after the famous “baptism of fire” at Alegría de Pío. El arca de la libertad, also inaugurated in late 2006, is a silhouette of Castro’s boat, the Granma, cut out of sheet iron (as is Cinco Palmas) and covered with paintings by fourteen prestigious artists. Fidel Castro himself decreed that this metallic mural be placed in the inner courtyard of Havana’s Museo de Bellas Artes. There, asserted the Commander and impromptu curator, was where this image should be situated, so that the public could enjoy it.
Examples of art that is comprometido, in the sense of politically committed art—although for some of the artists invited to participate, it may be hard to escape the word’s other connotations of “compromised,” “implicated,” or made-to-order for the government—these images in metal are corrosive. They express with immediacy and eloquence the authoritarianism that reigns in Cuban society. They are optimistic representations, tokens of a supposed collective support for the government—thirty artists worked on Cinco Palmas—and exalt the heroic saga of the revolution in a grandiloquent mode, with strong mythic overtones (the Granma as the “Ark of Freedom”). In their very conception, the rhetoric of these two works bears more than a faint resemblance to the triumphalism found in the media, billboards and Cuban TV’s political programs and news shows. If, by its critical content, contemporary Cuban art displays before the foreign public a flexibility and capacity for discernment on the part of the institutions that promote it, the recent collective tributes seem to show that works of art destined for Cuban viewers—the first conveniently located in a highly visible public space, the second autocratically consecrated as art by the government’s maximum leader—are little different from those seen in the contests and salons of the seventies.

Martín Ramírez

2009-01-03T05:09:00.000-08:00

I
An uncertain day in 1925, Martín Ramírez crossed the Mexican border to the United States. He was a man of thirty years old and in his homeland left a wife and four kids. He worked during five years on the construction of the train tracks for Northern Railroads. Then Ramírez became a homeless. When the police arrested him, he has not able to articulate any word. He was shut away in psychiatric asylums, where he spent the last thirty two years of his life, on a silence just interrupted by some monosyllables. His case, as it was diagnosed, was catatonic schizophrenia.
Probably nobody would have remembered his story, if it wasn’t because Ramírez draw profusely at the psychiatric institution. Many of his creations were sent to his relatives; who destroyed them, because they were afraid that these were materials contaminated with chemicals. But still hundreds of his works were preserved. Most of the times, they are long sheets of craft paper, covered with train motives, automobiles, bridges, buildings, tunnels, riders, and peasants. This was the world in which Ramírez lived, and probably the one that he was not able to translate into words. A college professor from Sacramento, interested in studying the creations of mental illness people, found an intensive expressivity on Ramírez’s drawings and started the task of collecting, and exposing his pieces –on personal and collectives shows- to stimulate his work.
II
Ramírez’s works makes me think on an innocence that is about to explode, that it seems to wander around and around on a circular maze. An absent vitality, submerged in the hopeless evening. Ornamental lines, drawn by a craftsman that constantly repeats the same gesture, lines that enclosure the characters or that leads them to dark hollows. Ramirez’s world has something of kafkanian absurd, of an infinite where it seems there are no exits. It is a world distant and warm, numb and vigorous, childish and terrible.

The Seer, The Seen, The Flesh (according to Merleau-Ponty)

2008-12-25T21:02:00.000-08:00

In his unfinished work The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty criticized what he called “perceptual faith”. For him, the philosophical and scientific tradition has been working with faith in the opposition between the subject (seer) and the object (seen). But this faith in itself has never been fully discussed. Consequently, Merleau-Ponty tries to go beyond the opposition between subject and object and presents a very basic and, at the same time, unusual argument: The seer is always visible; the seer is not merely a subject who sees the other. On the contrary, the seer is deeply implicated in the visible. Thus, there is not such a binary opposition between the seer and the visible; but rather, they both participate in the same element, of the same “flesh”.

I

One can say that we perceive the things themselves, that we are the world that thinks itself –or the world is at the heart of our flesh. In any case, once a body-world relationship is recognized, there is a ramification of my body, and a ramification of the world, and a correspondence between its inside and my outside, between my inside and its outside.
The Visible and the Invisible(1968:136)

..to see the other is essentially to see my body as an object, so that the other’s body could have a psychic “side”. The experience of my own body and the experience of the other are themselves the two sides of the same Being:
where I say that I see the other, in fact it especially happens that I objectify my body, the other is the horizon or other side of this experience.
The Visible and the Invisible(1968:225)