Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Cultural Bodies

         Stablished living in Texas as permanent resident since 1998 Abdel Hernández San Juan is a theoretician and writer author of books such as Rethinking Urban Anthropology, Anthropology of archaeology: A Perspective from Ethnometodology and cultural anthropology, The Intramundane Horizont: Hermeneutic and Phenomenology of Everyday Life, The Indeterminist True, Being and Monad, Self and Acerbo: The Self and the social between writing, research and culture, The Thresholds of the Couple: Self-Ethnography,  The World Correlate: Interpretant and Structure in Posmodern Cultural Theory, Given and the Ungiven, The Presentational Linguistic, The Constelations of Common Sense: sociology of common sense and anthropology research theory, amongst many others.  

   A Guest Scholard of the faculty of sociology and anthropology of the lake forest college of Illinois in his area of research of anthropology, ethnography, the museum, curatorial practices, collection and the representation of culture convoqued around the issue of the archaeological and tourist markets of Yucatan and the ruins of chichen itza, the anthropological fascination with the Maya and previously a guest lecturer panelist at the faculty of anthropology of the university of Houston, congress of Ethnometodology to discuss on the equinox film, since 1997 he is a complimentary research associate anthropology faculty at rice university and transart foundation artistic director

  . He Previously lived many years in Caracas, Venezuela were he has being research director of his individual projects at the Center of Research of the University of Visual Art Armando Reveron and curator at the alejandro otero museum of visual art doing his individual research and fieldwork in Venezuelan popular markets and lecturing theoretical courses and seminars at museums, universities and institutions

Contents

Cultural Bodies

Neither inside nor outside

Culture in Art from Texas

Alchemies of the Sense

Artists in Trans

Translating Cultures: Asian American art and culture

Non-Siting the Site

The Degree Zero of the Screen

Cinema and Gesture

A meddle way between narrative and non-narrative

Another Cartographies 

A Sense of communion

Cultural Bodies: Cristina Jadic (USA).
©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, 

Houston, Texas, USA

Ethnographer and Cultural Theorist, Research Associate,
Anthropology Department- Rice University

Cristina Jadick is a young Cuban American Artist born in the United States. Her visual work is characterized by a strong personal style, that places  us on a new and provocative road at the intersection between the languages of Contemporary Art and cultural performances that explore identity and memory.

Today in a world of growing information complexity and generalized markets, the definitions of  "the aesthetic" as well as "the beautiful" are outdated.  The aesthetic, in a highly pragmatized universe, acts as a therapeutic vehicle to define the  everyday experiences and becomes an ideal place to explore cultural resonances and values that may not be expressed in the typifying language of common sense.

The exhibit presented here, "Cultural Bodies", is an example of the above. The Exhibit is presented as aesthetic pages or slides that work as expressive interfaces of the Artist's  living process. The pieces that constitute the exhibit are the result  of a year of research done by Cristina to explore her own identity, memory and cultural heritage developed during long processes of migratory dynamics and bilingualism that were present when she was growing up and that constituted her own ethos, values and emotional world that elapsed between her and the society she grew up in. 
But in addition to this intimate exploration, Cristina's work also communicates individual introspection with collective abreaction. By means of an archeology of what is yours, of relics and personal belongings using her own body as an inventory of "blind marks," visiting herself as though in an excavation session, exploring her own shadows and sewing languages inherited from her predecessors traditions, Cristina discovers in her own oblivion of Cuban culture, forms of aesthetic memory hidden and masked by remembrance.   In addition to the myth of the search for self, the artist wants to make us understand how even in oblivion and at the bottom of individual experience, we again find culture, solidarity and connection with others.The exhibit is expressed as a journey going from the personal-intimate to the collective-cultural, the culture is a universe of evocation of bridges full of metaphors of solidarity and integration in the ethos.  In this sense, each canvas is done as a sensory cultural body, a sensitive surface covered with forbidden areas, silent spaces, places that show lack of determination, and, above all moments of hope.  Evoking geometric languages, old graphics and numeric maps on the high plane, highly poeticized, the works, project amazing tension which borders between the rational and the emotional.  Each piece is expressed as a biographic vehicle as well as a sensitive body in which we can find the traces of time, the marks of gestures thst occurred some time ago, transient inscriptions of faces that were seen some time ago, evocation of sounds, the presence and absences that appeared in memory some time ago.

"Cultural Bodies" is one of those exhibits that leaves you, not only with a number of interpretations but also with a feeling of hope. Cristina Jadick is a young woman with a recent  art career whose work however, evidences one of those expressive talents that exceed the norm. I met Cristina in the Spring af 1997. Since then, I have been impressed by her early and commendable way of utilizing printmaking  techniques and mixed media as creative games of palimpsest and bricollage. Today, as I stand in front of this exhibit, I observe in awe the marks of transparency, the metaphor of what is insinuated, the development of an expressive technique  with little precedent in the imagery of contemporary visual postmodernism"

Being able to make the materials and their combinations blend in such a way that instead of expressing their inherent selves, make emotions, values, memories speak is the maximum aspiration aesthetic experience can have, that is going by tradition, as in cinema or theater, where the aesthetic is seen as being directly linked to anthropologic emotions, intuitions and to the collective ethos.  This is not easy.  Most of the works of art distract us with how they were created_and this is perhaps what conveys most clearly her unique talent_is that the materials act as ventriloquists, as if through them, the creator achieves a monologue of their essence, breaking form, journeying directly to the horizon of the senses, emotions and feelings. 

  notas

   Este ensayo resulto de varios meses encontrándome con cristina Jadic en su studio durante la preparación de su muestra individual en Sicardi gallery cultural Bodies y fue el catálogo de la misma. Lo escribí durante mi estadía como complementary research asociate scholard en la facultad de antropología de la universidad de rice e inicio un proceso de escritos posteriores y continuada relacion

Texas, 1998
END.

Neither Inside, Nor Outside

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

 The work of LIHIE TALMOR functions as a film of the subversive unconscious. Her works fix and retain, in a sort of miniature map of the semiotic memory of the group, the tiny settings of conscience, the meticulous task of separating and uniting, holding back and liberating. There, where the individual is alert, attentive to what he sees and to what happens, in that space of tension where the accent of conscience is formed, LIHIE builds small texts which work as nodules, hinges, transit structures representing nothing but the very gesture making them, the accumulation that makes words and actions probable. 

  The work of LIHIE TALMOR is not a window refracting reality as its reference, nor a simulacrum writing substituting reality under the illusion of a collection of topics. In her works, "the city", "the body" and "the memory" are inclusive; the constructive shapes of the pieces permeate from inside and cannot be described from outside, as if "the city", for example, was the containing horizon of the traces. We are not before lines, denoting volumes describing a course that can be outlined; here, the place where matter is curved and the material is hollowed works as "the double figural" of an atavistic operation, secretly linked to collective gestures, to ways of delivering, of placing, of organizing. However, more than in the sedimentary levels of memories, which undoubtedly permeate the decisions on technique and image fixation, the work of LIHIE is organized somewhere else. 

  Against the idea of a work that stems from an "intimate inside" I would like to propose a different reading, in which LIHIE's works appear as if  "delivering externals". The act of disposing of an "inwardness" is here distributed. The ego is dispersed and one cannot find an "intimate" background referring to the being, to its existential dilemmas, to its private obsessions. Even though the works are charged with strong introspection, it is also true that they disintegrate the pulsional contents of the self and crystallize in "useless" structures personal and alien, original and gregarious, unique and promiscuous. We are before a unique figure within the visual universe in Venezuela, somehow because, as opposed to other artists, where craft is believed to be something by itself, LIHIE's work makes good use of the biographic and psychographic contents of techniques and of image fixation. 

  LIHIE knows that in art there is not such thing as neutral spaces, she works on an over-codification of art history. LIHIE's works evidence an awareness of intertextuality and offer a diagonal, more impure reading of the cultural field where they are created. We intuit that the work of this artist is setting the bases for a rich discussion about the emergence of a Venezuelan contemporary art attuned to the present situation of the country, as well as capable of offering new options to the rich intercultural dialogue that is presently leading the concert of Latin American plastic arts. In this sense, as well as being original and strong, the work of LIHIE evokes the most active and committed side of art made in our country today. 

Notes 

Este  texto es un ensayo sobre la artista israelí establecida en Venezuela Lihie Talmor que escribí como resultado de una visita a su studio y visualización de su obra y que posteriormente fue el texto del catálogo de su muestra individual en el museo de arte sofia imberg, el texto esta revisado desde la actualidad

Abdel Hernandez Presentation text for the catalogue of the exhibition "The Creativity of Evil" Sofia Imber Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas May-August, 1996 

Culture in Art from Texas (USA)

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, 

Houston, Texas, USA

Written and composed in English by abdel Hernández san Juan

     Texas culture is a unique phenomena in the unites States. While there are of course to many interpretations on the issue given the fact that Texas has embodied seen from outside of the state several stereotypes of common sense meanings such as for example the image of Texas as the main land of the oil, on the one side, or as the state which capsulate the more technological and modern towns of the country toward ideas of future cities and or by being the land of nasa, such outside stereotypes creates an image of course unrecognize Texas cultural specifities. 

  There are as ever to many ways of course to afford culture but one of the often privilege way to go in deep around a culture revolves around discussing its art. 

  In this sense instead of discussing Texas culture by affording it as a text directly I would like to do in this text a sort of move, I want to discuss Texas art as a text through which we can at least offer several hermeneutical views of the texts of Texas as culture.           

  This is not a way to say that I am far to recognize a Texas art scene, there is, without doubt, a Texas art scene, but such an scene is bigger than what I can cover as a single critic including in the visual art thousands of galleries and museums. Instead of it I prefer to focus myself in a more near single perspective discussing according to my experience specific artists based in studio visits, dossier critiques and a variety of meetings 

  One of the best exhibits for example I has seen in many years an especially in the whole Texas art scene, offers a fascinating overview on the issue of subjectivity in Texas culture in the genre of environments installation can be the sound of silence by usa artist Cristina Jadic.     

  Cristina in my concern she is herself a significant phenomena both looking to art itself and examining ways to discuss the relation between art and culture and or on how to discuss culture according to or through the semantique analysis of the way art texere and or Philigrane cultural forms. Her background in print making is possibly related with such a unique form to engage cultural issues, the exhibit in question focused a phenomena in a first level mostly natural like it happen in the traditional form to afford for example landscapes, however, very far to landscaping her motive, she ingeniously transformed her nature motive in a cultural one. 

   In such an exhibit she choiced to afford an issue almost undiscussed before in Texas art and however culturally important in the area. Texas as a cultural region is defined at least the south side of the state by the imminent presence of the gulf coast sea, the Mexican gulf, many letlee villages and communities are in fact unfolded through the coast such as, coming from Houston, the Galveston village, a very old western typical village while also taking a way toward el paso and Monterrey, beaches cities such as padre island and corpus cristi not to mention kimas. Paradoxically, however, probably related with the very modern development of the main center cities such as Houston and Dallas and the phenomena of the Arizona desert incredibly Texas subjectivities are in general forgetting the relevance of the sea. 

   The assumption of a natural phenomena as a way to explore cultural ones is being certainly often and not completely new in Texas, Terrell James for example have an incredible serie of abstractions directly using geological motives show casing it and Tracy Hicks explored several times amazing inventories, collection and recollections of objects from everyday life mixed with geological elements and conserved under natural and chemical liquids thinking for example about his inventories of books under geological matter, but the way Cristina has afforded the gulf is definitely unique and without precedents.             

  She first explored to do a collection of many of the matters usual’s but often unrecognized in the gulf coast environment such as kinds of sacks in several grains, waves and colors, kinds of sands in several grains, tones and colors as well as woods, sticks and campeachy woods. After doing a kind of meticulous inventory of it she afforded the whole Texas art supply gallery by fully transforming it into a virtual gulf coast environment, disseminating the sacks on the flour and building tridimentional structures of woods internally lighted within the whole gallery. She builded it with the several sticks and campeachy woods collected while covering each one with the sacks around in several tones and grains. 

  The internal lightings of the structures passing by or through the sacks grains produced a phenomena of relation between light and shadows that Philigrane and tamize in terms of subjectivity the impressions of the whole transformed site. 

   The exhibit, however, was far to just be an inventory of collected stuffs, she also did several films in clouse ups of the sea specially the moment when the wave arrives to the border of the sand including sounds of it and projected the films images over walls extended sacks and the sound of it      

  The already described environment engaged the Texas viewer through subjectivity by calling the attention on his sensorial and multisensorial body memory, on how to evoque in the body memories forgotten and or unattended but significant clues of a natural memory culturally important, the main way to explore within the exhibit forms to call the multisensorial experience of the body memories of the natural phenomena under subjectivity toward culture consisted about how she spatially interrelated photos of her own shadow with the relation between light and shadow created through the Philigrane of the matters collected from the natural environment.

  Houston as city like Dallas use to be environmentally speaking in term of subjectivity mainly a capsulated technology body phenomena city, while the city itself have, of course, a lot of fascinating cultural phenomena’s in terms of architecture and well as in terms of communities, customs and values, the very modern and high technology development of the city tend to overwhelm citizens sensations under artificial environments producing with time a sensation of technologically capsulated bodies far to nature, while in term of culture Texas is being stronger in idiosyncrasies and traditions both in terms of native Anglo-American traditions, as well as in terms of the mixtures and hibridations created by the subjectivities of the borders including how Mexican culture reflects and echoes in Texas cultural sensibilities, feelings and identities, the clues of nature in contrast with the artificial environment of the main modern cities are important in terms of the semantique body memory to bring awareness on cultural issues.

   we should not forget at this semantique level of analysis on the fact that discussing the interpretation of signs and visual icons, this is not the first time cristina explored the meanings of her own body shadows. A year before to an exhibit at Foley during the biennale of photofest cristina created an individual exhibit inside a showcase of an older and relatibly abandoned old no longer working shopping center of the city mainly transforming the show case with photos of the shadows of her own body surrounded by corns a food connected both the tradition of native Indians with the modern mass media and or massive custom of eating porn corns during washing movies in the film theater or television, a presentation titled connections and disconexions, and she also used images of the shadow of her body printed under a variety of textiles, fabrics and print making evoquing the woman tradition of waving in her family in her exhibit cultural bodies at Sicardi gallery.

  Turning the attention to completely different phenomena in Texas art and culture we have on the one side the amazing surrealist landscapes of Italian artist long time living in Houston who late moved to Dallas and late to the north of the country. Donald Caledare, who use to work in his commerce galpon, developed big bidimensional landscapes of imaginative worlds. 

  His landscapes suggest something mix the imagination of places out of the earth like landscapes of undiscovered planets with the idea of possible landscapes, its surrealist effects are less related with the usual mean of surrealism toward tropes and metaphors of dreams or the exuberant fictions of imagination to invent over reality unreal landscapes of the imagination and more with a certain curiosity on undiscovered landscapes but to a certain point possible if we use our memory on the logical and structural principles regulate nature under earth landscapes.

  In this sense Donald landscapes can be discussed as landscapes of the possible or as landscapes of the imagination of possibilities, he uses what is logic in earth landscapes but to figure out possibilities of such a logic to generates relationships between surfaces, volumes, colour and accidents at least by now inexistent or undiscovered in the earth. 

  By this mean his landscapes are ambiguous phenomena’s of the imagination inhabit in between a feeling of the imagination of landscapes out of the earth and or the idea of how imagination can create congruent ideas of hypothetical realities transforming the figurations of the possible in a kind of means of experimentation, surreal because not in existence under earth topographies but naturally possible his universes are in between philosophical imagination and science fiction. 

  There is something also at Donald landscapes that remember recreated universes around far and or palimpsests of culture as for example in film the series of Indiana johns explored travels to far lands and culture as forms of travels in time toward superposition’s between the traveler culture and the visited one culture in a form created imaginative palimpsestual images of cultures less real than created by the temporality of the film itself.

   Without images of culture and without actors as in film, but focused only on natural landscapes, his work remembers something of that kind of relation between reality and fiction, 

   Ariel Masson a Mexican American artist living in Houston even if she can be related with cristina and Surpik in the sense of certain attention within her painting on issues of intimacy or ways to relate issues from her single sensibility to femininity her paintings fars to it since instead it remember something of the impetus of the transavantgard like for example the paintings of Cuban artist living in Florida Ana Albertina Delgado ex-member of the so-called pure group of the eighties, while Masson paintings are more subtly on the way to femininity and more focused in colour and the states of animus of the subject 

      Another artist of interest to be discussed regarding Texas culture through the arts can be the puertorican –American Ibsen Espada, stablished in Texas since several decades his work of painting is an amazing way to afford the imageries and the subjectivities of the streets in a form unique. The idea of vocabularies or graphic forms of street visual speech and sometimes alphabetical exuberant words, well known in the visual culture of graffiti can be perceived as vestiges or as echoes at Ibsen paintings but as an attitude in the gestures readable through the manner of painting or in how subjectivity is affording the canvas and the frame, while without any direct reference and or use of such specific kind of visual repertories, without writing words and without direct references to graffiti iconographies and sual symbols, by getting something of the street style of painting as if speaking when the visual transform by clues in the as if of speech acts and by asumming a certain often visually recognized attitude regarding a certain transavangard form to assume the canvas Ibsen creates recreated organic universes which are abstract in form but an abstraction shows to be nearly related with the body and with habitat instead of abstraction conceived as way to exit the body sensoriality, such a way to relate abstraction with habitat can be in fact recognized as a general characteristic of Texas art at least in Houston, overall in Terrell James, while less in Virgil or Hicks, abstraction is mostly seen and assumed as something very related with and near with the abstractions of the sensorial body memory toward its surrounding, instead of representational reflections on the environment, Terrell and Ibsen they have both explored, each one in a different form, organic abstract forms directly evoques and suggest the multisensorial universes of the semantique body completely defined by the inmediacy of habitat and environmental issues, but when Terrell attention of the issue seems to move toward an spiritual sublime around it, Ibsen paintings explore the opposite sort of move not so much the feelings of a fine sensibility addressed to the purity of soul as in Terrell, but instead trying to capture something on how the habitat surplus or overcome thigs from the social world and the streets but to later be transformed again at Ibsen outcomes in organic forms something as if such an abstract form impregnated by subtly clues or echoes of the social streets returned to the sensorial body of the inmediacy habitat    

Nota

  Este texto en un primer esfuerzo por complexionar acuerdos y compromisos que definí y arregle en Houston con los distintos artistas que discuto, en 1998 se había publicado mi ensayo Cultural Bodies sobre la muestra del mismo título de Maria cristina jadick en Sicardi gallery como parte del catálogo, en aquella ocasión yo había estado en su studio varios meses de modo que conocía el proceso de preparación de la muestra, pero adicionalmente a ello hay dos muestras posteriores de cristina cuyo proceso de preparación conocí en su estudio y en cuyas presentaciones había estado presente sobre las cuales no habría escrito, el ensayo conjuga el trabajo de escribir sobre esas dos muestras una en Texas art suply en Houston en 1999 y la otra en Foley fotofest en 1998 con otras visualizaciones que hice en esos mismos años, 

   desde 1998 hasta por lo menos 2002 estuve encontrándome con Terrell james en su studio para visualizar y discutir su arte, asi como en mi propios apartamentos en holly hall y en timmons lave, richmont a donde ella me visito o durante salidas que hacíamos por la ciudad de houston, 

   en 1998 Ariel masson me invito a su studio para visualizar sus pinturas y que escribiera y otro tanto también Ibsen espada estuve dos veces en su studio con la misma finalidad, en cuanto a Donald Caledare desde 1997 hasta por lo menos fines de 1998 nos veíamos en su studio en commerce Street para visualizar y discutir sus pinturas, 

Bibliography

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Cultural Bodies, essay published in the catalogue of Christina Jadic exhibit Cultural Bodies, High quality full colour, Sicardi gallery, also published at www. Mariacristina.com, Houston, Texas, usa, 1998

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Self and Acerbo: The Self and the Social Between Writing, Research and Culture, Complete Works, Tome IX

Alchemies of the Sense: Arturo Duclos (Chilean).

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, 

Houston, Texas, USA

    The recent work of Chilean artist Arturo Duclos, in particular his series Serifot that he is exhibiting at Sicardi Gallery as part of Armonia Chimica, is among contemporary Latinoamerican art one of the most complete expressions of the postmodernist game with the seduction of meanings. We are confronted with an artist who invites the viewer to walk on the subtle edge that exist between our distance and our identification with the most mundane values of popular culture. The artist avoid the official representations to show the distance between what it is and what it should be.
      Ordinary and extraordinary, timid and extroverted, circumspect and charming, vain and sophisticated, vulgar and aristocratic, what are this canvases expressing. One hand we find a syncretizing operation in which the artist has gathered in one space the aesthetic values, tastes, preferences and symbolic territories of different social groups that the institutional representations try to maintain separately. On the other, we see the spurt of new beings with their own landscapes and horizonts formed by the alliance of those differences, from the mixtures of created universes.
      However, it is not, as in Duclos previous work, an ironic signalizing of the simple mixtures of elements. Although a syncretising attitude from his previous work can be perceived, this time mundane tapestries filled with allusions to the kitsch and the social cosmetology do not correspond as much with the Bajtinian inversion of the mask, its fundamentals or the travesty. The artist is not found sheltered behind his canvas syncretising from below, the identification with the impure, inauthentic values, the culture from above, the high aesthetics of the art and its consumption.
      I would hare to say that these works are more intimate, although they are certainly not personal, they do not contain life obsessions or the artists biography. They reveal an existential proposal, much more redeeming than syncretizing, moved by a deep exploration of those mixtures that today form the baroque in souls. Further away from the quotation and the text, Duclos explore a profusion nearly clonal of the original and the copy, where the copulation of the authentic and the impure corresponds with his search of new beings and creatures.
      As in alchemy, it is about finding the new synthesis that the combinated elements engender, not the elements per se. The job of the artist here is one of an archaeologist of the surfaces, looking for the scars of transition and not the origin.
      Seeing the new works of Duclos, that meticulous labour through which the artist extract from the fabric, with tailor´s precision, what has been subtracted by time , we feel we are walking on a very subtle edge. We find ourselves among allusions to the eccentricity of a decorator who looks for an orchestrated harmony, a wall restorer’s taste for the worn-out, old parchments that give to the material its archaeological time, and a certain imitative aristocracy. But, walking under or over the same drop-curtain that the fabric creates, we slide ourselves through the sensuality of its folds, we start to visualize the erotic and seductive landscapes that the surfaces generate as new poets who emanate from the creaking delirium of the fake.
    We cannot avoid wondering if in the fabrics of Duclos what we have tried to look for in the deep is really on the surface, where the bodies crash. The artist brings to the surface the most hidden texture of the textile, the mysteries of the weft, its unions. The deepest of the skin, Paul Valery used to say. In Duclos fabrics, sense, as the transcendental reason of life, is sliding in the erotic surfaces. The technique is not a way to archieve expression, but an x-ray of the sense, what the artist calls textile transfers. The new canvases of Duclos work in the alchemy of the sense revealing a new esotericism of the soul. An it is from this idea of a new esotericism of the soul—born not from religious systems but from a spiritual speculation, that the works produce the effect of an inventive cabala. It is an art that restores the ornament opposing the baroque as a simple variegation of the figure; its meditative function is inhabited by new gods and mystic villages that constitute the sublime of daily life.
    Without abandoning a trans-avant garde attitude, it should be said that the sceptic and the nihilistic component of work of attitude that distinguishes the weaving of pictorial classicism and bad forms in all Duclos work, still can be seen in his recent work. It seduces the viewer to visit places where we cannot or do not want to differentiate between the banal and the sublime, the authentic and the inauthentic, the original and the copy. More than a work about meaning, it places the viewer in The Cabala with works about the unsuspected alchemy of the sense.
  Gilles Deleuze states that it would not be an animism, since the sense is precisely the dimension that relates our acts to transformations, transcending the fetichism of the totem. Perhaps this idea of Deleuzes could help us understand why a work so aware of the semiotic and the textual as Duclos could be titled today, in the year 2000, with a phrase as mystic as The Cabala. Or perhaps we can get help from Julia Kristeva, when she affirmed that, in dealing with the sense we must understand that in its most internal limit, the human experience confirms an esoteric feeling.
    The majority of the references that I use in my work, wrote the artist in his statement, are deeply established in the language of the occidental culture although they appear camouflaged and hidden by a syncretizing delirium over the image and the code of language. Armonia Chimica, like a book, aspires to answer some of the biggest questions of contemporary knowledge, but in a dissipated rigor, in the symbolism of an order that alludes to the seduction of meanings.

Notas

   El texto sobre Arturo Duclos lo escribí luego de varios encuentros con Duclos y Catalina en Houston para que escribiera las palabras del catálogo y discute la muestra que luego fue expuesta para la cual fue su catálogo ese mismo año 2000

Published as the text of the catalogue of Arturo Duclos 2000 exhibit at Sicardi Gallery, Houston, Texas, EUA

Artists in Trans: Seven Exhibits on Campus at Rice (Venezuela and USA)

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Habana

Written and composed in English

by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

   If we can still say when probably it seems to be near to ending, that this one is yet an age of suffixs just when suffixs semantiques seems to be tired exhausting we can also say that an age of endings to words but more even to something as suxffixs –pos, meta, intra, trans or anti--, is also an age of enriching the meanings by which words and concepts substitutes by better ones or change meanings to something new, just like happen with languagees, dialect, ideolects, fashions and naming tendencies. The life of suffixs reflects no more that an infinity complexity, a complexity that never exit specificities a suxffics supposes to suggest.

  A Pos will ever evolve a diachronic succession, an effect that can be more or less considered as a periodical one suggesting history or as a sequencial one, suggesting cinema. To only contrast two effects of a sequences at the periodical level of pos, but about a same social reality phenomena, we may think about “Pos-avantgard” and “postmodernism”. 

  In saying pos-narrative cinema, by instance, we evolve a microlevel of sequence still periodical, but saying pos-production, posdata or posedition we already exit the periodical, suggesting instead micro-diacronicities of simultaneity. However,  as suffix, more or less cinematic or periodical, a pos will ever evolve an external relation between something before and something after, to perceibe and name something as a post your body need to be out of it like in a thirst position which from outside take distance to the sequence and define it as a post that will ever be an after from, outsiding a before. 

  The richennes level of the suffix trans with a necessity for it is a complex phenomena, but being yet not well discussed. To say trans as suxffix one need to be from the inside of something to which trans presents as a goes beyond, a trans always (is) being an always inside that extending going beyond, it supposes an inside domain that use to be one of substantives just like specialties, tecniques, profesions, medias and values. A domain best comprehend and emcompass trans as a suffix, it suggest how from inside an specialties goes beyond, a profesion goes beyond, a concept goes beyond, a media goes beyond, a system of values goes beyond. Like exteriority to elements define a pos, a suffix trans stay as internal condition and presents to inside phenomenologies an extended moment when a substantive seems, feel, appear and presence going beyond, it is an under substantive. 

  When we say transmedia, we suggest a media that cant be reduced to the media it is just as something may mixture with another media, like it happen with so-called mix-tecniques and mix medias in art or like it happen when in computer multimedias a domain of visual design mixture with sofweres cybernetics, image movement and simultaneity of tolls. Saying transdisciplinary we evoque a dimension through which a discipline expertise or specialty experience goes beyond.   

  Instead of interdisciplinary, imagined to be the exchange of external things as tolls –as if two insides exteriors taken something from the another one inside-- like a give, suffixing trans a discipline stay inside extending, this going beyond appears to a domain as a new extended dimension of the inside, it trans because it fund itself the goes beyond, it is the same, but begining to be something more nor less. 

  From this perspective, a suffix trans appear to suggest conditions of fusions, this concept, fussion, better express terrains of substantives, a substantive is not a substance, it maybe something without substance, Kristeva discussed transubstantiations at the sensible time when something goes beyond substances as transubstances evoquing this level that may applie to trans like when we say transart, it is an art that staying being art goes beyond, is we say transavangard we exit the periodical exteriorization between avantgard and posavangard as an exterior after and stay inside avantgard suggesting how it becomes and goes beyond, if we say transcultural we experience this condition the suffix accent something goes beyond and fusion. The suffix trans is being ussually regarded to suggest an age of complexities. 

  The artists I will discuss further including myself trans in several forms, they are in fact artists in trans and explicit a condition that goes beyond and fusion but being art and extending it from art domains including tecniques, specialties, expertises and profesions, also values, ethos and cultural resonances, we all mixtures from the inside of art extending dimension, a level that both transmedia, transart and transubstance, but also transdiscipline, transvantgard and transculture.

  With all the ending of suffix tired semantical exhaustation already expressed trans aplie to this artists in trans to evoque how we experience an age of art and the age in art opening a variety of questions that offers an opportunity to think and reflex, should we speak abaut a transartist when an artist work from art specialties mixtures as a media professional, as a semiologist or as a sociologist?. 

Art and Anthropology

The Traffic in Culture departure from Clifford Geertz The Refiguration of the Social Thought at The Interpretation of Culture first version published and still stay around artesanies nor preceselly high art, modern, fine and contemporary art. While my individual full agreement and accord is Stephen A Tyler with who since being a research associate at the faculty of anthropology at rice despites from June 1997 I am working as colleagues, friends and partner, I also knows well George and I specially recommends regarding him his late editions serie published at the university of Chicago because it firsts begins to near Stephen contemporary thought and begins to nearly arrives to contemporary culture of relevance to us. The attention should be moved to consequences responses in contemporary culture received the epitome and echoes about writing culture as the feminist volumes departures from The Deleuze reader such as Woman’s Writing Culture process the tradition pertinently to contemporary thought and culture. Did you read Carlos Reynoso The Adveniment of Postmodern Anthropology?

  Reynoso introduction and the volumes itself it better reflects the impetus of the santafe seminar from which and after which writing culture erases

  Certainly and I agree position with Stephen A Tyler, my choice of theoretical agreement and affinity, but even when Reynoso better reflect the seminar impetus than Writing Culture, it is also an edition so that the turn itself in anthropology need to continually reference to Santafe seminar despites from which everything comes from. I did fieldwork theory and practice both in terms of art avant-garde theory and practice questions since earlier European XX century avant-garde and in terms of interdisciplinary questions with mainly modern, contemporary sociology but also a per cent of anthropology and ethnography considered within two projects Hacer, (Urban) and Pilon, (rural)

  My attention to anthropology inside my theoretical and critical writings from the eighties 88 was first inside papers I did in avant-garde theory mainly references Peter Burguer, Umberto Eco, Terry Eagleaton and Pierre Bourdieu so that epistemologically my initial interest to makes anthropology inclusive inside my avant-garde critique writings dispate from structuralism, particularly anthropology as inclusive to modern, contemporary sociology, in a few words, mainly Pierre Bourdieu, I also  referenced Levis Strauss inside my art avant-garde writings 88s, particularly I first referenced Strauss in concrete papers his interview with Louis Charbonier and his paper art and ethnology.

  But being in Caracas thanks to my full readings and studies of various Svetan Todorov books mainly Symbolism and Interpretation which first really stablishes clear departures of a theory of the symbols and the symbolic despites from the issue of exegesis developing it as no one before him to a pluralist and democratic sense to a truly convival of infinity possible interpretations of symbols more than simply a tolerance, also his books Genres of Discourse and critique of the critique, I then begin to become thanks to Todorov gradually motivated and interested to the interpretationist turn in anthropology and in my first book Borders and Overflows of Art, Possibilities of the Transart, a very phenomenological book I conceived, written and composed in 92, a book from the art field centered around first the sociological theoretical discussion on the individual and the collective, indeterminism and determinism in sociology dispate from the theory of art autonomy, again as my main references, Peter Burguer and Pierre Bourdieu, I centered Junger Habermas Theory of Communicative Action in that book through a Thomas Mc Carthy development of the pragmatics of communicative reason and I dedicated extensive pages to discuss ethnomethodology as I written it after reading Habermas Theory of Communicative Action, Alfred Shurt Knowledge in the World of Every Day Life and Javier Muguenza and Salvador Bueno Contemporary Sociology Theory.

  From that perspectives, nor without references to Bourdrillard, I references again Levis Strauss this time according to Kristeva and Serres interventions at the seminar on Identity in Paris and I begin to include references to Interpretationism in anthropology particularly the Clifford Geertz theory of the symbolic as he abstracted it from his book The Interpretation of Cultures first version I full readen and studied in Caracas. During that months I lectured at Hacer on Geertz The Interpretation of Cultures and makes references to a book of Geertz I liked a lot, his After the Facts, One Anthropologist and three cities, I also mentioned during that visit Carlos Reynoso compendium and James Clifford The Predicament of Cultures first version published at Gedisa which is an author I was interested in since I readen thanks to Desiderio Navarro his essay The Collection of Art and Culture earlier published by Desiderio at Criterios Magazine. 

  It needs to be theorized and discussed in new ways

  But when I really approached it in a completely new perspective was as curator with my letlee curatorial practice of various exhibits I bring, exhibited and presented on campus at Rice University with my co-curator surpic angelini as we both montages, releases, opening and closure it to the general public during the spring of 1997.

  I try in fact with this letlee cutatorial practice series of exhibits to open and discuss a completely new way to explore this relation between high art and anthropology as I consider pertinently may be offering with each exhibit several ways and possibilities to afford and makes it successfully work. I first provided as curator a general approach to the issue itself, art and anthropology, offers a general background, I asked, including myself exhibit proposal, to each one of the artists I selected to afford it each one completely free getting with each exhibit a completely new and original, creative contribution to the issue.

   I bring it to Houston and presented it with Surpic Angelini, my co-curator, we both did opening, releases, montages and closures of each one and it was success with several success publications such as Patricia Johnson Art Market Review, The Houston Chronicle, Trance Plant by Donald Caledare, Artlies Magazine and publications at the Houston press and the Houston Press television then I stay living stablished in Houston from that date to currently, I am here like in 92 just visiting.

  The main critical, theoretical and also field critical and practical references to all this is a paper I did Regarding the Inmaterials, Lyotard at Pompidue. By Abdel Hernandez, which explicit and reflect how I conceived and focused all this from the beginning since I received the Lyotard catalogue at Mavao museum being the curator in 1994.

   I provided them my theoretical attention, statement and approach on this issue of art and anthropology, I also provided them references to all this we are speaking on about, I asked them to offer their own responses and ways to completely free afford it their ways including my own one also at my individual exhibit the market.

   The Rice Media Center is a building on campus defined to exhibit during the year both scholars and students exhibits evolving photography, video and film, mainly audiovisuals, there is not at rice university a faculty to audiovisuals as there is one at ISA, but there is mainly the faculty of art and The Rice Media Center given an auditoriums to lectures and film projections, photography labs to print photography’s as well as film editions and sound editions rooms, then it includes an art gallery open a per cent a year to also guests exhibits coming from any university, museums and or the art field in general and also a general space available to exhibits with wood panels.

  Overthere, at the gallery, I presented an exhibit by artist Surpic Angelini also my cocurator of the general serie, who born in Venezuela, Armenian father, Anglo-American mother, she moved from Venezuela, like I did too from Cuba, 20 years old, she married with an italian cardiologist and stablishes living in Houston, being an architect as she studied architecture at the central university of Venezuela, the day of her exhibit opening there we included also a mexican American artist Gabriela Villegas who exhibit a performance.

  We both then, Surpic and I, exhibit and montage in campus an exhibit by Venezuelan artist Juan Carlos Rodriguez with also Juan Carlos the three of us at Media Center. 

  We did also both exhibit and montage at the farish gallery at the faculty of architecture which is also defined to yearly exhibits architectural projects by scholars and students and provides a per cent a year to guest exhibits from any university, art museum and or the general art field like the media center, we exhibit overthere an exhibit by Juan Jose Olavarria, a Venezuelan artist stablished in the city of Valencia

   There was also at the sculpture court back yard sewall hall an exhibit of anthropology and etnography of my authorship as single author I bring, montage and exhibited, The Market from Here: Mise in Scene and Experimental Ethnography by Abdel Hernandez San Juan with my guest participant scenographer Fernando Calzadilla, a bipersonal show by both of us. The sculpture court, like the media center and the farish gallery is being mostly an space back to the sculpture room of the art faculty, it is an outdoor biggest space under the sky and under the ground.

  There was finally at the Rice Media Center a meeting conversation by Thomas Mc Evilley who after visiting all the exhibits on campus say:

   Well, there is currently simultaneously opening all the exhibits on campus and we are here with the curators Abdel Hernandez and Surpic Angelini, and me, from the department of art, and George Marcus, from the Department of Anthropology, and I think we may say something from each faculty. Mc Evilley provided a one hour and half extraordinary lecture which approached the curatorial serie in regard to the campus exhibits openings, extends to many philosophical analysis and developments since Hegel and discusses also significant developments about art in the united states since the sixties with accent on the current Anglo-American art palestra and feminist art in united states. 

   He also provided significant reflections on main art issues he considered relevant to be theoretically and critically attended in regard to this serie of specific exhibits, he also comments the ones of his choices, and on the issue of art in art history in general providing pertinent analysis to previous artists cases evolving this relations between art and anthropology, he also mentioned and reflect around backgrounds in regard to Stephen a Tyler, James Clifford and George to then courtesy introducing George who immediately counterpoint and offered his impressions on the exhibits he also visited. A conversation film record.

  A year after Mc Evilley published also an interesting article on the exhibits on campus references me Abdel and surpic as curators and George with us, an article published at art in America titled Artists in Trance, Various Artists, New York, 1998.

  Being as I am a permanent resident living in Houston I traveled driving my car from Houston to north Mexico Monterrey legally crossing the border to visit my sister who was living in the city and to meet my mom and dad after almost 10 years without seem them.

   Let me tell something on this issue of art and anthropology that nor only I did proposed and focused a new way to explore these relations with my letlee curatorial serie of exhibits already mentioned but I also first anticipated to include to the spring a publication announced as conclusions titled Reports from the Threshold of Art and Anthropology. By Abdel Hernandez, Stephen A Tyler, Surpic Angelini, George Marcus and other Ethnographers.

  Now as I explained before given The Traffic in Culture, Refiguring Art and Anthropology it is still related and regarded to artesanies mostly and not properly to high art, fine arts, modern and contemporary art.

  Now as I expressed before in terms of high art avant-garde questions, fine art questions, contemporary and modern art questions, the one who is clearly, pertinently and successfully understanding all this with me is Stephen A Tyler, we are both fully agree in this, there is not, in fact, a paper still created and produced major to understand all this than the one written by Stephen in response to me Evocation, The Uwriteable, a Response to Abdel Hernandez, Stephen did after the spring Sept 9, 1997, I will even say about that the main two pivotal papers to afford and understand this serie may be yet Regarding the Inmaterials, Lyotard at Pompidou. By Abdel Hernandez and Evocation, The Unwriteable, a Response to Abdel Hernandez. By Stephen A Tyler.

   Why and how maybe all this work in terms of curatorial practices, how may all this be significant and why should we consider a curatorial practice already exhibited and finished as a continues point of references going back on it cyclically?, first because a curatorial practices of exhibits supposes to be and should be defined and understood through a concept Stephen and me Abdel are gratefully agree in working on with which is the concept of display, a curatorial practice evolves to be and is being in fact a display to various heterogeneous kinds of theoretical, axiological and critical attention, it is something you may return to accent something such as curatorial specific, concrete practice pointed out, clarified, lightened, given language, made explicit, centered, etc. 

   By the way, each time you need by any reason in the field to discuss something, or any time you may be of awareness about something despites from a certain current writing or research it may transport you or invite you, suggest you to go around, to revisit, to move around certain things a display made explicit, so if you have as I have several curatorial practices I displayed at distinct spaces, then you may visit one or another display optionally to more or less discuss a variety of things, and also mostly it is a display nor only after being exhibited and finished but best yet it is also a display before, to the curatorial statement as a way to explore experimental relation between modes of discourses, theorizing, from writing or lecturing to exhibiting exploring also riches forms of relations between texts and displays, texts and the visual, sintaxis and spaces, including also what the exhibits itself development and display, explicit and pointed something evolves to be a display nor only to me as the curator but to each artist and to me also as author of one of the exhibits.

  There is no one around in regard to this meeting theme exploring it as clear and successful as Stephen and me are, there is also by the way a whole theoretical and intellectual production each one of us did during this years, me my recent significant books The Subject in Creativity. By Abdel Hernandez, Being and Monad. By Abdel Hernandez, The Presentational Linguistic. By Abdel Hernandez, The Given and the Ungiven. By Abdel Hernandez and The Intangible. By Abdel Hernandez   

  Now, however, I recognize all this references books and papers moves beyond the spring, it clearly and usefully applied even helpfully to the spring too, but it is in fact of significance to an intellectual, theoretical production despites after the spring evolves writings by me, Abdel and writings by Stephen but with clear results also from the faculty graduated students. 

  I am research associate at the faculty, but the results of a move is being finally considered as definitive when you may have clearly successful graduated students from the move, and there we have Scott writings on the Entertainment parks and Stanford Carpenter thesis of comics which evolves nor only discussing comix but doing comix himselves with discussing around being Afro-American exploring the concept of the chorus, etc. Nothing of that were possible without Stephen and me Abdel. But if we stay around the spring I will mention as the main references Regarding the Inmaterials, Lyotard at Pompidou. By Abdel Hernandez, Evocation, The Unwriteable, A Response to Abdel Hernandez. By Stephen A Tyler and additionally I will mention to be considered Mc Evilley lecture already explained.

  Now as I expressed before after reading several main books regarding such a turn in anthropology I may provide a synthesis resume on what really means something interesting in terms of high art avant-garde questions, fine art questions, contemporary and modern art questions. First I will mention as relevant to us additionally to mainly and overall Stephen, a James Clifford paper on Ethnographic Surrealism included at his The Predicament of Culture Book, a book I readen fully and I prefer in his first version as published by Gedisa. In this paper James Clifford explores the possibilities of ethnographic surrealism to ethnography questions coming from a France ethnographer, Michael Leiris who was both a part of the art surrealist movement of the early XX Century in Europe and also an ethnographer who written the Africa Fantom, a writing Jacques Derrida included by first time in the first chapter of his Margins of philosophy moving his writing in a column and leiris writing through another column simultaneously.

   I consider also of relevance George Marcus notion of Conspicuous Productions, Conspicuencies pertinent in my terms to contemporaries conspicuencies, a concept he discussed in his Late Edition, I have for example various conspicuencies in my own practices between for example curatorial practices and production, (explanations provided on how the curator itself as a figure born in the art field as a conspicuency contingency between the old producer and the old art critic), I second have myself practices conspicuencies between Curatorial Practices and fieldwork, this concept of George is being certainly useful and relevant to curatorial practices, there is also very interesting results regarding George attentions to Corporated Futures, Corporate Identities, if you revise any of the softweres you may have in your computer you will faster recognize in the credits how the identities of corporations works, you will find overthere Georges and Johns, Stephens and Mikes, Anglo-American names, but also Isiko Kasushi, Kens and all kins of Japanizes names, chinesses names, indian and Pakistan names, shukia and also hispanics, hernandez, lopez, etc, all people working together in a corporated identity.

   Finally, there is also a pivotal attention George pay and this is something a phenomena maybe nor easy to be understood overhere, discussing both poscapitalist identities as there is today a transformations turn in capitalism moving beyond all the previous parameters and postsocialist identitites, meanings interviews and works about and around subjectivities that comes from exsocialist countries discussed as posocialists identities. Finally, there is also a concept developed by George I also experience in my own writings and practices, which is that one of multisite, this is mainly what I consider really relevant regarding George, I am not saying The Traffic in Culture is nor an interesting efforts, but I reference it only in Papers I discussed which evolves artesanies.

Notes

-Explanation on the curator comes from the old producer and the art critic as a field contingency, a theoretical development on this issue maybe readen at the News Paper El Universal News about my lecture ponencia The Curator as Creator I discussed at the first curators meeting and encounter at Puerto Vayarta organized by the Museum department of the Conac in Caracas, Vicky, usually the curator with Alfredo Guevara of the Earth Biennale internationally displayed in Caracas, Venezuela by several decades, see in regard the article Concluye Hoy I Encuentro Nacional de Curadores, La Dimension Economica de la Contemporaneidad entro de lleno en las discusiones del Segundo dia del I Encuentro Nacional de Curadores de Arte con la intervencion del joven teorico Cubano Abdel Hernandez sobre el Nuevo arte de los intermediaries, El Universal, Numero 30, 447, Cuerpo 4, Caracas, Sabado 16 de Abril de 1994

Notes

   Esre texto es sobre las siete muestras que expuse en rice university en Houston en 1997 pero fue escrito en ocasión de una conferencia en la havana sobre el tema formando asi parte de una serie de conferencias internacionales, es decir, realizadas fuera de estados unidos sobre mi pequeña curaduría en Texas ya que antes en 1998 ofrecí una conferencia sobre la misma en el museo de arte contemporáneo de Maracaibo tras una invitación del museo Jacobo Borges y del director del museo de Maracaibo Manuel espinosa conferencia que impartimos ambos es decir yo y Surpic. 

   La conferencia en la habana la impartí solo pero forma parte de la misma serie de conferencias internacionales sobre mi curaduría de Texas, estos esfuerzos de ofrecer conferencias sobre la misma fuera de estados unidos están relacionados con el hecho inevitable de que aunque la muestra fue en Texas el proceso de producción de la misma lo hice antes en caracas primero durante mi estadía como curador en el museo de artes visuales alejandro otero ya que fue en el museo donde concebí los conceptos e ideas principales que la centraron, asi como luego cuando Surpic inicio a trabajar en conjunto conmigo a través de dos años de producción que se complexionaron ya en términos de realización de las muestras en 1996 pero que abarco desde 1994 hasta 1996 en caracas

References

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, An Expedition to the Threshold. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Book, Houston, Texas, USA, 1997

Thomas Mc Evilley, Artists in Trance, Art in America, New York, USA, 1998

Thomas Mc Evilley, lecture to the film, rice media center, 1997

Asian American art and culture

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, 

Havana

Free Lance

Ŵritten and composed in English 

By Abdel Hernandez Sa

   Ken aŵazu is an Asian American and yet also interestingly a Japanese art curator and graphic producer, who begging his carrier initially stimulated by both individual cultural experiences such as being established around 12 years living in Neŵ York and being at the same time a japanice regarding his family acerbos, he born in Japan and speak both English and Japanese, but earlier stay living in EUA and this experience in Anglo-American multicultural society positibly impacted his curiosity to explore and to a certain point archaeologies his oŵn cultural backgrounds, ŵhile his oŵn neŵ yorkian western urban point of vieŵ also placed him among our oŵn generation of Americans between globalized metropolitanism and a neŵ age sensibility to looks out respectfully cultures values and an ambiguous, so bloŵred, shifted relationship betŵeen being Asian American and being japanice at the same time. 

  Hoŵever, as soon as ken becomes progresibly evolved by such a curiosity exploration on his oŵn experience it accent and impacted ken by recognizing hoŵ his oŵn father, kiyoshi aŵazu, ŵas an earlier pioneer exploring in Japan a renovation about opening ŵays of seen asking and answering questions from a contemporary art condition of global and cosmopolitan but also traditional issues in Japan, he elaborated and yet established in Tokyo a whole neŵ ŵay to assume and explore the challenges of creating a global contemporary Japanese art but contributing original ŵays of seen enriched by Japanese traditional visual, graphic and cultural values. 

   In doing so, ken discovered in his oŵn father a first response to his oŵn dilemma as Asian American, ŵhile being Asian American in multicultural EUA surrounded by an extrapoled commercial ŵays to understand Japanese cultures, from market successfully globalized technologies such as Mitsubishi corporations, (Toyota or Sony, etc) to Japanese urban restaurants of very artisanal culinary traditions, ken become stimulated to explore his oŵn cultural heritage in a form that valuated traditional Japanese culture, learning himself traditional japanice print making, for example, he also discover hoŵ his dad seen from a Japanese point of vieŵ ŵas since the sixties, contemporanizing Japanese visual art ŵhile at the same translating traditional visual and material culture in global languages and global languages in and to Japanese traditions so establishing enriched ŵays of seen ŵhile creating neŵ cultural values. 

   Such a process of self exploration brings back ken to Japan and established him in Tokyo so progresibly becoming, as he born in Japan, also as a Japanese art curator, producer and performer ŵhos ŵork is today being related ŵith a labor of doing both promoting his father ŵork by organizing kiyoshi aŵazu exhibits and catalogues in Japan and around the ŵorld, promoting neŵ and young contemporary Japanese art from Tokyo and other Japan cities and developing at the same time creative, aleatorial and relational experiences between the arts and of cultural research through visual and graphic art displays such as art exhibits, art catalogues and also films presentations, lectures, print making workshops, experimental music recordings, demonstrations and concerts.

  With all the previous say, I don’t want to gives the impression about ken exhibit being a critique to the yuppies fiber culture of the last decades, it is not about an ideological critique of the so called frivolity culture of generalized vanity that established itself strongly in EUA and around the corporate and business culture of the late century and after, but yet, as a neŵ age neo hippies counter response which assimilated the best learning’s of the nineties but to create something best and renoŵed, a revaluation of spiritual values in our current technology and generalized market business age and a reestablishment of social informalism, inventiveness and creativity also in ŵays to produce and circulate art and events.

  Hoŵever ŵe should recognize that this Neo turn at western new age impetus counter response can maybe open an interesting critical discussion as explicit in Ken Awazu exhibit with Washio, Shin Sasakubo and Daisuke Aoki particularly in Japan ŵere the yuppies fiber is still strong.

 Makurihirogeru in Havana presented at the house of Asia by Ken Awazu including graphic works of his father kiyoshi Aŵazu, the contemporary young Japanese art of Ŵashio, the music of Shin Sasakubo and Daisuke Aoki is an experience I ŵill anthropologically sustain that even if, both to a tourist passing visitor as to Cubans vieŵers in a beautiful old Havana building, (nearly to the species house at the mercaderes corner), seems to be about, placed at an ethnicity house as the Asian one and full of Japanese references, as something self referential to japanice culture, is far to be about Japan, on top being done by yes Japanese artists using their oŵn medias, toll and techniques repertories, it is instead about being Asian American and Japanese at the same time as something still seen from a EUA perspective. 

   Being a part in ken previous efforts to explore relationships between Asia and America as part in a self exploration, moving not only in betŵeen EUA Asian american and Japanese culture as his oŵn background, but noŵ also I would say around americanicity, seen, feel, interpreted and understood as an Asian American point of vieŵ and also tryng to communicate and engage a Japanese sense of americanicity thanks to evocations, of affinity to tourists and Cubans senses of it.  

   Of course, it is an Asian point of vieŵ on it and overall a self exploration perspective more than a discourse about or referential to American images, but equality to hoŵ Anglo-American or Afro-American point of vieŵ usually express it in EUA it is also communicating an spiritual feeling of transculturation of potential communication to any acerbo and background. In doing so by just an exhibit and a letlee program of exchanges and from this point of vieŵ I consider Makurihirogeru in Havana as a visual art professional exhibit committed to explore in fine art plastic arts medias, an experiment of cultural translation in visual culture of both artistic and aesthetic values. 

  In Awazu graphics, however, there is also a peculiar attention to the potentials of superposition’s, juxtapositions and photomontages to create visual poetries not only defined by analogies, metaphors or the symbolic contents of images, but also to more than the symbolism of images creates a kind of grane and graphic plot in which the trope horizonts is not as much being defined by specific tropological figures but yet to communicate sensations of avant-garde fine arts and visual cultural resonances of hibridations, a plastic evocation of spiritual resonances successfully crossings decades of visual revivals in Japan and around countries such as Poland and Canada were several significant fine art museums has dedicated anthological exhibits to the importance of kiyoshi awazu work and published high quality full colour catalogues of kiyoshi works, exhibits and also earlier efforts to include collaborations with experimental music and related arts such as film and cinema. 

  I should be sincere in saying than being an American and specially as also ken, one to whom living established in Anglo-American EUA has being a definitive experience in both my intellectual carrier and emotional life Makurihirogeru is an exceptional exhibit which I hope, as also their music and print makings, communicates it through the plasticity of versatile, subtly, calmed and pacific harmony spirituality of the paintings, drawings, posters and photomontages pieces, to a tourists passing and to a Cubans sense of it as ŵell. 

  In general Kiyoshi Awazu visual work but mostly best clearly expressed and well complexioned defined by a new generation young Japanese artists original renovations on the background of Kiyoshi legacy, among artists as Washio, Makurihirogeru can be seen as a pospop neobarroque as I recently commented it to Stephen. Another point of interest in Makurihirogeru in Havana, also a point to understand kiyoshi results in exploring graphic mixtures and Washio ŵay is being defined by the significant role that rituality play both considered in the high arts, as explicit in body and creative procesual art in general, but also as a visual graphic results since kiyoshi both abstract canvases and ŵays to explore plots in between figurations and backgrounds. 

  I consider this remark point as explicit not only at kiyoshi and Aŵazu artist’s studios, the ŵays for example to surround the environment to create in life style also opens to exchanges ŵith visitors, but also at the piece surfaces seems as a kind of creative and very inventive, in regard also to ritual, ŵays to recycle and relate motives, to imbricate languages nearly to urdimbres as explicit in several visual backgrounds paintings and graphic solutions, and horizonts such as, for example, juxtaposing western fine art motives, subtly film motives ŵith traditional Japanese motives always surrounded by in terms of the aesthetic whole harmonic backgrounds in colour and complementary tones, suggesting a minimalist relation between abstractionism in painting and a minimalization of spirituality and culture  as it can be also perceived in current modern relation between techno music and modern rituality at the internet age as I discussed it in current EUA at Ritual in the technology world of everyday life, currently a fashion issue in our contemporary EUA today fusionism.  

  My concept of ritual in regard to painting evolves an analysis about rituality in the Jack Pollock procedures of paintings canvases on the flour and the body processes of painting as seen in my paper Hermeneutic and axiology, hoŵever not without saying that even ŵhen kiyoshi also practiced paintings on the flour his ŵork is not certainly related as much ŵith Pollock, it looks nearly more related ŵith the abstract informalism of tombey and Cy Tombly ŵhile again in a unique form that can’t be reduced or limited to any one of the informalists including here some informalists inspirations from Japanese and Asia gestural ŵritings in gestural painting, all this and the strong originality of kiyoshi can be clearly perceive at his catalogues Graphism in the Wilderness

    I ŵill not speak about pastiches, remedos or surcidos in postmodern aesthetic terms regarding kiyoshi I ŵill prefer here to speak about an ecological procedure as I commented on unrest, a workshop performance conduced by Washio ŵith many of us several days after the opening. In fact as most artists from his generation, not only in Japan but in Europe, EUA and around the world including Cuba, kiyoshi ŵork ŵas still committed ŵith earlier and late modernism puritan ultimate visual questions and answer around mains things regarding everything and not as much ŵith postmodern questions, his ŵork can be regarded as important precisely as he contributed from his previous, older generation, a ŵay of seen which anticipated some aspects on our current, but not about irony and or parody, there is however a turn or a change of attitude explicit in Ŵashio.  

  Despite from all that ŵe should not forget or lose our attention on the clear fact that especially Makurihirogeru in Havana is a curatorial practice of ken as Asian American in EUA and Japanese at the same time exploring interesting relations and translations between Asia and americanicity. 

  Visually speaking it is obvious hoŵ the ŵork of Washio, a very young artist represent a completely neŵ, interesting, creative turn to his oŵn generation not only in Japan but I ŵill say to his generation anyŵere in EUA and Cuba also. 

   It is also being visually obvious how the plastic art exhibit itself as graphic art including kiyoshi Aŵazu pieces, Washio drawings, displacements and workshop and also the aleatorial, experimental music of shin and aoki, presents and explicit clear analogies and similarities betŵeen Japanese graphic designs and aleatorial music, current Anglo-American neŵ age sounds and music’s, Cuba experimental classics and aleatorials such as those explored by Leo Brawer, and also Anglo-American graphics from the sixties, Japanese graphics and Cuban graphics. 

Illustrations

The Exhibit

Photo of Makurihirogeru Poster Design

General Vieŵ of Makurihirogeru Exhibit at the Asia House

Details of tŵo Shin Sasacubo drawings on Sounds on black Backgrounds

Details to Ŵashio Drawings Installation

Photos selections of the Best kiyoshi graphics Exhibited

The Workshop

Photo of ken Presenting the Workshop ŵith the table tolls

Photo of Abdel Long Closing his Eyes

Photo of Daisuke Oblique body Position showing the notes book

Photo of the Workshop general day ŵith participants

Details of Abdel Draŵing the Napkings

Details of Washio Ŵriting an old Japanese Paper

Details of Abdel Writing Scripture, Inscription, Scriturality

Lectures

Photo of ken Given the Lectures at ISA

Photo projection of kiyoshi general exhibit at the kanasagua Contemporary Art Museum of Japan, Abstractions and Graphics on ŵalls

Photo projection of ancient Sr shoŵing the traditional printing technique 

Photo of three Woman’s at kanasagua Museum Playing Sound Instruments 

Music

Daisuke Playing his instrument

Shin Detail Playing his Pieces

Note

    Este texto es un ensayo sobre el curador y productor de diseño japonés Ken Awazu que nació de un proceso espontaneo, nos conocimos a propósito de que el necesitaba traducción al inglés para unas explicaciones que estaba dando en ISA sobre los dibujos de su padre, le hice las traducciones y luego lo ayude como traductor inglés-español en el proceso de producción iniciando ese mismo año una serie de diálogos en 11 B 1360 donde vivo por medio del cual volvió a visitar la habana esta vez con una muestra en la casa de la cultura de Asia, el texto discute esa muestra, la coordinación de su segunda visita fue posible atraves de isa gracias a Jorge rodríguez en ese momento decano en la facultad

-This paper titled is based on the fact that I meet ken in a circumstance in which he needed my translation in English in a situation of communication, he asked me to help him with it and I was actually his translator during all his first visit helping him to travel back to do the exhibit both in person and through the email as well as during his second visit, but then at the same time I am sustaining that without using words his exhibit was itself a translation of cultures, so using the word in regard to both me and him as well as in regard to the trilingual nature of the experience, English, Japanize and Spanish-

For a previous lecture about this issue of the relations between the arts and regarding Japanize culture see Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Relation and Differences Between the Arts, lecture discussed at Los Angeles Art Festival Panel, The Japanize House of Culture, December, Los Angeles, USA, 2002 

-In this panel I lectured on this issue also participated with also the participation in panel of Surpic Angelini, my co-curator to a letlee series of exhibits I bring from Caracas, presented, montage and exhibited together with her at Rice University campus, spring, 1997, also villegas and Robert, Los Angeles Art Festival, The Japanize house of culture, December, Los Angeles, USA, 2002

-For additional papers I written on this issue particularly around things happen at Los Angeles The Japanize house of Culture read Mobile: Heidi Abderhalden and Rolf Abderhalden. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Los Angeles Art Festival, The Japanize house of culture, December, Los Angeles, USA, 2002

-A Paper Essay written in English by Abdel Hernandez San Juan in occasion of Makurihirogeru, a paper dedicated to Asian American and Japanese Art Curator and Graphic Producer ken Aŵazu in evocation to our Wonderful unrecorded but meaningfulness dialogues of February 2015.

- Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Ken Awazu, Field Meaningful English Sessions, Three Days, February, included Abdel work as translator from spanish to english in occasion of Ken efforts to be back in Tokyo and then back to Havana the same year with Makurigirogeru exhibit at the Asia House including printed graphic poster and three young Japanize artists Shin Sasacubo, Aoki and Washio Tomoyushi

- Makurihirogeru was an exhibit produced and curated by ken Aŵazu as a formal guest of the Asia house and it included a workshop at the Asia house regarding the same invitation and tŵo lectures discussed at ISA by ken Aŵazu as a formal guest of the Faculty of Plastic Art dean Jorge Rodriguez.

- I want to express here also the value of the labor procedures of Maki Ashida Art Promoter beautiful young girl woman from the Japanese embassy as promoter of the exhibit, presentation and workshop. 

- For an additional publication on this issue of the relations between the arts see Cabrera Sarlot, Colloquia The Blowring Limits between the Arts, with Cabrera Sarlot, Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Jorge Rodriguez, Nelda Castillo and Ruslan Torres, Cupulas Magazine, ISA, University of the Arts

- One of the beautiful moments of Makurihirogeru ŵas precisely the workshop explained by ken and conducted by Ŵashio following the impetus of an opening day performance to vieŵers constantly printing a print making motive for viewers to take it home and titled Unrest a titled I commented Washio as soon as I arrived to the gallery after reading unrest on a meaning of rest not as usually it means descanso in Spanish, to take a rest, descansar, a short time sleeping, but in the phonetic means of rest in spanish in regard to remnants, residuals, rests, so unrest, something rest but not, an ecological metaphor of recycling ŵhen a rest is always reincorporated to a continuum circulation processes, I used tŵo napkins usually rested to ŵasted after cleaning tolls to draŵing on it and evoque it. Daisuke proposed an oblique body postured shoŵing to us and to the vieŵers a note book. Ŵashio workshop conducer ŵhos drawings and graphics are defined by being inventive and creative refigurations proposed a gestural Japanese writing on traditional Japanese papers, to me unreadable as ŵriting as I don’t s read Japanice, but to a certain point readable as gesture, something I then commented ŵith ŵriting on the same kind of paper the ŵords scriptures, inscriptions and escriturality in English. Cuban artist Jorge Rodriguez presented to us tŵo haiku poems, The Frog in the Pond, the sound of ŵater, The shadow of the doud, the sea is quiet, calm.

- During a visit of ken Aŵazu and Aoki to my home space, field office and studio space 11, ken and ken aŵazu proposed In Japanese and Spanish tŵo tongas, 1-Enciendo un Fosforo, En la  brevedad de la llama veo el mar nebuloso, Desechar la vida por la patria importa?, 2- Aunque se adentra, aunque se adentra, el cerro azul, 3- Mirando el cielo hasta que pueda mirar, 4- Un Viejo estanque, Se Zambulle una rana, Ruido del agua, 5- Cuánto cuesta una taza de felicidad?, 6- Yendo por el caminito del arrozal, A donde sea que se va, Algún día, El retorno es al mismo lugar, Es el infierno, Es el paraíso, Muchacho del cielo. Ken offered again a general explanation on his posŵard father generation in Japan, at the end of the ŵar kiyoshi ŵas a child, a generation ŵith everything to be done and begging ŵith nothing to lost after the ŵar disbastations and forgetfulness’s and an enthusiastic and optimistic impetus to build a future and paradoxically ŵhen japan ŵas open than ever to the ŵest, kiyoshi and several other artists explored the possibilities to do both things developing more than ever ŵestern art in japan, in contrast to japan traditional techniques ŵhen art ŵas nothing than artisany, but at the same time looking than ever to long time ancient traditions, so valuating more than ever before the values of such a beautiful traditions, so learning as possible from traditional techniques artisans and incorporating it to a contemporary ŵestern Japanese art in a form unique. 

  After Aoki played his instrument, which he fund as an object in his father antique collection at his father restaurant and which he learn to play thanks to a peruan emigrant ŵho as many south americans emigrate to Tokyo looking for best economic life, visual artist and sensibly master of fine art Jorge Rodriguez, commented about that in playing his instrument he feel the impression of listening someone ŵho first learn to hear ŵhat nature ŵas saying through such an air and ŵood instrument by exploring in the beginning of his piece, as much as possibly the humble natural quality of air and ŵood and then in the second half as if saying, ŵell I already learn all you teach me on your natural qualities and on tradition, may I noŵ play something creative, imaginative, myself expressions?, this ŵas essentially Rodriguez comment, to which Aoki response confirming that learning from this instrument is to him a continues and infinity process, certainly.

  Remembering hoŵ I defined the issue itself as a challenge also to Cuban artists, ken offered some comments on contemporary and traditional issues in his father generation and asked ŵhat do you think that makes Cuban art to be something itself, hoŵ can you define it, and there ŵas an interesting moment of counterpoints betŵeen completely different point of vieŵs, according to Rodriguez valuation it is probably curious hoŵ the best ŵell knoŵ and recognized cuban contemporary artists are generally very evolved in exploring tradition, something to ŵhich graphic designer and painter Edel Bordon ansŵered from a very opposite point of vieŵs saying that ŵhat makes Cubans unique is a very strong western rigorous and professional techniques and that to him there is not possibilities to build nothing cuban itself, but something global ŵhich if you don’t knoŵ t is done by a Cuban you ŵill probably think on it as something done by someone from any were. 

I explained at the same time my western neŵage position saying that neŵ age itself is defined by exploring the relation between very high modernity such as high technology and spirituality, modernity and rituals, looking respectfully to traditions and incorporating it. Finally ken argue that he is motivated and interested in traditions but free, from a global point of vieŵ out of nationalistic boundaries. 

References

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Intangible, Literary ŵork book as single ŵriter, author, composer, Abdel Hernandez San Juan Books, Houston, Texas, USA

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Curator as Creator, Caracas, Lecture discussed at the First Meeting of Art Curators, Neŵs Paper El Universal, Caracas, Venezuela, 1994

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Email on Axiology, Mediation, Superobjectification, Remediation, Emails to Stephen, 2014, Pp, Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Field Letters, since 2013, Abdel@isa.cult.cu

Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Stephen A Tyler, Seven Papers, A Neŵ Philosophical dialogue

Stephen A Tyler, Evocation, Response to Abdel Hernandez, Evocation, The Unŵriteable, A Response to Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Sep 9,

Non-Siting the Site: A Summer home

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Havana

Written and composed in English
by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

  Brian Deutzman a young Anglo-American filmmaker from New York has recently finished his short movie A Summer Home. The film itself is one of the best films I has seen in many years.
  It suggests certain relations between how the eye worked in the aesthetic of surrealism earlier films and Posmodern figures explored, however, in a form that seems to move beyond such figures, even when probably still some very subtle almost evanescent echoes or clues of remedos, pastiches and parodies may be perceived yet behind, it is not only less than usually in Posmodern works but almost diluted inside a more spiritual and metaphysical artistic whole that suggest to be a previous form to a concept he is actually exploring in his current new film, that one of metafiction.
  In A Summer Home the concept of metafiction is not as focused yet, but the way Brian explored the relation between site and non-site suggest an ambivalent effacing play between fiction and nonfiction grow up from a question about what is it a site and what is it a non-site from the moment a real place basis the film but non-sites it through all the film toward imagination and evocations of the film around. The film itself was made possible thank to a grant Brian winner discussed to be performed and based around an specific site, a real hotel somewhere in Florida Brian choiced to do it.
  The preminence of the concept and spatial dimension of a site in the basis of a work of art research, major to define the current so-called site specific art installation in plastic and visual art, may be here probably related with a certain motivation to efface boundaries, both aesthetics and visuals, but also institutionals, between film and plastic art through a sense of the visual arts in general, usually institutionally divided. However, beyond such an effacing wishes, the way Brian has explored this relation between site and non-site around his choiced site-hotel contribute a point of view on the matter only possible from a filmmaker perspective.
  A few of the things I discussed with Brian as soon as seen his film may be developed here. One of these things regarded the experience of the viewer with a film as A Summer Home in terms of physical memory, on how to remember and reconstruct the scenes of a film as such when frame by frame there is not a linear drama mimesis experience as in narrative fictional films in a level the body may look for or call out inside experience to reconstruct it part by part or by analogies?. My accent on this physical concept of memory directly regarded how a viewer, who usually have to memorize from a present one frame a previous already out of presence one, may memorize a previous unpresent from a present frame in a film as such.
  In contrast I pointed how in plastic arts the viewer can tour the whole canvas with all the elements simultaneously presence and presents to the eye in a same surface or space presence all the time. Another of these things I discussed in a first critique conversation start from the point his films basis in anticipation a site specific located place as the reason and basis to it, even to get the grant choosing here a hotel, and on how from the moment a choiced site prestaablish the work to be done he was obviously in front of questions and under the challenges of deciding about how to represent such a site as a matter, the site itself and his relation as filmmaker to it.
  Given that obviously Brian decided to commit himself with moving outside any purposiveness for representing it, but instead, to explore other possibilities, the question on such alternatives possibilities comes to the front. I pointed on how the challenge to make references to a site specific reality is being an equal one to art as to anthropology from the moment beyond just meeting or knowing it, something about it should be or need to be also communicated, reference, denoted, described, storytelling, narrated, registered through reproduction medias as photography or film, documented, reported or simply represented in any of the symbolic forms a languages, a writing or any other medias, supposes to inscribe the experience it means as a site.
  On a first side, to contrast this challenge, in plastic arts the idea of site specific installation presents in the following form: while certainly any art exhibit space sited may be seen as a site specific from the moment it supposes to be placed any were, only when the work of art in question transform such a site in the motive, object, basis and reason of the piece contents issuing it as a site, we can properly speaks about generically a site specific installation.
  In a few words a conventional exhibit of framed canvases, volume sculptures or even spatially installed objects maybe called site specific but in a form metaphorical because only when the site become the object of the exhibit contents it is generically a site specific installation. Now, certainly to make it happen and speaks the artist has to deal with how to reference the site in any of the forms previously explained, on how to references site located issues and experiences, from a gallery room, or some institutionally recognized exhibit space, to any outside or inside architectural, urban, community or natural readymade space usually not recognized to exhibit but an artist may choice and design to it.
  In fact, since lands art this issue itself become complex because it evolved nor only an exhibit or a work related from reasons, motives and contents with an specific located site space, but also the moving and transportation of it between several well differentiated and usually far sites, so ending to become referenced, performed, presented, transported and documented, a multisited one experience.
  From moving something happening in nature to the art museum through documentary material to moving things evolved to be community sited to an audience context and to another audience context of the exhibits displays documentary materials to be a multisited issue complex phenomena itself.
To end this critique after seen his film I suggested to him to think about the concept of memory now considered in terms of the body memories, on how the body itself which experienced it as a located placed maybe a first vehicle to collect things from a site specific instead of reflecting it so considered by the body as experience. However, it seems to be obvious how Brian choiced all his ways the opposite to represent and decided instead to evoque something that’s starts to move effacing the boundaries between site and non-site.
  Speaking on the issue I pointed Brian argued to be interested about memory front the inside of the art work, meaning his point of view from his creative process, on how memory works inside his own experience as filmmaker to conceive and do his work.
  He also mentions how dreams he experienced during the months he stablished living in the hotel, helps him to solution relations between the textual and the visual level arguing that sometimes a dream may suggest a solution to relate aspects of reason and intuition when a directional method can’t provide a response and explained to be nor only interested but truly motivated and attentive as a dimension of his explorations on the relation between film and psychoanalysis.
  The conversation then developed around this two aspects of memory, the physical one, I pointed, regarding the viewer, and the creative one he pointed on his attention to the building process. The film as a whole is visually and poetically beautiful from the first scene to the last one with as general prevalent effect the impression of the eye in surrealism films environments and images.
  It communicates a sense of harmony, with a very good photography frames by frame from the beginning to the end. A significant level of experimentalism with atmospheric and environmental music is also obvious and work along the movie structurally, and the cellular phones electronically effects the sound of a voice of the main character young woman Karin and her mom usually ear in off. The conversation between both stay the whole movie as the only main narrative and dramaturgic textual level of the film.
  It starts from the very first image of the film as a conversation between both taking place at the same time when the film run but in off so with sometimes an effect of tape recording late hear and sometimes an effect of real time happening. 

  The relation between this text level and the visual frames one is not a didactic, anecdotic or directional one, the image some time run free while the text free too out of frame, but the general conversation provide all the film need to stablish common sense readings and it maintain certain order of chronology with the frames.
  In a synthesis whole the young girl is being curious to visit a hotel she knows by family references, but she has never visited. She then realizes to finally visit that hotel.
  The film begins with a first image in front of the hotel and with a first question of the young girl to her mom through the cellular phone.
 
  Are they bombing here too?, she ask?
  No, bombing is bad to tourism, in America they dismantle everything brick by brick and no one notice.
 

Fig 1- Image of the external door façade, Brian Deutzman, A Summer Home

Fig 2- Image of the bricks lobby, Brian Deutzman, A Summer Home

  The conversation stay running all the film, sometimes it reference very objective things, sometimes its frees in a form letting open that evoques without knowing if it happens as an effect of the film director sound editions, or as a dimension of the communication this two persons have in between.
  The common sense conversation of the film takes places and decurse around the site which supposes to be builded by her grandfather something reinforced in the movie with two sequences images one about a shopping show case exhibiting the architectural draws of the hotel in the same hotel, external drawings and photos of it.

Fig 4- Shopping show case exhibiting the architectural draws of the hotel in the same hotel, Brian Deutzman, A Summer Home

  But also with a series of photography’s exhibited at one of the hotel halls about a day a country club of the hotel was created. The site and non-site relation with the hotel Brian choiced as a place in Florida stay through all the film as a dimension to be visually explored.
  In several of the scenes, additionally to a few inside living rooms scene of the girl alone, the viewer may have a certain objective image of the hotel according to which the hotel looks to be under rebuilding, a presentation of the site become experimental itself through the movie including various images.
  A first nearly external façade one already discussed shows a door from outside with an inside lovy full of bricks suggesting to be a corrosive and or under construction site something confirmed late in the movie when such a place lobby repit now with an small cart man moving construction materials.
  A second one general external image seen from the streets shows a whole building under construction in an street area undersigned to side walkers and cars. Finally, there is also the hotel halls image, the living rooms scenes and a landscape view seen through a hotel internal window that shows the girl main character far away in the sea coast so suggesting to be a hotel near to a beach.

Fig 5- Internal window view shows the girl far away in the sea coast, Brian Deutzman, A Summer Home

  The subjective position of the camera through the film is a major point here to be discussed, it resolves around as a free independent eye showing everything the hotel sites, halls, rooms, places, windows, landscapes and the girl main character scenes, but it is far to be just or simply a panoramic objective point of view showing a reality.
  From the visual point of view the camera eye seems to move also looking for something else or to be a part in the main character curiosity between the know and the unknow relates her situation visiting something she knows from the family and her grandfather builded.
  An image scene I consider one of the best if not the best one scene of the movie references the hotel surround construction situation when the woman character stay strait long time creating a symbolic body metaphor. In such an scene she is in front of a background natural landscapes with all her face extremely turned up looking to the sky for long time and in the background between the sky and her, the viewer may see an imponent image of several cranes, while her mom voice in off say something like a poetry:

Sky Machinery of the Death
The spirit of the damnes
They congregate in places like this
Let them to be in peace

Ending with a dissolve from the sky to abstraction this scene finish with a flashing image of a travel postcard and an screen television effect, the symbolic scene itself departure from a previous disolvence near images of Karin face and her thoughts monologues phrases or also a poetry:

Distant points of Light......
Who’s Awake this night?......
Buzzing far lights …………
Is shelling to begin? or are just the stars?........OR …….

Fig 6- External image of the girl and the imponent image of several cranes, Brian Deutzman, A Summer Home

A few scenes before Karin mom cell voice said:
 
Karin, Karin
Did you hear me?
Is everything Ok?
I need to give you instructions,
We have to pick up the pieces

  With such a mom phrase the film transition from Karin objective situation to Karin extremely subjective situation (accent with a near image of her face in a film dissolvenses with sounds), moving from her room to such a long static first subjective state and body position.
  The three main internal rooms hotel images shows Karin in three different forms.
  The first one shows the moment when she first time entrance to her hotel living room after walking from the hall with her handsbacks and open the door to be surprised when she see the television on with an screen visual and a sound effect but with nothing to be washed.

Karin Mom: We have a family story here, cellular voice entrance

Fig 7- Image of Karin entrance the room with the Television on, Brian Deutzman, A Summer Home

Karin: Shady Place, Shady people, Karin expresses.

Karin Mom: We can make it work, if your grandfather were alive

Karin: But is not alive, said Karin,

  Such a television screen effect, the same one superposed with a postcard flashing after sky dissolves to abstracts when ending Karin symbolic body position looking to the sky, also flashes together with natural sky shellings when the viewer may see Karin through the hotel window far away in the coast and she said:

Karin: Not a soul in this place

Karin Mom: You are not alone, (Shelling and screen tv flashings effects on the sky) 

Dear granddaughter,

Karin grandfather voice entrance in off
Starting to exit the last part of the film toward the end with the grandfather off voice

Entrance Panoramic Images of the Wind forces removing everything in the living room like curtains but the room now empty with still the same screen television effects.

Grandfather voice:

You has come to late,
This place now just a memory
Just a picture laid flat without perspective
I tried to build something here but found the land was follow and cursed
I too had come too late,
you looked at me and saw yourself reflected

Notes

  -Additionally I discussed on the eye in surrealism and a certain relation between surrealism and etnography I called out in reference to Derrida and Leiris as an ethnographer who was a part of the art surrealism movement of the earlier XX Century. 

  - A Film by Brian Deutzman, conceived, composed and directed by Brian Deutzman, made possible thanks to the generous support of the john s and James lknight foundation, main actress Karin: the voice Karen Segal, Karins mother: Noga Segal, The corpse: Stefan Catinella, Sound design and original score by Izabella Dousoglou, executive producers Lucas Leiva and Jillian Mayer, special thanks to Danielle and Borscht Corporation.  

  - In the other inside room scene she is on the bed or is rough back from a dream

Bibliography

  
Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Posmodern Work, Paper, Transart Foundation of Houston Collection, Translated by Gabriel, Houston, Texas, USA, 1995

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Beyond the Intertextual, Paper conference lectured by Abdel Hernandez San Juan at the Fondren Library Lecture Auditorium as a guest of the faculty of classical and Hispanic studies, curator at the alejandro otero museum of visual art, introduced to the audience by George Marcus from the faculty of anthropology, translated by Graciela Daichman, coordinated by Hector Urrutibeity, Dean of the Faculty of classic and Hispanic studies and Surpic Angelini, president of transart foundation, Houston, Texas, USA, 1996

The Degree Zero of the Screen: The Eye Body in a Summer Home

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Havana

Written and composed in English
by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

  I should speak in only five minutes, I written a paper on the movie Non Siting the Site, but it is to letlee time not only to read that paper but even to maintain a lecture of only five minutes constrained by a longer paper, from this point I will try to discuss some new issues while also doing some relations between this issues and the paper. 

 I am interested in a concept trying to continue my theory on a certain relation between Deutzman movie an the effects of the eye of the camera in earlier surrealism, that one of the optical unconcient developed by Rosalind Krauss.

 Certainly this concept of the optical unconcient is related not with the idea of the optical provided by op art when all we have in front of us visually are the lines, colors, surfaces and special effects of oculars phenomena’s physically illustrated as an optical illusionism in front of the eye since such an optical effects repit in front of the viewer eyes which can be your, mine or the eye of any one, ocular effects of many complex visual illusionism that the eye can recognize in his memory as a recording of its own capability to focus, distort, relate, mix, diffuse.

  All this effects even when displayed out in a complete abstract form without referentiality to any representational reality are recognized by the eye in the field of its own voluntary activity, it consist on top to the viewer eye about comparitions between the recognition of its own ocularism and certain things the use of technology of special effects can unfold in front of the eye as oculars, because even when the concept of the optical unconcient reference the eye it is regarded to and related with instead a field that is not defined by the eyes focus capabilities or technology developments around it, but with all the things the eye remnants.

  This remnants are not by the way things the eye intentionally remnants, but things the eye is being seen when many things are simultaneously happening and the eye can’t focus and or retain it, such an unconcient is then being cumulated as a memory in the eye body, it is about things the eye seen and unseen or seen without focusing to seen it or seen without time to see it or to focus it by a moment, seen it but without memorizing it because of the velocity and then all that is being cumulated goes to be a collection.

  There is however another thing to be pointed regarding the optical unconcient, far to contrast how it suppose a cumulated field distinct to that of the ocular effects of opticals it mainly consists like a visual unconcient out there that can be discussed in images and is usually related with the eye images of velocity and simultaneity. 

  The major reference here is the image of the velocities of the consumer society in current neoliberal capitalism so called by somes as late capitalism when everything around is a field of constant images passing in a very accelerated velocity of merchants and publicities, spots and commercials in the television and the internet, but also in the city when all the building shows big publicities and everything around walking are visual images of bodies, sensations, sensorialities, objects, lights and colors with movements, cars, people sailing and buying, all this fast images of very modern technologies velocities and visuals things of simultaneity supposes to the eye to many things happening at the same time that the eye can’t simply retain, the eye have to usually focus but at the same time the eye can’t elude all this things happening around, all this are also taking place and being cumulated by the eye body memory creating a whole field of sensoriality and sensations to the body.

  My point to call this concept here is to say that there is a certain work with the optical unconcient in Deutzman movie while and this is my main point paradoxically Deutzman is exploring it in a form toward a concept I would like to propose here to short approach aspects of the movie defining it as the degree zero of the screen when the screen the computer one at the internet, the screening of everything in the cities merchant publicities I already mentioned in consumers, but also the cellular wireless one screen and the television one is one of the major channels and ways to discuss all I previously explained, a symbol if we can say of such a visual field

  What I am point here is about that in a movie as this one which reference a hotel and a certain story between a douther, her mother and her grandphater with all the dramatic effects of the very strong focused photography and the symbolism of memory, the visual alutions and use of the screen have a conceptual reason when by the way the screen is majorly evoqued and constantly used in the movie more in regard to the screen of the connected wireless cellular phone, here the screen is being related with how the light of the phone light and illuminates Karin faces along the movie and is conceptually also related environmentally with the voice as both narrative and environment in the movie. 

  I will then like to theorize this symbolic relation between the screen, the voice and the lighting of the face, I think we can discuss interesting conceptual issues on this relation considered mostly not out of my previous discussion of a field of full sensoriality and sensation related to the body memory. 

  While we don’t have images of the wireless screen, it is evoqued all the time by light and the electronic sound of the cellular, the voice and Karin face, we have Karin body sensoriality all the time accent and specially on this regard there is a certain relation also accent between how she projects her voice toward body sensoriality and how she expresses to feel her relation with the phone and light.

  Such a degree zero is also obvious with the image of the moment when the television screen is being in stand by not in off, on, but without channel transmissions, without images when it produces also a sound of nothing like the noise of nothing and visually all the screen seen to be gray.

  A certain concept of the grain of the screen I have pointed previously can be also mentioned here as probably related with such a degree zero of the screen because if we can say that beyond a visual grain when to me there is also at any screen if not literally or almost visually diluted but supposed a visual grain from the moment an screen evolve to be always something like another surface between us and reality or a surface to our bodies that to a certain point Tamiz or Philigrane, but a grain that also translate and or communicate visual, tactile and sound, like the grain voice of the screen that to me is also the voice of this sensorial field when simultaneously is reestablished an the idea of quotidian domain, but a grain also visual in this gray moment of suspended screen without images transmission.     

  Why is then Deutzman letting the screen in standby when his movie will supposes to explore some of the certain of the eye in earlier surrealism and also something of this optical unconcient.

  This effect of the screen is being used in the movie not only when the girl Karin entrance to her room and is surprised when she see that the television is on with this screen effect, the wind moving the curtains and she touch the screen with her left hand saying shadow people, but also, it visually run several times in the movie as a flashing unexpected effects in several scenes, related for example with sound of the  sky before raining and is also used as a flashing effects in certain dramatical moments of the movie.

  Why the optical unconcient, we have a site very well placed in the movie a hotel in Florida with a certain story and all the accent on it, but we also have the non siting of it the cellular phone relating two voices inside and outside, we have the flashing screen and we have a sequence of photography’s creating a symbolism while all this is related in a form certainly toward a certain critique to linear narrative as predominant in experimental cinema something explored in a unique form in this film

  I focused and proposed in fact in my paper this concept of non siting the site as pivotal as well as I discussed certain issues of multisite when doing comparation of this with site specific installations starting by the fact that the movie play all the time with the hotel as site including exhibits of the hotel drawings inside it in as a shopping show case. 

Notes

  I have to many theoretical development around the the visual issue and phenomena of the screen but focused in the internet connected environment of the computer screen mainly books such as An Expedition to the Threshold. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, an experimental book I composed in Houston, Anthropology Faculty at Rice University and after that my books The Given and the Ungiven and The Presentational Linguistic, 

  This paper was a Conference I lectured at the arthouse an space directed by Brian Deutzman and Helena as a guest of Grisel Antelo, 2018 

  I commented to Deutzman regarding my concept of the eye body cumulated field of sensoriality and unseen seems that this is not about a deep unconcient like in old psychoanalysis but a superficial one and poslacanial, 

  I becomed attracted by this concept the optical unconscious revising in the library in Houston at borders book and Barness and nobles a  book of Rosalind Krauss,  my development of the concept are my own ways of theorization on the issue, since I only did  a general revision of Krauss book reading some pages while without yet reading it fully since I don’t have the book, but attracted and interested in the possibilities of the concept, while I will read it fully to a future completion of a more near comparative analysis between my perspective and the way Krauss has discussed it. We are both from different perpectives interested and working in poslacanian criticisim and in that sense our perspectives are related, but Krauss original concept seems to be more related with photography. There is however Krauss paper I fully read which can be instead mentioned, Video Art: The Aesthetics of Narcisism as well as another one II also full read History of the Eye, the book in question is The Optical Unconscious (October Books) Paperback – July 25, 1994 I started to use the concept in a paper I written in Chicago and I lectured at the lake forest faculty of sociology and anthropology, 99, mentioning Krauss.

Bibliography

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Art Pizte paper, conference lectured at the panel Maya Art and Anthropology, written and conceived by Abdel Hernandez San Juan in Chicago lectured at the lectures auditorium of the Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology as a guest of the faculty in the lake Forest College, an invitation and program coordinated and  introduced by Quetzil Eugenio, the paper writing was also translated by Quetzil Eugenio, Assistance Professor of anthropology in the Faculty, Lake Forest College, Chicago, USA, 1999

Rosalind Krauss, "Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism" (October, spring 1976),

Cinema and Gesture: Regarding Image and Gesture in A Summer Home

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Havana

Written and composed in English
by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

  The main concept that can relate how cinema is in the very side of film and in the very side of the visual arts, can be the concept of gesture in its relation with the concept of cinema 

  Let develop how can we theorize and discuss this. 

  I will first want to explain how gesture is evolved and major to understand how the imagination of cinema started to be considered from the visual art meaning now only the plastic arts coming from painting, drawings, photography, etc., let then late discuss how gesture can be theorized and discussed in cinema coming from the very side of film recording far from the plastic arts meaning discussing it as a matter of the camera and let after try to theorize and discuss how to relate as well as difference both sides 

  The first way to start to include cinema in the plastic arts was related with the imagination to retain and record in a film the process of painting, there is usually a time in the process of painting when affording the canvas with steins and colour it evolution from the empty canvas to drawings and painting something, this process take a time of days or weeks sometimes months or a year but is usually loosed or forgotten replaced as process by the final result paintings with its images.

  Paying attention to that process itself more than to the final result happen without being yet considered to be recorded but as an attention itself on it by asking why should that spontaneous field of gestures erased and replaced by a final outcome or end and not retained by its own values and interest like it was in action painting when the canvas consisted about only an interface of the ritual process of painting and when the concept of the canvas as interface replaced the idea of the canvas as a metaphysical representational frame.

  There was yet of course a frame at the end because all the interfaced process is finally collected and seen under a frame but the philosophical basis on how to understand the concept of frame changed. It was an slow process. Since the earlier abstractionism the idea itself to replace that idea of using that frame to create the illusion of a represented reality by an abstraction started to modify how to understand such a frame and such a surface, it was an slow process to see such a support as a near surface and not as an illusionist representation of the eyes illusions.

  Abstractionism started it while cubism explored ways to then reconsider reality under such a new idea of the frame, de-composing and or deconstructing it, exhibiting the frame by the way without a painting was first done by max Ernest an artist from the Dadaism and surrealist movement and materic art a tendency developed by artists such as Tapies was the first one to really transform the canvas in an interface. 

  While in abstractionism the canvas evolutioned to be a surface it was still yet a metaphysical one, the turn of materic art started to transform the canvas in an interface while there was not yet a full attention to gesture in it the idea of the frame as interface supposed to understand that anything collected inside such a frame start to be seen as a gesture. 

  The full attention to gesture considered as a representational fact was a matter focused by expressionism but it was yet a representation of gestures and not gestures itself, the moment to meet both things, the canvas as interface and the attention to gesture, started in USA with artists as Klein and Pollock, the first one used to use models not a references to be represented but as actors to be painted like naked woman’s who’s bodies Klein painted in blues and then asked them to clues their bodies under an empty canvas to late collect the whole used colour to be exhibited at show cases, the second one Pollock certainly transformed the canvas in an interface of spontaneous gestures.

  The imagination of cinema in the plastic art started from there, artists who committed themselves to use the camera to record the process of painting with attention to the stein and the near phenomena of lines, gestures and colour now seen and or considered as a visual cinema to be also sometimes accompanied by music, there are in fact earlier cinemas in the plastic art consist mainly about a near cinema of the process of painting, steins, colour, lines and gestures in movement while doing it framed as a cinema abstract universe now with music and sound.

  The difference between this concept of gesture and the concept of gesture that we have in cinema seen it now coming from the very side of film is defined by the fact that in film the camera is already from the beginning placed to ask the question while in the plastic arts the camera was just a toll that arrived later to fix and or retain a gesture considered before the arrival of the camera.

  Given that in a film the camera is already there from the beginning everything regarding gesture revolves around the already framed field of any image to be considered as gesture, the camera is being seen before a gesture and the gesture is being seen as later, there is no longer in film a free gesture before out of the eye focused attention but an eye asking on it the recorded images and or the actor body movements considered as gestures.

  Instead of an interface of a process before the frame and the eye consist already in a recorded level that is being representational to any further outcome gesture. However, the theoretical discussion of cinema supposes a relation with gesture that turn our attention to the fact that the first inscription evolved in a recorded image can be also seen as interface something clear when we use the camera like in documentation to only retain and memory something like for example occasions of everyday life that by any reason we decided and or want to remember and retain as a memory.

  Of course, this idea of the camera seen as an inscription of a recorded passing time stay to be again by different reasons looking to the camera still as only a toll since to pay attention to such an inscription as just interfaces supposes to priorize what is being experience as experience itself, a family vacation occasion, for example, considered to be important as experience, or a travel, considered to be relevant as travel itself when the camera is being used and all its recording as only a toll.

  But there is something about this that helps to understand in a deeper manner the more ontological relation between cinema and gesture, if we ask about cinema itself, what is it, how can we define the consistency of cinema, when and to define what can we certainly speak about the specificity of cinema.

  This question itself near to explicit that if we are now in front of many image already recorded like a collection and we have to make a differences in between about when are with in front of a cinematic image and when we are not, such images toward to define here we have a cinema while in this other one we don’t have cinema, the basis to define it as cinema is defined itself by a certain relation, a major one, between such an image as image and the clues of a certained gesture to which such an image supposes and or seems to be related.

  The point here is not about looking for a gesture in terms of representational images of gesture, but about how to understand how and when the whole image as image can be considered as a gesture, a cinematic image, related from the beginning as we well know and defined by movement, stay to be cinematic and not other thing precisely when we can recognize in such as image as a whole that there is something of a gesture in it. 

  And I think that this concept of the image in movement considered as gesture, again not as a representation of a gesture but as a gesture itself is related with the clues of how the ontology of the image in terms of space and time is expressed in the image entrance.  

  This idea of the image entrance moves us to the relation between subject and object and to how the subject is being related with the recorded process of getting an image inscribed and or created.

  The idea of recording and inscribing certainly move us toward a presupposed already pregiven reality or phenomena who’s entrance to the frame is not to intervened in its nature by the subject position, something of the subject attention should be entertained to use a word in the sense that the eye and the frame gives entrance to images retaining the gestural instance of it as it was already and letting the frame be to a certain a point or level almost an interface.

  A cinematic image always address us to the ontological relation between image and movement with the concept of gesture, if we are in front of a cinematic image something of that image as an image in movement should call our attention to a certained gestural regard of the image ontology with the space and time of the relation between the subject, the eye, the frame, the space and time of the recording process and the object, the element retained, inscribed and or choiced, selected, focused and or composed, it can be more or less intervened and or manipulated by the subject intentional composition, motivations and ideas by the ways to let it speak the clues of the relation between the image entrance to the interface and the clues of the space and time of the subject relation to it as both as pregiven and as modified, intervened an or used under a composition.

  The issue of space and time in cinema is a complex issue theoretically, I would like not to go this time such a way because it far us from an attention to film, but if there are certain relations between cinema in film and cinema in the plastic arts if we choice the concept of gesture to analyze it there are also major differences in between both sides.

  The first difference is defined now not by the ontology of cinema but by the ontology of the image, from the side of film the ontology of cinema is paying attention to how the image ontology group up in the subject as a retained, recorded image, the attention is turned to the inscriptural instance when the ontology of image is regarded to be at the end an effect of the ontology of cinema, what is important to film about cinema is the fact that such an image is in movement, while the attention to the image in the plastic visuals arts is regarded to such an image as an object, in the plastic arts cinema is only used to turn the attention on the ontology of the image not to cinema itself which is at the end only considered a media, but to the superobject of images such a cinema creates or help to accent. The visual artist can be more or less interested in the fact that his work is finally a cinema even interested in that a lot but if we really pay attention on the why we will immediately recognize that the reason of the attention will be always about the superobject it helps the image to become.

  From the side of film the same phenomena is being considered exactly in the opposite sense the attention is not at all to the superobject of the image or to image as a superobject, but instead to the supersubject. The ontology of cinema seen from the film side bring us to the idea a supersubject while the attention to cinema in the plastic arts turn us to the idea of a superobject. 

Notes

  1-I conceived this paper as a reconstruction memo of all I discussed to a film of Brian Deutzman during 2016

  2-There is an additional short dialogue on my concepts distintions of superobject and supersubject to which I illustrated the concept of the image as a superobject with the case of pop art image Andy Warrol when the effects of the image seems to be a superobject more more real than the real object or the case of hyperrealism when it seems to be more real than the real in a few words cinema is being explored in the plastic arts mainly to obtain the several modalities of superobjects cinema helps image to be, while the supersubject can be cinema itself when the accent is ordered to focusses not on cinema as a toll or a medium to obtain an image but all the opposite when the ontology of image appears as an effect of the ontology of the cinematic

Bibliography

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Relations and Differences between the Arts, conference lectured at Los Angeles Art Festival Panel, The Japanize House of Culture, December, Los Angeles, California, USA, 2002

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Hermeneutic and Axiology, The Subject in Creativity, Complete Works, Tome II and also The Interpretation of Art: Hermeneutic and Analysis of visual Art Discourses and Rhetoric’s, Selected essays

Roland Barthes, Reading Gestures, The Responsibility of Forms, Essays on Music, Art and Representation, The University of California Press

A middle way Between Narrative and non-narrative, Environmental Sound in a Summer Home

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Havana

Written and composed in English
by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

  An statement thinking about sound and music in film and cinema starting from the concept or the idea of silence can be conceptually interesting to an occasion focused on sound and music. Silence is the opposite of sound and music or the symbol of no sound but at the same time the concept from which sound need to be related to be defined as a sound itself, silence or not sound seen as the opposite pair or as the other side of sound as sound need silence to be sound and silence sound to be silence, each one need the other to be itself. 

  The previous issue remember how Hegel defined and discussed the relation of mutual necessity and oppositions between major pairs, between being and nothing, for example, even considered out of existential parameters, when the idea of nothing appear not as an emptiness of being, of not feeling or feeling nothing, which by the way is also needed by being to know the opposite of his feelings, but regarding nothing for example as the opposite of being in the idea of infinity or in the idea of the consistency of becoming.

   A being is nothing without a becoming and a becoming is nothing without a being, to be it have to become and to become it have to be, but becoming if we stay asking about it itself seems to be, paradoxically, like a nothing to a being, each one need its pair as one with itself, being to be need to become as one with itself inside its own self and becoming need being to become, in the same manner sound need silence to sound and silence need sound to silence and there is in fact sound in silence and silence in sound. 

  The question, however, is about why are we thinking about this relation currently to think about sound and music in film and cinema. Aleatorism itself, in fact, grow up and started from music pointing out from the beginning this relation between sound and silence as experimental to music and by the way to music and sound inside film and cinema.

   The point I would like to discuss out here about, however, is the diagnosis of a certain contemporary generalized situation that tend to opposite narrative, anecdotic or mimesis on the one side and fragments on the other in contemporary film and cinema and by the way to how music and sound use to be usually explored in it, like it happen between for example, the so-called artistic photography and documentary or testimonial photography or between very functional architecture versus a very aesthetic, artistic and or formalist stylized architecture or between utilitarian arts such as ceramics and artesanies missregarded as minor arts versus the very fine art, there is to me in film and cinema currently a similar situation between narrative and non narrative or narrative versus fragmentary in contemporary film, on the one side lineal plots of dramaturgical arguments mimesis reality following an Aristotelian anecdotic sequence of introduction, considered as a presentation of the issue or theme, the characters and their contexts, the evolution of their relations to a nude climax and then it final issue end or outcome with music and sound helping and or mainly reinforcing that relations and on the other less or counternarrative films toward fragments in which sound and music play a more aleatorial, experimental and sometime environmental place.

  While I am not saying that the relation can be stablished in the same manner than the previous examples of the plastic arts, there are however several reasons to stand why experimental film seems to prefer to usually go on the way to fragments an attention back to the diminute elements consistence of the things. 

  If we are on the way to pay attention to fragment everything in fact revolves around decomposing something in it parts or deconstructing a whole to see the more infinitesimal elements in which it consist and by the way it is a form to look for or go to its origin, there is in fact a relation between fragments an a certain return to an state of things before being reduced to or evolved within a whole while in the case of sound and music in film and cinema it means instead of sound and music over contents an attention to the more diminute elements consistence of what a sound is in its ontology and by the way its relation with it inclusive opposite pair, silence. 

  In usual narrative films for example a young girl is living with her mom in the village and with the new husband of her mom, then her phater is living in a letlee village out of town and the movie should show her life between her everyday life activity going to school and back home daily within her family situation at her age, her mom with a new husband and her dad out of town, how to build a dramaturgical argument psychologically convincing, something that can be the life of many girls in society, of course, this choice example can be seen in society as a fragment to a certain point as well as there is the possibility to build it using fragmented methods more or less such as, for example, playing her mom character always as a voice in off but never appearing in scene and playing her as something when the girl is older and all we are seen as daily presented as her memories when she was young, but the story should run out a convinced narratives in terms of dramaturgic and the psychology of the characters in regard to reality meaning in regard to a mimesis on how the viewer have an experience on young girls in society with a similar life, here the fragment is used only as a toll to something else, it is being used as a toll of box to create a whole that at the end will be composed again by a certain lineal narrative. 

   Now I think, to put an example that is not going toward a complete fragmentation that Brian Deutzman film a summer home is a good example that he is trying to explore a way in the middle of the two extremes, there is not in his film a fragmentation but the creation yet of another new whole that is being spiritual and metaphysical with an idea of a unity and certainly when fragment are not always meanings of chaos or fragmentation as tend to be the case in many artists who working with fragments become themselves fragmented and their work fragmented while there is a moment in fragment when aleatorism conceal like in galaxies and the universe with an idea of harmony, however, aleatorism is still and yet a pivotal concept to understand it and John cage was the founder of aleatorism, his famous concert one hour of silence can be conceptually an example here, cage as the one who first explored this collecting of recording of sounds from everyday life and composed with that. 

  Cage was not himself in the field of film and cinema, certainly, but of music and conceptualism but I would like to say that through the concept of fragment in collecting sounds as given in everyday life and doing Aleatorials compositions with it Cage was exploring the possibility of fragments while to me one of the main characteristics of film currently is a tendency to stay far from the idea of a linearity or a lineal narrative, a reaction to diachronsm usual and predominant in most of the so-called experimental films today and yesterday. 

  But when I say that there is another way to see how to explore the possibilities of fragments to create another kind of wholes or aesthetic whole to the film as in Deutzman I am speaking on something that still need a more aleatorial relation between parts with the whole. 

  There is in Deutzman film yet when less than many others an exploration of a way to relate elements or parts to the whole of the film, the aesthetic whole less narrative toward a more aleatorial way to relate the elements or parts with the whole, instead of the Aristotelian linear parameter of introduction, climax and conclusion subordinated usually the film to a dramaturgical linear narrative or to a mimesis of reality, it is a way to see who to compose a whole in which the parts are related through fragments, a more significant place to fragment, this is then the aleatorial character of music and sound in his film including as main the sound of the cellular phone and the voice, while I remember it worked generally in the film as environmental sound.

  However according to him music and sound is being overwhelming film since many decades to currently, he explains that usually in contemporary film the viewer can even close his eyes and understand the whole movie by just listening the music and the voice so that image is being progresibly only a supplement and that he is interested in the opposite sour of move seen how to obtain a more near and interrelated relation between sound, music and image, he mentioned his experience to do the sound and music of his film a summer home when everything was filmed silently and the girl did the film music and sound proposal, she is an specialist in computers sounds more than in music, but composed it to his movie, he discussed this issue of the overwhelming of sound and music in his own generation in usa filmmakers today and also evoked the time of silent cinema of the earlier XX century when silence was pivotal as not sound or, to place my theory of the beginning as another way to sound, and he mentioned how surrealism and neorealism can be seen today.

  Regarding his accent to get a more interrelated relation between image and sound I am thinking about the case of Philip glass movies Koyaniscapsi and powaskatsi in which the first one a half of the movie consisted about recording images of nature in a very slow motion like galaxies, the sky, the sea, a desert, the nature phenomena’s in close up and details in a very slow motion with a Philip glass music played permanently as sound in a very abstract form both visual and sound toward the very slow motion images of modern civilization like buildings of downtown in new York, or people in consumer activity in the commercial molls, and walking the street and the cars in a very slow motion with the music back as well as powaskatsi slow motion about ritual from people in primitive Africa, a very close up slow motion of the jumping in a ritual dance, to progresibly slow motion images of ritual in modernity and technology with again Philip glass music in the background.

  The case of silent film in the earlier XX century was related with a very theatrical way to mise in scene the relation between text and image, every sequence was following the next one framed with a text, that mise in scene of the relation between text and image supposed to theater an innovation to parameter of dramaturgy but stablished at the same time at least to the current situation with film, an strong subordination of the visual to dramaturgic while to Brian in Chaplin films the body performance of the actor was very important the actor body movements as pivotal to understand everything and that film founded in image and the visual not on sound and music.

  To be back on the issue of the beginning I would like to relate this concepts of sound and silence as a major pair of both mutual inclusivism and opposite sides predominant in the ways experimental music has gradually infinitesimalized fragments of sound to progresible transform the piece of music in a more conceptual piece and in the case of film and cinema to transform in a conceptual phenomena the ways to relate music and sound with, through and within it–lees subordinated to a textual sense of drama--a more conceptual way to stablish and make work music and sound in its relation to image and the viewer experience.

  For sure this is a phenomena that can be equally diagonized regarding preferences to pairs paradoxes in experimentalism like for examples the relation between writing and the white page in several modalities of experimental or creative writing when the word as a graphic phenomena visually unfold on the page starting to explore its relation with literacy letting speak in the production of sense and meanings the emptiness of writing, spaces of no writing or simply the white spaces in between words or an empty page, or in the case of contemporary installation letting speak the while walls or simply the opposite of an object like it was in certain conceptualist exhibits like the idea of the white cube when exhibiting nothing but just the concept of the space empty taked the place of the supposed to be piece and or object to be showed.

  While in the visual art of the plastic side such a phenomena can be understand from the pair present and absences, more related to its visual nature there is too certain relation between objectood as matter and non object as inmaterial that suggest or remember something of the inmaterial nature of the non object or not matter, something usual in music, and the way experimental music is being exploring aleatorism since cage such like the electroacoustic move is being stimulated with similar questions, inquiries and motivations.

  From the moment a sound is being seen as a diminute ontological element or fragment the attention of a musicology on it turn to extend and or explore how to see music in ordinary sounds and by the way extend the domains of what can be considered music, like it happens with ready made in the visual arts when any object from everyday life not considered art started to be accepted, the turn of aleatorism in music opened a possibility to accept any sound from nature, everyday life and ordinary environments, while at the same time it helped to understand sound in it relation with silence opening a field to compositions of very complex experimental music like the acoustics and atmospheric character of very classic and elaborated music around the relation between sound and silence as a conceptual one, and on how the sound of silence tend to be the primary conceptual form of a sound inside it as a musical phenomena itself.

  Now this play with opposite pairs is not simply a play toward fragments or aleatorials it is also related with a way to build sense and meaning. 

   Such an imaginary of the sound seen from the pair sound-silence founded the conceptualization of music and entrance to film and music in a form that considerably changed how music and sound started to be explored within it.

  While Deutzman film can be considered as an exploration in the middle of the two extremes of over narrativized films on the one hand and Aleatorials or toward fragmented films, on the other, the case of music and sound in his film –a film that still have a certain story between a mother and her douther, her grandfather and a certain family story around a hotel, seem to be explored as environmental and as the more aleatorial element within his movie –mostly here the two main or first plane sounds, the wireless cellular one and the voice usually addressed through that phone in between Karin and her mother, when certainly there is also, without forgetting the very focused play of photography, a certain relation between free images and sound in the film, like the flashing of the screen effects of television or the sound of the sky ready to raining interrelated, to mention one example, as possibly a dialogue around Brian accent to interrelate visual image and sound more nearly.

  To end this approach I would like to finish with examples of very quotidian and or everyday life sound collected, recorded and late include inside a composition in anthropology and installation, the sound, for example, in my own work of anthropology the market from here: mise in scene and experimental ethnography I bring and presented at rice university back yard sewall hall in Houston during the spring of 1997 which included the recording of everyday life sounds of the Venezuelan markets played as environmental sound permanently like the sound of the vendors sailing the merchants both vendors in a place and mobile ones sailing, the sound of the wind on mobiles and sonajeros, campanitas in the popular markets and of the car traffic and urban surround and of animals, etc., the sound of washing the clothes in the barrio in Juan Carlos Rodriguez installation as I presented inside my curatorial series of exhibits on rice campus spring 97 and the sound of the sea in cristina Jadic artists from Texas exhibit titled “The sound of silence” recreated environmentally with materials and photography’s of the sea the gulf coast beaches environments, something Deutzman defined as immersive installations.

Notes

I want to express spetial thanks regarding this paper and conference to two friends of mine who remembered to me in recent years the major work of John Cage, to Terrell James for her regard of the San Francisco Art Institute paper on the exhibit of Mariana de Ball dedicated and inspired in Cage, to Alejandro Frometa by his presentation to me of Cage Concert Silence and to Surpic Angelini who participated with Cage in several performances in California

This paper is my conference to a panel titled Thinking in Sound and Music in Cinema and immersive installations, with lecturers Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Brian Deutzman to be discussed at the primavera sound music festival of Barcelona pro mid-april, Spain, 2019, but the panel was rejected so it is now simply a paper on such an aspects in Deutzman film

   Notas

este siguiente conjunto de textos sobre Brian Deutzman fue posible gracias a una presentación de Brian Deutzman en espacio Altamira dirigido por Edel Bordón y Yamile Bordón en ocasión de una curaduría de Yamile pardo sobre las fotografías de Kasia Trojack, la ocasión fue posible gracias a una invitación que me hizo Grisel antelo ya que la presentación de Deutzman en espacio Altamira fue una producción cultural de ella con Elena Molina y su espacio arthaus, posteriormente gracias a Grisel y Elena con arthaus, mi visualización se extendió a conocer más ampliamente el trabajo de Deutzman y a desarrollar diálogos entre ambos a modo de escribir sobre distintos aspectos de su film, los textos reunidos de hecho discuten una variedad de aspectos sobre el film de Deutzman y uno de ellos fue una conferencia en arthous mis agradecimientos especiales pues a Edel, Yamile, Grisel y Elena, asi como también a Deutzman

Another Cartographies: Maria Victoria

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Written, composed, created in english by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

   As an issue itself cartography is encresently becoming a curiosity and inspiration motive to more than a few visual artists since decades ago, argentinean painter cuitca, for example is being exploring maps as me too since many years ago, complexioning it as a full individual exhibit at my charcoals Gathering the Dispersed Energy at Sicardi Gallery, Houston, Texas, EUA 1996 defined as “maps of senses”, moving from map-territories relations to abstract surfaces and recently relations map, life, travels and cities. 

  I has never seen, however, a ŵell focused exploration through cartography as in Maria Victoria plastic works. Certainly focusing mainly on it, she is moving cartography from being simply a visual fascination ŵith antiques or ancient visual effects of maps in fashionist aesthetics surfaces, to also seen cartography as a conceptual and heuristic activity, understanding it as an extended procedure, meaning a kind of cartographizing in general which suppose to be around asking how may it provide facilities in regard to conceptual questions on the relationships between knowledge and reality, cognition and place, conceptualness and sites.

   Being to me one of the riches younger conceptual artists of her generation globally speaking, as also Tatiana mesa and analia amaya, Maria work is  fascinating precisely since she often afford major questions around cartography to conceptualism and land art according to exploring both the visual essay as a photographic genre to cartographizing as a conceptual visual media to tollfully explore processual and documental inquiries on the body as seen in her work presented at batiscafo “From such a point the world may be seen”, a piece composed by images sequences and a vitrine collection Inventory.

  I am thinking also about Maria pieces writing biggest numbers on selected urban sites and streets to be seen from city roofs and or perpendicularly from city high latitudes, to also aerial maps, a piece consisting on walking hours during a day through the city, or her recent exhibit to her master in France. 

  “From home to the school, from the school to home”, for example, it is a piece consisting on a series of photography’s in everyday life from which through the conceptual act of designating a fragment of reality, a physical cut of space and time, a selected sequence, she shows images from fragments of a trajectory travel defined by the title, “From home to the school and back home”, something about a daily ritual weekly, a repetitive activity daily and monthly, from morning to afternoon, a sequence of images taken from the car as she experience it daily. 

  The interesting point in question here is about how such as fragment of reality is being a reality to perception in two forms at the same time, first as simply a designation of the real seen as something “out there” as pregiven to us, and second, on how what is seen from inside, the mobile car, her body taking the photos from the car, her gaze, her displazament, her perception, her experience in everyday life, establishes or delimitate in a distinct mode the same fragment of reality, in spacial and temporal terms. 

 Such a phenomena defined as a relation between coordenadas is a pivotal one to understand and analyze Maria Victoria. To her it is a priority to question and explore to what point two coordenadas, a first one defined as reality by something “out there”, (her selected fragment of reality, “From home to the school from the school to home”) and a second one defined by herself, her own body movement, herself as a subject, as a camera taking, as a visual essays, relates and divides, distant and compliment, intersect and separate, given as result a series of interesting questions about what is it property documenting, what is it exactly to reconstruct or to sequence. 

  Her ŵork is nor exactly about the ontology of cinema, a concept I recently proposed, when paradoxically the artificial sequence of cinema is being not to coincident with the principle of ontology, but instead it seems to be related and evoques the principle of cinematographic framing usually recognized by hoŵ movies directors and or camera film mans, often use to use the fingers of the two hands to create a kind of framed rectangle in the air located exactly in front of the fragment of reality object they has choiced to be record or filmed, doing ŵith their finger a rectangle as an outline or an sketch on it, as composing it, something that also alludes to the idea of quoting reality, or saying reality but in between quotes, it is but it is not, or it is but as defined by such a quotation, or as the “as if” of it, as something defined by such a frame, a simple rectangle ŵith the fingers.  

  So to a greater point Maria is playing a major regard on this two coordenadas defined by and in betŵeen subject and object, on how from a certain point subject and object stays distance and fars in betŵeen and from a certain another point it nearly one to the other, intersect and relate sometimes being almost diluted each one through the other, getting fully imbricated. She explicit hoŵ from a certain point of view a subject can be seen, for example, as the objective in opposite to the subjective, seen the objective as it supposes to be ŵhat an object to a subject should be. 

  For example, herself can be seen as the objective in regard to her body, the car in movement, the camera with her, while from another point of vieŵ the subjective can be paradoxically the object, the reality “out there” provided by the camera, or the opposite ŵay, meaning, the reality “out there” seen as an objective reality and then all the previous say, her body, the camera, her mobile dynamics, something defined by being subjective.

   To me Maria Victoria is being exploring a very good balance way between subjectivity and objectivity, subject and object, the objective and the subjective. Her piece presented at Batiscafo is a clear example of it. She explicited, in fact, possibilities to cartographizing as an alternative to get spatial and temporal visual modalities pertinent to forms of procesual arts when the action played by a body as it seems to act seen through an image, evolves relationships between the space and time of both, the visual documentation of it and the previous experience of it as well, obtaining a visual documentation that seems to maintains the same here and now to the present visual documentation as seen by a viewer and the body action it describes and or record, everyday life, a time passing as urban decourses, citizenship, in regard to space and time.

   What makes unique this piece, ŵhat makes it outstanding is about hoŵ the action she plays, the one ŵe recognize thanks to a photographic sequence that shows her just doing it, a map of the city places where she is doing it and a present showcase showing the photographic sequence of doing it, is not defined by being something enigmatique, inaccessible or distinct in terms of the consistence of it to ŵhat as a matter of fact ŵe have certainly in front of us in the gallery room, the action the artist play, the one ŵe perceive through documentary photos, recorded, documented and showcased collected consist itself in cartographizing, it is just herself in the city at several selected urban places and locations, cartographizing. 

  So, documentation here is not about documenting something else which is itself another thing about which documentation try to be about, reference, tematize or reconstruct. Usually a documentation is defined as such because it reconstruct something else, enigmatic itself, something seen as another thing different to what a documentation often is as a fact itself, here instead, documenting and presenting is being a cartography and the activity shoŵed at documentary materials is being the activity of cartographizing itself, so the ŵork documents itself, it appears at the end as another moment of a same and continuate activity, it is not about ŵhat is ŵas, nor about reconstructing as something after, extrinseque and or hexogen.

  A preservation principle, in fact suppose to be discussing here the idea of documenting as reconstructing, in a feŵ ŵords, the conceptual activity of cartographizing seen through an unfolded documentation unfolds the conceptual activity it is and consist, the art piece in front of the viewers is being here a moment of a process I ŵill define as both presenting and eliciting cartography.

  Hoŵever it can be seen also, paradoxically, the opposite ŵay around, if ŵe pày attention, for example, to an anticipation map also provided by Maria and exhibited ŵere the vieŵer can clearly recognize several points in the city ŵere the activity ŵill be, in fact, the map can be read in both form, as a ŵill be and as an it ŵas.

  To Point a feŵ additional comments about the camera it is taken by Maria herself in “From Home School from school home” but not as ŵell at to “From such a point the World maybe seen” or to her video piece ŵalking hours through the city, to this one, Maria asked it to be done by Tatiana. This time the time of the action, ŵalking through the city and taking a film on it ŵas happening at the same time also spatially, by this reason its brigs to question to ŵhat point a certain extrinseque relation specially spatially betŵeen documenting and a passing reality taken, relevantly participate at reconstructive procedures often and usuals to any relationship betŵeen documentary materials and body performance, a pivotal question if not the main one to any form of procesual art.   

  Looking to it more focused yet, if ŵe nearly pay attention to “From Home School from school home” ŵe ŵill seen hoŵ a visual sequence of very simple images camera taken shoŵs successive fragments of reality almost as it can be simply given by nature to perception, if ŵe try to look at it to understand hoŵ each one relates in betŵeen in terms of asking hoŵ is a sense of a sequence provided, ŵill be not easy to get a ansŵer, there is not in betŵeen a plot relation to draŵ it fine, nor a thread, a yarn, a linen, a course or a tŵine, nor a narrative dramaturgically readable under the image level providing something, but instead, ŵe have a title, telling us on a decursive trajectory, ŵe have a ŵindoŵ glass in front of the camera intersected before thanks to which as herself seen it from the car, ŵe can also see nearly a quotidian landscape, the car passing movement impression can be recognized as an effect from inside betŵeen a ŵindoŵ glass and an exterior images. 

  We also have a certain homogeneity at the level of the image itself, it is a same natural landspace defined by a feŵ images and a same urban landscape by a feŵ additionals, a sense of a ŵhole is here provided by the idea of a quotidian space and time passing in a maria ordinary day looking out. What makes it enigmatic is hoŵ it explore as I previously explained a relation betŵeen subject and object but not, hoŵever in a sense train to relativize objectivity and subjectivity, nor in a sense dichotomizing materialism and idealism as it ŵas in older philosophical debates, but in a sense pointing out hoŵ building an art piece can function as a ŵay to explicit hoŵ an idea of reality maybe build, it is, in a feŵ ŵords, a procesual art question.

  A question on hoŵ art deliver the relation between internal and externals and on hoŵ art exits to exploring out places and the city is being here significant and meaningfulness, the concept of a place and a non place as ŵell, becomes here experimental and heuristic. In this regard Maria and Tatiana, despite from their aesthetics, visual and thematic deference’s, are coincidents, a commitment ŵith procesual art pivotal questions.

   Mainly focused in exploring cartography, maps, territories, coordenadas and city places, Maria beautiful images of biggest numbers to be seen from city roofs written and draŵ in urban spaces camera taken epitomize a general spirit and impetus of her generation even ŵhen since moving from photography to video, she begins progresibly to accent computer sensors and simultaneous projections as in her master ŵork recently exhited in France.

Written in English and Spanish by Abdel Hernandez San Juan Translation English-Spanish by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Note

   Being a conceptualist, I can say that the relation map-territory is a significant horizont of exploration to any of us, speaking on conceptualism from analytical philosophy of language and from the plastic arts as a tendency, land art itself supposes affording places and sites, designed, assigned or solicited, it evolves sites specifics, natural spaces, places around art institution or choices spaces outs something becoming to many of us an abstract philosophical and cognitive question evolving subject and object, knowledge and reality, a map unmaterialized beyond map as something visual. 

  María is being focused on this issue bringing it to the front more than any one artist from her generation, even ŵhen she is also using the map as image. Maybe ŵe may find some conceptual artists in the past ŵho used maps visually exhibiting it to regard relations ŵith places and displazaments, but to some of us the sensuality of maps as a visual phenomena ŵas significant despite from hoŵ it also seems to dissolves as image in abstraction diluted within our intellectual dematerializations.

2. To visit a Maria Victoria Site including images as Maria texts visit www.mariavportelles.com, to read an online publication of this text visit http://www.mariavportelles.com/otras-cartografias-maria-victoria.html, there is also at this text online site links to some of my books literary ŵorks as single author onlines. 

A Sense of Communion: Cindy Sherman

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Theoretician, Ethnographer and art critic

Free Lance

 Written, conceived, composed in English 

by Abdel Hernandez San Juan 

  I am persuaded to discuss The Complete Untitled Film Stills of Cindy Sherman, a visual catalogue she did herself published at the Museum of Modern Art, 2003, a product catalogue she did selecting several between her oŵn Film Stills photography’s. I am persuaded first because I has never experienced before a well communicated sense of communion in and on our oŵn values in today USA, specially values I believe, visually, than enjoying her catalogue

  I am clear about that in doing so Cindy is probably experiencing something personal about herself, revisiting herself by choosing images, but she did it composed from today as a propositional ŵhole which is to me what really matter as a general statement also on her. 

  To me her catalogue evoques a visual sense of communion in our values. A great ŵork, in my opinion, should not only creates theoretical, intellectual and conceptual pleasure, but it should also persuade our sense of feelings about something being explored, it should remove our impressions and perceptions on something issued as we previously experienced it and suggest neŵ ŵays to look at it, to evoque it.

  Her visual composition is not about the gaze, nor on the eye, even nor about photography, nor about film, it is instead a composition of images taken from everyday life passing as experience here and noŵ evoquing a sublime of it, everyday life seem as something sublime itself, the sublimes of tradition, for example, and of femininity in it, of a passing daily, of a quotidian, apparently ordinary time. An everyday life ethos is strongly well communicated in her catalogue to a level that transcends previous explorations.    

  However, I don’t understand why she speak about characters, why she define this several moments of a woman, herself, as characters, probably she is using the word characters metaphorically, to me this is all mostly her, all this are moments of herself. I seen there moments of a same ŵoman that inhabit her spiritually, ethically, emotionally, physically and intellectually. 

   Regarding communion which is to me the ethos her catalogue, we should advance a synthesis of all this moments of a woman. Probably driving each one of this moments of a woman inhabits Cindy as person evolves valuable things she feel and enact according to instant moments, periods of life, liminalities of being, but at least to me as male there is only one woman, Cindy as a girl which in fact results to me as male very attractive as female, it is all like enacting several moments of her feminine dimension as woman sensually.  

  It ŵill be probably better to think about an holistic sense of romance and intimacy that evoques the selves, she herself, but also a renascence of values that supposes a relation betŵeen modernity and tradition to us in USA.

  Thinking on this sequence ŵith calm, I asked myself if subjectivity should be considered as ŵell. Certainly subjectivity as a concept always provides bridges, but despite from hoŵ subjectivity can help for to communicate several of this images in between and to her as a self-exploration, this self-exploration is also communicating a sense of communion. Beyond a matter of procedures, at the level of evocation it is something more than just subjectivity.  

   Is it possible?, to move beyond subjectivity?, yes and not, not because even diluted as if nothing about a subject happens, nor a perception, nor an eye, nor an observer, subjectivity stay in the background, nothing fully empty subjectivity ŵhen at least if not a reticulary retinean, nor a tamiz, nor a philigrane, even nor a grain, but a memory of it ŵill persist both as a body memory and as a sensorial one still evolving subjectivity. 

  And yes because a sense of the ethos evolved in a daily life sublime includes subjectivity but moves including more than just subjectivity. Cindy is proving here a sense of links creates an evocative ŵhole provided by major links betŵeen images, body and emotions, ŵe should not lose our attention that this is overall a sublime of every life here and noŵ, so nothing, even the idea of subjectivity is over it. 

   Will be probably better to speak about synesthesia, the communication of something ŵe experience, on tradition, on a sense of ŵoman, on villages, on daily time passing, on space and architecture, on femininity, on soul and body beauty, on male and female attraction, on hefty and pristine seduction too, if ŵe consider Cindy decided herself to composed it as an out product.

    Instead of speaking about performance, I ŵill speak here about life first and second about art and life. I would like then to make a distinction between nature and intentionally. To me, contemplating it, all this images are purely life, her daily life, not necessarily something created to be art, maybe yes, maybe not, or on top if sensibly related through a daily spiritual sense of beauty exploration, a self-taking images, and an esthetic research, etc, it is then first Art and Life, and simply the joining contemplation of it, this old concept relations, not properly performance even ŵhen there is a feŵ ones a letlee more theatricals.

  I consider also her serie therapeutical, artistically speaking to herself and also to us something I ŵill say, this therapeuticall aspect can be recognized as a general characteristic of Cindy as artist since ever.  

  Revisiting herself this series have in my opinion a value evolving also an exploration on USA Anglo American cultural identities and the mixtures that results which to me is a matter on acerbos and backgrounds more than on a fix identity, meaning on fine traditions between urban and rurals experiences, betŵeen values, family and everyday life rituals, the village, the town, the city, identity itself as a cultural issue seems to be catastrophic to be fixed, but instead, its reveals the significance of everyday sublime ethos to evoques cultural and traditions values resonances.

  The concept of evocation evolves here a composition that choices to stay letting an open possible horizont of suggestions to viewers feel it without a closure, but communicating by relating elements, not train to provide a fixed ultimate form on it. 

  There is a turn however at this point beŵeen art and life and the concept of performance considered as a continuum process ŵhen performance seems to be diluted in everyday life passing rituals and art redeems it as every day, ŵhile the concept of performance, despite from a linguist and sociological aception on it, which simple accent the human nature of language as activity and daily ordinary activity as human performance, is being here yet diluted in art and life reestablish as a visual sequence experience not necessarily as something to be documented or reconstructed as experience, but to evoque something else, like in film and cinema, a certain cinema of daily life.

  However, from the moment a composition is being performatibly explored as an art proposal product or a visual art statement on it a conjunction appears betŵeen visual art and cultural performance in a sense contemporary sociocultural, exploring memory and identity between art and anthropology or to say it in my oŵn sense of meanings ŵhen a relation betŵeen high art and anthropology merges to the analysis of culture

   Another values I think to be pointed here out is about the significance that ritual and rituality plays through her selected sequence, I even think on ritual as the best and beautiful quality of her serie product, aesthetically, in terms of ethos, spiritually, erotically, ethically and also intellectually. 

Notes

  1-I First included comments on Cindy Sherman in a paper I did in 1995 The Postmodern Work. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, currently at Transart Foundation collection, 1412 West Alabama, Houston, Texas, EUA

  2-I want to express my thanks to mari Victoria for introducing to me Cindy Sherman catalogue

Bibliography

  
Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Posmodern Work, Paper, Transart Foundation of Houston Collection, Houston, Texas, USA, 1995

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Beyond the Intertextual, Paper conference lectured by Abdel Hernandez San Juan at the Fondren Library Lecture Auditorium as a guest of the faculty of classical and Hispanic studies, rice university, Houston, Texas, USA, 1996