the Buenos Aires Review » Art

On Luna Paiva’s “Memorias Herméticas”

heather — Sat, 22 Aug 2015 12:38:35 +0000

Andrew Berardini

Even if the meaning of ancient totems disappeared, their meaningfulness has not. A human hand altering nature with purpose, these ancient stacks of stones mark a path or honor a god, measure the stars or memorialize war. We can’t really know for sure. Stand in the shadow of a megalith and you feel its force, an ancient energy still at work, blunted by our ignorance but no less powerful in its shifted mass. We know it means something important, even if we’ll never know precisely what. In stone cairns scattered across a planet, we find evidence of our ancestors, a simple shape we still make in the few wildernesses we have left. It is a basis of communication and expression with material, the beginning of sculpture.

Here these sculptures stacked by Luna Paiva angle with their own obscure and powerful spirit. Much like their ancient inspiration, her cairns do not easily reveal their secrets. We can glean some history of humans, the subtle properties of metals at work, how they learned to shape them. We can feel their rough and towering presence. Their mystery is their power.

Cast in bronze, Luna’s shimmering totems take on the aura of their material. Tooled and statued, formed and fetished, the casters of idols and statues prefer bronze for its particular properties. Composed of copper and usually tin, the ductile and enduring bronze when setting expands just slightly to fill a mold’s finest details. It can be poured into grand and dynamic poses. The finish of patinas can make that metal turn a hundred chemical colors, transform cold hard metal into supple flesh with fresh bruises and stained blood, give the static statue the illusion of shifting movement and coiled animal grace. A perfect material to shape and tribute the gods.

The cults are gone, the idols desecrated. Very few of the most beautiful of the ancient bronzes survive. The body of the god boiled into weapons and money. So go all religions. Many a bronze crucifix has melted into the belly of a cannon, the pocket of a priest. But the metal of many uses persists and is used again, bending to each new need. And just as easily bent back.

Bronze’s primary component, copper still moves the flows of energy across continents, linking house to house, station to station. A bringer of Luciferian light, lace it together into the electrical grid and this metal illuminates modern life, turning shadowy cities into bejeweled circuitboards. This power makes Aphrodite’s element essential for modernity and more than one landscape has been despoiled to satisfy a mechanized world’s gluttonous and irreparable desire for more. Ever a medium to what lies beyond, a pure attraction of energy across space and time that cannot linger, tensile and conductive, copper bends and carries but does not keep. The lust that shivers through it dissipates in consummation with other metals, but alloyed it births the powerful bronze and the all the expressions that artists can shape with it. Bronze endures. The burnished brown whispers origins we’ve since forgotten, but that survive in this alloy.

As history passes into legend and myth before its forgotten, only a few artifacts remain to teach us the tales of our ancestors and how we came to be. In these ancient structures renewed, Luna entices us to try and follow the mysterious trajectory that brought us from there to here, and even maybe further yet.

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“Memorias herméticas” is currently on view at Gallery SlyZmud in Buenos Aires.

Images: Javier Agustín Rojas for SlyZmud

Passages: My Art as an Everything

heather — Sun, 30 Nov 2014 16:48:52 +0000

Natalia Brizuela on Nuno Ramos
translated by Andrea Rosenberg

“No sé.” “I don’t know.” That’s the response Tintin and Captain Haddock get from the inhabitants of the Andean country—vaguely reminiscent of Peru—where they’ve traveled in search of their friend, Professor Calculus, who has been kidnapped and taken there by the last descendants of the Incas. Whenever Tintin and Haddock encounter someone—all of them with indigenous features—and ask if they’ve seen their friend, the natives respond, “I don’t know.” That “I don’t know” is the resistance of the colonial subject. That negation is the power of the powerless: “You can arrest me, you can interrogate me, you can torture me, you can exterminate my people, but you can’t make me talk.” Today the phrase arrives on the shores of the Río de la Plata in the form of an embodied echo: we might, with that phrase, trace a lengthy genealogy of resistance and struggle in Latin America, from the colonial period through the terror of the dictatorships of the twentieth century to today.

Here, a few pages of Tintin serve as a springboard for Nuno Ramos’s installation of sound and performance. Tintin, the young Belgian reporter and explorer who took his readers along with him on adventures in the Congo, Latin America, Egypt, China, India, and dozens of other places, was, through the numerous translations produced, a childhood fixture for millions of children in the last century. Tintin’s travels and adventures around the world are the product of a Europe in self-aware decline, a Europe whose centuries-long period of colonial control and exploitation of vast swaths of the earth was beginning conspicuously to fall apart. For that Europe, Tintin offered a sort of fantasy of its own life after death, the transformation and translation of the most brutal and violent legacy of modern times into “child’s play.” While no adult can doubt the imperialist ideology behind Tintin, for millions of children he offered History in the form of a fantastical adventure. For Nuno Ramos, philosopher-artist-writer, Tintin is not just a reminder of childhood but one of the quintessential sites of reading, of imagination, of exploration, and, in this case, of an activation of and movement toward the political realm through art.

“Passage,” “poetic simultaneity,” “latency,” “constitutive vacillation,” “a hybrid form,” “my art as an everything”—thus did Nuno Ramos himself describe his multifaceted artistic practice a few years ago. Films, sculptures, installations, paintings, performances, music, literary works that all echo one another. A single title, a single name, a single figure, or a single idea that is repeated, in passage from one medium to another, from one material to another, in an artistic endeavor that has since the end of the 1980s been necessarily hybrid.

Nuno’s art is never a single object, a single material, a single instance. Everything he does remains in a state of latency, ready to be retrieved, to reappear, to live again. Hence the title of one his most paradigmatic books, Ensayo general. Everything in Nuno is a rehearsal; we never view the definitive version. This is also the case with our “No sé”: it was first presented in Guatemala in mid-2014; now, we are witnessing a new version, revivified by the rich texture of the local context. The performance will be recorded, and at some future date this material will be turned into a film—probably one with the same title. As the days pass, the sound-filled garden will be transformed into a passage toward death.

The material of the world enters Ramos’s universe as if it were in an alchemist’s laboratory: thus, the mutation and transformation of the material and, closely linked, abandonment and death are two of the core themes of his poetics. Some of his favorite materials are:

Lime

It was at the end of the 1980s that Nuno Ramos, then a young painter, took his art beyond the pictorial frame and began to explore space, matter, and mutation in installations of what we now clearly know to be the expanded field of contemporary art. The vehicle or material that allowed him that departure and expansion, the instrument of his shift toward another artistic practice, was lime. This happened in a show called Cal in 1987 in Rio de Janeiro: the gallery space was shared by a series of constructions of lime: a heap of lime and canvas; wooden columns 1.8 and 2 meters tall, filled with lime; a “sail” made with lime and canvas. Into the early 1990s, lime was one of Ramos’s favorite materials in his alchemical laboratory: mixed with other materials such as cotton, paraffin, and tar, it created shapeless masses of matter that spread across the floor as grime, mounds very reminiscent of garbage [Pele 1 (Homenagem a Carlos Parana)) and Pele 2 (Para Frida)]; as words, a sort of writing in lime, to literally give body to the poetic and exploratory words of Nuno the artist, who is also a writer [Canoa]; and as a title for installations that explored the mutation and transformation of material without using lime as one of their materials [O pó da cal queima o pó do corpo].

Here, in no sé (El Templo del Sol), the body leaves its mark on lime, as the artist had already done in the series of photographs included in the book Minha fantasma. A white, ghostly body: a body that straddles the boundary between being a body and ceasing to be one, a threshold between living and dead matter.

Films

All of Nuno Ramos’s films, including the three being shown at the Parque de la Memoria, have a correlate or “poetic paraphrase” in visual art: Luz negra and Casco were exhibitions, and Illuminai os terreiros an installation. In a sense, it is easy to think that they function as a documentation or record of visual work, because in effect they are. In them we see the work’s process, its staging, its drift, its transformation. But we should not think of Nuno’s films as documentaries: they are not there merely to instruct the spectator on how Nuno Ramos’s art comes to be. The films are films; they are works of art themselves.

Let’s take Casco, for example. The first sculpture with that name is from 1999. An enormous mass of laminated wood, with a shape analogous to that of a ship’s hull, embedded in a large rectangle of burned and compacted sand. That first hull has a subtitle: the name of polar explorer Shackleton, whose ship, The Endurance, became trapped in the ice. In 2004 Casco returns, but it is different now. It began as a performance on the beach in which three characters recited texts written by Nuno as the tide rose. As they spoke, the characters also cut up small wooden fishing boats and fit one boat inside the other, destroying and reconstructing the hulls. As the tide rose, the ships and their destroyed hulls looked like the remains of a shipwreck. All of this was video-recorded, and the film was made based on this material. Later, some of the shipwrecked hulls served as sculptures for the exhibit Cascos at the Banco de Brasil Cultural Center in São Paulo. These wrecked hulls were covered in tar, emerged from sheets of tar. Others, made of compacted sand, were not included in the recorded material for the film.

The films are the last mutation, the final iteration in the alchemist’s laboratory, so that the substance returns eternally as a filmic image, as a ghost of itself. They are the continuation after the end. They are what survives. What continues to arrive afterward.

Sound

With the arrival of the new millennium, sound—like music, like noise, and like song—appeared in Nuno Ramos’s art. In this exhibit, sound emerges from the bowels of the earth, issuing through underground speakers, forming an interrogation whose questions are simultaneously both meaningful and meaningless, banal and metaphysical, concrete and abstract, and their goal is to apprehend the body, to restrain and expose it. In Ramos’s 2002 sound installation Luz Negra (Para Nelson 1), the sound issued from a series of graves, now covered and filled with earth, that contained massive speakers that reproduced the voice of Nelson Cavaquinho singing “Juicio final.” In that first sound installation, as in this one, it is soil—as an organic material but also as a metaphor for the world—that speaks, or questions, or sings. In both, the voice is disembodied, obscene in that it is literally off-scene and also sublime. Soil, haunted by the dead, composed of dead and decomposing matter—which allows it to regenerate and gives it life—speaks to us, will not leave us be. Sound, in Ramos’s work, emerges from an earthly beyond, from beneath the material—sometimes, as here, from soil, but also from salt, from water, and from hay [Vai, Vai] or from within furniture and statues [Grave, grave; Tenho sede]. The voice in particular, and the sounds in general, return from the beyond. They survive all destruction—that destruction that is so constant and fundamental in Ramos’s work. They are what remains and what always is. The return of the voice from death and, in that sense—but also in other senses—the voice once more.

Language and Writing

Nuno Ramos is an artist and a writer, and the two undertakings are inextricably linked in his work. He is, then, a writer-artist, or simply a contemporary artist, for whom the material or the medium in which he works cannot be identified. This became quite clear with the publication of his first book, Cujo, in 1993. Reading that text is like being in the artist’s studio, which by that point already more closely resembled an alchemist’s laboratory. In his installations and in his writing, Nuno, like those philosophical pseudoscientists of old, investigates the material composition of the world, the transmutation both of matter and of the soul. In no sé (El Templo del Sol), we hear a dialogue or an interrogation between an absent voice and the voice of a body that is in the process of being transformed into a ghost made of lime. I distinguish between words—language—and sound because words are important in both their material and their sonic qualities. That is why we hear “No sé” and see it written in charcoal on the wall. That is why the words of that first book, Cujo, appeared as material things before becoming mere symbols, in installations in the early 1990s: forms written with lime, with petroleum jelly, on the floor, on the walls. Words acquire bodies. Words in Nuno’s work always have bodies: they are objects and they are symbols.

It is the verge or the boundary, the place where materials mingle and blend together. That same boundary appears in Nuno’s most recent work. It is perpetually in motion, resisting clear demarcation, preventing the viewer from clearly distinguishing between one material and another, between one state and another. It is the boundary of the indistinction that marks today’s aesthetics. It is also, and perhaps primarily, the far boundary of the world.

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Image: from the video “Casco” (2004) dir. Nuno Ramos, Eduardo Clima, and Gustavo Moura.

The Teachings of Tour13

heather — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 05:25:20 +0000

Tour13 from Pont de Bercy

Caitlin Bruce

Tour Treize is a former HLM (Habitation à Loyer Modéré or rent controlled housing) building that has been turned into a 360-degree art space, covered floor to ceiling with graffiti and street art installations. Over a hundred artists from more than sixteen countries were invited to create site-specific works that transformed the housing development from living space to art space. A six month secret collaboration between Gallery Itinerrance director, Mehdi Ben Cheikh, the Mairie of the 13th, and the owner of the building ICF Habitat la Sabilière, the project explores, among other things, the relationship between ephemerality and urban space.

The nine-story building, one of many modernist style structures that went up during the second major phase of urban renewal in France in the 1960s and 1970s (following the 19^th century urban renewal practices initiated by Baron Von Hausmann) was, initially, a response to the need for housing for populations at the economic margins. Largely constructed on the periphery of Paris proper, HLM housing has since become a visual trope for instability, threat, segregation, and the failure to achieve social stability through modernist design.Tour Treize emerges, then, from a complex milieu where state-supported housing is aligned with state-sponsored art making. In France, unlike the United States, the government heavily supports the arts, enabling a large degree of experimentation and genre-transforming developments since practitioners are not (as) beholden to a profit model.

Ben Cheikh imagined the project as a way to stage the ephemerality that characterizes street art as a form and to create an aesthetic experience that was free, open to the public, and impossible to sell. Accordingly, the building was open for only one month, from October 1 to October 31, 2013. The Tour13 website, created in collaboration with website designer and filmmaker Lallier, offered a virtual tour of the building, replete with interviews from participating artists. The website would only exist for ten days after the closure of the building, and could only be “saved” by viewers clicking on the website content, pixel by pixel. Any content not saved would disappear after November 10^th. In suggesting an alternative mode of urban citizenship, less acquisitive and more inquisitive. the project sensitizes us to the plurality of worlds constantly in the making in plain sight and beneath the radar of more official urban production.

Visiting Tour Treize: Patience and Urgency

To visit Tour Treize, situated a quarter kilometer west of Bibliotheque François Mitterand, one had to brave a line of people that wound around a full city block. Because the building was slated for destruction and not as sound as it had been in its prime, there was a 49-person limit, meaning that the guards had to institute a one-person-out and one-person-in policy. Pragmatically, this meant that if one secured a place in the queue 50 meters from the entrance, a four-hour minimum wait was in order.

Waiting is Futile sign.

The wait on the queue tested patience, but also was a singular experience of camaraderie and excitement. I myself tried three times to enter the building, first waiting for two hours, then four, and then seven and a half. The third day I had learned what to do: arriving at the site three hours before full light, I had packed three meals, an extra scarf and hat, and a dense book to read. There was no movement during the several hours before doors opened, so people took a seat on the pavement, or on little foldable stools, and closed their eyes, listening to music, reading, or quietly eating breakfast. Some expansion occurred when the friends of early risers arrived, but there seemed to be an understanding that the place of those stalwart folks who had committed their wee hours to the line should be respected.

Pixaçao on façade of Tour13

Above all else, however, was the exhilaration of watching visitors exit the building. Beaming, laughing, stupefied, repeated encouragements were delivered to those still in line. “It’s just…wow!” “Incredible,” and more direct support, “Bon courage!” After seven hours surrounded by the same four to six people, a sense of communitas developed, conspiratorial smiles and nods were shared as the line advanced, and later on, glances of recognition were exchanged inside the building itself.

I linger on the affective experience of waiting because it pointed up the temporariness, and singularity, of the exhibit: if one didn’t see it now, it would be gone. This experience can be understood as a form of what Greg Siegworth and Melissa Gregg describe as “sensorial pedagogy” – teaching publics to be more attuned to practices through an emphasis on experiences of the senses. In the case of Tour 13, the experience of waiting instilled in the visitor an acute awareness of small shifts in the surroundings as one advances forward, inch by inch, hour by hour. Once inside, a variety of three-dimensional reappropriations of domestic space enabled the viewer to see crumbling walls, gutted bathrooms, and empty kitchens as potential scenes for creativity. The fleeting nature of the exhibit was differently articulated in the works themselves, in which a central theme was the relationship between temporariness and creation and destruction, as matters of both content and form.

Experiencing Tour13: Internationalism, Fragility, and Memory

The building was organized loosely around national and regional affiliations. Each floor contained the work of artists from two to three bordering nations, and floors were graphically connected by graffiti that ran up and down the stairwells and hallways. Because of the limited body count allowed in the building, the viewing experience was less crowded than one might have expected. Such intimacy also conveyed the experience of being an explorer (urban exploring, or urbex is a popular past time in Europe for street art aficionados).

Entering the first floor, one is confronted with a map of Syria on the floor, made out of pita bread, above which hover a cluster of bombs in the form navy-green paint cans with little wings attached.

Rodolphe Cintorino. Photo Credit: Caitlin Bruce

The metaphorical word play is critical. To do graffiti is also called “bombing,” a word used to connote the aggressive taking back of city spaces that some graffiti writers enact.

Portuguese artist Mario Belem’s “Je ne Regrette Rien,” an homage to chanteuse Édith Piaf, can be read as a manifesto for street artists and graffiti artists who produce on the street with the acute knowledge that their work may not persist for more than a few days, or even hours. “I regret nothing,” the piece declares, gesturing to the fact that the many months of production, all of which will be reduced to rubble in 2014, are still meaningful.

Mario Belem, Portugal. Photo credit: Caitlin Bruce

Pantonio’s flying/running rabbits, which also dashed across the exterior of the tower, creating a connective tissue between inside and outside, were one of my favorite elements of the project. The fluid motion was mesmerizing, and seemed appropriate given the scene of destruction (floor boards torn up) around the creatures, also pointing to something more sinister: the rabbits flee. From danger, from imminent destruction, perhaps from the patterns of urban renewal and revitalization that uproot and push out the very residents who used to inhabit Tour 13 and its surrounding structures.

Pantonio, Portugal. Photo Credit: Caitlin Bruce

A destruction-aesthetic figured in many of the apartments. Appliances filled with waste, paint cans, or foam, and floors entirely removed or reduced to dust implied immanent elimination. Katre’s room, which was covered with photographic images of architecture, lines extending from the images across the ceiling, and a breakfast table replete with a radio, glass and plate and surrounded by rubble referred to life interrupted. The radio suggests some of the rubble aesthetic of postwar East German cinema, but also the wreckage that continues to proliferate in the wake of acquisitive neoliberal agendas.

Katre, France. Photo Credit: Caitlin Bruce.

The ephemeral as haunting and haunted space was embodied by Tunisian artist Dabro. His figures, barely distinguished from their background, emerge as ghostly whispers from the walls. They suggest the erased histories and lingering memories of the building’s residents, or his own memories of home, laminated onto the space of Tour13.

Dabro, Tunisia. Photo Credit: Caitlin Bruce

Inti Castro, from Chile, further draws on tropes of memory, forgetting, and violence. The entrance to the main room has the words “Memorias” in legible typset print. Entering the colorful inner room, one sees a wall violently punctured, but the paint designs are not disrupted. Embedded in the hole in the wall is a photograph of a little girl. Shrine-like on the one hand, the jagged doorway and uneven floor also create a sense of unease, a memory not fully worked through.

Inti Castro, Chile. Photo Credit: Caitlin Bruce

Finally, in Brazilian Loiola’s piece, we are placed in intimate confrontation with anxious female figures. One notes “Don’t leave me in peace/alone.” Elements of the apartment (curtains, doors, a radiator, bathtub) remind the viewer of the everyday lives quietly, or not so quietly, lived in this building.

Loiola, Brazil. Photo credit: Caitlin Bruce.

Distinctions between ephemerality, memory, and forgetting begin to emerge. The ephemeral, as the Tour13 website attests, does not necessarily need to be forgotten, it just cannot be tied to physical existence. The forgotten and destroyed, however, are written out historically and physically, as Inti Castro and Loiola’s pieces testify.

Afterlives of Tour13: Ephemerality as Resistance to Precarity

In her recent text, Culture Class, Martha Rosler explores the problematic linkage between artists (who frequently live in precarious economic contexts for production, itinerant in the strongest sense of the word) and the managerial class, white collar workers in the IT industry, engineers, intellectual workers at universities. According to Richard Florida, these two groups, which he refers to as the “creative class,” are linked based on their affinity for the three “T’s: technology, talent, and tolerance,” a link that Rosler suggests is more than tenuous. Pragmatically, both artists and members of the managerial class ostensibly survive based on project-based and self-directed labor. In Florida’s formulation, such an arrangement is the result of a kind of freedom to choose one’s work, enabling “creatives” to remain unentangled by extended obligations and able to pick new endeavors, a kind of dynamic ephemerality of labor. However, as Rosler reminds us, such a conflation contains the seeds of its own demise, insofar as the labor economy that maintains white collar work supports neoliberalism, an agenda that has “created a capitalism that eats its young.”

The 2011 Occupy events reminded urban citizens that space should be shared and radically public, protesting against the broad-based precarity that is naturalized by a neoliberal economic and social model. In France, where high unemployment numbers and economic slowdown have reinvigorated debates about the place of social welfare governance, this relationship between “creatives” and neoliberalism is not as tight as it is in the United States. Nevertheless, in a city still characterized by an astronomical cost of living that forces laborers, immigrants, and many artists to the periphery, unstable labor conditions (intermittence, lack of benefits, and the nostalgic narrative of the struggling artist who must hold one to four day jobs to support his or her craft) make it so that many artists are priced out of cities. Such precarity is often romanticized by businesses, city management, and media as an emblem of the “creative class” that heralds future growth benefiting all urban citizens, instead of a select few, downplaying the many who cannot or do not survive.

Tour13 affectively and aesthetically intervenes in such debates by engaging in a form of sensorial pedagogy that sensitizes viewers to the distinctions between ephemerality and precarity, memory and forgetting. It emphasizes that public aesthetic space can be shared without being commoditized and reveals the many forms of life, memory, and creative production that take place within and outside national borders, in highly visible spaces surrounding Centre Pompidou but also in dingier alleys in Belleville and in art collectives outside the city in Montreuil or Drancy. By inviting audiences to emotionally engage with work that is condemned to disappear, and giving them a chance to “save” it through memory, talk, and pixel-by-pixel mouse clicks, Tour13 offers a scene of urban pedagogy where the temporary is not reduced to the forgotten.

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Images: Caitlin Bruce

Costa Rica: The Modern as Contemporary

heather — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 02:27:19 +0000

Ben Merriman

Costa Rica’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MADC) is located in a disused liquor distillery in the capital city of San José. The building still looks like a factory—unlike, say, the case of the Tate Modern, little has been done to convert the building from its original purpose. The museum is not air conditioned, and like the rest of San José it is warm and humid in all seasons. Wasps buzz in the rafters and tar sweats from the beams. On my visit, I walked in past an unstaffed front desk and looked at art unmonitored by guards or proximity sensors. MADC is a national museum that is neither isolated nor protected from the everyday life of its country. It is this contiguity, along with a vigorous engagement with the styles of the historical avant-gardes, that made MADC one of the most exciting museums I have visited in several years.

Costa Rica has not produced artists or writers of worldwide renown as other Central American countries have done. One could connect the lack of artistic visibility with its placid political history. The country is enviably stable, and though bullet holes from the brief 1948 Civil War are still visible in parts of the capital, this conflict is less a historical trauma than it is a point of national pride: the Civil War ended with the abolition of the military and of racial segregation, with universal suffrage and the creation of a constitutional republic. Perhaps uniquely in Latin America, the United States has maintained close economic and political ties to Costa Rica without meddling or invading. The country has many social problems, but no social catastrophes, and in accordance with this, few émigrés.

One of Costa Rica’s most vexing social problems—sex tourism and its consequences—was at the center of MADC’s major display of new work, “Rein@s de le Noche” (2011), by San José artist Eugenio Murillo-Fuentes. The exhibit comprised twelve large mixed-media pieces on the topic of sex work. The cycle bears a marked debt to Neue Sachlichkeit and the Berlin Dada. Murillo’s subjects—assault, police harassment, drug use, and lustmord—are lurid, his colors garish, and his human figures distorted and aggressively depersonalized. In these formal and thematic respects, the work does not advance past the styles of Interwar Modernism. In other ways, though, the work is joltingly contemporary: San José is best known as a hemispheric focus of sex tourism, and the country is struggling to balance its Catholicism, national traditions of civic tolerance, and economic dependence on foreign visitors. Though the works present few specific markers of place, the exhibit suggests that it is about San José. Murillo’s use of the @ symbol, in Spanish a relatively new typological means of signaling gender neutrality, is an acknowledgment that transgender sex workers are as visible on San José’s street corners as ciswomen. (A literal translation into English, “Queens of the Night,” might convey a similar ambiguity.) The featurelessness of his human figures similarly blurs the matter of gender, which is largely beside the point: Murillo’s work emphasizes (and implicitly criticizes) the reduction of sex workers to interchangeable objects of masculine fantasy. A second meaning of the exhibition title drives home this phantasmagoria: “Reina de la noche” is also a colloquial name for a toxic, night-blooming cactus.

It is not unusual for contemporary art to address a difficult social issue, but Murillo’s choice of medium, and his impersonal style, affords the viewer a less fraught space for moral reflection. Without ducking the ugly realities of sex tourism, Murillo shields viewers from the specificity of particular workers and clients in a way that a medium such as documentary photography would not. Depersonalization, though not the present norm for politically engaged art, avoids both the ethical conundrum of taking aesthetic pleasure in the unhappy lot of another human being, and the economic problem of making a profit from a freely given image. This step back from immediate reality would run the risk of over-aestheticizing a social problem, save that no visitor to the museum could fail to be aware of sex tourism in Costa Rica. (Even the government acknowledges the particular dilemmas; outside the museum were posters from a state-sponsored anti-transphobia campaign, a laudable project also altogether unimaginable in the United States.) The cycle is therefore a context-specific installation—it is not conceived for the specific exhibition space, but for its social environs, and would lose its intelligibility elsewhere.

Murillo, like most artists on display at MADC, suggests the continued adequacy of modernism to our present moment. For the most part, the contemporary art on exhibit proceeds as though Pop and Conceptualism had never occurred, and the most memorable pieces make sense of Latin American reality primarily with the formal resources of expressionism, Dada, and surrealism. Cecilia Paredes’s sublimely useless “Navigation Device” (Instrumento de Navigación) calls Kurt Schwitters to mind, but also drives home a criticism of Neocolonialism. Patricia Belli produces a high heel (“Shoe”/ “Zapato”) with an insole of thorny, poisonous Guanacaste bark, a work suggestive of Meret Oppenheim, but also making a clear point about masculine culture. Visitors from more cosmopolitan locales might take the reliance upon these styles as a sign of relative isolation. The great achievements of the historical avant-gardes are nearing their century mark, and the artists do not seem particularly driven to produce formal novelty.

However, the work at MADC can be understood in precisely the opposite way. Modernism sought to make things new, and treated the styles of the past as contemporaneous with the present and the products of all cultures as a shared store of artistic achievement. The first fruits of Modernism are now old enough to be history, farther from us in time than Modernism itself was from the academicism of the early 19^th Century. The turn toward Modernism on display at MADC is earnest rather than appropriative, and suggests a union of the substance of Modernist styles with the spirit that first informed them. The result is something quite rare in contemporary art: work capable of surprising the viewer, and inviting a changed perspective on the world outside the museum walls.

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Image: Eugenio Murillo-Fuentes, “Disputas esquineras” (2011)

Instructions for Navigating in amongst The Dead, followed by a Requiem

heather — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 17:08:03 +0000

Paola Cortés Rocca on Bruno Dubner’s Las Muertas (The Dead)
translated by Jennifer Croft

1. Images are wily: they don’t lay out facts, don’t make any cases. They’re indolent and superficial: they would have us believe that the world is what we see, and that it’s just fine as it is already. They reside as far away as possible from Comprehension, which begins where we resist appearances and first glances.

2. “When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures,” said Susan Sontag. Photographic discourse is elegiac and crepuscular: it not only cherishes the past, but also converts into past everything it touches. Salvaging it, damning it, protecting it, asphyxiating it. Photography is an overprotective mother, sweet and terrifying. A melancholy lady in eternal agony.

3. In the new regime of technology dominated by the digital, certain characteristics that may be attributed to visual and linguistic “information”—objectified in artworks, digital books, websites, even watches with no hands—are useful, too, in establishing the way in which that information circulates, the way in which subjects—producers, artists, writers, readers, consumers, etc.—make connections, amongst themselves, with others, with words, images, and the things that support them. Everything is (read: should be, aspires to be) ephemeral and disposable and, at the same time, everything is worth being recorded, catalogued, and archived; everything changes vertiginously, aspires to be updatable, to mutate into new and improved versions of itself while also remaining static enough to incorporate discrete elements that attach to and multiply the same basic platform. The approachable, the intuitive, the easy-to-use reified sarcastically the punk utopia: billed as accessible to all, it is in reality the distillation of absolute specialization, training, and research. We are more intimate than ever before—with other people, other geographies, and other histories—and yet we have never been so distant.

4. The digital is a new regime of technology (Bishop), but it could also be called a new mode of reproducibility (Benjamin) or a new redistribution of the sensible (Rancière). What is clear, however, is that analog photography, as a citizen of Modernity, also inhabits this unstable and ultra-contemporary universe. Photography is very twentieth-century, very aged. Photography is classic, modern, bold, and every so slightly passé. “Yo soy aquel que ayer nomás decía / el verso azul y la canción profana.”

5. In his Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure describes the sign as a psychic entity in which the signified and the signifier are unified by arbitrariness. Signage holds pre- or post-Saussurian signs. There the word is very far from being a psychic entity, be it more or less virtual. It is an object, a thing chiseled onto stone or marble, stamped across glass, resplendent, that then deteriorates and finally rots away. “Gold letters, metallic letters,” announces one sign captured here by the camera of Bruno Dubner. Furthermore, design, typography, materials are nothing if they are not opponents of the arbitrary. There is even some humor in the O of the “Lotto” that contains a lottery drum, as though the word itself were playing. Even if our vision begins to fail us, and we need to go to an optician, we can rest assured that there will be no actual reading required in the signs for them—all we have to do is recognize the typography. In signage, the word explores its analog face.

6. There are two stories present in any history of the promotional sign: the one about styles and the one about uses. The first spans the Belle Époque and Toulouse-Lautrec, Art Nouveau, Bauhaus, Russian constructivism. The second speaks to the metamorphoses of the sign from its beginnings as an instrument of advertising designed to sell things and services (drinks, plays, experiences) through its career during the World Wars as a bonds-collecting tool and an encouragement to join the armed forces. The sign is a hybrid being: it signals the meeting, in the second half of the nineteenth century, of art and market, esthetics and civil intervention. Today, when there is nothing but the blurring of boundaries between design, aesthetics, market, advertising, politics, consumption, recreation, and war, signage is a venerable old lady, an illustrious antecessor. “Hora de ocaso y de discreto beso / hora crepuscular y de retiro.”

7. Asked about some of his pictures illustrating signs of Buenos Aires, photographer Bruno Dubner rejects terms like retro or vintage in characterizing his work. His thing is a liking for the old. He also maintains that his relationship with analog is not a kind of fetish (let alone gerontophilia or necrophilia). It’s part of a documentary task in which the oldness of signage is recorded by means of similar age: analog photography. He is exhibiting the results of this labor in a show entitled Las muertas (“The Dead”).

8. “This is not a pipe”: Magritte’s painting shows the ontological, aesthetic, and political distance between the object and its representation. The Dead: Dubner’s photographs head in the opposite direction. Two technologies start to look alike, making a mode of visual representation equivalent to a linguistic form, flirting with the confusion between aesthetic object and merchandise. Las muertas makes note of the scriptural character and the objectual dimension of analog photography, and at the same time, it records the visual becoming of the word in the universe of the promotional sign. “This is not a pipe.” The assertion is now obvious. What we often forget today is exactly what Dubner’s pictures point to: there can be no representation without medium, materiality, support. And that, in adding its meanings and its own history, changes everything. Who believes the word Coca-Cola, the brand, and even the beverage itself could exist in a grim Arial 12?

9. The Dead says that analog photography is traces, brand, symbols, writing. Signage is design, composition, color, highlighting, the display of meaning. The photographer documents their long-lost beauty, their glorious past, their end. He tracks them like a detective. And he finds them rusted, tattered, like the faded letters of the word “epoch” (click, a picture is taken, and it becomes forensic). This is, in fact, a funerary rite.

10. On behavior at funerals, Manuel A. Carreño writes: “Those accompanying must walk at a slow pace, and with an air of circumspection and devotion that befits both the nature of the ceremony and the situation of the mourners, for it is always a sign of good manners to show that one shares in the grief of those especially afflicted.” (Manual of Civility and Propriety Applicable to All Youth of Both Sexes, Caracas, 1853).

Requiem

The death of god, the decline of man, the culmination of history, the end of art. These are all predictions for the future, evaluations of the present, theoretical preoccupations, urges that guide aesthetic practice, experiments, challenges, and releases. They are also melancholy celebrations, shows of fascination and of fondness. There is a vampire plot to The Dead. Not only in the hazied boundary between celebration and wake, between consecration and obsequies, but also in the moment where the death of signage is declared alongside the death of the analog image at the very same time that the former is brought back to life through the eyes of the latter. The photographer turned documentary-maker, detective, or forensic pathologist celebrates every find in games of framing, precision, and flashes of humor. Perhaps because, with its cheerful funeral and its living dead, Bruno Dubner’s work reminds us that it is just when a medium gets old that it can say anything or think everything. Thus Las muertas exhibits the paradoxical concurrence between obsolescence and utopia.

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Translator’s Note

The following quotes from this piece are Rubén Darío’s:

Yo soy aquel que ayer nomás decía
el verso azul y la canción profana.

I am the one who just yesterday spoke
the blue verse and the profane song

Hora de ocaso y de discreto beso
hora crepuscular y de retiro.

time of sunset and a discreet kiss;
time of twilight and seclusion

From Will Derusha and Alberto Acereda’s translation of Rubén Darío in Songs of Life and Hope / Cantos de vida y esperanza. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

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Images: Bruno Dubner
Las Muertas * Galería Foster Catena * Honduras 4882 * Buenos Aires * until September 2013

Omnia Caro Tenebrarum

Pola Oloixarac — Fri, 16 Aug 2013 16:58:20 +0000

Pola Oloixarac
translated by Maxine Swann

The living and the dead at his command,
Were coupled, face to face, and hand in hand
Virgil, The Aeneid, VIII 483-88

In rock caves like these, Cicero reports (Aristotle confirms) the obscure metaphysics of the Etruscan pirates. Their domination spanned the Tyrrhenian Sea up to the Cisalpine Gaul as far as Alalia and the Latium, before the coalition of Carthage; Herodotus mentions that “their ships brandished enormous golden spiders or gigantic octopuses.” They secured the ships to rocky formations of alum, remnants of the marine floor elevated to the surface that was man’s; then they descended with ropes into the caves turned tombs.

(These grottos have been known to attract human beings. They are not indifferent to the organic. It’s the voice of the tundra that coats beings with its excretions, without distinguishing their provenance. The cave imitates the insects that enter it on intimate expeditions, in crystal formations that parasitize.)

Under the rule of their king Mezentius, the Estruscan pirates lay down the ropes and arranged the body of the prisoner vis-à-vis the corpse of a dead man. The two were tied together in such a way that arms, legs and eyes coincided in every detail, mouths grazing; the death of the cadaver inoculated the living body through a mysterious process that fascinated the Etruscans because they saw in it the explosive transmutation of the color palette, blushes and yellows followed by black tones, the veiny network becoming visible. A green stain in the abdomen swelling up and expanding, the pacts of the hard and the soft coming undone; the black victor devouring everything.

Darkness moves quickly over the body of the living person, whom the Etruscans don’t stop feeding so as not to interfere with the sacred phases of the pictorial communion between the living and the dead. Eventually, trailblazing worms open up a pathway uniting both bodies through the abdominal zone, pregnant with diminutive beings; when the black paints both bodies, they stop bringing food.

Experimental pioneers of the vanitas, the Etruscans meditated on earthly nature through their works. In his Confessions, Saint Augustine departs from the horror that numbs the pens of his predecessors and comments philosophically that it is human nature to be tied to a body that rots. Thinkers and agents of the inexorable image-movement, the map of the Etruscans merges until it disappears into the map of Rome.

Till chok’d with stench, in loath’d embraces tied,
The ling’ring wretches pin’d away and died.

It’s probable that the moral and aesthetic suffering was truly intolerable—that the implacable metaphysics of the method killed them with horror first. The installations of Etruscan vanitas in the caves don’t eliminate this possibility: the living figure confronted with his mirror, observing close up his new face as an inhabitant of the other world. Lovers of the symmetry of gemstones (their taste for octopuses and spiders, beings whose symmetry strides two worlds, that of the radial shape of lower organisms and the bilateral towards which the human tends), the Etruscans scattered the forked monsters in the inner skin of the grotto. They created new beings with eight limbs, and populated the cave.

Virgil evokes its novelty (tormenti genus); the technique avoids the lower passions of the torturer (beatings, agitation) and introduces the innovation of death by contagion, horizontal, contiguous. The ἀγών (the human struggle, trivial) transforms itself into “agony”: the battle between two comes down to one, the condemned man devoured by the death coming from within, death that he has before him, face to face.

Stoical, the rocks of the cave observe impassibly the discolorations of the phases of the new creatures, the declensions of life radiating and decomposing. The philosophers of the Stoa, who dreamed of imitating the rock, have accepted that knowledge implied shaking off the ecstasy of ἀγών, in order to become a form of prose—the place of man in the phrase of the world. Death for death’s sake—without the mediation of an executioner.

The cave, the rope and the vigilant spectator, he who brings the nourishment.

Quid memorem infandas caedes, quid facta tyranni effera?
Di capiti ipsius generique reservent!
Mortua quin etiam iungebat corpora vivis
componens manibusque manus atque oribus ora,
tormenti genus, et sanie taboque fluentis
complexu in misero longa sic morte necabat.
Publi Vergili Maronis, Aeneidos

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Stoa. Luciana Rondolini-Diana Drake at miau miau. Bulnes 2705, Buenos Aires. Until August 27.
Our thanks to: Esteban Bieda, Gabriel Catrén, and the artists.

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On Repetition: Nietzsche, Art Basel, and the Venice Biennale

heather — Tue, 30 Jul 2013 17:08:49 +0000

Mariano López Seoane
translated by Pola Oloixarac

In fairy tales, curiosity, one of the forces that sets the story in motion, is always punished. This ancestral warning has stopped few, even though punishment has rained down upon us from Eve’s appetite for apples to the present day. It was the desire to see things up close, to be where the action was, that drove me to visit the Venice Biennale and Art Basel in the space of two weeks. The punishment was not long in coming. Like a hero in disgrace, I was condemned to repetition: in both places, the same artists, the same names, the same questions and, what’s worse, the same experience.

There’s little to say, in critical terms, about Art Basel. It’s a fair: it aims to sell works and make names circulate, ignite careers, turn artists into stars. And that is exactly what it does. All critical cannons are aimed at the Biennale, which presents itself as an intellectual, or at least a reflective, exercise. The fact that it’s hard to establish a clear distinction between the two events speaks of the direction the Biennale has taken, but also about major changes in the art world and the culture industry behind this change. What follows is an attempt at capturing these transformations.

Repetition Hell opened up under my feet at Basel. I arrived in the Swiss city a little tired after an exhaustive inspection of the Biennale and its excretions. I didn’t know much about the fair (beyond its reputation for being the biggest art fair in the world) or about the city (I only knew of its Roman past, and its place in the tortured biography of Nietzsche). It’s possible that the insistent buzz of his name conditioned, or telepathically imposed, a receptivity to what returns.

Nietzsche taught at the University of Basel from 1869 to 1879, in what would be his only formal tie to a teaching institution. At the time, he was a young promise in the field of classical philology. Health problems, and his growing weariness of academic conventions and repetitions took him to quit. He left Basel to become an independent, traveling author. Only then could he focus on composing his greatest works, The Gay Science among them, where, in section 341, he presents for the first time the eternal return as the ultimate test. Let me explain: Beyond cosmological pretentions, the figure of the eternal return can be understood as proof that we’ve reached what the philosopher understands as the height of human greatness: amor fati, the love of destiny. If, when faced with the prospect of having to repeat our lives for all eternity just as we have lived them, we are inclined to accept, then, says Nietzsche, we are demonstrating the highest affirmation of life, the greatest love for life’s twists and turns. This would be a transcendental, positive repetition crucial to the affirmation of life, and quite different from the mind-numbing repetition of routines, academic work and, we could add, of the market.

The first effect of my double voyage was an objective déjà vu: the artists highlighted in the Biennale reappear in the more openly commercial displays of Basel. What’s more: some of the works that could be acquired at the fair seemed to complete what the Biennale didn’t propose as a series, but the fair revealed as such.

Berlinde De Bruyckere shines in the Belgian pavilion of the Biennale with her monumental zombie tree trunk, but lays down just two little sticks (a -dead?- deer on a table, and a small trunk) at two of the Fair’s central stands. In the section of the Biennale curated by Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy exhibits a doll that seems like something straight out of Sesame Street; conveniently, in Hauser and Wirth, he presents a Snow White made of black silicone belonging to a series he did a couple years ago at the Armory Show. George Condo, who shot into the pop firmament after the cover he designed for rapper Kanye West, also makes a double showing (multiple, in fact, since his work appears in several galleries). Alfredo Jaar presents an interpretation of the Apocalypse tailor-made for Venice, and an excessive intervention in the Unlimited section at Basel. Jeremy Denner shoots us a dose of English Magic in his curatorship for the British pavilion, and reappears with a simple print (“Bless this Acid House,” 10 editions, sold out) at the stand of Parisian gallery Art Concept in Basel. The omnipresent Ai Wei Wei, as vast as the Chinese Empire, proliferates at the origin (in Venice, in at least three different places and circumstances) and returns at the fair. Llyn Foulkes’ deforming portraits can be seen at Punta della Dogana and the halls of the fair. Thomas Schütte’s neogothic sculptures reappear everywhere. Rikrit Tiravanija is also present in the two cities of global art. The examples could multiply (eternally?), forming what Graciela Speranza has called the “globalized checklist” that defines contemporary art today.

The question is whether the art at the Biennale and Basel can pass the test of eternal return, or whether we are standing before a repetition of another kind, the banal repetition that haunted Nietzsche in his days as a professor. In any case, and as Nietzsche would have wanted, the Eternal Return Test can serve as a measuring stick to distinguish artworks that break through the desert of ennui created by the rest, artworks that turn their gaze on us, capturing the light and shadows of the present, open to today, to the future, and to the archaic, from those frozen in the category of symptoms. In either case, faced with these two types of repetitions, criticism has something to say.

Let’s start by affirming life: let’s fix our eyes on the artworks we could revisit over and over again, for all eternity. They are few, they can be counted on two hands. Five come to mind at the moment: the aforementioned Berlinde De Bruyckere at the Belgian pavilion; the SS Hangover ship by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, on the shores of the Encyclopedic Palace; Mathias Poledna’s video at the Austrian pavilion; the barely perceptible performance by Tino Sehgal at the entrance to the Giardini; the mock-encyclopedia by the Swiss artists Fischli and Weiss.

I think these artworks stand out from the rest of the exhausting itinerary because they cultivate languages that set them apart from the manic pulse of the Biennale, because they make us question the grammar of the spectacle, because they highlight an emerging dissent, and offer a warped image of the circuits themselves, fostering a critical distance not always present at these events.

Their significance comes through most clearly against the backdrop of the conditions of reception of the works at the Biennale and Art Basel. The overwhelming quantity of artworks; the mingling of techniques, languages, traditions, horizons; the fact that, even at the Everest of spatial design, we are visitors to a mind-numbing heap of artworks, names and cultures. Everything conspires to make these itineraries a confusing experience in which one learns as much as one forgets, in which one’s senses and understanding are stupefied like those of an inhabitant of a megalopolis. Where one experiments not the artworks, but rather the internal logic of the itinerary: its speed, rhythm, and lack of relief. All in all, the experience is closer to that of visiting an amusement park than an exhibition at a gallery or a museum. This manic pulse is the first thing reverted by the aforementioned artworks. Let’s see how.

Right after the impressive architecture of the Arsenale, Ragnar Kjartansson’s “S.S. Hangover” surprises the fatigued visitor. After hours of walking and seeing without looking (a sort of immunological response to the confusion), his legs, head and eyes are sore. After the main event and a series of national pavilions, the view opens onto the water (the channeled sea), a surface that invites you to sit down and relax. That’s where the Icelandic artist placed his ship, a fishing boat redesigned with Greek, Icelandic and Venetian patterns. Like the visitors to the Biennale, the ship repeats a mechanical itinerary. But it does so at a pace impossible to sustain in the frenzied succession of halls and pavilions and the reflux of visitors: crewed by a sextet playing a piece for wind instruments specially composed by Kjartan Sveinsson, this “kinetic sculpture” maintains a slow pace—more like drift than travel. Indeed, the ship goes nowhere: it travels from one point to another along the wharf, in the shape of a U. A controlled, limited drift that invites the viewers to question the sense of their walks and provides them with a much-needed moment of relaxation. The grateful visitors gather in the grass by the dozen; the proof of the restorative, healing effect of Kjartansson’s work is found in the amount of time they spend there, given to contemplation, a practice seemingly banished from the rest of the Biennale.

It is quite possible that, seeing this artwork, the viewer resumes a capacity for action that the cruising speed of the official itinerary forbids, or at least debilitates.

The remaining pieces provide a similar repose, allowing the visitors to engage their interpretive apparati. The installation prepared by Berlinde De Bruyckere for the Belgian pavilion opens up like the gullet of a mythological animal. The almost blinding luminosity of the Venetian spring and the Biennale rooms finds a fierce counterpoint: the pavilion is almost completely dark. The only illumination comes from a filthy skylight, where opacity claims the advantage over transparency. The viewer’s advance necessarily comes to a halt.

Our eyes need a few minutes to adapt to this new environment; when they do, we can only move in cautious, small steps. At the center of the room, where the darkness is less dense, stands what the artist, in collaboration with JM Coetzee, has called Kreupelhout: the trunk of a zombie tree, scarcely alive, barely strong enough to search for light. It’s a sculpture that brings the dark forces of nature, the haunting whispers of the woods, into the shrine to encyclopedic vanity. Kreupelhout seems to speak both of a past that we willfully block from our sight, and of a future of ecological disaster and genetic mutation. Standing before it, the viewer’s response can only be emotional: alone, surrounded by shadows and icy currents of air, the viewer beholds the agony of a semi-living being, half human work, half error of nature. He is caught—perplexed, speechless—between the desire to flee and the will to help.

It’s no accident that De Bruyckere’s project involved the collaboration, in the form of curatorship, of a writer. The process of creating the installation, documented in the catalog of the pavilion, entailed a back and forth over emails between the artist and the writer, in which suggestions, corrections, and encouraging words were exchanged: all this was set into motion by a short story Coetzee sent De Bruyckere at the end of 2012. Here, this sporadic contact and elective affinities conspire in the creation of a monstrous work that distances itself from the “professional” supervision and bookkeeping of aseptic curators, always looking to make a splash.

The monumental, unfinished piece by the Swiss artists Fischli & Weiss also brings us to a halt, for other reasons. Their famous “Plötzlich, ein Übersicht” hides in a central room within the Giardini, only accessible via a narrow stairs. Two guards stand at the entrance, forcing the visitor to line up to see the work. The wait provides an initial deceleration. The work, a vast 3D encyclopedia of small figures made in clay, demands a detailed, slow motion examination.

The viewer’s gaze is necessarily tender: the Lilliputian size of characters and scenes lends itself to a respectful, almost intimate close up, yet the succession of scenes ends up raising a series of questions, inspiring reflection. The artists gathered together their personal obsessions, building an encyclopedic work-in-progress that calls into question the all-encompassing pretensions of the Encyclopedic Palace and mocks the enlightened ambitions that serve as the premise of that endeavor, and others. Nevertheless, what they offer is a labor of love: love for tradition (by reconstructing a humanist canon we could call romantic, ranging from the figures of Goethe, to Frankenstein’s monster, to Freud); love for certain moments of the culture industry (TV characters, the Rolling Stones); love for thought and philosophy (many of the little sculptures represent concepts like Theory & Praxis).

The two remaining artworks are unique in that they transcend the hell of repetition by making use of repetition. The animation presented by Mathias Poledna in the Austrian pavilion invites contemplation on loop. It’s a short film produced using the animation techniques of 1930s Hollywood. A character that could be a dog or a rabbit takes a stroll while singing a song. Other animals join in and sing along; even flowers wake up to say hello. Walter Benjamin has analyzed the utopian potential of prosopopoeia in Mickey Mouse. The impact of the video, in this context, is more modest, though: a new pause in the darkness, a moment of rest in which we are all eyes and ears. Peaceful, comfortable, we surrender ourselves to the mimesis of one of the first forms of cultural industry as though it were a soothing balm. The video is short. We can watch it over and over again. Get in the loop. And take advantage of this state of mind to think about the conditions under which it was made, about what sets it apart from an old Hollywood film (where does art begin and end?), about a natural landscape that is not seen as a friendly wonderland anymore. About the pleasure of senses as a horizon in and of itself, one that is typically dimmed, or banished entirely, by art seen at Biennales. The artwork is simple, candid, yet it opens up a space for questions that other monuments to sophistication don’t manage to pose.

The specter of the loop is also present in the winning performance by Tino Sehgal. Almost imperceptible, it takes place in one of the central halls of the Giardini; in a way, it disturbs the contemplation of the artworks hanging on the walls. Upon entering the hall, the visitor hears a swarm of sounds, from howls to drumming. Immediately, the viewer discovers that the sounds are made by people, by then revealed as performers, kept at bay in a corner of the room, who use their mouths as versatile instruments, improvising an unstable choreography that consists of just a few steps. This choreography and cacophony goes on as long as the Biennale is open. The continuum is repeated—if we can speak here of repetition—day by day, from the first to the last day. Rather than repetition, Sehgal in fact proposes a reflection on its impossibility. Every day, the performers are the same; what changes are the combinations—directed by Sehgal—that make up the groupings, and the sounds and movements they improvise.

Paraphrasing Hegel, Borges once wrote that music was the most perfect form of time. This intervention adds the human body to the phrase: music and dance, syncopated and erratic, yet contained in space, are offered as the most perfect forms of time for the Biennale visitor. Indeed, without even knowing what’s been seen (there are no signs indicating this is an artwork, or declaring authorship of any kind), the viewer stops at the threshold, or uncomfortably at the center, observing a narrative develop with no recognizable structure, seeming to caress entropic drift. What’s destroyed, once more, is the firm step of the visitor that seeks to remain a pure observer. An unsettling contemplation is imposed upon us that makes us question again the limits of art (or our notions of art) and the pace that marks the consumption and absorption of an artwork.

We named five works of art. It is telling that, together, the great colossus of contemporary art (Documenta completes the Holy Trinity) produces barely a handful of memorable artworks, to be treasured and eternally repeated. There is, though, an overwhelming abundance of works informed by what we could call the “wow factor.” This factor dominates the selection concocted by the curator to build up the Biennale’s Encyclopedic Palace (which, from its title, aligns itself with a politics of exclamation). What’s interesting, or alarming, is that this selection coincides on so many levels with that of the market, as manifested in Basel. We are confronted by a repetition, in the works themselves but also, beyond them, in the contemporary experience of art. Indeed, repetition determines this experience, giving it the peculiar taste of something already known. The experience repeats like an ill-settled meal.

A sympathetic party might offer the following hypothesis: duly informed of the treasures that would be on display in the Ark of the Biennale, the world’s major galleries choose to (or have to) take advantage of the exposition, publicity and legitimization (by the sector of the market controlled by curators and critics) of their artists; as such they commission a work in a sellable format for their stand, an obvious yet nonetheless astute way to commercialize the je ne sais quoi of participation in the Biennale. It’s a perfectly rational, transparent strategy, which could be observed earlier on in Buenos Aires, more precisely at ArteBA, where the auction house Roldán offered a remnant of the monumental (and repetitive) piece that Nicola Constantino would present a few weeks later in the Argentine pavilion of the Biennale.

Meanwhile, those with a penchant for conspiracy theories—not delirious ones—might argue that there are questionable ties between the curatorial team of the Biennale and the directors of the most powerful galleries on the planet, who, from their positions of power, could have influenced the decisions of the Head Curator, the President of the Biennale, or the curators of the national pavilions. One could imagine (even discover) a murky system of returns.

Both interpretations are viable, and their exploration may bear edifying fruit. But let’s look beyond the craftiness of the gallerists and the amoral shenanigans of the great art companies and their highest functionaries, and consider the structural conditions for this trite, non-sublime, repetition that fails our Nietszchean test. Indeed: which traits of the contemporary art world would explain the family resemblance between the market’s fairs and their counterparts in the realm of ideas? A Biennale is, after all, an event for thought and intellectual dialogue, a space for exchange among artists, curators, critics, and audiences.

Isabelle Graw’s High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (recently translated into Spanish by Cecilia Pavón and Claudio Iglesias) offers some hints in this direction. The book can be read as a symptom: her attempts at defining the two worlds (the “art market” and the “knowledge market”) fail consistently throughout the book, almost like negative proof of her hypothesis. Graw alternates between insisting on the separation of what she defines as two independent worlds, and recognizing that the categories she’s using no longer serve. In a wonderful paradox, the failure of her argument brings forth the phenomenon in bold letters. Graw adopts the master narrative of many historians, brandishing post-Fordism to explain the subordination of art to celebrity culture and the growing role of the market as arbiter of art, assigning value in every sense of the word. What is brought to light is the loss of autonomy of the “knowledge market” in the face of the growing hegemony of the market as such: the fact that an artwork has a commercial value is enough to secure its value in the art world. Undoubtedly, this plays a key role in the bad repetition we’ve been talking about: artworks consecrated by the market, in Basel and at other fairs, gain visibility and become part of the cartography of contemporary art as mapped by the Biennales.

But other elements should be taken into account when thinking about this repetition, in order to paint a broader picture of the collapsing boundary between two art markets.

Beyond the celebrity status gained by many artists (such as Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Georg Condo, and Tracey Emin, among others), events associated with the contemporary art circuit have become part of the world of show business. Biennales and global art fairs are forced to fit on an international calendar that includes not only Cannes, various fashion weeks, and global parties, but also soccer’s World Cup and the Olympic games. Thus, the events of a supposedly autonomous world (art) have become part of the dynamic geography of the global spectacle, absorbing some of the key features of mass spectacle as defined by Walter Benjamin, and losing, along the way, much of what made it unique. And so the experience of visiting a Biennale feels more like visiting a mall or an amusement park than like visiting a small show in a museum or an artist’s atelier.

The key to all this can be found in the mass character of these events, as though the spectacle was the only language Modernity (and its many post- avatars) had learned for dealing with the gathered masses.

Walter Benjamin saw a political potential in these developments. The diffuse or distracted reception always allowed by architecture became, in the age of technical reproduction, a model for art emancipated from the aura, able to be politically repurposed. The motto in this famous essay was: politicize art as an antidote against the growing aestheticization of politics promoted by fascism.

Let us simply say that 20th century history documents the life of both options—that one is not enough to counteract the spread of the other. The political and the social’s growing engagement of the logic of show business is, in fact, not the exclusive patrimony of fascism, but rather a current reality, the byproduct of the industrialization of culture, what Adorno and Horkheimer would later deem “monopolic capitalism.” The vignettes in Adorno and Horkheimer’s essay, like the aphorisms in Minima Moralia, can serve as a starting point for an interpretation of the show put on in Basel and Venice; a spectacle that, without question, knocks art off its high culture pedestal—but without giving us anything in return. Benjamin’s proposal of politicizing art is practically annulled by the format that regulates both spaces. Only where a different logic and pace emerge, where viewing art is something other than taking a tour with predetermined pauses, speed and wow moments, can one find a space for reflection and thought. That’s what these artworks I listed before offer us.

It should be said that they are not alone. These artworks join other efforts silently navigating the Palace rooms and the pages of the Encyclopedia, works that the pace of entertainment encourages one to overlook. Partly because it’s hard to portray them as highlights, and even more so because it’s hard to sell them. It’s precisely those works that are not repeatable, in the flat sense in which George Condo, Ai Wei Wei and Paul McCarthy can repeat themselves. And yes, I said works: many are not even works of art. There has been much talk about the Biennale’s young curator Massimo Gioni’s choice of outsider art. Alongside the big names and emerging artists, there are housewive’s drawings, dolls devotedly hand-made by amateurs, voodoo flags, offerings to religious temples, etc. Beyond these examples of an extra-artistic impulse (in itself a way to challenge the commercial drift: how does one sell a voodoo flag collection?), we have the works of artists and intellectuals dedicated to exploring an interior world.

It doesn’t really matter that this interior world is a fiction; less powerful, interesting fictions have fostered meaningful explorations. And this is precisely what the Biennale produces in this respect, in very diverse ways (more than an interior world, one might have to speak of interior galaxies). I’m thinking about Aleister Crowley’s tarot cards, the temple-like sculptures by James Lee Byars, Carl Jung’s Red Book, Roger Caillois’ esoteric collection of stones, the mystical abstractions of Hilma af Klint. There’s something in the tone these interventions impose upon the environment in which they appear, the rhythm they set for the viewer, that sets them apart from the Palace of Entertainment. These magical objects set us in a mood, they situate us, they demand our attention.

That’s what is at stake in the good repetition, as defined by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition: “It’s about producing in the work a movement capable of stirring the spirit beyond all representation; it’s about making movement itself a work of art, without mediation: it’s about substituting mediated representations with direct signs; of inventing vibrations, rotations, turns, gravitations, dances and leaps that cut straight to the spirit.”

Had the Biennale’s curator been faithful to the pulse of these objects and artworks, he would have made a more silent, less spectacular, probably more hermetic show, one that was much more honest and disruptive for those very reasons. Concessions to the desire to leave the viewer speechless and to art consecrated by the repetition of the market make this journey an echoless experience, like a panoramic tour of counters full of commercial products. Naturally, a visit to the supermarket can be instructive, and become an aesthetic experience on its own. But a Biennale should foster the application of other skills, set up a dance floor across which our mental faculties can move freely.

This potential, this capacity to offer a profound, authentic, sublime repetition, is latent in the art world. But it remains inert, or dormant, when those spaces that could provide certain autonomy conform to the regime of the entertainment industry. The artworks I have singled out, and all the efforts to suspend the reign of the Palace of the Spectacle, encourage us to build and preserve spaces where art can present itself as a manifestation of the unrepeatable; as that which, because it is unique, we want to see repeated for all eternity.

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Images: Mariano López Seoane (of artworks mentioned in the text)
Counsel on the translation into English of this piece was provided by Heather Cleary

The Red and the Black

heather — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:52:19 +0000

María Gainza
translated by Jane Brodie

I’m scared. I’m sitting on a plastic chair waiting to see the doctor. It’s a cold spring morning and I’ve come here because my right eye has been twitching for several days. It throbs—intensely, insanely, especially the lower lid. I sometimes think it’s going to burst. I have ruled out the most obvious causes: it’s not fatigue because it sometimes starts up just five minutes after I wake up; it’s not strain because I haven’t read a thing for a week; it’s not alcohol or cigarettes or coffee because I’m a strict ascetic; I don’t believe in stress. I’ve considered possible illnesses. I went online and found forums for people with a twitch in their eye. One group even invited me to one of the meetings they have on Monday nights in the basement of the Hotel Bauen. They sit in a circle and recount a wide range of psychic woes: chronic melancholy, sick ideas, recurring headaches, feelings of unreality. Sometimes they invite a celebrity who has been afflicted with the “crazy eye” to talk about their experience, issues like how to keep the camera from capturing your inner quake. Sandra Ballesteros was supposed to go to the meeting I was invited to. I didn’t end up going, and I opened another e-mail account for fear of retaliation. Then, to put an end to the aftershocks, I made a doctor’s appointment.

The waiting room is white, immaculate. Across from me, a mother and son are also waiting to see the doctor. The boy, who is wearing thick glasses, is chewing gum, and when he looks at me he pulls it out of his mouth to form a hanging bridge that swings back and forth. His mother tells him to cut it out, but he keeps at it, and I look away. My eye starts twitching for the millionth time so far today. Then I see the Rothko. It’s a poster on the wall. I glance at it quickly because if I keep looking at it too long the beating in my eye starts to feel like a galloping horse. It’s a red vertical Rothko; I recognize it because I have seen it at the Museum of Fine Arts. A classic Rothko: a devil red on burgundy that veers into black.

People always say that until you’ve seen a Rothko in person you’ve only seen half of it. I’m surprised by how much there is to see in a reproduction, though. Even in a reproduction, Rothko seeps in through your body, not your eyes. Like a fire at stomach level. Some days I think that Rothko’s works are not works of art at all, but something else: the bush from the biblical story that blazes but never burns up. There is something in a Rothko that never grows old, despite its creator, despite the inflamed rhetoric that weighed down his works for so long. My generation was not co-opted by the hagiographers of the artist, writers steeped in Jung, Nietzsche and Heidegger, anything that might heighten the messianic dimension of Rothko’s work. For years, the myth made him out to be a creator of icons from the beyond, an idea that fascinated his collectors while also placing him firmly in the tradition of abstract art as spiritual trip, a tradition that began with Kandinksy. This is what I am thinking about when the secretary tells me that Dr. Despontin is ready to see me.

To the south of Saint Petersburg is the city of Daugavpils, formerly called Dvinsk. In the early 1900s, under the Czarist regime, there weren’t enough jobs to go around and young women saw prostitution as an employment opportunity. To avoid that fate, Anna Goldin married the pharmacist Rothkowitz when she was fifteen. She had four children. The youngest of them, Mark—the future Rothko—was the most sensitive. A hypocondriac, he was the only one who studied the Talmud. Though there is no historical record of killings in Dvinsk, as an adult Rothko described how “the Cossacks took the Jews from the villages to the woods and made them dig a large grave. I pictured that square grave so vividly that I´m no longer sure if the massacre actually happened or if I made it up, but that image has always tormented me.” One morning Mrs. Rothkowitz and her children got on a boat at the port of Libau. They headed to America to join the children’s father, who had left some months earlier. They landed in Portland, Oregon, and they still had sea legs when Mr. Rothkowitz died of colon cancer. The young Mark was just eleven years old. He was poor, a Jew and a leftist. He finished high school as best he could and received a scholarship to Yale to study law. Months later, when the crash of ‘29 was beginning to shake the country’s foundations, Rothko dropped out. He had decided to go to New York to “bum around and starve a bit.”

If he had actually starved at that point, Rothko would be a complete unknown today. Until the age of forty-five, he was just another painter. He went through a Surrealist phase, an intense mythological period that is strikingly unpromising with its mediocre employment of the line. Then, in the 1930s, he started painting wrenching urban architectures with elongated figures in the style of Giacometti. Everyone considered him a lost cause when the “eureka” moment happened, that moment artists wait their whole lives for and that sometimes arrives and sometimes doesn’t, the moment when the vision finally surfaces. It happened in the summer of 1945, when he set out to paint a series of blurry abstract blocks that floated in the space of the canvas. The line had disappeared, the colors had exploded: pinks, peaches, lavenders, whites, yellows, saffron with the evanescence of steam on glass. He had been studying Matisse and Milton Avery, and his entire eye seemed to have dilated. It was no longer just an optical organ; now Rothko could touch, smell and feel through it.

You stand in front of a canvas like a sunrise. You are bathed in its light. You are drunk on its color. It is not a harmonic or orchestrated color but a free color, a color that breathes within the painting. These are beautiful paintings, perhaps the most beautiful ever produced by an artist in North America. But beauty can be sublime or it can be decorative, and Rothko’s paintings went perfectly with the leather couches and angora rugs in the living rooms of New York’s Upper East Side. The critics tore him to pieces, and Rothko agonized while his bank account grew. Some accused him of manipulating effects and turning the rigor of Abstract Expressionism into a profitable business. He began to defend himself with statements like “Tragic experience is for me the only source of art.” It was like he was digging his own grave and for years that grandiloquence would drown his works, turning them into opaque menhirs instead of transparent windows.

The thing is, anxiety made Rothko talk too much. He forgot that the most powerful thing in a work is often its silences, and that style is a language in its own right, a means to insist on something. Looking at a Rothko is a spiritual experience of the sort that does not allow for words. It’s like visiting the glaciers or crossing a desert. The feebleness of language is rarely so patent. Before a Rothko, one looks for phrases from a Sunday sermon which are really just euphemisms for “holy shit.”

In the years of his greatest success, from 1949 to 1964, Rothko began to fall apart: his marriage ended; his friends left him; he was drinking like a fish, and he was embittered and contemptuous. He was caught in a downward spiral of destruction. One stormy night when he was leaving his building, the doorman warned him to “take care, the streets are rough.” Rothko answered, “There’s just one thing I have to watch out for: the black swallowing up the red.”

I have to keep my eyes shut until the drops take effect. I cheat, peeking through damp lashes every now and then. I look at the Rothko poster. I feel my pupils dilate. I open and close. When I open my eyes, the red sucks me in; when I close them, it floats on the black of my eyelids. I move closer, trying to follow Rothko’s instructions and stand forty-six centimeters away from the image. And I ask myself how this man could have made the euphorically abstract paintings of his best period during the lowest point of his fall? And that takes me to T.S. Eliot: “The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind that creates.” Dr. Despontin’s secretary orders me to sit down and I retrace my steps, eyes shut.

On the morning of February 25, 1970, Rothko walked into the bathroom, took off his shoes, placed his pants and shirt on a chair and used a razor blade to cut two deep slashes in his forearms. He had advanced emphysema. When his assistant found him, he was lying on his back in a puddle of blood, his arms stretched out to his sides. An hour later, when the police arrived, he was floating in a red pool the size of one of his paintings.

If style is character, now his detractors were faced with a work of sheer gravitas and a mystery to solve. A secret that Rothko had taken with him to the grave. What really happened in 1959 when, at the height of his career, Rothko refused to deliver the paintings he had made for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York, the highest paying commission in the history of Abstract Expressionism? Get off the subway at 375 Park Avenue, cross the street, look as far back as you possibly can, and you will see the building created by Mies van der Rohe in 1954. The Seagram is pure bronze, travertine stone and dark glass, a stylized tower colder than a logarithm. Now walk into the restaurant, as restrained as it is palatial. Do you see the palm trees, the small pool, the flambé dishes? Can you see the Mirós and the Frank Stellas behind the Picasso curtains? They cover the space where the Rothkos were supposed to be.

Why Rothko agreed to decorate a symbol of American economic power at the height of the Cold War is unfathomable. Dore Ashton, who visited him at his studio frequently, says that Rothko thought the murals were for the employees’ cafeteria. Others see this as farfetched and claim Rothko knew perfectly well that they were going to crown the luxurious restaurant. His friends Barnett Newman and Clifford Still turned out to be his worst enemies, calling him a prostitute of art. But, as someone I know would say, there are perfectly decent forms of prostitution. Rothko said something else, specifically to journalist John Fischer in 1959 on an ocean liner heading to Naples: “We must find a way of living and a work that does not mean the end of us all.” Between glasses of whiskey downed on the coach-class deck, Rothko told him that his master plan was “to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room with paintings that will make those rich bastards feel that they are trapped.” He was thinking of Michelangelo’s oppressive Laurentian Library which he had seen in Florence some years before and was planning to visit again during this trip. Days later, in Pompeii, the Rothkos (his wife Mell, his daughter Kate, and now Fischer, who tagged along everywhere) visited the Villa of the Mysteries. Rothko was struck by the lusty use of red and black in the dining room dedicated to Dionysus, by the perverse way the colors blended together. All of this was in his head when he returned to New York and took his wife to lunch at the newly opened Four Seasons. His paintings were not yet on the walls; he said they needed some finishing touches. The restaurant was overflowing with navy blue Brooks Brothers suits, Stefano Ricci ties, pearl necklaces and ermine stoles. Rothko savored his gazpacho, his eyes nervously scanning the place. Suddenly, his spoon midway between his mouth and his plate, he asked Mell if she smelled something funny. “Like what?” she asked. “Like filthy money,” said Rothko. He then gulped down his cocktail, pushed the table back and announced that he would break the contract.

The murals that never made it to the Four Seasons are grey blocks on black backgrounds. When the scandal had died down and photos of the paintings came to light, everyone thought, “No wonder. These paintings are a dead-end street, a tragic fall.” Not at all. When the case is reopened, when the dark blotches on the wall are analyzed, we realize that Rothko was showing some muscle: he wanted to measure himself up against the corporations. He thought of his murals as a way of exposing the dirty laundry of the American empire. He wanted to rub their noses in their money and make a work as unwelcome as a piece of glass in the risotto. He wanted to resuscitate a central idea from his aesthetic creed, the notion of art as a vehicle for change. But in New York in the late fifties, all art could do was amuse. That day at the Four Seasons, Rothko understood that for the bankers and businessmen having lunch around him, his paintings, whatever color they were, would end up being as decorative as their wives.

Dr. Despontin assures me that I don’t have anything serious. It’s a twitch, an involuntary tremor of muscle fibers due to irritation. My eye stops throbbing. I’m going to live, he tells me. While I’m waiting for the elevator, I take a last look at the Rothko poster. I stare at it. It makes me feel unique: the ruthless loneliness of this sweaty piece of flesh that is me. It reminds me that I am alive and it saddens me, like when you cling to a promise of happiness that you know can’t be kept.

My husband got sick twice. Non-hodgkin lymphoma was the diagnosis. B cells the first time around, a long but relatively easy treatment; T cells the second, a devastating treatment that was twice as long. There are those who say, “You have no choice but to fight it when it happens to you. You would do the same.” I don’t think so. But he put up with it. In Ramos Mejía Hospital for a year. Nights like tunnels, a pleurisy that gripped his chest, lethal chemotherapy and countless other horrors that I will spare you. At the hospital there was a whore, a dark woman in a red dress and fishnet stockings. She would sleep during the day in the plastic chairs at the entrance, curled up against some bags that I guess held her belongings, shaking every so often as if a bolt of lightning had struck her inside. At night you could hear her walking through the wings of the hospital, her heels against the icy tiles; she went from one patient to the next, rubbing herself against the iron bars of the beds, doing what she had to do.

A Rothko was hanging next to my husband’s oxygen tube. It was a clipping from a magazine. He had other things up as well: a poster of his rock band, a postcard of sex symbol Coca Sarli in a river, a napkin autographed by Uruguayan soccer star “Prince” Francescoli. I was the one who had put up the Rothko; his friends had put up the other stuff in an attempt to cheer him up. He said that, like pictures of saints, the images helped him at night when the silence of the hospital was overwhelming. “Sometimes I take a dose of morphine and light them up with my flashlight. It helps a little.” One night when I stayed with him until late—it must have been eleven—the whore walked by and stopped by our bed. She greeted my husband by name and lingered to look at the images on the wall; the moonlight came in the window like a floodlight. “Was it just me or did she recognize the painting?” I asked my husband after she had left. “It’s not you; she’s seen it before. We were talking and now she says that ‘Roco’ is her favorite painter.” I ran into her again two nights later; we were waiting for the elevator but it had gotten stuck one floor up. While we waited, I smiled at her and tried my best to seem cool. I was curious about her interest in Rothko, the connection between art and the street in the most literal sense. But she avoided eye contact, putting me in my place as bourgeois arty girl, hospital tourist, armchair anthropologist fascinated by the exotic. I quickly understood and didn’t bother her further. When the elevator finally came, we went down in silence and walked out into the large central hall that connects the different wings to the lobby. She walked ahead of me. For a moment, I thought she was leading me to the chapel, to some sort of sacrifice or communion. But then she turned down a dark hall that led to the Hemodynamic Unit. Her dress was the last thing I saw, the precise instant that the red dissolved into the black.

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Image (modified) via artobserved.com